On April 19, 1995, Richard Wayne Snell, an anti-Semitic white supremacist, was executed by the state of Arkansas for murdering a Jewish pawnbroker in 1983. The victim was in fact an Episcopalian, but Snell, believing his own propaganda, thought all pawnbrokers were Jewish. Snell also killed a black Arkansas state trooper, for which he received a separate life sentence. He had also cased the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, with the idea of launching a rocket attack on it.
 
If the date of Snell's execution looks familiar, that's because 168 men, women, and children were massacred at the Murrah Building that day. Conventional wisdom says Timothy McVeigh chose the date to commemorate the second anniversary of the destruction of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, two years earlier. According to Daniel Levitas, author of The Terrorist Next Door, the date might well have been chosen, in whole or in part, to honor Snell.
 
Domestic terrorism is a clear and present danger, but a poorly understood one. Hundreds of hate groups within our borders have loose and shifting alliances and affiliations, with thousands of active members and hundreds of thousands of sympathizers. If Al Qaeda is a shifting, adapting international threat, US terror groups are equally nebulous, idiosyncratic and unpredictable.
 
Doctor-killing anti-abortion terrorists, homicidal tax haters, and world government fearers all may be looking at the same websites, sharing methods of destruction, and swallowing whole the same myths as Klan members, Nazis, and other self-styled vigilante psychopaths.
 
So if we had, within our borders, a major bust of domestic terrorists, especially ones with far-reaching associates around the country, the government would trumpet that triumph of law enforcement as a victory in the war on terror, right?
 
Right?
 
According to a UPI piece by Jim Kessler, president of the D.C.-based consulting firm Definition Strategies, John Ashcroft's Department of Justice has put out over 2300 press releases in the last three years, but not one has mentioned William Krar and Judith Bruey.
 
Who?

You know, that couple in Noonday, Texas, who had enough weaponized cyanide and other toxic chemicals to kill thousands, who'd rigged over a hundred bombs of different sorts -- including pipe bombs, bombs disguised as suitcases, and other such nasty tricks -- along with an arsenal of automatic weapons, plus a half-million rounds of ammunition?
 
The ones who got caught by a fluke, when fake United Nations and Defense Intelligence Agency badges they'd sent to a cohort in New Jersey got misdelivered to Staten Island and the recipient called the FBI?
 
The ones who were found with a storehouse of anti-Semitic and anti-government literature? The ones who'd been hauled in about the time of the Oklahoma City bombings before charges were dropped? The ones who were believed to be arming militia groups around the country?
 
No?
 
The ones who pled guilty and will be sentenced May 7th?
 
Me neither. Not until I started poking around the web looking for recent instances of terrorists discovered among our fellow Americans.
 
Why in the world would President Bush and John Ashcroft keep this case quiet?
 
Daniel Levitas, quoted in a Christian Science Monitor story, put it this way: "Excuse me, a chemical weapon was found in the home state of George Bush. 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."
 
A mistake because if we're going to defend this country, we'd better focus on where dangers actually lurk and celebrate methods that have proved successful. Yet the Attorney General has established Justice Department policies -- affecting the FBI as well -- that prohibit investigating citizens on the basis of their arms purchases, no matter how excessive.
 
If Krar and Bruey's co-conspirators had managed to massacre the entire U.N. General Assembly, or commit mass murder at a DIA facility, how would Mr. Ashcroft have defended that policy, when the couple was already well-known to the Feds? When those weapons, chemicals, bomb-making material, and 500,000 rounds of ammunition ought to have attracted law-enforcement attention as the cache was being stockpiled?
 
And for all our concerns about weapons of mass destructions, this week's news that a terror cell in England, evidently affiliated with Al Qaeda, possessed osmium tetroxide, an unregulated industrial chemical that could kill thousands with its fumes, should remind us of the danger of easily purchased industrial chemicals.
 
What's also clear is that the government must recognize and acknowledge that homeland security and national security are synonymous. Domestic terrorists threaten this security as surely as any foreign enemies.
 
Enormous new bureaucracies and worldwide war may be far less important than realizing that legally available products, used by terrorists operating entirely within our own borders, could pose the greatest threat of all.
 
And would anyone like to volunteer to remind the Attorney General that the Second Amendment protects arms only in the context of defending the nation, not attacking it? If you can't get through by normal channels, I'm sure you can find someone to mail you a Department of Justice ID.