Last month, a defendant pleaded guilty to possessing “a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition,” and dozens of other illegal weapons. Terrorism expert Daniel Levitas described the nab “at the very top of all domestic terrorist arrests in the past 20 years in terms of the lethality of the arsenal.”
Funny that in this era of flashing color-coded alerts and endless government press conferences, I hadn’t heard of this case. Or is it?
[O]utside Tyler, Texas, the case is almost unknown. In the past nine months, there have been two government press releases and a handful of local stories, but no press conference and no coverage in the national newspapers.
So why, you may ask, hasn’t the government and media been publicizing this case? The answer may lie in the other items that authorities found: “white-supremacist and anti-government literature.” You see, the defendant, William Krar, is a white American, not a Koran-reading Arab. So apparently his bombs are not as dangerous as al Qaeda’s.
Levitas understates the obvious:
“Excuse me, a chemical weapon was found in the home state of George Bush,” says Levitas. “I’m not saying the Justice Department deliberately decided to downplay the story because they thought it might be embarrassing to the US government if weapons of mass destruction were found in America before they were found in Iraq. But I am saying it was a mistake not to give this higher profile.”
I’ll be more direct: If authorities had seized Krar’s stash in the hands of an Iraqi national living in the U.S., every high-ranking Bush administration official would have been trumpeting this case in front of the cameras as proof that the invasion of Iraq was warranted. But since there’s little political currency to be gained from locking up a right-wing extremist, the incident proceeds virtually unannounced.
