Terrorism-at-a-Distance: The Imagery That Serves US Power

Beau Grosscup is professor of international relations at California State University, Chico. He is the author of The Newest Explosions of Terrorism (New Horizon Press, 1998).

 

F

or nearly two centuries the rationalisation system of American foreign policy was based on the moral constructs of American benevolence and the “uniqueness” of the American social and political experiment. From the late 1960s, a politicised image of terrorism was added to that system. The product of a closed system of discourse dominated by researchers and security analysts with close ties to government and private institutions—labelled the “terrorism industry” by Edward Herman and Gerry O’Sullivan—this image encourages Americans to view terrorism as the most dastardly of evil deeds. More to the point, it portrays the terrorist as “an enemy of the Western establishment, somebody who stands in the way of the realization of Western aims”.¹

 

This jingoistic imagery has been highly effective in rallying public support for US foreign policy for nearly three decades.² Initially, American policy makers took advantage of terrorism’s pejorative connotations to undermine public support for various anti-colonial nationalist movements by linking them, and them alone, to the terrorist label. The Palestine Liberation Organisation in the Middle East, the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, the African National Congress in South Africa and Namibia’s South West African People’s Organisation were all affected by this effort. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration and its terrorism industry experts insisted that anyone opposed to Western, in particular American, interests was a Soviet-sponsored terrorist. Restricted to this jingoistic analysis, Americans rallied behind the administration’s revitalised Cold War agenda against an evil Soviet empire and its international terrorist network.

 

The same is true in the post–Cold War era. Terrorism industry experts, who continue to monopolise the terrorism discourse, argue that rogue state, Islamic, narco and “ad hoc” terrorism are central components of a New World “Disorder” threatening the American way of life. Their efforts have not been in vain. During the Persian Gulf War, linking Saddam Hussein to anti-American terrorism heightened American support for the slaughter of Iraqi military and civilians, much as linking Manuel Noriega with narco-terrorism rallied public support for the illegal invasion of Panama in 1989. Terrorism imagery also produced public acquiescence in American military interventions in Somalia and Haiti, interventions which were presented as “humanitarian” missions. In the mid-1990s, revitalised images of Iranian-backed Islamic terrorism dominated foreign policy discussions of the threats to American initiatives in the Middle East and beyond. By the end of the 1990s, the evil terrorism of Osama bin Laden and Slobodan Milosevic provided rationales for the “humanitarian” use of American air power.

 

Essential to the success of the jingoistic concept of terrorism is a carefully constructed imagery labelled here “terrorism-at-a-distance”. Two assertions combine to produce this imagery. The first contends that terrorism occurs “over there”, that it is a product of foreign cultures and a sinister act of foreign adversaries whose treachery victimises Americans who live in or travel to far-off lands. The second, reinforcing the first, is the warning that although Americans have been spared the horrors of contemporary terrorism at home, our luck is running out, our day is coming. It is only a matter of time before America’s global pursuit of freedom and democracy and its open society make enemies of foreign terrorists and draw them to the United States, both as a land of exile and as a potential target of terrorist actions. Thus, unless preventative foreign and domestic policy measures are taken, the stage is set for the “victimisation” of America.

The Foreign-Policy Factor

Richard Falk argues that the concept of terrorism has been useful in sanitising US foreign policy: “This process is aided by locating ‘terrorism’ in the foreign other, a process that can build on the racist convenience of non-Western challenges.”³

 

Locating terrorism in the “foreign other” has been a consistent theme of American “expert” analysis of contemporary terrorism. In its Cold War construction, terrorism was the work of the Soviet Union, both in its own actions (Afghanistan) and via its control and/or sponsorship of foreign states, namely Cuba, Libya, Syria, East Germany, North Korea, Nicaragua and Iran. The Soviets were said to be behind the non-state terrorism of the PLO, the Baader–Meinhof gang, the IRA, ANC, Swapo and individuals such as Carlos, Abu Nidal and Mehmet Ali Agca.

 

Despite the demise of the Soviet Union, terrorism has not disappeared, and the terrorism-at-a-distance thesis continues to underlie American analysis. State-sponsored terrorism is now the work of foreign “rogue” states (retitled “states of concern” by the Clinton administration in June 2000), namely Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and North Korea. The centre of the international terrorist network, allegedly headquartered in Moscow during the Cold War, is said to have moved three times, initially to Baghdad in August 1990, then after the Persian Gulf War to Tehran. In August 1998, President Clinton informed the world that under Osama bin Laden, the international terrorist network was now headquartered in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan.

 

Non-state terrorism is described as multifaceted, complex and foreign-based. Among its agents are leftist groups newly orphaned by the demise of their Soviet parent. In the post–Cold War climate they frantically search the political landscape for foster parents to supply them with the materials of terrorism. Even more dangerous to the American-led new world order are the dual foreign threats of Islamic terrorism and narco-terrorism. Islam is portrayed as a monolithic menace and a universal threat to Western civilisation in general and to the United States in particular. This contemporary consensus about Islam is built upon historical images of “Islamic militancy”, of an “Islamic mentality”, of “Islamic fundamentalism” or “the Shi’a penchant for martyrdom”, all of which helped provoke the fervently hostile Western response to the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. Commenting on the media coverage of that crisis, Edward Said writes:

 

We were back to the old basics. Iranians were reduced to “fundamentalist screwballs” by Bob Ingle in the Atlanta Constitution, Claire Sterling in the Washington Post argued that the Iran story was an aspect of “Fright Decade I” while Bill Green on the same pages of the Washington Post wrote of the “Iranian obscenity” aimed directly at the heart of American nationalism and self-esteem.⁴

 

In the 1990s, the Persian Gulf War against Iraq, the New York World Trade Center bombing, the Hamas–Hizbollah challenge to the US-sponsored Middle East peace process, and the terrorism tied to Osama bin Laden and his “fundamentalist” colleagues have re-ignited the fires of anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States.

New Forms of Terrorism

A by-product of the Cold War, narco-terrorism, too, has survived the end of the Soviet Union. According to terrorism industry experts, its growing presence is connected to central features of the emerging political order. First, with the loss of Soviet support, the modern terrorist, in need of financial resources, seeks to gain huge profits from illegal activities. How else, American terrorism experts ask, but through the sale of drugs could terrorists afford the costly weapons of mass destruction they ardently desire? Second, the politically constructed image of the lawless rogue state directly supports former Secretary of State George Shultz’s claim that “drug trafficking requires an environment of lawlessness and corruption to enhance the production and marketing of illicit drugs”. Conversely, the insidious imagery of narco-terrorism exaggerates the nature of the threat, providing the American architects of the new world order with the pretext for intervention in the affairs of the designated “rogue regimes” in direct violation of the right to national sovereignty. Although the United States is the major market for “insidious drugs”, the plague of narco-terrorism is located exclusively in the foreign “other”. Its origins are found either in the Islamic “fundamentalist” regimes of Iran, Iraq and Libya, or in the drug cartels of South America, Asia and the Middle East.

 

In August 1995, terrorism industry experts discovered a new form of foreign-instigated terrorism threatening America and its friends. In this “decentralised” or “ad hoc” model, specialist guerrillas are brought together to commit a specific terrorist act and then quickly returned to their country of refuge. The new modus operandi is allegedly followed by Muslim extremist groups and possibly by those who bombed the World Trade Center. It is a new operational design in which there are no clear patterns, associations or the traditional cell structure used by terrorist organisations in the past. “Ad hoc” terrorism is difficult to counter and even to analyse as it involves general guidelines coming from religious leaders, rather than precise commands. Terrorism industry experts say the new model has probably been seen in Argentina, the United Kingdom, Egypt, France, Algeria and Israel.

American Jingoism

Firmly established in Cold War and post–Cold War constructs, the imagery of terrorism-at-a-distance serves the US national security establishment by reinforcing American ethnocentricity and jingoism. First, insisting that terrorism is the dastardly deed of foreigners strengthens the high moral opinion American citizens hold of themselves, their society and their benevolent role in the world. Armed with this view and believing US foreign policy to occupy the firmest of moral ground, Americans see their nation’s adventures abroad as beyond reproach, deserving support with vigour and righteous indignation. In this bipartisan, jingoistic climate, the assessments of foreign policy analysts, particularly terrorism experts, are held in high esteem as “moral truths” and as making “moral sense”.

 

Typical of these “moral truths” is a distinction made by revered terrorism expert Brian Jenkins. Jenkins argues it is morally defensible to drop American bombs on Iraqi cities from twenty thousand feet, or to lob sixteen-inch shells for six months into Druse and Shi’ite towns in Lebanon from the battleship New Jersey. Yet the suicidal car bomb terrorist who killed 241 marines in Beirut committed a cowardly and morally indefensible deed. Typical also was the climate of official and public moral outrage evident in February 1996 when Cuba shot down two private planes belonging to “Brothers to the Rescue”, a Cuban-American anti-Castro organisation. Despite diplomatic objections by the Cuban government, the group’s planes had been violating Cuban airspace and dropping anti-communist leaflets over Havana for nearly a year. Yet for most Americans, Cuba’s status as a state sponsor of terrorism (a US State Department designation) and the alleged innocence of the “humanitarian” Brothers to the Rescue overrode Cuba’s claims to sovereignty and national self-determination. As a result, the crimes of the Brothers were sanitised, while the intensified US embargo and the UN censure of Cuba captured the moral high ground.

 

Second, the imagery of terrorism-at-a-distance connects with American views about foreigners, the inferiority of their culture and the danger they pose to the American way of life. The construction of a heightened “foreign threat” to Americans at home and abroad permits US policy makers to pursue means and measures that would otherwise be highly controversial with the full approval of most Americans. “We need to hit them before they hit us” was the battle cry that allowed the Reagan administration’s false accusations of Libyan hit squads and a Libyan terror network operating from Tripoli to escape close public scrutiny. In 1986 the high-pitched rhetoric began to pay off. According to Gallup polls, the 14 April 2024 US bombing of Libyan cities garnered 77 per cent public approval ratings. Eighty per cent of Americans surveyed wanted more strikes on Libya and 64 per cent favoured bombing raids on Iran and Syria, even though a vast majority doubted that such strikes would have any effect on curbing terrorism.

 

Likewise, public opinion polls taken in the wake of the “accidental” downing in 1988 by the US warship Vincennes of an Iranian civilian airliner with 290 people on board found little American sympathy for the Iranian victims and their families. Sixty-one per cent opposed any US compensation for the victims’ families. Seventy-four per cent in a Washington Post–ABC poll and 86 per cent in a Los Angeles Times poll blamed Iran for the tragedy.

 

In the 1993 New York World Trade Center bombing, the major media operated exclusively with the terrorism-at-a-distance thesis. In a Time article entitled “Tower Terror”, Richard Lacayo said the bombing raised “the specter of terrorism in America ... terrorism seemed like something that happened somewhere else—and somewhere else a safe distance over the horizon”. Cover stories in both Time and Newsweek, while acknowledging they had no evidence for their speculations, immediately attributed the bombing to foreign enemies ranging from Bosnian combatants to Russian nationalists. Also credited with ending American innocence and “raising the specter of terrorism in America—hitting us at home” were the usual suspects: Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Ahmed Jabril, Abu Nidal, Hamas and the Palestinians. Yet the World Trade Center bombing and the media hyperbole failed to separate Americans from their belief that terrorism in the United States was a rare event. Gallup polling found only 12 per cent of surveyed Americans admitting to a personal sense of danger from terrorist acts in their workplace or home, down from 19 per cent at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. In short, despite a foreign bombing on American soil, all aspects of the terrorism-at-a-distance thesis remained intact.

 

For the Clinton administration, the World Trade Center bombing provided ample opportunity to strengthen the terrorism-at-a-distance imagery as well as instigate new counter-terrorist measures against foreigners, in particular those opposed to American foreign policy initiatives. Acting on his assertion that “grave acts of violence committed by foreign terrorists are disrupting the Middle East peace process”, President Clinton, via executive order, barred US citizens from donating anything, including humanitarian aid, to twelve “terrorist” groups (ten of them Palestinian and two Israeli). In April 1996, Clinton signed new counter-terrorism legislation permitting the deportation of aliens “suspected” of terrorism and authorising the president to designate any foreign group and its US branches as “terrorist”. No court review of the presidential decision is possible. According to civil liberties experts, these draconian measures aimed at foreign individuals, groups and their American supporters are unconstitutional and threaten the civil liberties of all Americans. Yet these serious charges found no voice in government policy circles or public forums. Indeed, the lack of public debate on these measures provides further evidence that the American political conscience remains captive to the imagery of terrorism-at-a-distance, in particular to the notion that foreign terrorism and its agents must be halted by whatever means are necessary before they again reach American soil.

The Evils of Counter-Terrorism

Finally, government and media presentation of the imagery of distance permits Americans to disassociate themselves from the horrors perpetrated on foreign peoples in the name of “counter-terrorism”. The actions taken on their behalf are not part of their immediate world. It is happening “over there”, as in the Israeli terrorism in southern Lebanon or American-sponsored “counter-terrorism” in East Timor, Central America, Iraq and southern Africa. It happens to “those who deserve it”, as then Secretary of State Alexander Haig said after the 1980 rape–murder of four American nuns in El Salvador. The same sentiment is explicit in Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s emphatic “yes” when asked if the suffering and deaths inflicted on the Iraqi civilian population by US-imposed sanctions and bombings were “worth it”.

 

Similar attitudes explain the lack of interest of an American populace, conditioned to equate Palestinians with terrorists, in Israeli Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 massacre of twenty-nine worshippers in a Hebron mosque. More recent evidence of American support for “counter-terrorist” violence against foreigners is found in the response to the Clinton administration’s missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan in August 1998. The strikes were enthusiastically supported even though the American public was divided as to whether they would actually reduce terrorism against the United States. An ABC News poll indicated an 80 per cent overall approval rating in favour of the strikes. Of those who thought the strikes would reduce terrorism, 98 per cent were in favour. But even of those who thought the strikes would increase terrorism, 68 per cent still approved of them. A USA Today/CNN/ Gallup poll found a 76 per cent approval rating for further missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan.

 

The legacy of the terrorism-at-a-distance mindset and propaganda is evident in public silence or vigorous approval of an “anything goes” approach to fighting terrorism. If American “counter-terrorism” actions violate Italian airspace in 1986 and Panama’s territorial integrity in 1989, and thus international law, so be it. The United States must take action since no one else can be trusted to do what is required. If training Nicaraguan anti-Sandinista (Contra) forces on American soil violates US neutrality laws, if mining Nicaraguan ports violates the principle of territorial sovereignty, that is regrettable, but extraordinary times require extraordinary measures. If selling landmines to Unita rebels in war-ravaged Angola, a country with the highest per capita rate of limb amputations among children, runs counter to concepts of human decency, that is unfortunate. In the battle for freedom, first priority must be given to America’s allies, even if it means in the Angolan case supplying instruments of human carnage to overthrow a UN-brokered peace or in Indochina supporting Pol Pot, the architect of the Cambodian killing fields. Fighting fire with fire, using terrorism to counter terrorism, is both moral and effective, the terrorism experts insist. Today, a large majority of Americans, with their moral righteousness on public display, agree that in fighting terrorism the end justifies the means. What matters is that American rights and interests are protected by keeping terrorism at a distance.

 

Media and tourist industries have played an indispensable role in this numbing of the public mind. While most Americans have experienced terrorism only indirectly, a few in their travels abroad have been the victims of foreign terrorists. In such cases, it is the media, through the lens of the television camera, photograph or film recreation, which decide what image to present, what act of terrorism to cover, indeed, what constitutes an act of terrorism. It is the image of the innocent victim, be it American retiree Leon Klinghofer, Marine Lieutenant William Higgins or Israeli children, victims of Hamas suicide bombers, that is important. These images are meant to elicit vocal public support for, or deafening silence to, the “counter-terrorist” measures intended to “make the world safe for the American tourist”.

 

Likewise, the federal government’s constant warnings to the American traveller of the dangers of anti-American terrorism strengthen the imagery of terrorism-at-a-distance. These travel advisories come in two forms: those warning of anti-American terrorism in specific countries and those advising of a general anti-American terrorist threat in the wake of terrorism-related events. Both types of alert followed the arrest of Hamas official Musa Abu Marzouk and the conviction of Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman in 1995. Similar alerts came in the wake of the US embassy bombings in Africa and US “counter-terrorism” missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998. Americans going abroad in late 1999 for millennium celebrations were also duly warned about terrorist plans to disrupt the festivities. Conversely, Americans at home were put on high alert against foreign terrorists posing as millennium tourists to the United States. Combined with the terrorism-inspired high alerts and tightened security measures at the world’s airports, these travel advisories keep both American tourists and would-be tourists keenly aware of the terrorism-at-a-distance phenomenon, thus enhancing its usefulness to makers of US foreign policy.

 

In all cases, whether located in America’s adversaries of the Cold War or today in the designated enemies of the contemporary order, terrorism for the US audience has foreign origins and foreign locations. It is “at-a-distance” and US foreign policy, using whatever means and measures necessary, must keep it there.

Masking the Domestic Epidemic

As is true of all successful foreign policy imagery, terrorism-at-a-distance has a crucial domestic component. The presumed singularity of terrorism on American soil noted above has been carefully crafted to reinforce the imagery of terrorism as “other”. Indeed, to the average American, incidents of domestic terrorism are rare. During the 1990s, only four events—the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the Unabomber case,⁵ the 1995 Oklahoma City explosion and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing—alerted the public to the threat of domestic terrorism. Government sources confirm the rarity of domestic terrorism. For example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation tallied only twenty-nine acts of domestic terrorism between 1990 and 1995. The bulk of these went unnoticed by the major media and were thus unknown to American citizens. Twenty-six acts were attributed to the usual suspects of the political left and “frivolous groups” that spokespersons of the dominant conservative culture blamed for two decades of violence in American society.

 

Yet, from the late 1980s through the late 1990s, an epidemic of domestic terrorism has plagued the United States. Except for the thousands who have been its victims, it has been an epidemic invisible to most Americans. Its invisibility is the product of a successful political campaign to mask the social reality of domestic terrorism. Led by the same government and private-sector terrorism experts noted above, the campaign has convinced the average citizen and major media that terrorism in America is unusual and that when it does occur, the responsibility rests with America’s irrational and desperate foreign enemies. In turn, the campaign has effectively hidden the epidemic reality of domestic terrorism. On both counts, the campaign reflects a second and indispensable element in constructing and sustaining the terrorism-at-a-distance imagery.

 

“Aren’t some of the public’s fears of people from some ethnic groups, to at least a certain extent, grounded in social realities? ... For instance, isn’t it true that many terrorist incidents in recent years have been associated with people from Middle Eastern political and religious groups?” asked Daniel Zwerdling on National Public Radio on 22 April 1996. This and many similar statements came in the wake of the bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. They reflect the successful effort to mask the social reality of terrorism in America. One form this masking takes is reassurances by terrorism industry experts that, although vulnerable, American society has so far escaped the epidemic of terrorism.

 

The overwhelming bias directed at foreign-instigated terrorism was particularly evident in the terrorist expert and media response to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. On the day of the blast, CBS News, CNN and ABC reporters proclaimed it an act of terrorism with Middle Eastern origins. Two days later in the wake of FBI sketches of two suspects looking as American as apple pie, a wave of syndicated columnists echoed the theme that the act was foreign-inspired and of Middle East provenance. “It has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East,” Chicago Times journalist Georgie Anne Geyer wrote. An angry A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times warned: “Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief terrorist threat against Americans, has not been working.” An even more strident Mike Royko of the Chicago Tribune recommended the wholesale bombing of a likely suspect country.

 

A chorus of terrorist experts repeated the claims of foreign instigation. “This was done with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible. That is a Middle Eastern trait,” said Steve Emerson. Islam expert Daniel Pipes was convinced that “the fundamentalists are on the upsurge and they make it very clear that they are targeting us. They are absolutely obsessed with us”. Neil Livingstone chimed in with, “Since the end of the Cold War, the biggest threat to the U.S. has come from the Middle East. I’m afraid what happened in Oklahoma has proved that.”

 

In the end the experts were wrong. The Oklahoma bombing was found to have been perpetrated by native-born Americans, not by Middle Easterners. Still, the Oklahoma City blast alerted the American public to the prospect of domestic terrorism. A Gallup poll taken immediately after the bombing found that 86 per cent of respondents believed that violence would probably occur somewhere else in the United States in the near future. Yet the poll found that Americans still regarded terrorism in the United States as a rare event. Only 14 per cent were “very” concerned about their own and their family’s safety. Twenty-eight per cent said they were “somewhat worried”.

FBI Obscurantism

Analysis by the FBI reinforces the imagery of domestic terrorism as unique and foreign inspired. In 1983 at the urging of the Reagan administration and congressional conservatives, the FBI elevated domestic terrorism from Priority 3 to Priority 1 status—its top investigative category. In its annual report Terrorism in the United States, the FBI’s Terrorist Research and Analytical Center provides operational definitions and data on domestic terrorism. According to the 1994 report, domestic terrorism is:

 

The unlawful use of force or violence, committed by a group(s) or two or more individuals, against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.⁶

 

International terrorism is defined as:

 

The unlawful use of force or violence, committed by a groups(s) or individual(s), who is foreign based and/or directed by countries or groups outside the United States or whose activities transcend national boundaries, against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.⁷

 

Based on these definitions, FBI reports affirm the rarity of terrorism on American soil. Between 1982 and 1992 terrorist incidents in the United States totalled 165 with suspected terrorist incidents numbering forty-four. Most terrorist incidents (79 per cent) were instigated by groups connected to the political left, including Marxist organisations, Puerto Rican nationalists and environmentalists. The FBI’s surveys for 1990 to 1994 put the total number of terrorist incidents at twenty-eight, with suspected terrorist incidents at five. Only one terrorist event, the Oklahoma City bombing, was added in 1995. Again, the FBI attributes the vast majority of these incidents (86 per cent) to leftists. In 1993 and 1994, only two incidents were labelled as international terrorism. One was the World Trade Center bombing. The other was the occupation of the Iranian Mission to the United Nations by five opponents of the Iranian government. In 1995, the FBI reported no acts of international terrorism on American soil.

 

A second method of masking the social reality of domestic terrorism is to dismiss the daily violence against American racial minorities, homosexuals, women, the anti-nuclear movement, environmentalists and the family-planning community as unrelated to the problem of terrorism. This task is accomplished in two ways. First, such violence is designated as unconnected to any political constituency, conspiracy or movement. It thus fails to meet the definitional criteria of terrorism utilised in the FBI surveys of domestic terrorism. In the words of former FBI director William Webster, it is not “true terrorism” and so is unworthy of FBI investigative priority. Second, without the terrorism label to give it the necessary glamour, the violence is judged by the media to be regrettable and unfortunate, yet undeserving of a high profile or sustained coverage. In short, officially and unofficially relegated to secondary status, the daily terrorism against some Americans by other Americans remains below the surface of public awareness.

 

Meanwhile, the officially designated terrorist event, defined as unique, foreign inspired and gravely urgent, receives extensive, often live, media coverage along with official government high-priority security status. This approach was epitomised in the media and government frenzy surrounding the new millennium and the Y2K issue, in which events were cancelled, security arrangements limited public assess and “suspected terrorists” were questioned, detained or arrested, often without cause.

 

The social reality of terrorism in America is very different from that conveyed by the prevailing imagery. On the FBI’s own definition of domestic terrorism, if applied without prejudice or political convenience, it becomes clear that in the 1990s (as in the 1970s and 1980s) various American constituencies fell victim to terrorism on a daily basis.

 

Family-planning facilities and their staff have been the victims of nearly thirty years of sometimes lethal violence. Attacks on homosexuals and lesbians by skinheads and neo-Nazi groups saw a sharp rise in the 1990s. These attacks fit the definition of terrorism, yet they remain shrouded in official silence, ignored by large segments of the American public or treated as acts of individual revenge with no particular political motive or organised social agenda behind them. Officially categorised as “hate crimes”, violence by Americans against Americans based on race, sexual preference, gender or religion continues unabated.

 

The early 1980s saw a series of Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi attacks on members of the African American community, including sniper-fire murders and woundings, knifings, beatings and police shootings. The attacks led African American leaders to conclude there was a national racist conspiracy organised by whites against America’s African American population. The charge fell on deaf ears at the FBI until the mid-1980s, when the bravado and violence of right-wing terrorists could no longer be ignored. By the end of the 1980s, the FBI had quietly prosecuted for acts of terrorism more than seventy-five members of such right-wing groups as the Order, the Aryan Nations, the Sheriff’s Posse Comitatus and the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord.

 

Yet, it took six years (1990–6) and the burning of fifty-seven black churches throughout the southern United States before Congress held a one-day hearing on the violence and President Bill Clinton called for an investigation into the possibility of a racial conspiracy. None of the church burnings was included in the FBI’s 1990–5 annual reports on domestic terrorism. As twenty-seven churches burned in the first seven months of 1996 alone, the FBI still refused to treat the fires as cases of terrorism.

 

In June 1997 the National Church Arson Task Force reported that there was “no evidence of a national conspiracy”. This finding would appear to vindicate the FBI’s refusal to treat the church arsons as terrorism. But on its own definition a conspiracy of two is required for terrorism, not proof of a “national” conspiracy.

 

Likewise, in the 1990s numerous reports indicated that violence and the wholesale terrorising of women because they are women, Jews because they are Jews, Arabs because they are Arabs, Asians because they are Asians and Muslims because they are Muslims was on the increase throughout the United States. In addition, as the twentieth century drew to a close, the mask that has hidden official terrorism, the use of terror as an instrument for the “policing of citizens”, particularly in America’s great cities, was being shorn. As the scholarship of Mike Davis and Christian Parenti reveals, official terrorism is just as insidious today as the well-documented terrorism by local, state and federal officials during the glory days of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow.⁸ Their findings are corroborated by investigations and convictions of police officers for race- and gender-based violence in many American cities, notably New York and Los Angeles. Yet the FBI says terrorism, especially “official” terrorism, is virtually absent from American soil. In masking the epidemic of domestic terrorism, the FBI and its like-minded colleagues in the national security establishment have approached terrorism from a posture of political convenience and with a behaviour pattern that is best described as “consistently inconsistent”.

The Patriot Movement

“New Images of Terror: Extremists in the Heartland”, read a headline in the New York Times on 24 April 1995, just five days after the Oklahoma City bombing, accurately reflecting the lack of public awareness about right-wing terrorist groups before that event. FBI reports confirm, however, that the major groups identified by the New York Times as elements of the right-wing Patriot Movement were involved in domestic terrorism from the 1970s through the mid-1980s. The same FBI surveys say right-wing terrorism disappeared altogether in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But over this period members of these “hate groups” convicted under terrorism laws a few years earlier continued their violent ways. For example, in 1988 members of Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance (WAR) murdered Mulugeta Seraw in Portland, Oregon. In 1990, Metzger and his son John were convicted of conspiracy charges. In May 1991, members of the white supremacist organisation, the Church of the Creator, murdered Harold Mansfield, a black sailor. Finally, in August 1991 the white racist group Phineas Priesthood staged a series of armed robberies, assassinations and kidnappings. The FBI definition of terrorism, if objectively applied, would categorise all three groups—their political/social agenda a matter of public record, their conspiratorial status well established and their members convicted of violent acts—as terrorists. But because the FBI and media deemed them unworthy of the terrorist designation and thus the scrutiny given to foreign and “anti-establishment” (leftist) terrorists, until April 1995 they received minimal public attention.

 

Given media and government apathy, the task of documenting the rise of the Patriot Movement has fallen to private human rights organisations, in particular the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). One month before the Oklahoma City bombing, the SPLC held a conference on right-wing militias at which domestic terrorism experts warned that the potential for violence from this element of the Patriot Movement was on the rise. In 1996, the SPLC’s Klanwatch Militia Task Force identified 441 armed Patriot groups operating in fifty states. Forty-two groups had clear racist ties. According to Klanwatch,

 

The Patriot Movement is a potpourri of the American right, from members of the Christian Coalition to the Ku Klux Klan ... they include tax protesters, millennialists, survivalists, Populists, freemen, constitutionalists, neo-Nazis, Skinheads, Klansmen, Identity believers, Christian Reconstructionists, secessionists, militant abortion foes, radical anti-environmentalists and gun enthusiasts ... they are overwhelmingly white, almost entirely Christian and predominantly male. And they are bitterly disappointed in what America has become.⁹

 

United by hate of the federal authorities, many Patriot groups are armed, conducting paramilitary training in twenty-three states in preparation for war with the government. Patriot members are instructed in the tools and methods of terror and sabotage. Their leaders publish and speak openly in racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-feminist and life-threatening terms. Federal government officials are specifically targeted for assassination. While the organisational structure is intentionally decentralised or hydra-like in order to avoid destruction, the groups are linked by readily identifiable organisations and spokespersons as well as by membership and common-cause issues and remedies.¹⁰

Links between Militias

The FBI refuses to apply the terrorism label to the Patriot Movement on the grounds that the definitional criterion of “unlawful use of force or violence, committed by a group(s) or two or more individuals” is not met. The FBI sees no organisation or conspiracy behind the violence, only unattached, isolated individuals. Yet more objective analysis finds the following evidence of organisational links:

 

1. Conferences at which a Patriot Movement unified strategy is discussed and voted upon by disparate groups and individuals who otherwise are at odds with each other. Examples abound, starting with the 1992 Rocky Mountain Rendezvous at Estes Park, Colorado, at which the national militia movement was organised. Another example is the annual Aryan World Congress, most notably the 1995 gathering that launched a surveillance campaign against the “enemy”, designated as civil rights groups and government agencies. State offices of the Aryan Nations were told to use “Salute” reports (information on size, activity, location, unit, time and equipment) in their intelligence gathering. On the same weekend Salute forms were given to two hundred militia members at the Tri-State Militia Conference in South Dakota.

 

2. The existence of a massive body of Movement literature, including notably National Alliance leader William Pierce’s Turner Diaries (1980), a fictional account of an Aryan revolt against a Zionist-controlled US government that starts with the bombing of a federal building. Patriot Movement themes are also publicised via Internet links (over one hundred websites), radio programmes, paramilitary training manuals (including a complete bomb-making guide), mail order businesses and newsletters.

 

3. The public advocacy by militia leaders of an organisational structure called “leaderless resistance”, consisting of small cells and the semblance of individual action to prevent movement destruction by the federal government. Obviously, if the FBI insists on evidence of a traditional pyramid organisational structure before labelling militia individuals and groups as terrorist, they will escape such identification.

 

4. Public statements by militia leaders encouraging violence against Patriot Movement enemies, including the federal government.

 

5. Material discovered by state and local investigations indicating the existence of clandestine paramilitary groups, such as the Special Forces Underground in Washington and the Viper Militia in Arizona. Among the items found are assassination lists targeting government and private individuals.

 

6. Common funding sources among individuals and groups that the FBI labelled as terrorists during the 1980s.

 

7. The application of anti-terrorism statutes in the 1995 arrest and charging of “survivalist” Thomas Lavy for possession of 130 grams of the deadly poison ricin. The arrest raises the obvious question as to why anti-terrorism statutes were invoked in the Lavy case if the FBI insists, as it does for example regarding anti-abortion violence, that an individual acting alone cannot be labelled a terrorist. If they can be applied against Lavy, then they can be applied against militia members.

 

8. Growing indications of militia-inspired violence and plans for violence. These include bombings of federal offices and buildings, plans to poison people and water supplies, plans to destroy airports, bridges and important telephone relay centres, and the stockpiling of weapons and explosives.

 

9. The founding and expansion of illegal private militia armies and paramilitary training throughout the United States, in direct violation of a 1986 Supreme Court ruling.

 

10. Possibly the most disturbing evidence of Patriot Movement organisational activity is the vigorous national recruitment of US military personnel to the racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, violent, right-wing cause.¹¹

 

The FBI’s stance towards the terror of the militias seems to differ from the perception of a large majority of state and local law enforcement officials, who believe domestic terrorism to be more widespread. This view is based principally on more expansive definitions of terrorism than the FBI’s and on the belief that the right-wing, anti-abortion, anti-Semitic, neo‑Nazi and anti-federalist elements within the Patriot Movement do constitute terrorist organisations.¹²

 

The rise of the Patriot Movement coincides with the epidemic of race, ethnic, religious and gender-based terrorism, yet government officials and media refuse to make the connection. A day after the Oklahoma City explosion, the New York Times published a list of terrorist bombings spanning forty years. It contained no mention of forty officially documented bombings of women’s clinics over the same period. No media or government source has ever publicly drawn the connection between these bombings and the Army of God manual which contains instructions on anti-abortion violence, including sixty-five ways to destroy abortion clinics.

Simplifying Terrorism

Through its dominance over terrorism industry experts, intelligence agencies and major media, the US political and economic establishment has successfully focused public awareness on the terrorism of foreign “others” while masking America’s epidemic of domestic terrorism. Utilising a politicised and partial analysis of terrorism and pursuing a counter-terrorism policy best described as “consistent inconsistency”, this camouflage effort has created and sustained the imagery of terrorism-at-a-distance. This has crucial political implications for both domestic and foreign components of US policy. Masking the realities of terrorism at home—of Americans terrorising Americans—permits the national security establishment to keep the problem of terrorism simple, straightforward and other-directed. Likewise, projecting the imagery that terrorism and terrorists plague only people of “lesser” societies sustains public confidence in the “special circumstance” of the American experience. As a result, terrorism remains a non-divisive, non-partisan issue, used with great effect to create the “us versus them” mentality so crucial to US domestic and foreign policy success.

 

For government and media proponents of the terrorism-at-a-distance thesis, sustaining their monopoly over the discourse on terrorism and the public consciousness is crucial to perpetuating their political agenda and worldview. For were the epidemic of domestic terrorism unmasked, were it made clear that American society is not a homogeneous mass, the unifying theme alleging the “oneness” of the American experience would be shorn of its merit. Were it evident that terrorism and terrorists are products of what is allegedly the most civilised of societies, the central component of a carefully constructed moral landscape would be shaken to its core. Lost would be all the advantages accruing to the makers of domestic and foreign policy from the public perception of, and preoccupation with, the combined imagery of America “the innocent and benevolent” and America victimised by terrorism-at-a-distance. Without the moral constructs that allow US leaders to maintain heavy-handed vigilance against foreign “terrorists and their sympathisers” and to use all necessary measures to “get them where they live before they get to our shores”, the ability to influence, indeed manipulate, the democratic populace would be greatly diminished. For the American national security establishment, that would spell disaster. For American democracy, it would be a blessing long overdue.

Endnotes

1. For a fuller discussion of this imagery, see Edward Herman and Gerry O’Sullivan, The Terrorism Industry (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), p. 9.

 

2. I use the term “jingoistic” rather than “patriotic” to imply a rigid attitude of “my country right or wrong”. The term “patriotic” implies some level of independent thinking in assessing a country’s national interests.

 

3. Richard Falk, “Terrorist Foundations of US Foreign Policy”, in Western State Terrorism, ed. Alexander George (New York: Polity Press, 1991), p. 116.

 

4. Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), p. xxiii.

 

5. Theodore Ted Kaczynski, called the “Unabomber” by the FBI because his first bombs targeted universities and airlines, was accused of being responsible for sixteen bombings which killed three people and injured twenty-three between 1978 and 1995. He was arrested in 1996. FBI officials concluded their investigation of the Unabomber by saying he had acted completely alone and was motivated by his hatred of technology.

 

6. FBI Terrorist Research and Analytical Center, Terrorism in the United States: 1994 (Washington, D.C: US Government Printing Office, 1995), p. 25.

 

7. Ibid.

 

8. See Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1990); Christian Parenti, Lockdown America (London: Verso, 1999).

 

9. False Patriots: The Threat of Antigovernment Extremists (Montgomery, Ala.: Southern Poverty Law Center, 1996), p. 6.

 

10. For a full discussion of the activities, organisational structure and statements of the American militia movement, see Morris Dees, Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat (New York: HarperCollins, 1996); Robert L. Snow, The Militia Threat, (Norwell, Mass.: Plenum Press, 1999).

 

11. “Extremism in the Ranks”, Newsweek, 25 March 1996, pp. 34, 36.

 

12. See Kevin Jack Riley and Bruce Hoffman, Domestic Terrorism: A National Assessment of State and Local Law Enforcement Preparedness (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corporation, 1995).