Moving to the Right: The Evolution of Modern American Terrorism

Brent L. Smith is chair of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. He is the author of Terrorism in America: Pipe Bombs and Pipe Dreams (SUNY Press, 1994) and has testified on domestic terrorism on several occasions before the US House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime.

Although US citizens have been popular targets of international terrorists overseas since the mid-1970s, Americans felt fairly insulated from the threat of indiscriminate political extremism at home. While this was not an entirely correct assessment of the scale of terrorist activity on American soil during the 1970s and 1980s, the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the Murrah Federal Building bombing in 1995 dispelled the myth of American immunity and shattered American conceptions that “it can’t happen here”. Our preoccupation with these two bombings has, however, obscured the broader patterns of American terrorism that have been evolving over the past thirty years. Most notably, the United States has witnessed an increase in right-wing and white supremacist political violence. To understand adequately the strategies and tactics employed in the seemingly disparate acts of recent white supremacist and Christian Identity violence, it is necessary to understand the events that influenced and shaped the distinctive character of contemporary American terrorism.

 

This paper examines the evolution of American terrorism, the principal ideological forces that have shaped it, its strategies and tactics and the manner in which the federal government has responded to it. When placed in context, events such as the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City can be better understood and efforts to prevent similar acts in the future better assessed.

Historical Context

The Oklahoma City bombing represented America’s first major exposure to the now-infamous tactic known as “leaderless resistance”. Originally advocated by Christian Identity adherent and Aryan Nations member Louis Beam, leaderless resistance is characterised by broad pronouncements from extremist leaders calling individual militants to action. Heavily indoctrinated in Identity theology, adherents are expected to know the types of targets to select without specific instructions. Everything from target selection to equipment acquisition is left to the individual. This unique and seemingly inefficient strategy reflects the influence of thirty years of determining which terrorist tactics are most successful and how best to counter governmental efforts to combat terrorism in America.

 

To understand this phenomenon, it is necessary briefly to review the evolution of American terrorism and the contributions its evolutionary stages have made to its contemporary expression. American terrorism has been influenced by three distinct models: (1) Castro’s “rural revolutionary” model; (2) the urban “cellular” model; and most recently (3) an “unco-ordinated violence” model. Each subsequent model bears the scars and “lessons learned” from utilising the previous ones. The outbreak of American terrorism influenced by Identity theology in the 1980s and 1990s might have taken a different twist had its chief theoreticians been better acquainted with earlier terrorism strategies. The first two of these models are discussed immediately below. The “unco-ordinated violence” model is discussed in greater detail in a later section.

The Rural Revolutionary Model

The history of modern American terrorism is inexorably linked to the revolutionary exploits of Fidel Castro in Cuba. In the months preceding Castro’s final defeat of General Fulgencio Batista in 1959, Castro and his most trusted lieutenant, Ernesto Che Guevara, had waged the classic rural revolution. The strategy had been quite simple: strangle the seats of capitalism in the urban areas by controlling the countryside. Through extortion, threats and violence, Castro wrested control of the island’s sugar plantations—a major source of employment for rural Cubans—from wealthy American interests. Critical to the success of the movement was winning support among the populace. Castro relied on his opponents to secure him that support. A combination of government repression and capitalist arrogance drew civilian recruits to his “army”. Using conventional guerrilla tactics, Castro’s small band gradually increased in size, adopting a basic military hierarchical structure as it grew. With the fall of Havana in January 1959, the revolution was complete.

 

Castro became the darling of the oppressed masses, spreading a wave of hope throughout Latin America. Gradually a wedge was being driven between the ideology of mass revolutionary violence advocated by Karl Marx and the beliefs of young, militant leftists worldwide who saw the initial use of small-group terror as a viable catalyst to successful revolution. Castro immediately set out to export his revolution abroad. Within the first two years of coming to power, he sent Cuban revolutionary forces to Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Algeria and Zanzibar. By 1962, Cuba was providing training for approximately fifteen hundred guerrillas per year from nearly a dozen African nations, as well as for the “advance guard” of terrorists from Palestine, West Germany, Italy, France and the Spanish Basque region. By 1966, Castro’s popularity reached a peak when, with the support of the Soviet Union, Cuba sponsored the Tricontinental Conference in Havana. With representatives present from revolutionary groups worldwide, Castro promised Cuba’s unconditional support for terrorist training. Leftist student groups in America, fuelled by the unpopularity of the war in Vietnam and viewed by Castro as a means of destabilising the United States, were drawn to Cuba for training.

 

The rural revolutionary model began to unravel in 1967. Events were taking place elsewhere that would elevate terrorism from adjunct status to centre stage as a revolutionary tactic. In the Middle East, Arab armies suffered their worst defeat yet at the hands of Israel in the 1967 six-day war. The defeat of Jordanian, Egyptian and Syrian forces in conventional tank warfare was swift and decisive. Palestinian extremists responded to the dilemma by creating groups and cells specifically trained to use terrorism as a form of “surrogate warfare”.

 

On the other side of the world, Castro’s rural model faced an even more direct challenge. Guevara, a handful of Cuban revolutionaries and famed French Marxist author Régis Debray left Cuba for Bolivia. With ambivalent support from the Bolivian Communist Party, Guevara created the National Liberation Army (Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional). Using the same strategy he and Castro had employed so successfully in Cuba, Guevara bought a rural farm as a training site and established a base camp in the jungle along with several supply points. But the movement never got off the ground. Guevara’s effort to recruit a guerrilla army from the rural peasants met with abysmal failure. Within six months, the Bolivian armed forces had identified the location of Guevara’s camps, his most trusted guerrillas were killed and Debray was captured. Guevara was wounded and captured on 8 October 2024 and later killed by his captors. Guevara’s failure had a dramatic impact on revolutionary movements around the world and also on the evolution of American terrorism.

Urban Cellular Terrorism

Waiting in the wings were theorists with new ideas about how to awaken the collective consciousness of the masses. Most notable among these were Abraham Guillen, a Spanish Marxist who saw terrorism as a legitimate method of rousing the urban proletariat, and Carlos Marighella, a practically minded Brazilian revolutionary who put words into action. Three months before Guevara was killed in Bolivia, Marighella attended in Havana the first meeting of the Organisation of Latin American Solidarity. In the summer of 1969, Marighella wrote The Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, a short but succinct blueprint for urban guerrilla warfare. The volume was extensively used in Cuba’s revolutionary training schools and was widely distributed by Castro throughout Latin America and the United States.

 

Marighella died before he could demonstrate the practical applicability of his theorising (he was killed in a gun battle with Brazilian police in autumn 1969). The Minimanual nevertheless became required reading for radical leftists from Venezuela to the United States. It advocated attacking the seats of capitalism—the urban centres of commerce and imperialist trade. To reduce the possibility of capture, urban revolutionaries were to be organised in cells. They would seek to create panic and spread distrust of the government’s ability to protect the populace. These “urban terrorists” were to serve in much the same way as infiltrators and saboteurs do in advance of an invading army. They were originally advocated for use in combination with a rural revolutionary model. However, with the advent of satellite technology and advanced surveillance techniques in the 1960s, rural revolutionaries found that their mountain redoubts and jungle camps could not avoid detection. Richard Rubenstein, a noted authority on revolutionary strategy and tactics, concluded that “after Cuba, most rural guerrilla organizations were defeated fairly easily—even in Venezuela, where urban violence was unleashed on a large scale in aid of a Castro-style rural struggle, their efforts proved fruitless”.¹

 

Gradually, the urban cellular model became an end in itself. The Cuban focus on terrorism in the Western hemisphere dramatically shifted from Latin America to the United States during the next decade. In 1969, Castro began sponsoring the Venceremos Brigades, meticulously recruiting over a period of several years approximately 2,500 leftist students from American colleges and universities, supposedly to help gather Cuba’s annual sugar-cane harvest. From 1969 to 1977, these students were trained in revolutionary and terrorist tactics; most returned to their college campuses with well-read copies of Marighella’s Minimanual. The Minimanual became the exemplar for a variety of leftist terrorist manuals that appeared in the 1970s and 1980s.

 

During this period, a variety of leftist revolutionary and terrorist groups emerged in the United States. Some of the most notable were the Black Liberation Army; the Weather Underground; the FALN (a Puerto Rican independence group); the New World Liberation Front; the Symbionese Liberation Army; the Black Panthers; the New African Freedom Fighters; and the May 19th Communist Organisation (M19CO). Not all of these were directly trained or supported by Cuba, but all reflected the influence of Marighella’s urban terrorist cellular structure. From 1970 to 1985, leftist groups targeted scores of banks, industrial plants, National Guard armouries, recruiting stations and other military buildings—all symbols of American capitalism and imperialism.

The Levi Guidelines

The end of the Vietnam War, the tainting of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and demise of the Nixon administration in the Watergate scandal, and significant civil rights gains in the 1970s, effectively served to dilute the social unrest that characterised the United States in the early years of the decade. Recruiting became more and more difficult for leftist groups as the decade progressed.

 

The urban cellular model created a dilemma for the leftist terrorist. How can terrorism be used to provoke governmental over-reaction without alienating the general populace from the terrorist group? How can terrorist cells operate “underground” yet still recruit and “reproduce” other cells until the movement is large enough to sustain a fully fledged revolution? Even without growth in the movement, terrorist groups must refresh themselves occasionally with new members, if only to replace the inevitable losses from arrest and incarceration. There is little choice: terrorists must either recruit or avoid arrest if the “cell” is to continue to exist. Despite these difficulties and the decline of social support for leftism in the 1970s, leftist terrorists were provided with an unexpected opportunity by none other than the federal government itself.

 

The Senate Watergate hearings, which opened in 1973, revealed misconduct not only by President Richard Nixon, but also by the FBI. Further investigation revealed extensive FBI misconduct from the 1940s through the 1960s, particularly in the investigation of dissident political groups.² Congressional inquiries led to the adoption in April 1976 of the Levi Guidelines, which identified the standards by which an internal security investigation could be initiated as well as the length of the investigation. These new restrictions, as well as efforts by the FBI to restore its tarnished image, dramatically altered the manner in which federal agencies investigated terrorist groups. As part of the FBI’s measures to avoid being perceived as “political policemen”, the number of internal security investigations declined from more than twenty thousand in 1973 to fewer than three hundred by the end of 1976.³

 

Terrorist groups able to avoid arrest until 1976 found themselves operating with virtual impunity for the next seven years. Despite a declining pool of leftist extremists from which to draw recruits, leftist terrorist groups were able to extend their activities into the 1980s primarily because of this shift in government policy. Most notable among these groups were the M19CO and the United Freedom Front (UFF). Led respectively by Marilyn Buck and Raymond Levasseur, these surviving groups were among the most successful of the American urban cellular terrorist organisations.

The Emergence of the Right

Left extremism began to decline in the mid-1970s owing to the end of the Vietnam War and gains made by the civil rights movement. By the late 1970s, right-wing extremism began to resurface in response to these gains. Affirmative action, welfare, special programmes for minorities and immigration policies led to increasing opposition to federal taxes. In time, anti-tax groups such as the Sheriff’s Posse Comitatus and the Arizona Patriots developed ties with religious extremists such as the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord (CSA) and the Aryan Nations who were opposed to “race-mixing”, abortion, homosexual rights and the “pollutants” of urban life such as adult theatres and pornography. Through the circulation of propaganda literature and a network of religious and anti-tax meetings, some of these groups became attracted to the growing Christian Identity movement. Most influential in this development were a series of annual meetings sponsored by Richard Butler at the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho. These brought together all manner of “anti-” groups—those opposed to federal taxes, Jews, blacks, immigration and homosexuals. The meetings provided an opportunity to expose various types of extremists to the religious, post-millennialist “philosophy” of the Christian Identity movement that would galvanise and militarise the extreme right.

 

The roots of the Christian Identity movement have been traced to the late eighteenth in what is now known as “Anglo-Israelism”. Believing that Christ and the true Israelites as described in the Old Testament were of Aryan ancestry, the British theory contends that the lost tribes of ancient Israel migrated to the European continent and later to Great Britain. The “Israel of God” tribe subsequently migrated to the United States, the promised land, where it was believed Christ would eventually return and set up his kingdom. The Jews were portrayed as the killers of Christ and the offspring of Satan. In the mid-twentieth century, the teachings of an American Methodist minister named Wesley Swift caused a surge of popularity for Anglo-Israelism. Swift maintained that Jews are the descendants of Cain produced by an illicit relationship between Satan and Eve. He taught that Jews, in confederation with Satan, have been battling God and his righteous people for control of the world since the fall of Adam. Richard Butler became pastor of Swift’s church in Mariposa, California, and upon Swift’s death, moved the church to Hayden Lake, Idaho, in 1973. Butler formed a paramilitary wing known as the Aryan Nations to complement the religious teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian. Although numerous Identity churches exist in America, Butler’s impact on terrorism in America has been the most dramatic.⁴

 

Isolationist by nature, most of the right-wing groups associated with the Christian Identity movement bought property in rural areas and established camps and compounds. By the early 1980s, some members of these compounds turned militant, stockpiling weapons against a feared federal takeover and engaging in paramilitary training. Ignorant of the writings of urban strategists such as Carlos Marighella, right-wing terrorists would have to learn for themselves the lessons that the leftists had learned a decade previously about the use of fixed rural compounds and a hierarchical chain of command.

 

In February 1983, Gordon Kahl, an active member of the Sheriff’s Posse Comitatus and the Christian Identity–affiliated Gospel Doctrine Church of Jesus Christ, killed two US marshals and wounded three others in a firefight in Medina, North Dakota. Kahl escaped and was hidden by others in the Identity movement for over four months. During this time, he wrote a series of letters and editorials that were published in extreme right-wing and anti-tax publications that served to whip up anti-government sentiment. Kahl was eventually killed in a gun battle with state and federal authorities in Arkansas on 3 June 1983. His death soon served as the catalyst—the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back”—that caused an outbreak of right-wing terror in the mid-1980s.

The ‘War on Terrorism’

With the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980, congressional criticism of FBI abuses of due process diminished. Instead of seeking limits on FBI investigations of dissident political groups, congressional subcommittees lamented the lack of FBI resources expended on domestic security.⁵ In October 1981, long-forgotten members of the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army and the Black Panther Party robbed a Brinks armoured truck in Nyack, New York. By November, police had discovered that these groups also had extensive ties to the FALN, the violent Puerto Rican nationalist group. Later that year members of another leftist group, the UFF, killed a New Jersey state trooper during a routine traffic stop. Sensing a wave of public sentiment against terrorism, Congress demanded change. In response, Attorney-General William French Smith issued a new set of guidelines in March 1983. Contending that the old Levi Guidelines were too restrictive, Smith streamlined the investigative process and gave greater flexibility to FBI field offices. Terrorism “task forces” were created and intelligence data shared between federal and local law-enforcement agencies under the Smith Guidelines.

 

With Kahl’s death in the summer of 1983, the extreme right turned violent. The terrorist group “the Order” was formed that autumn and, along with several other right-wing groups, declared “War in ’84”. With the new Smith Guidelines in place, their timing could not have been worse. Despite several successful armoured-truck robberies by the Order that funded (and perhaps continue to fund) right-wing terrorist groups, the outbreak of right-wing terror in 1984 never really got off the ground. The collaborative efforts of the Order and the CSA came to a screeching halt in April 1985 when the FBI laid siege to the CSA compound in north Arkansas.⁶ The siege netted not only the leaders of the CSA, but also remaining Order members fleeing from the northwest. From 1985 to 1987, the FBI arrested more than seventy-five right-wing terrorists from over half a dozen terrorist groups—the Order, the Order II, the CSA, Aryan Nations, White Patriot Party, Arizona Patriots, Sheriff’s Posse Comitatus and several with Ku Klux Klan ties. All were linked in one way or another to the religious beliefs of the Christian Identity movement.

 

Leftist terrorist groups that had survived into the 1980s met a similar fate. One of the first FBI terrorism task forces netted the UFF in November 1984. The M19CO likewise fell victim to the new FBI focus on domestic terrorism, as did Puerto Rican terrorist groups. Following their theft of $7.1 million from the Wells Fargo depot in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1983, the Puerto Rican nationalists the Macheteros (Machete Wielders) came under FBI scrutiny. The Macheteros were severely damaged by the arrests of over two dozen members in 1985.

 

Nearly two hundred terrorists from over twenty different groups were indicted and brought to trial in federal courts within three years of the implementation of the Smith Guidelines, which had unleashed a FBI response not unlike that against the criminal gangs of the 1930s. During the late 1980s, the FBI also received significant extensions of authority and jurisdiction against international terrorists. In 1986, Congress passed the Omnibus Diplomatic Security and Anti-terrorism Act, which gave the FBI authority to investigate, arrest and return to the United States persons accused of terrorism against American citizens abroad. Previously, such crimes were subject solely to the laws of the host nation. For the first time, the United States was claiming jurisdiction for crimes committed on another nation’s soil. Like the act itself, the implications were far-reaching. During the 1990s, America’s federal prisons would house the first of several international terrorists convicted of acts of terrorism committed overseas. FBI Director William Webster’s fears that getting the FBI more deeply involved in “political policing” would further erode public confidence in the FBI proved unfounded. Ironically, the initiative against American terrorism during this period helped restore the tarnished image of the FBI following the Watergate hearings.

 

The successes of the federal government in the latter half of the 1980s and the concomitant failures of terrorist groups had dramatically different effects on left- and right-wing extremism. Leftist terror was virtually extinct in the United States during the 1990s, whereas the extreme right regrouped for another assault. The two most formidable terrorist threats against the United States—the Christian Identity movement and Islamic fundamentalist terror—had been effectively challenged. Against the extreme right, the Smith Guidelines proved to be an effective investigative and prosecutorial tool that almost wrecked the violent fringes of the movement. Against Islamic terrorism, implementation of the Omnibus Diplomatic Security and Anti-terrorism Act of 1986 resulted in the successful conviction and incarceration of terrorists who previously believed they were insulated from prosecution. Neither of these federal strategies eliminated terrorism, however. In fact, both foes regrouped, re-examined their strategies and eventually escalated the war.

Leaderless Resistance

The round-up of Identity extremists in the mid-1980s resulted in the conviction of all but the most noted leaders of the movement—Richard Butler, Robert Miles and Louis Beam. They were acquitted of all charges relating to the “War in ’84” in a federal criminal trial in 1988. The failure to convict Butler, Miles and Beam gave the Christian Identity movement a new lease of life. Although terrorist acts by Identity adherents virtually came to an end during the first half of the 1990s, the movement’s leaders were busy devising an alternative to the traditional rural compounds and national networking that had characterised its methods during the 1980s. In 1992, approximately 150 leaders of Identity, anti-tax and other right-wing, anti-government groups gathered at Estes Park, Colorado, to hear Beam expound the virtues of the leaderless resistance model.

 

Leaderless resistance is intended to minimise both civil and criminal liability for extremist group leaders. Leaders of the extreme right had not only been the targets of criminal prosecution in 1988, but had also incurred the wrath of the Southern Poverty Law Center in a series of civil trials. The goal of leaderless resistance is to distance the commands of movement leaders from the actual acts of terrorist perpetrators. In so doing, leaders hope to break the “chain” required in conspiracy trials. When applied effectively, the model presents severe problems for federal prosecutors.

 

These shifts in strategy during the early 1990s reflect major changes in the world of terrorism. While leftist terrorists moved from a rural revolutionary model to a cellular model during the 1970s, the extreme right moved directly from a modified rural revolutionary model to leaderless resistance. They thus bypassed the traditional cellular model so widely used by leftist terrorists and assumed to be synonymous with terrorist organisational structure. Actually, leaderless resistance is merely part of a growing trend among terrorist groups worldwide to move in the direction of what political scientist Michael Barkun refers to as “uncoordinated violence”.⁷ Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups have used the fatwa, or religious edict, for years. Both leaderless resistance and the fatwa involve political or religious pronouncements by movement leaders calling for violent action against individuals, institutions or governments. Individuals or small cells of terrorists react independently of the movement’s leadership to select targets, and make and carry out plans. Although the number of incidents of terrorism in America was fairly low in the early 1990s, Islamic and right-wing extremists perpetrated the two most publicised terrorist incidents in American history. The World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 finally forced Americans to realise that terrorism on American soil was no longer a mere possibility.

Governmental Excess

For the government, unfortunately, the successes under the Smith Guidelines also unleashed a new, and sometimes chaotic, zeal by the FBI and other federal agencies for quick intervention. Between 1989 and 1996, pressure for swift and successful resolution of terrorism investigations by the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms led to serious mistakes in at least four highly publicised cases. In two of these cases, federal investigators erroneously targeted the wrong suspects for investigation. Richard O’Ferrell was misidentified as the prime suspect in the bombing murder of a federal judge, Robert Vance, in 1989. O’Ferrell was eventually exonerated after extensive investigation. Similarly, security guard Richard Jewell was falsely identified as the Atlanta Olympics bomber in 1996. Both cases resulted in highly publicised civil suits against the FBI and news media organisations.

 

Errors in two additional cases, however, infuriated anti-government zealots. The first involved the killing of Vicki Weaver, the wife of white separatist Randy Weaver, during the Ruby Ridge, Idaho, standoff in 1992. This case galvanised anti-gun control extremists in America, who viewed government efforts to arrest Weaver on minor gun charges as indicative of how far the federal authorities were willing to go to erode Second Amendment rights to “keep and bear arms”. The second case involved the siege at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in 1993 that eventually resulted in the deaths of over eighty members of the religious group. This incident outraged many who saw the assault as an infringement of religious freedom in America. The two incidents revitalised right-wing extremism, as distinctively manifested in the militia movement of the late 1990s. The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 may be viewed as retaliation for the expansion and assertiveness of the federal role in terrorism investigations in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Oklahoma City and Beyond

Following the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on 19 April 1995, the federal government unleashed another assault on terrorism in America. The militia movement, spurred on by the events at Ruby Ridge and Waco, became the primary target of this federal initiative. During the next five years more than seventy-five members of militia and right-wing, white supremacy groups were indicted as a result of FBI “domestic security/terrorism” investigations. What is most striking about these indictments is that the groups and persons targeted used substantially different methods from the right-wing terrorists of the 1980s.

 

There has been much debate about the application of the concept of leaderless resistance. There is substantial indirect evidence that the concept has been put into action. During the 1980s, right-wing terrorist groups such as the Arizona Patriots, the Order and the CSA were fairly large, having fixed compounds and extensive contact with other groups. During the 1990s, however, the average number of persons indicted from various groups dropped from 9.4 persons to 5.8 persons per group.⁸ Similarly, while the number of terrorists indicted during the 1980s and the 1990s was approximately the same, twice as many groups were involved in the indictments of the 1990s. The 1990s in the United States witnessed more individual (as opposed to group) indictments, smaller groups and fewer large conspiracy cases. Several of these cases involved small groups and individuals who claimed to be members of the “Phineas Priesthood”, a concept deriving from the theology of the Identity movement merged with practical application of the leaderless resistance tactic.

 

Further evidence of the application of leaderless resistance by right-wing terrorists in recent years is provided by the manner in which these defendants behave at trial. During the 1980s, right-wing terrorists were much more likely than left-wing terrorists to plead guilty and provide testimony against other defendants. In the 1990s, however, this pattern was reversed. Nowadays, right-wing terrorists are much less likely to plead guilty, turn state’s evidence and testify against other defendants. They generally seem much more ideologically committed than their 1980s predecessors. Nationally, the guilty-plea rate has increased in all federal criminal trials to over 92 per cent. Among right-wing terrorists, however, this rate has dropped to less than 25 per cent. Contemporary right-wing terrorists have begun to act more as left-wing terrorists did at the height of left extremism during the 1970s.

 

Finally, right-wing terrorists have become more outspoken during their trials. Instead of pleading guilty, they tend to demand the attention that public trial provides, using pre-trial and trial publicity to elicit sympathy and raise political issues such as gun control and the limits of federal authority. So far, these strategies have not deterred federal prosecutors in their efforts to convict indicted right-wing defendants. Conviction rates for right-wing defendants increased from 70 per cent in the 1980s to over 85 per cent in the 1990s. There is considerable concern, however, that these convictions are not accomplishing the goals of the Smith Guidelines—specifically, to “behead” terrorist organisations by convicting and severely punishing their leaders. Although conviction rates have increased for those indicted, the leaderless resistance approach may be inhibiting our ability to convict, or even indict, group leaders.

The Sentencing Dilemma

Moreover, the federal government has implemented sentencing policies that may be counter-productive in the war on terrorism. In particular, federal policies to punish gun violence and guidelines intended to minimise disparity in sentences appear to be inhibiting the ability of federal prosecutors to behead terrorist organisations. Terrorists convicted during the 1980s could expect severe sentences, receiving on average jail terms that were three-and-a-half times longer than those given to non-terrorists convicted of the same federal offences, such as the illegal possession of a firearm. In keeping with the goals of the Smith Guidelines, most of these extremely long sentences were reserved for the leaders of terrorist groups, although even lower-ranking terrorists received longer sentences than “similarly situated” non-terrorists.

 

The sentencing phase is particularly important in accomplishing the Smith Guidelines’ goal of dismantling terrorist organisations. The federal courts have a long tradition of allowing consideration of “uncharged and unconvicted conduct” during sentencing. Consequently, a strategy emerged in which discussion of the terrorists’ motives was avoided at trial, but figured prominently during the sentencing phase. This strategy became particularly effective in imposing lengthy sentences on terrorist group leaders in an effort to “dismantle the organisation”.

 

The introduction of new federal sentencing guidelines in 1987 continued to provide for the consideration of uncharged and unconvicted conduct, but their aim was to reduce disparity in sentencing. This goal conflicted with those of the Smith Guidelines. Prior to the implementation of the 1987 guidelines, a person’s rank in a terrorist organisation was highly significant, with leaders receiving sentences that were two-and-a-half times longer than those given to subordinates. In recent years, however, rank has diminished as a factor in sentencing and is no longer a significant indicator of sentence length. Although leaders in the 1990s still received longer sentences than subordinates, the disparities of previous years have been considerably reduced. The implications are ominous. Not only are federal investigators and prosecutors now faced with a terrorist tactic—unco-ordinated violence through use of the fatwa and leaderless resistance—intended to minimise the liability of group leaders, they may also be thwarted in their efforts to dismantle terrorist organisations by the sentencing guidelines.

 

The federal sentencing guidelines not only reduce the ability of courts to punish terrorist leaders severely, but their mandatory sentencing requirements also preclude the offering of attractive plea bargains to less important terrorists. During the 1980s, federal prosecutors frequently used “strict liability” or “presumed liability” statutes to garner quick convictions of terrorist group members. These statutes, concerning such offences as possession of an illegal firearm, silencer or automatic weapon, provide that “possession implies intent” and allowed prosecutors to obtain convictions without having to raise the question of “intent” and political motive in terrorists’ trials. The statutes were used extensively in the 1980s to convict minor terrorists. In return for their guilty pleas on such counts, offenders were offered minimal sentences in exchange for testifying against group leaders. Now, however, these same statutes impose mandatory prison sentences. Consequently, plea bargaining among terrorists has declined. Federal prosecutors have lost a significant tool in their efforts to dismantle terrorist organisations. Some changes to the federal sentencing guidelines may be necessary to allow prosecutors greater flexibility.

Prospects for the Future

Federal anti-terrorism initiatives during the late 1990s focused extensively on the militia and anti-government movement. There was a substantial increase in the number of investigations of militia groups, and an FBI outreach programme initiated contact with them to explain what types of behaviour they could legally engage in and dispel fears about the role of federal law-enforcement agencies. These measures appear to have had some success. The number of active militia groups and of terrorist acts has declined since 1996.

 

There is some evidence that the Christian Identity theology associated with almost all right-wing terrorist groups during the past twenty years is no longer the choice of young white supremacists. Odinism and other variants of paganism have emerged as powerful “spiritual” recruiting ideologies, particularly among skinheads and in the “black metal” music scene.⁹ The Identity movement has a long tradition, however, and should not be discounted yet. It still provides the most comprehensive religious, political and economic explanation of the world’s ills for a host of marginalised Americans. Immigration, affirmative action, gun control, the farm crisis and taxation remain significant sources of discontent for many white Americans. These desperate people will continue to see in Identity theology a rationale for their situation and a blueprint for violence.

 

Although the extreme left has been relatively docile since the federal crackdown on terrorist groups in the mid-1980s, a resurgence of leftist violence in America is a real possibility. If the Republican Party wins the national elections in November 2000 and obtains control of both houses of Congress as well as the presidency, violent left extremism will become much more likely. Black and civil rights activists, Marxist and socialist diehards and environmental extremists are certain to fear that the civil rights gains, economic programmes for the disadvantaged and environmental protections of recent years will be at risk.

 

The coming decade will be particularly trying for law-enforcement and federal anti-terrorism efforts. New terrorist strategies such as leaderless resistance will frustrate investigators, leading to calls for the easing of privacy laws, curtailments of freedom of speech and changes in the rules regarding terrorism and domestic security investigations. Similarly, the small but potentially devastating threat of terrorism with weapons of mass destruction will put pressure on federal authorities to expand the powers of investigating agencies. The next few years will be a period of tremendous economic opportunity for the United States, but also one of great danger from internal threat. How the US government handles this opportunity will determine whether the threat of internal polarisation and extensive terrorism becomes a reality.

Endnotes

1. Richard Rubenstein, Alchemists of Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1987), p. 66.

 

2. Tony Poveda, Lawlessness and Reform: The FBI in Transition (Pacific Grove, Calif.: Brooks/Cole, 1990).

 

3. John T. Elliff, The Reform of FBI Intelligence Operations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), p. 79.

 

4. In September 2000, a jury found Butler and the Aryan Nations (AN) liable for punitive and compensatory damages in the injury of two persons assaulted by AN security personnel. The multi-million dollar judgement will result in the loss of Butler’s AN compound at Hayden Lake.

 

5. Poveda, Lawlessness and Reform, pp. 128–30.

 

6. The Oklahoma City bombing occurred on 19 April 1995, the tenth anniversary of the failure of the “War in ’84”.

 

7. Michael Barkun, “Leaderless Resistance and Phineas Priests: Strategies of Uncoordinated Violence on the Far Right” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, San Diego, Calif., 1997).

 

8. Brent Smith and Kelly Damphousse, “The Prosecution and Punishment of American Terrorists: 1980–1996” (paper presented at the “Terrorism and Beyond ... The Twentieth Century” conference, Oklahoma City, Okla., 17 April 2024).

 

9. Eric Ward, Jonn Lunsford and Justin Massa, “The Sounds of Violence”, The Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report (autumn 1999), pp. 28–32.