Homegrown Variety: Not muslims, not news
Another arrest of home grown terrorists goes largely under-reported:
In the East Texas hamlet of Noonday — known for onions, not anarchy — federal agents arrested a common-law couple last April. They were hiding a weapons cache, including, as CBS News Correspondent Bob McNamara reports, the makings of a sophisticated sodium cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands.
William Krar, 62, with ties to white supremacist groups, pleaded guilty to possessing a chemical weapon and faces life in prison, while 54-year-old Judith Bruey could get five years. She pleaded guilty to conspiracy to possess illegal weapons.
“They certainly had the capacity to be extremely dangerous,” says U.S. assistant attorney Wes Rivers.
What agents found at a storage facility shocked them.
Photographs obtained by Dallas CBS station KTVT show illegal machine guns, boxes filled with 500,000 rounds of ammunition, homemade bombs, bomb-making instructions, antidotes for nerve agents and a Ku Klux Klan calling card.
January 8th, 2004 at 11:26 am
Dave Niewert has been covering this for a while. he has lots of information on his site.
January 8th, 2004 at 11:27 am
Uhm, where’s his site?
January 8th, 2004 at 1:15 pm
What this highlights is simply the deception of this administration’s so-called “War on terrorism”. By bypassing normal international human-rights laws used in typical law-enforcement rules, they are able to pursue their enemies unhindered. Terrorists are no longer just criminals, but they are war-time “enemy combatants”.
Why isn’t “William Krar” an enemy combatant? Because he serves no strategic interest, and therefore can be handled quietly as ever by our functioning legal system according to peace-time laws.
There’s a great article in Foreign Affairs this month about this.
January 8th, 2004 at 1:36 pm
See, this proves that Texas has ties to al-Qaeda! When do we invade?
January 8th, 2004 at 1:37 pm
Sorry
dneiwert.blogspot.com
He is a former journalist who has written at least one book on domestic terrorists.
March 15th, 2004 at 11:25 am
Thought you might be interested in a column I wrote on the William Krar case for UPI.
Outside View: Who is William Krar?
By Jim Kessler
A UPI Outside View commentary
Published 3/14/2004 2:57 PM
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WASHINGTON, March 14 (UPI) — Since his appointment as attorney general, John Ashcroft’s Washington office has issued 2,295 news releases. Not one of them has mentioned the name William Joseph Krar.
Krar’s attorney is saying it’s all a misunderstanding, and Krar himself is not talking, but his arrest by federal law enforcement in the small town of Noonday, Texas, last April may have stopped the most devastating terror attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11.
Krar, who is affiliated with several anti-government, white supremacist militia organizations, was apprehended after mailing a package containing false U.N. credentials, Defense Intelligence Agency IDs, phony birth certificates and a forged federal concealed weapons permit to a co-conspirator in New Jersey.
The package came with a note that read, “We would hate to have this fall into the wrong hands.” It did. It was delivered to the incorrect address.
An alert citizen contacted the FBI, which led to the arrest of Krar and the discovery of a mind-numbing weapons cache: fully automatic machine guns, remote-controlled explosive devices disguised as briefcases, 60 pipe bombs, nearly 500,000 rounds of ammunition and enough pure sodium cyanide “to kill everyone inside a 30,000 square foot building,” according to federal authorities.
The arrest of Krar and two associates was the talk of the town in little Noonday, Texas, a sleepy community of about 500 people located 100 miles southeast of Dallas. But outside of a few local news stories and a handful of mentions in several national outlets, the William Krar arrest is the proverbial tree that fell in the woods.
Even more astounding is the stony silence from the Ashcroft Justice Department, which found at least 2,295 occasions to toot its own horn that are apparently more newsworthy than the Krar arrest.
“We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how we announce our activities,” a Justice Department spokesman told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Really? This is from a Justice Department that averages two news releases every day and has never been shy to march out every triumph over the arrest or conviction of anyone remotely connected to overseas terror.
No, this Justice Department is obsessed with thinking about how they announce their activities. And that is what is so intriguing about this arrest and the conspicuous lack of comment from Ashcroft.
It is, to quote another famous crime fighter, reminiscent of “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time,” said Inspector Gregory. “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
Is there a double standard at Justice between the public pronouncements over arrests that fit our current stereotype of terrorists and those that don’t? It is a question deserving of an answer. As for William Krar and his associates, who knows what they were planning? Perhaps they were going to blow up the United Nations or release sodium cyanide poison in the Pentagon. Perhaps they were ultimately going to do nothing — just stockpile weapons of mass destruction and pass coded communiqués to each other bemoaning the Zionist occupation of the United States.
We don’t know because William Krar is not talking. And neither is the Justice Department.
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(Jim Kessler is president of the Washington-based consulting firm Definition Strategies. He can be reached at jkessler@defstrat.com.)
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(United Press International’s “Outside View” commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)
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