Keywords

Cyanide

Politics

If you don’t read David Neiwert’s blog, Ornicus, you should. But if you don’t you would have missed one of the biggest terrorism stories of 2003:

Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the home and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and antigovernment literature.

Without question, it ranks at the very top of all domestic terrorist arrests in the past 20 years in terms of the lethality of the arsenal,” says Daniel Levitas, author of The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right.”

But outside Tyler, Texas, the case is almost unknown.

…it points up just how political the terror war is. There is no value for the Bush administration to highlighting domestic terrorism right now,” says Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas in Austin. But there are significant political benefits to highlighting foreign terrorists, especially when trying to whip up support for war.”

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