Behind the Lone Terrorist, A Pack Mentality

[MountainLaurel]

Wow, someone from the FBI actually calling white supremacists and pro-lifers terrorists?!

:wow:

Oh wait, the article says he left the FBI in 2004. This would have been just about the time the FBI started changing its policy toward domestic terrorists, whereby they now consider environmentalists the most dangerous internal threat in the U.S. :eyes:


The FBI has long maintained that Timothy McVeigh, who was executed in 2001 for the Oklahoma City bombing that claimed 168 lives, was the prototypical "lone wolf" terrorist and that anyone implicated in the bombing conspiracy is behind bars. But old loose ends and troubling new revelations about McVeigh's association with white supremacist groups have led many people to wonder whether a wider conspiracy was behind the bombing that took place just over 10 years ago. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, is considering holding hearings to try to answer these lingering questions. What he is likely to discover is not a disagreement over the facts, but a fundamental misperception of how most extremist groups operate.

Most people have never been to a Ku Klux Klan rally or a militia meeting; you don't stumble into one by walking through the wrong door at the dentist's office. Chances are, you wouldn't know how to find where a white supremacist group meets in your community. In fact, you'd probably be shocked to learn that there was one in your community.

snip

But every once in a while, a follower of these movements bursts violently into our world, with deadly consequences -- McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, Buford Furrow Jr., Paul Hill, to name just a few. And all these convicted murderers were identified as "lone extremists," the most difficult terrorists to stop because they act independently from any organization.

Or do they?

Tim McVeigh seemed able to find a militia meeting wherever he went. He was linked to militia groups in Arizona and Michigan, white supremacist groups in Oklahoma and Missouri, and at gun shows he sold copies of "The Turner Diaries," a racist novel written by the founder of a neo-Nazi organization. No one finds such groups by accident. Eric Rudolph, who planted bombs at the Atlanta Olympics, two abortion clinics and a gay nightclub, grew up in the Christian Identity movement, which identifies whites as God's chosen people and encourages the faithful to follow the biblical example of Phineas by becoming instruments of God's vengeance. Aryan Nations, formerly of Hayden Lake, Idaho, was a center of Christian Identity thought; not incidentally, Buford Furrow worked there as a security guard before going on a shooting rampage at a Jewish day-care center in Southern California. Paul Hill wrote of the need to take "Phineas actions" to prevent abortions and was so well known that the news media used him to speak in support of Michael Griffin's killing of abortion doctor David Gunn. That Hill later shot an abortion provider himself should have surprised no one.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/04/AR2005060400147.html