Behind the Lone Terrorist, a Pack Mentality (White Supremacists)

[GOPFighter]

An op-ed piece in the Washington Post written by a former FBI undercover agent.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/04/AR2005060400147.html

The FBI has long maintained that Timothy McVeigh, who was executed in 2001 for the Oklahoma City bombing that claimed 168 lives, was the prototypical "lone wolf" terrorist and that anyone implicated in the bombing conspiracy is behind bars. But old loose ends and troubling new revelations about McVeigh's association with white supremacist groups have led many people to wonder whether a wider conspiracy was behind the bombing that took place just over 10 years ago.
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Most people have never been to a Ku Klux Klan rally or a militia meeting; you don't stumble into one by walking through the wrong door at the dentist's office. Chances are, you wouldn't know how to find where a white supremacist group meets in your community.
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Tim McVeigh seemed able to find a militia meeting wherever he went. He was linked to militia groups in Arizona and Michigan, white supremacist groups in Oklahoma and Missouri, and at gun shows he sold copies of "The Turner Diaries," a racist novel written by the founder of a neo-Nazi organization. No one finds such groups by accident.
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While the FBI is right to distinguish between hate speech, which is protected by the First Amendment, and hate crimes, it should not ignore the larger conspiracy simply because the leaders of these groups have devised a method of masking their influence. The murderous destruction of another race is a crime, not a political platform.

It's a good article, until the last paragraph when the author concluded, "It's like searching every haystack for a needle. Perhaps we'd have better luck if we paid more attention to the needle factories. This is especially true now that militant Islamic terrorist groups like al Qaeda are adopting the model of leaderless resistance that our homegrown terrorists mastered so well."

I hate to be cynical but it sounds like as long as these guys targeted on African-Americans, Jews, government workers, gays and abortion clinic doctors there was no need to get too excited, but now that Islamic terrorists are adopting the same tactics, maybe we should pay more attention.

I don't think that's what the author meant, but that's the message I got.