TERRORISM AND AMERICA:
A Commonsense Strategy for a Democratic Society
By Philip B. Heymann
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 179 pages, $25
TABERNACLE OF HATE:
Why They Bombed Oklahoma City
By Kerry Noble
Voyageur Publishing, 234 pages, $19.95
In the late night hours of April 19, 1985, an FBI task force of agents and SWAT teams took up positions outside the Mountain Home, Ark., compound of a self-described white supremacist group known as The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord. After a four-day standoff ended with a peaceful surrender, agents uncovered a treasure trove of arms, explosives and cyanide.
Not quite two months later, on June 14, TWA Flight 847 carrying 153 passengers from Athens to Rome was hijacked by two Lebanese members of the radical Shiite Muslim Hezbollah sect, who demanded the release of Shiite prisoners held by Israel. By the time the situation ended, one passenger, U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem, had been murdered and 39 others, all Americans, were held hostage in Beirut for 17 days before being released.
Though thousands of miles apart, these two incidents are part of the fabric of two books that, in widely disparate style and approach, examine the who, the what and the why of domestic and international terrorism, particularly as directed against American citizens.
In “Terrorism and America,” Harvard law professor Philip B. Heymann, a former deputy U.S. attorney general, takes the reader on a scholarly, though at times dry, journey to examine how the U.S. can address the myriad and complicated issues presented by terrorism and still maintain civil liberties. It is an issue that seems to grow with importance, particularly in the wake of such tragedies as the bombings of a federal building in Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center in New York City, and those at two U.S. embassies in Africa this month.
Touted by no less an expert than former CIA chief R. James Woolsey as a “new standard of comparison for writings about terrorism and how to deal with it,” the treatise begins with a simple message: “(W)e can and must deal intelligently and dispassionately with a resurgent phenomenon, terrorism, that is designed to replace reason with fear and anger. . . . Above all, the book is a broad prescription of calm common sense . . . as the remedy for any great democracy.”
His strategy relies heavily on increased international cooperation, a continuation of a policy of refusing to cave in to terrorist demands, a strong emphasis on current practices such as the use of undercover agents and other forms of intelligence gathering, and a willingness to use “immense investigative resources to investigate any terrorist event targeting Americans at home or abroad.”
Kerry Noble, in “Tabernacle of Hate,” also speaks with authority on his topic–how he devolved from a Texas Bible student into a high-ranking member of the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, a group that was linked to a wave of hate crimes that included plots to assassinate a federal prosecutor, a judge and an FBI agent, as well as a botched bombing intended to cut off the natural gas supply to Chicago.
Noble’s is an odd account of some of the inner workings of an organization that “evolved from a quiet, rural community church into a violent, paramilitary, right-wing, white supremacist group.” The Covenant was just one of a spectrum of groups that are difficult to categorize but seize on the Christian Identity movement and run the gamut from the Ku Klux Klan to right-wing militias and the Aryan Nations.
A common tenet of the Christian Identity movement is that God gave America the Constitution as a divine revelation to the Founding Fathers only to have a Jewish conspiracy surface in Colonial times to ruin it by passing the amendments known as the Bill of Rights. Such groups refer to the U.S. government as the Zionist Occupational Government.
Noble professes to have renounced those beliefs in the wake of a federal conviction and prison sentence for racketeering and weapons violations and asserts that his book is an attempt to expose “the dangers of the right-wing movement, its paranoid mentality and philosophy” and to spell out how law enforcement should approach such groups to avoid disasters like the 1993 incident in Waco, Texas, in which David Koresh and more than 80 men, women and children died in the fiery end to a 51-day standoff with federal agents.
While Noble’s account is not fine writing and has a sort of Jerry Springer-like feel to the descriptions of the lifestyle and activities of Covenant members, it is accurate, according to Steven Snyder, an assistant U.S. attorney in Ft. Smith, Ark., who was involved in the eventual prosecution of Noble, and James Ellison, the leader of the group.
We must take Noble’s word that he has seen the wrong of his ways as the No. 2 man and chief Covenant spokesman in Ellison’s compound. But even if there are doubts about his current state of mind, there is no question he presents a bizarre story of how several dozen fellow citizens followed him and Ellison from the founding of the Zarephath-Horeb Community Church to its conversion into a well-armed paramilitary organization complete with a combat training ground called Silhouette City that used popup figures depicting Jews and blacks as targets.
The group came to believe in the literal interpretation of certain Bible verses found in the Book of Revelation that judgment would “come in one hour, that peace and safety would cease and sudden destruction would come. . . . (W)e believed that we had to `Prepare War,’ ” Noble writes.
The book is thick with discussions of how he, Ellison and other “elders” contorted the Bible to justify the view held by other similar groups that judgment is coming to America and the world to punish, in Noble’s words, “The homosexual; the liberal, idolatrous preachers; those officials in high places; the merchants of trade and usury; and all those who refused the word of the Lord.”
“We twisted scripture. . . . (W)e conveniently neglected scriptures that had to do with living in peace as shining lights in the midst of darkness,” Noble writes. “We became not only desperate, but proud that war would come and that we would be a part of it.”
“Tabernacle of Hate” reveals seamy activities in the compound located on the shore of Bull Shoals Lake. Ellison and others practiced polygamy, taking several wives. The rhetoric–some of it repeated in the book, perhaps for shock value–escalated into scatological spewing of racial and ethnic epithets. And preaching of peace turned to urgings of violence.
The subtitle, “Why They Bombed Oklahoma City,” is misleading. There is only a passing discussion of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the two former Army pals convicted in the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people.
But Noble’s insights into his own seduction more than a decade ago continue to be relevant. Earlier this year, Larry Wayne Harris and William Leavitt Jr. were charged in Nevada with possession of deadly anthrax bacteria. Although the charges were dropped when it was determined they possessed a harmless anthrax vaccine, Harris was identified as a former member of the white supremacist group Aryan Nations who had been traveling the ultraright underground circuit, telling various militia groups how to create and defend against bubonic plague, anthrax and other potential biological weapons.
The threat of biological terrorism has already raised its head in Japan, where members of the Aum Shinri Kyo cult were blamed for the release of the nerve agent sarin in a Tokyo subway that killed 12 people in 1995. Earlier this year, the FBI reported that in 1997 the agency opened 100 criminal investigations into biological- and chemical-weapon use.
Heymann, in his thoughtful analysis of the political implications, both domestic and international, of developing and maintaining a sound and well-reasoned policy for dealing with terrorism, emphasizes that the threat of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons as instruments of terror “should be near the top of any list of new priorities.”
