When FBI agents searched a rented storage locker in a small east Texas town last year, they were alarmed to discover a huge cache of weapons and the ingredients to make a cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, says the Chicago Tribune. The arsenal’s owner was not a foreign terrorist with ties to Al Qaeda but a 63-year-old Texan with an affinity for anti-government militias and white supremacist views. William Krar, an itinerant gun dealer, quickly pleaded guilty to possession of the chemical weapon and then clammed up.
“All of this homeland security, all of the orientation of the government’s war on terror is about protecting our borders,” said Ken Toole of the Montana Human Rights Network, which monitors right-wing groups. “We’re moving back into this period where radical right-wing activism is being dismissed as goofy and loopy, whereas the Al Qaeda threat is around every corner. But the right-wingers are much closer to home. And they are still there.”
A member of the Michigan Militia allegedly killed a Michigan state trooper after a traffic stop, while in South Carolina, a family of “sovereign citizens”–right-wing anarchists who reject all government power–allegedly ambushed and killed two local police officers.
Said Daniel Levitas, author of, “A Terrorist Next Door,” a study of domestic terrorist groups published in 2002, “If you look at the cycle of rebirth of these movements over the last century, each cycle is more and more extreme. Now we have William Krar in Texas building a fully functional chemical weapon. You’ve had paramilitary activists produce ricin. It’s only a matter of time before one of the more hard-core remnants of the militias decides to one-up Timothy McVeigh…There are thousands of William Krars out there who aren’t being pursued.”
Link: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0404190180apr19,1,5394376.story