Anything You Can Do…
Not to be outdone by foreigners, some homegrown lunatics appear to have been gathering weapons, including the makings of a massive sodium cyanide bomb, for who knows what. The LA Times article on this mentions that bloggers have had a role in calling attention to this unsettling case—which I hadn't previously heard about either. (Hat tip: Jenn Holland)
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
LATimes requires registration, so here are some other good links –
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=us&q=cyanide+bomb
LATimes requires registration, so here are some other good links –
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=us&q=cyanide+bomb
LATimes requires registration, so here are some other good links –
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=us&q=cyanide+bomb
Thanks, glenn
Thanks, glenn
Thanks, glenn
LATimes requires registration
Then read it here:
Case Yields Chilling Signs of Domestic Terror Plot
by Scott Gold
Los Angeles Times
January 7, 2004
HOUSTON — One evening two winters ago, a man in Staten Island, N.Y., absent-mindedly flipped through his mail. Inside one envelope was a stack of fake documents, including United Nations and Defense Department identification cards, and a note: “We would hate to have this fall into the wrong hands.”
It had. The package, intended for a member of a self-styled militia in New Jersey, had been delivered to the wrong address.
From that lucky break, federal officials believe they may have uncovered one of the most audacious domestic terrorism plots since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. Starting with a single piece of mail, investigators discovered an enormous cache of weapons in Noonday, in East Texas, including the makings of a sophisticated sodium cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands of people.
Three people ? William Krar, a small-time arms dealer with connections to white supremacists; Krar’s common-law wife, Judith L. Bruey; and Edward S. Feltus, the man who was supposed to have received the forged documents ? pleaded guilty in the case in November. They are being held in a Tyler, Texas, detention facility and are scheduled to appear before a federal judge for sentencing next month.
But what is typically the end of a criminal case may be only the beginning in this one. Some government investigators believe other conspirators may be on the loose. And they readily acknowledge that they have no idea what the stash of weapons was for ? though they have tantalizing and alarming clues of a “covert operation or plan,” according to an FBI affidavit.
“What was Krar going to do with this stuff? That’s what we want to know ? and we don’t know,” said Brit Featherston, an assistant U.S. attorney and the federal government’s anti-terrorism coordinator in the eastern district of Texas. “There is no legitimate reason to have this stuff. The bottom line is that it only had one purpose, and that was to kill people. And it’s very troubling that we have yet to figure it out.”
Krar, 62, who lived in the piney woods of Noonday, a tiny community about 100 miles southeast of Dallas, pleaded guilty to possession of a chemical weapon and faces a possible sentence of life in prison, Featherston said.
Bruey, 54, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to possess illegal weapons and faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison, Featherston said.
Feltus, 56, of New Jersey, has pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting the transportation of false identification documents and faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison, Featherston said.
According to the FBI affidavit, Feltus has told investigators that he is a member of a group called the New Jersey Militia, which, according to its website, believes the federal government has grown too powerful and says it is “ready, as a last resort, to come to our nation’s defense against all enemies, foreign or domestic.”
It is unclear whether Krar or Bruey had any involvement with the organization. Neither representatives of the New Jersey Militia nor attorneys representing Feltus and Bruey could be reached for comment.
Tonda L. Curry, a Tyler attorney, represents Krar, who appears to have made much of his living, investigators say, by manufacturing trigger parts for .223-caliber Bushmaster rifles.
Krar, Curry acknowledged, is an “eccentric” who broke the law by possessing weapons he was not licensed to own, including fully automatic guns.
He has not cooperated with investigators, and Curry would not reveal any details of her conversations with Krar regarding motives for possessing the weapons. She said, however, that she had “never seen anything that indicates there was any kind of terrorism plot or any intent to use these things against the American people or the government in any way.”
“He was not the type who kept these things at ready access. They were miles from his home in a storage facility,” Curry said. “His home was not a bunker, an arsenal, whatever you want to call it, where he was ready to attack. These things were stored as collectibles.”
The case began to unfold in January 2002, when the package was mistakenly delivered to Staten Island. Investigators traced it to a mailing and business center near Tyler, then to Krar and Bruey, who lived together in Noonday.
With Bruey’s permission, they searched a storage facility the couple had rented. The firepower inside shocked law enforcement officers.
Investigators found nearly 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 65 pipe bombs and briefcases that could be detonated by remote control.
Most distressing, they said, was the discovery of 800 grams of almost pure sodium cyanide ? material that can only be acquired legally for specific agricultural or military projects.
The sodium cyanide was found inside an ammunition canister, next to hydrochloric, nitric and acetic acids and formulas for making bombs. If acid were mixed with the sodium cyanide, an analysis showed, it would create a bomb powerful enough to kill everyone inside a 30,000-square-foot facility, investigators said.
Also discovered were anti-Semitic, antiblack and antigovernment books and pamphlets, according to the FBI’s affidavit.
The affidavit included documents recovered from a rental car Krar was driving in Tennessee when he was pulled over by a state trooper in January 2003 for a minor traffic violation. Inside the car, according to the affidavit, the trooper found many weapons, including two handguns, 16 knives, a stun gun and a smoke grenade.
The documents were titled “trip” and “procedure,” and appeared to list rendezvous points in cities across the nation. They also listed what appeared to be code phrases; some investigators say they believe the phrases could be used to indicate a level of awareness of law enforcement officials or others.
” ‘Tornadoes are expected in our area’ ? things very hot; lay low or change your travel plans,” one document said. ” ‘Major thunder storms are predicted’ ? they are looking pretty hard; be cautious.”
The clues, wrote FBI Special Agent Bart B. LaRocca in the affidavit, suggested an “involved criminal scheme which could potentially include plans for future civil unrest and/or violent civil disorder against the United States government.”
Revelations, however, that many questions remain unanswered in the case have made it the target of the new, post-Sept. 11 politics of terrorism.
Critics of the Bush administration say federal officials and the mainstream media are suffering from tunnel vision ? that they are so focused on international threats that they have failed to give sufficient attention to threats at home.
At most, the critics say, increased attention to this case could have brought more answers. At the least, they say, if the defendants in this case had been people with foreign backgrounds or Muslims, U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft himself would have announced the arrests and the guilty pleas.
Instead, details of the case were revealed in a half-page press release sent to local media. Officials say the case was at one point included in President Bush’s daily security briefings, but it remains virtually unknown outside East Texas ? even though, critics point out, it represents an instance in which federal authorities discovered a weapon of mass destruction.
Much of the criticism has come on Internet Web logs, known as “blogs.” People who operate the websites, or “bloggers,” have seized on the Krar case and what they perceive as the inattention it received from the Bush administration and major media.
The fault, critics say, lies not with law enforcement officers, whom they believe prevented a deadly plot from developing. Instead, they say, the fault lies with an administration that adheres too closely to a script.
“If anyone wanted evidence that the ‘war on terror’ is primarily a political marketing campaign ? in which war itself is mostly a device for garnering support ? they need look no further than the startling non-response to domestic terrorism by the Bush Administration,” one blog, called Orcinus, said recently. The blog, which uses a killer whale as its mascot and targets the nexus of politics, culture and journalism, is written and compiled by David Neiwert, a Seattle resident and former journalist.
Robert Jensen, an associate professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas in Austin and director of the College of Communication’s honors program, agrees with the criticism. He says that the Bush administration, to promote its efforts overseas, “needs a public that is afraid and sees these wars as justified.”
“The primary justification is a fear of people ‘out there’ who want to come here and get us,” he said. “Arrests of foreigners are very effective arrests to publicize. It has a political function. Domestic terrorism may be, in some ways, more of a threat. But there is no reason to publicize it. It doesn’t have any political benefit.”
Federal officials disagreed with the contention that their international investigation into terrorism had distracted them from domestic threats.
“Certainly, our international anti-terrorism efforts are clearly the No. 1 priority,” said Mary Beth Buchanan, the Pittsburgh-based U.S. attorney for the western district of Pennsylvania and the chairwoman of a committee of federal prosecutors that advises Ashcroft. “But domestic terrorism is also a part of that. As we’ve increased our efforts to find the sources of international terrorism, we are also stepping up our efforts in the area of domestic terrorism as well.”
Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said the observations about the Krar case are overly cynical.
“We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how we announce our activities,” he said. “We base all our decisions on the facts and the law and we pursue all violations ? vigorously.”
just register as user=anonymous password=anonymous
damn liberal media!!!
DMCA police! You are so busted!
New Jersey Milita??? Is anyone else amused by the thought of this? “The feds have become too powerful!” Geez… look at your own state!
Clearly the Feds are not doing enough about domestic terror…oh, they caught the guys– but they didn’t hold a press conference!
On “24”, my favorite TV show, last year’s plot featured some domestic terrorists. Middle Eastern terrorists wanted to nuke LA. They approached some domestic militia types and asked them to blow up the federal building where the Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU, a quasi-fictitious agency created for the show) was located. The bombing was scheduled for the same day as the nuke, to disrupt CTU’s efforts to stop the bomb.
By the end of the season we learned that the nuke was a conspiracy between domestic militia men, middle eastern terrorists, a female version of John Walker Lindh, an oil cartel, power-hungry bureaucrats used as dupes, a couple of outright traitors inside the government, and the President’s ex-wife.
What’s really sad is that all these people with their combined resources still couldn’t stop Special Agent Jack Bauer from single-handedly bringing them down in 24 hours. (They did, however, manage to strip him naked and torture him with a soldering iron, a scalpel dipped in ammonia, a tazer, and a drug to slowly collapse his lungs, but they couldn’t kill him.)
Good show. The domestic terrorism thing just reminded me of it.
“By the end of the season we learned that the nuke was a conspiracy between domestic militia men, middle eastern terrorists, a female version of John Walker Lindh, an oil cartel, power-hungry bureaucrats used as dupes, a couple of outright traitors inside the government, and the President’s ex-wife.”
Yeah, right. There’s an old saying: Two people can keep a secret only if one of them is dead. In the last couple of decades domestic terrorism events have usually been perpetrated by individuals or groups of less than a half-dozen.
Given the recent history of the Militia movement, the New Jersey group probably has about a dozen members, most of which are government infiltrators.
But who knows, perhaps next season will see a plot involving a conspiracy among domestic gun control advocates, European environmentalists, a female unibomber, a non-GM food cartel, power-hungry U.N. bureaucrats used as dupes, a couple of outright traitors inside the labor unions, and an ex-president’s wife.
P.S. Don’t hold your breath.
Definitely a sad statement about managed perception and reality regarding the war on terrorism. The administration crows about arrests/detentions of Muslims who maybe have a tenuous connection to Islamist terrorism. Yet this plot was absolutely “the sum of all fears” (terrorists armed with false government id’s and chemical weapons operating within the U.S.) and not a peep from Justice because the perpetrators don’t fit the script.
Certainly puts the war in Iraq in an ironic perspective as well. We invaded that country to prevent this scenario! Forget about Iran, maybe Texas should be next! 🙂
The good news is at least somebody is doing their job in spite of the politics. Another well-organized, well-armed domestic terrorist plot is stopped. Would be interesting to see the number of domestic terrorists busted with plans and the means to execute them versus foreign terrorists since 9/11. I recall at least 3 domestic and 0 foreign so far. But who knows, I’m sure that’s classified.
Larry-
So far this season our hero is struggling to stop a deadly virus from reaching the market. Some Ukrainian scientists are offering it for sale to the highest bidder, and our hero is under cover with a Latin American drug cartel that’s trying to buy it so they can sell it at a profit to various terrorist groups that they do business with. There’s some weird English dude working with the Ukrainians, and our hero’s ex-girlfriend (who was one of the traitors inside the government earlier) just showed up to try and buy it on behalf of some unknown group (we think her employers might be Germans tied to that oil cartel from last year, but we don’t know for sure yet).
No sign of gun control activists so far, but I doubt they’d want anything to do with our hero (who can do mean things with a sniper rifle, or even a hacksaw, for that matter…). But some of the bad guys seem to be German, and Germany opposed the war, so that should warm the hearts of everyone here, right?
I definitely agree with the idea that the NJ Militia is probably a small group. Beltland Sniper? 2 guys. Oklahoma bombing? 3 people. I would expect this group to be similar.
As for forging ID’s, do any of you get the Loompanics catalog or have internet acess? It’s not hard.
The Scientologists ran a semi-sucessful infiltration program of the US Gov’t. THey probably still do.
What’s most significant about this case is that the system worked! Some guys with fraudulent ID and a weapon of mass destruction were found by the FBI and will be sentenced by regular courts. The sentences may be shorter than I’d like, but they won’t be doing anything again any time soon, and the cops now know who they are.
Sure, the success was based on a fortuitous tip, but that’s how so many successes in life are. Whether in personal matters, business, criminal investigations, scientific research, etc., chance is always a factor and it usually favors the prepared mind. So I wouldn’t let the huge element of luck detract from celebrating that the system worked. The government performed one of its vital functions for us.
And the government apparently did this without sending people to Guantanamo, without declaring anybody an “enemy combatant”, without the initial benefit of the mammoth Department of Homeland Security (which didn’t exist when this investigation started), without a national mood ring (which also didn’t exist when the investigation started, and which was apparently not used in connection with this case), without insane security measures that don’t really make us any safer (e.g. much of what happens at airports), and without any of the other insanities associated with our “War on Terror.”
So let’s give the government a hand for doing its job for once, and request that in the future they continue doing the good work without all of the idiocy that is currently part of our War on Terror.
I wonder how many of my friends and classmates have to be slaughtered next time before some of you figure out there is a war going on here?
“Wouldn?t it be more accurate to say the system (U.S. Post Office) screwed up and an alert civilian made the save?” Do we know this? The reports say delivered to the wrong address, which could mean that the package was mis-addressed or that the address was written in a chicken-scratch that even the best minds at the PO could not decipher.
Excuse me now, I have to go deliver my neighbor’s mail and hope he has mine.
Meanwhile, I’m assuming the plan for the bomb was to blow up a Planned Parenthood clinic. Keep people from killing their pure white babies while cutting down on the number of welfare mothers in one fell swoop.
Tom from Texas, given that most estimates I’ve seen of the American Muslim population put it around 5 million or more (plus a couple hundred thousand Christian Arabs), interviewing all of them after 9/11 would have been more accurately described as “an utter squandering of law enforcement resources” not “prudence”. Let’s consider this:
According to the FBI itself, it has between 10,000 to 11,000 “special agents”, meaning people who actually do investigatory work (http://baltimore.fbi.gov/career.htm). Let’s use the numbers 10,000 agents and 5,000,000 American Muslims for purposes of keeping these figures round. (I will generously assume in your favor that all the FBI agents are fluent in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and any of dozens of other languages Muslims may speak, so that we can assume no translators are required.) This means each agent has to conduct 500 interviews. If each interview averages 15 minutes a piece (and assuming no travel time is involved), it will take 125 hours or approximately 15 and a-half working days. In other words, even if the FBI put every single agent it has on this mission full-time, it would still have to stop all of its other fieldwork for *3 weeks*. More realistically, if we started to include translation difficulties, etc., this would’ve taken months.
Tom et. al.
Your lambasting for the “right wing troll” comment is what I get for posting late at night when my head isn’t screwed on straight. I apologize to everyone.
Gracious apology accepted, T. That comment really didn’t sound like you. And no, I honestly don’t think you’re a circle jerker.
Tom,
I don’t get your point about the suicide terrorist vs. the one who intends to save his skin. Regular law enforcement did not stop McVeigh and they did not stop Atta. They captured McVeigh after the fact. Aside from the fact that we got the satisfaction of executing him and not Atta, there is no difference. Although, there may be the added bonus of getting more information to prevent other attacks from someone like McVeigh. Either way you still have a lot of dead people.
If you discover a plot and are able to stop it, the terrorist attack is averted and the individuals cannot act again (if the system is working right) regardless of whether suicide was part of the plan.
My beef with the way the war on terror is framed (at least publicly) is that it is based on dangerously faulty assumptions that this story should shatter. They’re dangerous because they encourage security myopia which is definitely not prudent.
-Islamists are a threat. Yes, but they’re definitely not the only one and maybe not even the most dangerous one.
-Massively damaging terrorist attacks require large, sophisticated organizations. Well, no.
-State sponsorship is necessary to pursue terrorism with WMD. It may facilitate it but is definitely not necessary.
-And, finally, my favorite. The world outside is a dark, dangerous place filled with crazy people who want to destroy us in our safe, sane haven in America. That is rubbish. The U.S. is as dangerous or more dangerous than most other places in the world. We have at least as many nut cases as anybody else and our society has fewer means of restraining them.
Oops. Forgot another of my favorite assumptions although it is not necessarily related directly to security.
-Western civilization is superior in every way to others. While I think that, net of all the positives and negatives, Western civ comes out on top, the fact that it produced Nazism and Communism among other nasties should encourage a bit of humility.
The username and password “laexaminer” work almost everywhere, fellows.
Thoreau,
A “law enforcement” mentality is exactly what led to 9/11, an act of war performed with the sanction and support of at least one state actor, probably several.
I’m not sure how the words “right wing” describe a person who believes in abortion freedom, believes in free speech, free immigration (although we probably need to restrict from certain countries on a temporary basis) and believes that the WOsD is our most grievous national sin since slavery. Just because many libertarians don’t believe in the ostrich defence doesn’t mean we are not libertarian.
ok…so anyone care to explain why, after finally finding some weapons of mass destruction (been searchin’ such a long, long time) the justice department didn’t make a big deal out of it? and why the liberal media didn’t flip out?
etc. cause any way you slice it this seems to be a good story, and pretty fucked up.
NJHC!
thoreau
“What’s most significant about this case is that the system worked!”
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say the system (U.S. Post Office) screwed up and an alert civilian made the save?
My problem with the present anti-terrorist effort is that authority is too centralized and responsibility too diffused. There is too much emphasis on what data the professionals think they can gather, and not enough on what off-the-wall symptom some reasonable person on the front line considers suspicious. I can just see the next local agent, swamped under a flood of suspicious FEARs (Financial Entity Activity Reports) sticking the next misdirected letter on the bottom of the pile.
Thoreau,
I am sorry if you feel that this board is “turning into a refuge for right-wing trolls” where not everybody agrees with you. I’m sure there’s a mutual masturbation board on the Net where you might feel more comfortable.
On the issue of domestic terrorists, regular law enforcement can work because Americans by and large are not the suicidal fanatics that Islamists are (ever wonder why Tim McVeigh didn’t drive the truck right into the federal building a la Beirut? Instead, he was high tailing it out of state).
When you are faced with an an enemy who puts no value on his own skin, much less that of his victims, you must use other methods than conventional law enforcment (which is primarily a reactive tool to stop people from doing something again, more rarely a deterrent to keep them from doing it in the first place). You don’t send Sheriff Taylor and Deputy Fife. You don’t let the rule of law become the worship of law.
Prudence, not the law, would have dictated that after 9-11 someone would have paid an investigatory visit to every Muslim and person of Arab birth in this country, just to ask a few questions. Unfortunately, we are no longer a prudent nation.
1. As Freerepublic will tell you, quoting a whole LAT article is not a good idea.
2. I have some on-set pictures of Kiefer Sutherland here.
3. I love the way the LAT partially supports the hyper-liberal Orcinus, while not revealing that he’s a liberal nut: The blog, which uses a killer whale as its mascot and targets the nexus of politics, culture and journalism, is written and compiled by David Neiwert, a Seattle resident and former journalist. Is the word liberal in that sentence somewhere?
However, they also need to bring in an “associate professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas in Austin and director of the College of Communication’s honors program” in order to let the readers know that the blogger is, indeed, correct.
The Kiefer Sutherland pics are here.
Matthew-
I’m well aware of the danger facing us. And I’m not terribly surprised to find that the “old school” approach worked better than all of the improvisation of the past 2 years. I mean, national mood ring? Huh?
And you can say that I’m being too lenient on terrorists when I oppose locking people up without due process, but due process seems to have worked on a group of conspirators with fake government ID’s and weapons of mass destruction. If due process hadn’t worked on them then maybe I’d change my mind.
What would make you feel safer? An out of control government that’s using its powers too indiscriminately to really focus and solve problems? Or a disciplined government that focuses on known threats and eliminates them?
Oh, wait, I forgot that Hit & Run is turning into a refuge for right-wing trolls who would prefer an out of control government. I mean, what better way to protect freedom than to remove checks and balances?
Please, let’s not drag bizarre conspiracy theories into something which can easily be explained by simple logic.
1. Why wasn’t this a big news item?
Because three guys is not the same as an international organization of thousands of trained killers.
1. Why wasn’t this a big news item?
Because very little investigation was needed.
The government didn’t need to assistance of the American people to find these people.
The government also didn’t need the approval of the American people to prosecute these people. This is not like the big national debate over the war in Iraq.
1. Why wasn’t this a big news item?
Because the guilty all pleaded, so there was little need for a trial and the associated publicity.
Krar, 62, who lived in the piney woods of Noonday, a tiny community about 100 miles southeast of Dallas, pleaded guilty to possession of a chemical weapon and faces a possible sentence of life in prison.
Bruey, 54, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to possess illegal weapons and faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
Feltus, 56, of New Jersey, has pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting the transportation of false identification documents and faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.
1. Why wasn’t this a big news item?
Because no one was hurt. Approximately 2,500 dead bodies in Manhattan makes news. Sheds do not make news.
Logic is your friend. Be kind to your friend.
To add a bit of reality to this thread:
These chemicals are not rare or incredibly difficult to acquire. These chemicals have legitimate industrial purposes. The entire Universe is made up of “chemicals”, and no matter how much the government may try to ban chemicals, we just can’t live without them.
Don’t let yourself be driven to hysteria over chemicals which the government says “would create a bomb powerful enough to kill everyone inside a 30,000-square-foot facility.”
First, the government is never a reliable witness. Consider their standard lies about the “street value” of siezed drugs.
Second, 30,000 square feet is so small as to be irrelevant. Even accepting the government figures of 30,000 sq. ft., it is absolutely trivial to build a “bomb” that can destroy a 30,000 sq. ft. building.
mr. spencer – why is it everytime someone poses a question the whole “conspiracy theory” doo dad gets dragged out? i was asking a legitimate question – some of your answers are also legitimate.
the thing that puzzles me about this is we got how many hours of coverage for that dipshit in cali (walker lindh) and thousands of hours of coverage for all sorts of extra bombers who never quite made it yet something like this, which has a fresh new angle and still induces the heebie jeebies got no play in new york. not even in the post, which has up-to-the-minute fearmongering capabilities.
none of what you mentioned has ever disqualified other stupid stories about non events, or our national mood ring in general, etc.
i am inclined to believe that there’s difficulty fitting white people from the middle of america into the current terrorist set the gov’t works with. simply because the same plot and materials, no matter how amateur and ineffective, involving arabs would have been front page news day in and day out.
if nothing else we can be glad our homegrown, middle-america terrorists are podunk morons.
NJHC!!!
Why wasn’t this a big story?
The current discussion of it
seems to be centered not on
the actual events, but on the
government in relation to it.
So ask why that wasn’t a big story.