June 7, 2002
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

New York Times Op/Ed

KALISPELL, Mont.

We Americans have conjured so specific a vision of
terrorists - swarthy, glowering Muslims mumbling
fanatically about Allah - that we're missing the threat
from home-grown nuts, people like David Burgert.

Mr. Burgert, a 38-year-old who last made a living renting
out snowmobiles here in this spectacularly beautiful nook
of northwestern Montana, had a terror plan that made Osama
bin Laden's look rinky-dink. Not content merely to kill a
few thousand people, Mr. Burgert's nine-member militia was
planning a violent revolution and civil war to overthrow
the entire United States government.

The plan, according to Sheriff James Dupont, was for the
militia to use its machine guns, pipe bombs and 30,000
rounds of ammunition to assassinate 26 local officials
(including Mr. Dupont), and then wipe out the National
Guard when it arrived. After the panicked authorities sent
in NATO troops, true American patriots would rise up, a
ferocious war would ensue, and the U.S. would end up back
in the hands of white Christians.

"The good thing is that most of the people who would do it
are so stupid that they would kill themselves first," said
Sheriff Dupont, who runs the law here in rugged Flathead
County, which is bigger than all of Connecticut and has
lots more grizzly bears.

But the litany of domestic militia plots, failed ones, is
still sobering. In Michigan, militia members planned to
bomb two federal buildings. Missourians planned to attack
American military bases, starting with Fort Hood, Tex., on
a day it opened to tens of thousands of visitors.
California militia members planned to blow up a propane
storage facility. Most unnerving, a Florida militia plotted
to destroy a nuclear power plant.

If these were Muslims who were forming militias and
exchanging tips for making nerve gas, then we'd toss them
in prison in an instant. But we're distracted by our own
stereotypes, searching for Muslim terrorists in the
Philippine jungle and the Detroit suburbs and forgetting
that there are blond, blue-eyed mad bombers as well. We're
making precisely the mistake that the Saudis did a few
years ago: dismissing familiar violent fanatics as kooks.

In fact, militia members and Al Qaeda members are
remarkably similar. Both are galvanized by religious
extremism (America's militias overlap with the Christian
Identity movement, which preaches that Jews are the
children of Satan and that people of color are sub-human),
both see the United States government as utterly evil, and
both are empowered by the information revolution that
enables them to create networks, recruit disciples and
trade recipes for bio- and chemical weapons.

It would be a mistake to put one's faith in the militias'
eternal incompetence. Jessica Stern of Harvard has written
about an anti-government activist named James Dalton Bell,
who earned a degree in chemistry from M.I.T. and is
unquestionably brilliant. By age 14, he says, "I was
studying the isomerization of benzyl thiocyanate to the
isocyanate."

Weren't we all? But Mr. Bell, who is now in jail, is also
believed by the authorities to have manufactured sarin, a
nerve gas, in his basement. He led a chemical attack
against an I.R.S. office and wrote an Internet book called
"Assassination Politics," which outlines a very clever
scheme to pay for contract killings of federal officials
with digital cash in a way that preserves anonymity at both
ends. There is also evidence that Mr. Bell talked
"hypothetically" of poisoning a city's water supply.

The things you learn in Montana: According to militia
members here, the World Trade Center attacks were a plot by
the Feds to declare an emergency and abolish the Bill of
Rights; the Columbine school shootings were a federal test
of new mind-control technology; a map on a Kix cereal box
shows the occupation zones Americans will be herded into
after the United Nations takes over.

Another thing you learn here is how to deal with grizzlies.
Don't be so focused on a distant moose that you ignore the
bear behind you. And if it charges, stand your ground until
it's 10 feet away, then shoot pepper spray into its eyes,
and - very quickly - step aside.

Right now, I'm afraid that the Bush administration is so
focused on the distant moose that we're oblivious to the
local grizzlies like Dave Burgert creeping up on us.