http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/07/opinion/07KRIS.html The New York Times, June 7, 2002 All-American Osamas Nicholas Kristof [Excerpt] Militia members and Al Qaeda members are remarkably similar. Both are galvanized by religious extremism (America's militias overlap with the Christian Identity movement, which preaches that Jews are the children of Satan and that people of color are sub-human), both see the United States government as utterly evil, and both are empowered by the information revolution that enables them to create networks, recruit disciples and trade recipes for bio- and chemical weapons. It would be a mistake to put one's faith in the militias' eternal incompetence. Jessica Stern of Harvard has written about an anti-government activist named James Dalton Bell, who earned a degree in chemistry from M.I.T. and is unquestionably brilliant. By age 14, he says, "I was studying the isomerization of benzyl thiocyanate to the isocyanate." Weren't we all? But Mr. Bell, who is now in jail, is also believed by the authorities to have manufactured sarin, a nerve gas, in his basement. He led a chemical attack against an I.R.S. office and wrote an Internet book called "Assassination Politics," which outlines a very clever scheme to pay for contract killings of federal officials with digital cash in a way that preserves anonymity at both ends. There is also evidence that Mr. Bell talked "hypothetically" of poisoning a city's water supply. -----