Have We Been Overlooking Our Home-Grown Terrorists?

This entry was posted by owl and bear staff on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 2:10 pm.

Is the strange domestic terrorism case from Maine a part of a larger trend of increasingly violent expressions coming from the American far right since Barack Obama’s election? Rachel Maddow weighed in on this recently:

Should this guy have been [caught] before he died? And, post-9/11, have we focused too much on stopping Bin Laden again at the expense of potentially stopping the next Timothy McVeigh?

The Maine incident is only the latest in a long string of cases of serious domestic terrorism emerging from the extremist Right since 9/11. David Neiwert rounds up some others.

The anthrax killer…the far-right “Patriot” who constructed a sodium cyanide bomb capable of killing hundreds…the Alabama militiamen who plotted to go on an anti-Latino killing rampage…the ex-Army Ranger who planned an anti-abortion killing spree…the young skinheads who wanted to kill 107 black people and cap it off with Barack Obama…There has also been outright malfeasance on the part of the FBI when it came to investigating far-right extremists in the past eight years…That appears to be changing–the FBI has been public about its concerns regarding the resurgence in white-supremacist hate groups and their activities and recruitment since Obama’s election. We’ll have to see if that translates into tackling the problem seriously.

[Crooks and Liars]