mintpressnews | “We’re currently in one of the hottest periods of extremist activity
in the United States that I’ve seen in my 20-year career. This blows
what we saw pre-Oklahoma City out of the water and makes it look like a
kindergarten picnic,” Daryl Johnson, a domestic terrorism expert and
founder of DT Analytics, a private consulting firm for law enforcement
and Homeland Security professionals, says during an interview for the recent Vice News documentary. Johnson was also the main author of the intelligence assessment issued by DHS in 2009.
Yet, rather than acting on the information gathered in the
assessment, the government cancelled all of its domestic terrorism
reporting and law enforcement training after the report was leaked and
politicized by conservative media outlets and politicians.
One such publication
described “the piece of crap report” as “a sweeping indictment of
conservatives.” It continues, “In Obama land, there are no coincidences.
It is no coincidence that this report echoes Tea Party-bashing
left-wing blogs … and demonizes the very Americans who will be
protesting in the thousands on Wednesday for the nationwide Tax Day Tea
Party.”
Conservative news organizations interpreted the publication of the
report as a political power play by Obama to demonize the right, rather
than an impartial analysis of domestic terrorism that could help law
enforcement.
In 2011, two years after the report was released, Johnson said he was
deeply disheartened by how the report was characterized. Johnson told Joe Hamilton at the Muskegon Chronicle
that he was “a former intelligence analyst and counterterrorism expert
for the U.S. Army, an Eagle Scout, Mormon, one-time church missionary,
an anti-abortion gun owner, and third-generation lifetime registered
Republican.” In short, he said he is a conservative. Johnson added that
the report could not have been a political move on the part of Obama,
since he was hired in 2004 by the George W. Bush administration.
Following Hamilton’s opinion piece, Johnson penned his own article for Salon, “Daryl Johnson: I tried to warn them.” In it, he makes a damning indictment of the DHS decision not to follow through on recommendations made in his report.
splcenter | At 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, a 7,000-pound truck bomb,
constructed of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and nitromethane racing fuel
and packed into 13 plastic barrels, ripped through the heart of the
Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The explosion
wrecked much of downtown Oklahoma City and killed 168 people, including
19 children in a day-care center. Another 500 were injured. Although
many Americans initially suspected an attack by Middle Eastern radicals,
it quickly became clear that the mass murder had actually been carried
out by domestic, right-wing terrorists.
The slaughter
engineered by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, men steeped in the
conspiracy theories and white-hot fury of the American radical right,
marked the opening shot in a new kind of domestic political extremism — a
revolutionary ideology whose practitioners do not hesitate to carry out
attacks directed at entirely innocent victims, people selected
essentially at random to make a political point. After Oklahoma, it was
no longer sufficient for many American right-wing terrorists to strike
at a target of political significance — instead, they reached for higher
and higher body counts, reasoning that they had to eclipse McVeigh's
attack to win attention.
What follows is a detailed listing
of major terrorist plots and racist rampages that have emerged from the
American radical right in the years since Oklahoma City. These have
included plans to bomb government buildings, banks, refineries,
utilities, clinics, synagogues, mosques, memorials and bridges; to
assassinate police officers, judges, politicians, civil rights figures
and others; to rob banks, armored cars and other criminals; and to amass
illegal machine guns, missiles, explosives and biological and chemical
weapons. [Each of these plots aimed to make changes in America through
the use of political violence.] Most contemplated the deaths of large
numbers of people — in one case, as many as 30,000, or 10 times the
number murdered on Sept. 11, 2001.
Here are the stories of
plots, conspiracies and racist rampages since 1995 — plots and violence
waged against a democratic America.
