Militants Are All-American Osamas

[John Young]

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.

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