Domestic Terrorism - Notable Incidents Of Domestic Terrorism

Domestic terrorism is not new to the United States. In 1920 the financial district of New York City was a terrorist target—a massive bomb killed thirty people. An investigation centered on Sicilian, Romanian, and Russian terror groups, but the case was never solved. More than eighty years later, scars from the bombs can still be seen on buildings in New York's financial district.

In 1954 four armed, pro-independence Puerto Rican terrorists started shooting guns from the visitors' gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives. Five Congressmen were wounded.

Bombings

16th STREET BAPTIST CHURCH, BIRMINGHAM, AL, SEPTEMBER 1963. In 1963 the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four female African-American children. Almost thirty years later, the case was finally closed when, on May 22, 2002, former Ku Klux Klan member Bobby Frank Cherry, age seventy-one, was convicted of four counts of murder. Cherry, who was trained in demolitions in the U.S. Army, claimed during the trial that he could not have planted the bomb the night before the attack because he was at home watching wrestling on television with his cancer-stricken wife. Prosecutors were able to show not only that no wrestling was on television that night but also that Cherry's wife was not diagnosed with cancer until two years after the bombing. Thomas E. Blanton, an accomplice in the bombing, was convicted in 2001 and sentenced to life in prison. A third accomplice, Robert Chambliss, was convicted in 1977 and later died in prison.

THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND, 1960s AND 1970s. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the radical left-wing Weather Underground, a splinter group of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), carried out some twenty-five bombings across the country. Among their targets were the New York City Police Headquarters in June 1970, the U.S. Capitol Building in March 1971, the Pentagon in May 1972, and the U.S. State Department in January 1975. In March 1970 an explosion ripped through a Manhattan townhouse where members of the group were making bombs, killing Theodore Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins, all members of the Weather Underground. The bombs being made were antipersonnel weapons loaded with shrapnel. By the late 1970s the Weather Underground had turned to bank robberies to finance its operations. Along with members of the separatist Black Liberation Army (BLA), it was involved in the October 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored car in Nyack, New York, in which two policemen and a Brinks security guard were shot dead. Among those convicted of the robbery were Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin, who served twenty-two years in prison; Judith Clark, sentenced to seventy-five years in prison; and BLA member Donald Weems, who was sentenced to life in prison, where he died of AIDS in 1986. In 2003 the Nyack post office was renamed in honor of those killed in the robbery.

ALFRED P. MURRAH FEDERAL BUILDING, OKLAHOMA CITY, OK, APRIL 1995. On April 19, 1995, a two-ton truck bomb exploded just outside the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people and injuring 518. Because a day care center was in the building very near the site of the explosion, many of the victims were children. Rescue workers searched for bodies in the rubble for almost two weeks after the blast. There was an enormous outpouring of grief for, and assistance to, bombing victims and their families. Oklahoma City residents and others aided the rescue workers and made monetary donations to assist the victims and their families. Several years later, a huge memorial was erected at the site of the bombing in honor of the victims.

Federal authorities arrested Timothy McVeigh for the crime. McVeigh, a disgruntled former army member who was rumored to be associated with an antigovernment militia group, evidently set the bomb in retaliation for the FBI's handling of the Branch Davidian cult standoff in Waco, Texas, in 1994, which resulted in the deaths of over eighty men, women, and children. McVeigh's bombing of the Murrah building on April 19 coincided with the date in 1993 that the Branch Davidian compound had been destroyed in a federal raid. He was convicted of the bombing and then executed by lethal injection on June 9, 2001. The government allowed the families of the victims to watch McVeigh's execution on closed-circuit television in the federal prison in which he died. Also arrested was McVeigh's accomplice, Terry L. Nichols. In 1998 he was convicted and sentenced to life for the deaths of eight law enforcement officers killed in the blast. In August 2004 Nichols received 161 life terms for the deaths of other victims.

CENTENNIAL PARK, OLYMPIC GAMES, ATLANTA, GA, JULY 1996. While the toll in lives and property damage was much lower than in the Oklahoma City bombing, a bombing in July at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, created international alarm. When a nail-packed pipe bomb exploded in a large common area, one person was killed and more than a hundred were injured. Authorities believed the perpetrator might have been affiliated with a Christian Identity group, a militant white supremacist organization.

Shortly after the attack, suspicion centered on a security guard at Centennial Park, where the blast occurred, but he was later cleared and given an official apology. In May 1998 the FBI added Eric Robert Rudolph to its Top Ten Most Wanted list, seeking him for questioning about the Olympics bombing and two later incidents. Rudolph was also charged with bombing an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, in January 1998. In that blast, an off-duty police officer was killed and a nurse was seriously injured. The FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Birmingham Police Department offered a $1 million reward. Rudolph was captured in December 2003 in North Carolina, where he had been hiding in the rugged Nantahala National Forest.

THE UNABOMBER. Over a seventeen-year period, an individual nicknamed the "Unabomber" committed sixteen bombings in several states. Three people were killed and twenty-three injured in the attacks. After reading a fifty-six-page manuscript supposedly written by the Unabomber and published in the New York Times and the Washington Post newspapers in 1995, David Kaczynski contacted the FBI and shared his fears that his brother, Theodore, might be the Unabomber. The manhunt for Theodore Kaczynski was one of the longest and most difficult in U.S. history, involving hundreds of federal and state law enforcement agents. Kaczynski was later captured and pled guilty at his trial. Although he claimed the bombings (usually letter bombs) were directed against the U.S. federal government, the victims were generally not directly related to the government. In January 1998 Kaczynski was sentenced to life imprisonment, with no possibility of parole, for his actions as the Unabomber.

MAILBOX BOMBER, LUKE J. HELDER. Beginning on Friday, May 3, 2002, eighteen pipe bombs were placed in rural mailboxes in Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, and Texas, injuring five people. On Tuesday, May 7, 2002, the FBI arrested twenty-one-year-old college student Luke J. Helder in connection with the bombings. Helder was charged by federal prosecutors in Iowa with the use of an explosive device to maliciously destroy property affecting interstate commerce and with the use of a destructive device to commit a crime of violence, punishable by up to life imprisonment. The pipe bombs, some of which did not detonate, were accompanied by letters warning of excessive government control over individual behavior. In April 2004 Helder was deemed to be incompetent to stand trial.

Anthrax Attacks

Anthrax, classified by the U.S. government as a potential weapon of mass destruction, is a bacterial disease spread through spores. The spores can live in soil or the wool or hair of diseased animals. Humans acquire the disease when the spores are inhaled or ingested. Ulcerous sores on the skin and lesions on the lungs are symptomatic of the disease. While potentially deadly if it spreads to the lungs, anthrax is treatable if identified early.

Terrorist attacks using anthrax occurred in the autumn of 2001. Anthrax-tainted letters were sent through the U.S. postal system in the first major bioterrorist attack against the U.S. homeland. No link was demonstrated between the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the anthrax attacks, but the anthrax attacks did prove that terrorists could use the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to unleash germ warfare against American citizens, news organizations, and congressional representatives.

Lethal anthrax bacilli infected the skin or the lungs of personnel at various offices, all of which had received letters containing a suspicious white powder: the Sun tabloid newspaper in Boca Raton, Florida; the headquarters of NBC News in New York's Rockefeller Center; the New York headquarters of CBS News; the offices of the New York Post in New York; the congressional offices in Washington, D.C., of Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont; and facilities of the Microsoft Corporation in Nevada. The anthrax also appeared at several USPS processing facilities and at several outlying mail-sorting centers for federal government agencies such as the State Department and the Department of Defense.

Twenty-two persons developed anthrax. Five died from it: two postal workers in Washington, D.C., a Florida newspaper editor, an elderly Connecticut woman, and a New York hospital worker. The government ordered thousands more people, mostly postal workers, to take the antibiotic Cipro as a precautionary measure. Nine months later, health specialists estimated that the tainted letters may have cross-infected as many as five thousand other pieces of mail.

The anthrax arrived in letters that contained a message referring to Allah (the name for God in Islam), and the message seemed to imply an association with Islamic terrorism. However, it became increasingly clear that a single person located within the United States could have packed the letters with anthrax spores. The attacks were not necessarily the work of a group, much less an Islamic terrorist group. The spores used had been highly "weaponized," or finely milled to diameters of between one and three microns. This technical feat ensured their maximum dispersal when the envelopes were opened or even as they shuttled from post office to post office. The level of sophistication in this refinement of the anthrax implied that a highly skilled scientist or technician within the U.S. military's own bioweapons research and testing program could have been responsible. As a result, although the perpetrators were still unknown as of late 2004, the anthrax attacks are generally considered domestic terrorism.

Another effect of the anthrax attacks was the slew of threats and hoaxes that followed. In late October 2001 a USPS employee, Sharon Ann Watson of Stafford, Virginia, was arrested on charges of perpetrating an anthrax hoax at the Falmouth, Virginia, post office where she worked. She was charged with knowingly mailing threatening communications and unlawful delay or destruction of mail. Each offense carried penalties of up to twenty years in prison.

By November 2001 a total of 353 postal facilities had been evacuated for varying amounts of time as a result of 8,674 hoaxes, threats, and suspicious mailing incidents, which averaged 578 per day. Postal inspectors had arrested twenty people for anthrax-related hoaxes, threats, and suspicious mailing incidents and continued to investigate eighteen additional incidents. A reward of up to $2.5 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone mailing anthrax resulted in 165 investigative leads. The attacks caused an expensive, difficult logjam in mail delivery that forced the U.S. government to buy multimillion-dollar machines to irradiate all mail in an attempt to kill any dangerous bacteria it might contain.