Oklahoma City Bombing, Unabomber Show Havoc, Deaths They Can Cause
by Ken Leiser, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Former Arapahoe County, Colo., Sheriff Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. connected the dots of home-grown terrorism way back in the 1990s, and came away with a chilling picture.
“We are beginning to face threats from militias, hate groups and others disenchanted with our government who are willing to communicate their message through violence,” Sullivan told a congressional panel, coincidentally, on the day of the Columbine High School massacre in April 1999.
Before the attack in nearby Littleton, Colo., there was the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and the explosion at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
Nothing since then - not even the foreign-born Sept. 11, 2001, attacks - has shaken the belief Sullivan shares with others in law enforcement: Home-grown terrorism remains an immediate danger.
“Prior to Sept. 11, probably next to Pearl Harbor, one of our biggest national tragedies was caused by domestic terrorism,” said Ray Gruender, U.S. attorney for eastern Missouri. “The Oklahoma City bombing.”
Indeed, Timothy McVeigh and Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski were the scowling faces of American terrorism long before Mohamed Atta and other disciples of Osama bin Laden turned airliners into missiles.
Most recently, the string of deadly sniper attacks in the Washington area have shown how murderous attacks can spring up at any time in the United States, paralyzing the targeted region.
(Sullivan, who retired as sheriff earlier this year, believes the sniper shootings are more likely the work of a cold-blooded serial killer than an ideological terrorist).
Homeland security leaders in Illinois and Missouri say they continue to take the home-grown threat seriously. Gruender said the anti-terrorism task force he heads has a subcommittee dedicated to domestic terrorism.
Lt. Bill Conway, the Missouri Highway Patrol’s state coordinator for counterterrorism, said home-grown sources of terrorism were “as much on the radar screen for us as international terrorism.”
Two officers work full-time on domestic terrorism issues.
Conway pointed out that Missouri had lost no law enforcement officers to terrorist acts plotted overseas, but troopers have been killed by people who could be classified as domestic terrorists. David C. Tate, a member of a white-supremacist group called The Order, was convicted of first-degree murder for the 1985 shooting death of trooper Jimmie Linegar in Taney County.
National cases like Oklahoma City, the Olympics bombing and the Unabomber prompted Illinois to set up its terrorism task force three years ago, said Illinois Homeland Security Director Matt Bettenhausen.
The state “hasn’t lost focus on that” during the post-Sept. 11 homeland security buildup.
“You don’t have to look any farther than what is going on out east with the sniper shootings,” Bettenhausen said this week. “We have our own fair share of home-grown nuts that we have to be watching.”
9-11 was wake-up call
While on the board of directors of the National Sheriffs’ Association, Sullivan helped organize terrorism-response training and special committees, but got little response.
After Sept. 11, Sullivan said, “Our requests for the training we do for local sheriffs’ offices shot up fivefold.”
Sullivan derived his experience from 20 years as elected sheriff in Arapahoe County.
During the 1990s, the county hosted the World Youth Day visit of Pope John Paul II and a G-8 summit meeting along with the city of Denver. He helped with security when the accused Oklahoma City bombers went on trial.
“We had to continually look at domestic and international terrorism incidents,” Sullivan said.
During his testimony in Washington in 1999, he warned that America was “not ready to meet the challenge” of home-grown terrorism, or attacks using weapons of mass destruction.
Law enforcement agencies, fire departments and emergency health care providers have made strides in the past 13 months, he said, but still have a long way to go.
“Most areas aren’t halfway to where they need to be but are one hell of a lot further than they were before 9-11,” he said.
Intelligence-gathering capabilities need to be built up to prevent further attacks, he said, complaining that the “intelligence deficit” that plagues the United States overseas hurts at home, too.
Preventing domestic terrorism before it happens can be a difficult task, Conway said. When does free speech, for instance, escalate to an act of intimidation against the government and its people?
“It is OK to demonstrate against abortions. We expect that and that is part of society,” Conway said. “It is when those people start using force or violence when they become terrorist groups.”
The same goes for the more radical pro-environment or animal rights groups, he said. Convicted Unabomber Kaczynski took out his disdain for modern technology by sending bombs to his targets.
“It is not so much what they believe in,” Conway said. “It is the methods they are using.”
In addition to the random shootings in Washington, other cases related to domestic terrorism include:
* Anthrax-laced letters that killed five people last year. Letters containing the spores were mailed to the Capitol offices of Sens. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., as well as media outlets in New York and Florida. No arrests have been made.
* Mailbox bombings covering Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado and Texas in May. Six people were injured in the separate explosions and 18 other unexploded pipe bombs were discovered. Police have arrested a Minnesota man in his early 20s who was allegedly creating the pattern of a “smiley face” with the locations of his bombs.
* Filing of charges this month against four U.S. citizens who authorities said tried to join al-Qaida and the Taliban forces fighting Americans in Afghanistan.
Professor Karen Larson, a cultural anthropologist at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, said Americans had been reluctant to accept terrorism as a pattern in their own culture.
Larson traces terrorism to “radical individualism,” social isolation and mental health problems. As a result, these home-grown terrorists can be motivated by anything from a traffic ticket they disagreed with to the government siege at Waco, Texas.
“Terrorism,” Larson said, “is basically a very selfishly based set of human behaviors.” NATIONAL FOCUS; Reporter Ken Leiser:; E-mail: kleiser@post-dispatch.com; Phone: 340-8119