America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (52 page)

Attacks on Jewish houses of worship represent a small fraction of the database's cases. But the database does not include vandalism of Jewish houses of worship (or Jewish cemeteries) or attacks on broadly defined Jewish institutions. For instance, Furrow's attack on the Jewish community center would not have made the database. If Christian Identity ideas motivated such ancillary attacks, expanding the types of criminality under consideration and then correlating them with attacks on black targets could conceivably yield additional leads and suspects in the 1995–1999 arson wave. As the South Carolina case illustrated and as the history of Christian Identity violence suggests, Identity zealots, or those under their influence, often find black targets more readily available. Identity ideas about Jews became more widespread and accepted in the 1980s, but it was still the case, per Ezekiel, that recruits entered hate organizations with antagonism toward blacks and Hispanics and then were inculcated with hatred toward Jews. Thus it was likely easier to sway members to go after black targets than after Jewish targets, much as it was during Sam Bowers's tenure as Grand Wizard in Mississippi. The only difference in the current environment is that Bowers directly ordered his attacks, while Identity terrorists, since 1985, had been inspired by or socially conditioned by men like Bowers but have operated as individuals or through small groups.

Law enforcement scrutiny forced domestic terrorists into ever-more-decentralized units of activity; the result was atomized,
individual fanatics—Louis Beam's lone wolves—who are limited in their capacity for mass casualty or debilitating attacks but who can only be managed and contained. Identifying a lone wolf or preventing his actions is, as former FBI man Mike German concedes, daunting: “like finding a needle in a haystack.” But German argues that law enforcement must therefore start looking at the “needle factory”—the leaders, groups, and subculture that make the terrorism possible. That effort must include recognition of a religious impulse that motivates some terrorists directly and that indirectly shapes the contours of the terrorist mind-set of many others. For all its flaws, the Megiddo report represented an important first step in that regard, but the timing of its release, in 2000, could not have been more inopportune.

Within a year, Al Qaeda launched the most deadly terrorist attack on American soil in the nation's history. If failing to appreciate the full history of religious terrorism in America, from Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination to the arson wave of 1995–1999, has obscured law enforcement's understanding of crimes, then this same ignorance, in regard to both domestic and foreign extremists, continues to jeopardize American security.

15

REVELATIONS

APOCALYPTIC RELIGIOUS TERRORISM POST-9/11

O
n September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda launched the most deadly terrorist attack on American soil in the nation's history. The tragedy fundamentally reoriented law enforcement's approach to terrorism. Understandably, the government focused its resources on identifying and disrupting Al Qaeda cells inside America's borders to prevent another mass casualty attack. Domestic terrorist groups became a secondary concern, so much so that FBI agent Mike German, who infiltrated white supremacist groups for the agency, resigned in 2005 and became a whistleblower. He gave interviews and wrote columns that attempted to put the terrorism problem in perspective, specifically highlighting the danger still posed by domestic terrorism. An examination of acts of terrorism (and attempted terrorism) on U.S. soil shows that in terms of the number of acts, as opposed to the number of people killed or injured, incidents of American right-wing terrorism far outnumber instances of foreign jihadi terrorism.

More and more terrorism experts have been arguing this point. Among them is journalist Peter Bergen, author of several books on terrorism and one of the only people to interview Osama Bin Laden. In a 2014 article for CNN's website, cowritten with terrorism expert David Sterman and titled “U.S. Right Wing Extremists More Deadly Than Jihadists,” Bergen wrote,

Since 9/11 extremists affiliated with a variety of far-right wing ideologies, including white supremacists, anti-abortion extremists and anti-government militants, have killed more people in the United States than have extremists motivated by al Qaeda's ideology. According to a count by the New America Foundation,
right wing extremists have killed 34 people in the United States for political reasons since 9/11. . . .

By contrast, terrorists motivated by al Qaeda's ideology have killed 21 people in the United States since 9/11. . . .

Moreover, since 9/11 none of the more than 200 individuals indicted or convicted in the United States of some act of jihadist terrorism have acquired or used chemical or biological weapons or their precursor materials, while 13 individuals motivated by right wing extremist ideology, one individual motivated by left-wing extremist ideology, and two with idiosyncratic beliefs, used or acquired such weapons or their precursors.
¹

The article was responding to Frazier Glenn Miller's April 13, 2014, assault on a Kansas City, Missouri, Jewish community center and retirement home. Bergen and Sterman, who research terrorism for the nonpartisan New America Foundation, highlight the fact that Miller shouted “Heil Hitler” after being arrested for his crimes. They then pose an interesting thought experiment in which “instead of shouting ‘Heil Hitler' after he was arrested, the suspect had shouted ‘Allahu Akbar.' Only two days before the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, this simple switch of words would surely have greatly increased the extent and type of coverage the incident received.”

The double standard highlighted by Bergen and Sterman extends not just to the media but to law enforcement. Consider two recent prosecutions of two different groups of people, one right wing and one (supposedly) jihadist. The first group is the Hutaree Militia, concentrated in southeastern Michigan but with affiliated members throughout the Rust Belt. At the end of March 2010, law enforcement authorities arrested nine of its members on federal “charges of seditious conspiracy, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, teaching the use of explosive materials, and possessing a firearm during a crime of violence.” Based on information obtained from two undercover informants, the FBI concluded that the Hutarees intended “to ambush and kill a local police officer and then use his or her funeral as a stage for further killings using explosive devices.”
One FBI informant, fifty-seven-year-old Dan Murray, infiltrated the Hutarees by attending meetings and earning their trust over time. He, in turn, introduced the next undercover informant, Steven Haug, as his best friend. Haug so convincingly endeared himself to the group's leader, David Stone, that he served as the best man at Stone's wedding. Both Murray and Haug surreptitiously recorded Stone making comments like the following: “We need to quit playing this game with these elitist terrorists and get serious because this war will come whether we are ready or not.” Of the scenario targeting police officers Haug recorded Stone as saying, “And if I kill their wives and their children inside, then so be it, because I'm sending a message to the rest of them.”

The government presented evidence that the Hutarees had trained (with Haug) to develop explosives, that they had a “kill list” for potential assassinations, and that they had cached as much as 148,000 rounds of ammunition. The Hutarees' defense team did an excellent job of challenging much of the government's case. It pointed out that Hutaree members had never actually detonated an explosive device—only Haug had done so—that the kill list included names of people who were already dead; that the government had selectively excerpted parts of the tape recording to highlight its case; that Murray often tried to bait Stone into making incriminating statements; and that the plans for the attack were defensive in nature, not offensive. This last point is particularly important, as the Hutaree Militia followed the teachings of Christian Identity. The war they referenced in the recordings was a holy race war. Their defense attorneys, as assistant religious studies professor Susan Palmer noted in her study of the case, emphasized the religious dimensions of their militia at trial:

Swor described his client as a firm believer in the
Book of Revelation
and the rise of the Antichrist. “The anti-Christ as David Stone understands it will come from overseas, and the troops of the anti-Christ will take over America. That is the resistance that David Stone was preparing for.” Swor emphasized the religious purpose of Hutaree training, as “contingency training for the Day of Apocalypse, when the forces of the Antichrist
literally
—not
figuratively, not symbolically, not allegorically—but
literally
invaded the U.S. and took over the U.S. government and proceeded to impose the will of the Antichrist on the people.” The Hutaree saw themselves as training for that day, Swor noted—but they would never give a date.
²

William Swor's point was twofold: first, to argue that the supposed plotting on the tape was too vague to constitute an actual conspiracy plot (as opposed to “just talk”), and second, to show that the plot was too fantastic to be taken seriously by the government in the first place. U.S. district court judge Victoria Roberts agreed with the defense; she “gutted the government's case against seven members of a Michigan militia, dismissing the most serious charges in an extraordinary defeat for federal authorities.”
³
In her ruling, Roberts asserted that this was a case of free speech: “The court is aware that protected speech and mere words can be sufficient to show a conspiracy. In this case, however, they do not rise to that level.”
⁴
The prosecution had presented evidence that the Hutarees had engaged in dangerous activities and were hostile to the U.S. government, but it had never presented any concrete plan, developed by the Hutarees, for an actual conspiracy, she argued. The government's case fell apart, and all that remained were convictions for illegal firearms possession against two members; the perpetrators got time served. To add insult to injury, members of the Hutaree Militia subsequently sued the government for damages and won.

Contrast the outcome of the Hutaree Militia case with that of the so-called Newburgh Four, four Muslim men from the working-class Riverdale community in the Bronx, associated with the Masjid al-Ikhlas Mosque in Newburgh, New York. In 2009 the federal government charged them with conspiring to blow up Jewish institutions and to shoot down military aircraft. Taped conversations from an undercover government informant played a key role in the Newburgh trial, much as they had in the Hutaree prosecution. With the blessing of the FBI, Shaheed Hussain, a hotel operator, had built a rapport with one of the four men, forty-two-year-old James Cromite, inside and outside the mosque. After four months, Hussain (falsely) claimed to be a member of a Pakistani terrorist group and made a
proposal to Cromite: the group would give Cromite $250,000 if he helped plot a terrorist attack against U.S. interests. Cromite actually ceased contact with Hussain until weeks later, when the former lost his job. At that point, Cromite recruited three other alleged conspirators: David Williams, Onta Williams (no relation), and Laguerre Payen. Veteran journalist and fellow at the Center on National Security Phil Hirschkorn reported that authorities arrested the four men “on May 20, 2009, moments after placing three ‘bombs' each equipped with 30 pounds of C-4 plastic explosives inside cars parked outside two synagogues in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.”
⁵
The explosives, and Stinger missiles also found in the possession of the men, “were duds created by the FBI and made available to the men through Hussain.”

The fact that the men were caught with the materials represented a clear advantage to federal prosecutors, one not enjoyed by the government lawyers in the Hutaree case. But in many other ways, the Newburgh case was far weaker. None of the men involved in the Newburgh conspiracy had any military background or training with explosives, and one clearly suffered from cognitive impairment. Despite the connection to the mosque, none of the men were particularly devout or pious. Hussain failed to record a number of key exchanges with the men, notably his first encounters with Cromite. In one of the recordings, the men actually expressed concern to Hussain about the loss of human life. More than anything, as Hirschkorn points out, Hussain seems to have served more as an agent provocateur than an informant. “Hussain did all the driving on ‘surveillance' trips. Hussain suggested the targets and the means of attacking them, and then provided the fake weapons to do so. Even when the temple ‘bombings' went down, it was Hussain, not the Newburgh Four, who turned on the fake detonators.” But an entrapment defense did not work, and the men received mandatory minimum twenty-five-year sentences. Even the district court judge, Colleen McMahon, asserted during sentencing that “The government did not act to infiltrate and foil some nefarious plot; there was no plot to foil. . . . I doubt James Cromite had any idea what a Stinger missile was.”

More than one observer has pointed to the surprising discrepancies between the outcomes in the two cases. Judges in both cases
voiced serious reservations about the government's case, but one did it while throwing out the basis for the government's charges while the other did it following a jury conviction. But the government's failure to secure a conviction in the Hutaree case may have as much to do with preconceived notions and ignorance about the history of religious terrorism as it does with free speech. In the Hutaree case, the government presented the religious motivation of the Hutarees but then let defense attorneys dismiss the end-times beliefs of Stone and his followers. Palmer notes how Stone's lawyer, Swor, “emphasized the ludic, speculative quality of Hutaree battle plans.” She quotes his closing argument: