#49
12/10/03
LOUDER THAN A BOMB
FBI Whispers Its Way Through a Terrorist Indictment
Well, it looks like the moron occupying the White House can finally crow about finding weapons of mass destruction…in
Texas.
A couple of weeks ago, William Krar pleaded guilty to the federal charge of possession of a chemical weapon. Krar and a
bunch of other seriously wacked-out guys in eastern Texas had been caught by the FBI producing sodium cyanide bombs. The chemicals
from such bombs have the capacity to kill hundreds of people at a time. (For comparison’s sake, remember that the anthrax
attacks of two years ago killed a total of five people.) In a warehouse raid that actually took place back in the spring,
the feds uncovered one hundred bombs and a massive stash of sodium cyanide, hydrochloric acid, and nitric acid.
This is, to put it mildly, mad scary.
Now, there’s something about this story that’s as least as disturbing as the finding of the weapons themselves.
And that’s the fact that at a time when our government seems fond of leaking and broadcasting every little crumb of
information about alleged WMD and lurking terrorists, those of us who do not live in eastern Texas have heard NOTHING about
this story.
In perpetually trying to justify his appointment to the post of U.S. Attorney General, John Ashcroft has never been shy
about putting on a big dog-and-pony show whenever his federal agents put their hands on a suspected terrorist. Ashcroft would
typically call a press conference, intone in his Frankenstein’s monster baritone that the Justice Department had nailed
this or that bad guy, and remind us of his undying vigilance in tracking down the people threatening our safety. But this
time, we have heard nothing.
Now it may be that the feds have been keeping it on the down low because their investigation is still open and they don’t
want to blow their chance to catch more of the bad guys these nut jobs are rolling with. But that seems unlikely for the simple
reason that they are handling the whole thing in open court, which means that anyone living in that part of world was able
to get the scoop just by turning on the 10 o’clock news.
This was not just a case of some anti-government folks stockpiling a mess of guns (though the feds found that stuff in
the raid as well). These guys had chemical bombs. So why have the feds – and the national media – been
so quiet about it?
To understand the answer, we have to understand who these would-be domestic terrorists are: white supremacist gun nuts.
Along with the bombs and chemicals, investigators found a cache of firearms and half-a-million – repeat: half-a-million
– rounds of ammunition. And as part of their investigation, the feds also learned that the three would-be terrorists
were attached to white supremacist groups in New Hampshire and New Jersey.
Now think about Mr. Ashcroft. A few months after becoming Attorney General, Ashcroft wrote a letter to the National Rifle
Association stating his opinion that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right for individuals to
own guns. Then shortly after 9/11, Ashcroft ordered the FBI to stop investigating whether or not any of the terrorist suspects they had rounded up had managed to purchase guns before their detention.
So, Ashcroft is such a gun nut that he doesn’t even mind if people he considers dangerous terrorists have access
to firearms.
Add to that the fact that Mr. Ashcroft has openly talked about his affinity for leaders of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Suddenly it becomes clear why John Ashcroft isn’t going to make a big deal out of nailing these
guys: they are essentially a more extreme version of Ashcroft himself.
Here’s an even more troubling aspect of the story. The investigators found notes that suggest that some of this weaponry
has already been distributed to other, unknown, persons. Which means that another terrorist sneak attack could be in America’s
near future.
This is what happens when people resort to lazy, racist practices like ethnic profiling to determine who is and is not
a threat to our safety. While more than a thousand Muslims were locked-up in the months following 9/11 – resulting in
the capture of not one single terrorist – white supremacists like these three were free to operate without the encumbrance
of race-based suspicion hampering their operations. (In fact, they weren’t even initially under investigation; the FBI
had to be clued-in to the operation by a New York resident who had received a package from one of the terrorists by accident.)
Racial profiling isn’t just inefficient, ineffective, and immoral. Sometimes it’s dangerous.
Knowledge is Power
