NYT: Jim Bell = Osama bin Laden

[R. A. Hettinga]

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/07/opinion/07KRIS.html?pagewanted=print&position=top




June 7, 2002

All-American Osamas
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

KALISPELL, Mont.

We Americans have conjured so specific a vision of terrorists - swarthy,
glowering Muslims mumbling fanatically about Allah - that we're missing the
threat from home-grown nuts, people like David Burgert.

Mr. Burgert, a 38-year-old who last made a living renting out snowmobiles
here in this spectacularly beautiful nook of northwestern Montana, had a
terror plan that made Osama bin Laden's look rinky-dink. Not content merely
to kill a few thousand people, Mr. Burgert's nine-member militia was
planning a violent revolution and civil war to overthrow the entire United
States government.

The plan, according to Sheriff James Dupont, was for the militia to use its
machine guns, pipe bombs and 30,000 rounds of ammunition to assassinate 26
local officials (including Mr. Dupont), and then wipe out the National
Guard when it arrived. After the panicked authorities sent in NATO troops,
true American patriots would rise up, a ferocious war would ensue, and the
U.S. would end up back in the hands of white Christians.

"The good thing is that most of the people who would do it are so stupid
that they would kill themselves first," said Sheriff Dupont, who runs the
law here in rugged Flathead County, which is bigger than all of Connecticut
and has lots more grizzly bears.

But the litany of domestic militia plots, failed ones, is still sobering.
In Michigan, militia members planned to bomb two federal buildings.
Missourians planned to attack American military bases, starting with Fort
Hood, Tex., on a day it opened to tens of thousands of visitors. California
militia members planned to blow up a propane storage facility. Most
unnerving, a Florida militia plotted to destroy a nuclear power plant.

If these were Muslims who were forming militias and exchanging tips for
making nerve gas, then we'd toss them in prison in an instant. But we're
distracted by our own stereotypes, searching for Muslim terrorists in the
Philippine jungle and the Detroit suburbs and forgetting that there are
blond, blue-eyed mad bombers as well. We're making precisely the mistake
that the Saudis did a few years ago: dismissing familiar violent fanatics
as kooks.

In fact, 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.

The things you learn in Montana: According to militia members here, the
World Trade Center attacks were a plot by the Feds to declare an emergency
and abolish the Bill of Rights; the Columbine school shootings were a
federal test of new mind-control technology; a map on a Kix cereal box
shows the occupation zones Americans will be herded into after the United
Nations takes over.

Another thing you learn here is how to deal with grizzlies. Don't be so
focused on a distant moose that you ignore the bear behind you. And if it
charges, stand your ground until it's 10 feet away, then shoot pepper spray
into its eyes, and - very quickly - step aside.

Right now, I'm afraid that the Bush administration is so focused on the
distant moose that we're oblivious to the local grizzlies like Dave Burgert
creeping up on us.

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"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'