Flag-Waving Terrorists?: Patriotic, constitutionally-minded citizens are being demonized by leftist "watchdog" groups and elements of the Justice Department as domestic allies of international terrrorists. (On the Home Front).

Attention, concerned American citizens: Do you know any "Super Patriots" in your community -- people who displayed U.S. flags in their front yards before the Black Tuesday attack, perhaps? Do any of your friends or neighbors talk just a little too much about the U.S. Constitution, or engage in criticism of the federal government even as it protects us from Osama bin Laden's murderous minions? Have you come across anyone who insists that the United States should withdraw from the United Nations, despite the central role played by the UN in organizing the global counter-terrorism coalition?

If you have encountered such people, it is your duty to inform the local Joint Terrorism Task Force, or any available civilian "watchdog" organization devoted to monitoring right-wing hate groups. Only by maintaining vigilance against domestic extremists can we win the war on terrorism!

This exhortation is a satire -- but just barely. The terrorist atrocities of September 11th, and the subsequent anonymous bio-terror attacks using anthrax-laden letters, have proven to be tremendously useful to those who seek to suppress "rightwing" political dissent. The most obvious beneficiaries of public anxiety over terrorism are self-appointed leftist "watchdog" groups who act as an informal intelligence network for federal law enforcement agencies.

Who's Watching the Watchdogs?

One key point of contact between federal law enforcement agencies and the "watchdog" community is the "Militia Watchdog Mailing List," an e-mail discussion forum established through the State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training program (SLATT). Created through a grant from the Justice Department, SLATT is an outgrowth of the "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996," passage of which was propelled by the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Access to the "Militia Watchdog Mailing List" is made available to law enforcement and intelligence officials, academics, and journalists who are deemed to have a legitimate interest in fighting "rightwing extremism."

In a message posted to the mailing list on September 23rd, attorney Bernard J. Sussman suggested that the newly created Office of Homeland Security should seek out the expertise of SLATT's "watchdogs": "It would seem to me that this new Homeland Security agency would be perfect to adopt SLATT and get really cordial relations with the other watchdogger-type organizations that already have some insight into domestic troublemakers." Given the extensive and growing informal cooperation that already exists between leftist "watchdogs" and various law enforcement bodies, it seems likely that Sussman's proposal has been well received.

"Watchdog organizations feed law enforcement agencies information in order to prompt them to go after their enemies, real and imagined," writes political analyst Laird Wilcox in his 1998 study The Watchdogs. Wilcox, author of several scholarly works and founder of the "Wilcox Collection on Contemporary Political Movements" at the University of Kansas, warns that self-appointed "watchdog" groups "put entirely innocent citizens at risk from law enforcement error and misconduct" by "alleging 'dangerousness' on the basis of mere assumed values, opinions and beliefs...." Left-wing groups devoted to "monitoring" the "right wing" consistently advocate "formal censorship or government reprisals against their ideological opponents.... They appear to regard their opposition and critics as sub-human and not deserving the amenities ordinarily afforded to other human beings."

One useful tactic consistently employed by "watchdog" groups, notes Wilcox, is to insist that their political opponents are motivated by racism, anti-Semitism, and similar prejudices -- and that these evil motivations are so carefully disguised and subtle that they can only be detected by the "watchdogs" themselves. In this fashion, a political activist who promotes conservative and traditionalist positions runs the risk "of being ritually defamed as a 'neoNazi' or a 'hatemonger' -- two categories that can have profound consequences for the victim," warns Wilcox.

This is particularly true in post-Black Tuesday America, as the public is besieged with media accounts describing the so-called "radical right" as a domestic arm of the international terrorist network that has killed thousands of our fellow citizens. "Watchdog" activists, who are deferred to as "experts" by the establishment media, insist that law-abiding, principled conservatives -- such as pro-life activists, defenders of gun rights, home schoolers, and advocates of U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations -- are close kindred to white supremacists, neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other militant bigots. One prominent "watchdog" activist has suggested that preemptive detention of "right-wing radicals" may be necessary in order to win the war against terrorism.

Beating the Drums for a Purge

"Although no one can say with certainty who's being investigated in the anthrax investigation," reported the November 22nd edition of the leftist cyber-journal Salon, "watchers of right-wing hate groups say there's been no dragnet pulling in members of militant antiabortion, white supremacist, Christian right or militia groups for questioning, let alone detention." Among those complaining about the federal government's supposed negligence is John Foster "Chip" Berlet, a veteran Marxist agitator who grandly styles himself the "senior analyst" of Political Research Associates (PRA). PRA, notes Wilcox, is actually a minuscule think-tank with a three-person office in Boston. But neither this fact, nor Berlet's long history of support for Marxist terrorism, has deterred the media from treating Berlet and PRA as reliable "experts" on the subject of the "radical right."

Berlet's devotion to the farthest fringes of the radical left can be seen in his 1980s-era membership in the "Chicago Area Friends of Albania" (CAFA), which described itself as a group of people who "are friendly with and supportive of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania." At that time, Albania was ruled by the Stalinist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. When PRA relocated from Chicago to Boston in 1987, CAFA commended Berlet for being "a steadfast friend of Albania through thick and thin."

But CAFA was not the only -- or the most important -- Marxist-Leninist front group in which Berlet enlisted. In his resume, Berlet proudly refers to himself as a former vice-president of the National Lawyers' Guild (NLG) and secretary of the NLG's Civil Liberties Committee. The NLG, notes Professor Harvey Klehr of Emory University, was created as "an affiliate of the Soviet-controlled International Association of Democratic Lawyers" and served as a legal front for the U.S. Communist Party. A primary function of the NLG, observed Los Angeles Police Department counter-terrorism specialist Arleigh McCree, was "to act as a clearinghouse and as an apologist and defender for terrorists and terrorism."

In January 1984, Berlet, along with several representatives of Communist and subversive groups, signed an open letter to Judge Charles Sifton demanding an end to federal grand jury investigations of leftwing terrorists. A July 1984 letter "To All Progressive People," signed by Berlet, applauded "grand jury resisters" who were charged with criminal contempt of court for refusing to cooperate with investigations of left-wing terrorists. "Criminal contempt is a 'legal' mechanism to establish political internment in the United States... an attempt to instill a 'snitch mentality' in which fear of jail overrides justice and principle," declared the letter.

It is not surprising that Berlet now acts as a "snitch" against conservative Americans -- and that he is openly suggesting that "political internment" of law-abiding conservatives is justified by the "war on terrorism." In an interview with Salon, Berlet protested that the Justice Department, "in a racist way," is "going completely overboard in rounding up [Arab and Muslim] people for whom there's no evidence whatsoever that there's criminal activity" while ignoring the supposed threat from "the militia movement" and other elements of the so-called right wing.

Asked to describe "possible domestic terrorism suspects," Berlet separates the "right wing" into "three sections. You have the Christian right, the patriot/militia movement and then the extreme right, where you find neo-Nazis, the Klan, and so on.... I do know that the Justice Department and federal agencies have reached out to draw from various researchers that have studied all three sectors of the right, but one never knows how that gets filtered up into the decision-making process of how to lead the investigations."

Berlet even suggests that the anthrax-contaminated letters sent to various news outlets and Democratic lawmakers are somehow a continuation of the campaign to impeach Bill Clinton: "They [the anthrax letters] all go to either media or Democrats. Well, OK, what have we just been through in the United States? A gigantic war against liberal media and liberal Democrats culminating in the impeachment of a president.... There are still people in the extreme right, but also in the Christian right and in the patriot/militia movement, who see leading Democrats and liberal media as the cancer eating away at the American body politic.... I wouldn't close the door yet to these folks because there are some logical arguments that can be made that connect those dots."

Berlet's comments could be considered fair warning to anybody who still has an "Impeach Clinton Now!" bumper sticker on his car.

Asked by Salon if he expects "a louder drum beat calling on the Justice Department to focus on some of these domestic right-wing groups," Berlet replied: "Oh, I hear the drums, I just don't hear the response." Berlet and his fellow leftist "watchdogs" have been dutiful drum majors, leading a veritable parade of media stories depicting the American "right wing" as allies of Osama bin Laden. "U.S. government experts do not seem to have seriously considered the possibility that Middle Eastern terrorists might have slipped some weapons-lab anthrax to a right-wing ally in the U.S.," Berlet complained to the November 22nd Christian Science Monitor.

A Crescendo of Alarm

Another drum major is James Ridgeway, author of an overheated study of "right wing hate groups" entitled Blood in the Face. In the October 31st issue of the left-leaning Village Voice, Ridgeway insists that the American "right wing" is essentially a fifth column for our nation's foreign enemies.

Referring to what he describes as the "virulent hatred shared by thousands of extremists within U.S. borders," Ridgeway writes that "the recent anthrax attacks look increasingly like their doing. Some of these people have yearned to acquire the means of biochemical warfare, and today they're calling for an assault." Further, he maintains, "there's always the chance the white-power guys in the U.S. won't have to do this all by themselves. Fueled by a shared anti-Semitism, the white supremacists of America's hinterland have forged links with extremists in Europe -- and perhaps even the Middle East."

In its coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing, THE NEW AMERICAN reported extensively on the documented connections between Timothy McVeigh's neo-Nazi co-conspirators and various Middle Eastern terrorist chieftains. (*) But Ridgeway, like scores of other leftist media scribblers and self-proclaimed "experts," isn't using the word "links" to describe actual operational connections between criminal elements in this country and foreign terrorists. Instead, he and others are operating on the assumption that America's domestic enemies are defined by unacceptable views regarding the role of the U.S. government, both domestically and internationally.

"White supremacists and Islamicists like Osama bin Laden just plain agree on a lot of things -- in particular, that global-ism and multiculturalism are the Uberenemies," wrote Michelle Cottle of The New Republic. This theme was also sounded in an October 18th Newhouse News Service article, which warned that potential domestic allies of our terrorist enemies included "the loose and fractious network of neo-Nazis, skinheads, Klansmen, Christian patriots, neo-Confederates and white separatists" and those who call for "an 'America First' shift toward isolationism."

The article cited left-wing activist Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernadino, who maintains that Osama bin Laden and the American "right wing" are joined by "a rigid philosophy on how society should be ordered. Both want their own homeland, hermetically sealed, where they can practice their own exclusionary, religion-based social order. In many ways, American racial radicals mirror the intolerant, extremist groups you see on the international scene."

Obviously, there are millions of Americans who are concerned about the loss of national sovereignty, and who have nothing but contempt for the twisted mind-set of neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and others of that ilk. But the cumulative portrait being drawn of the "radical right" as a domestic enemy deliberately omits such distinctions. Those who express "anti-government" views -- anti-government," that is, according to the emerging official line -- are now being cast as potential terrorists.

An op-ed column by Gary Ackerman and Cheryl Loeb in the October 24th Christian Science Monitor cited a "warning to America" from the website of an "extremist Christian group" to illustrate that "there are disaffected Americans who harbor intense hatred for their own government and are willing and capable of committing violence against national targets.... Given the existence of these groups, speculation that one or more may have been involved in the spate of anthrax-filled letters going to prominent American targets has some credibility."

Ackerman and Loeb, who are researchers for the Monterey Institute of International Studies, argued: "The ideology of anti-government militants telegraphs the possibility of a backlash against heightened security, post-September 11.... They view the federal government as an enemy of the people, depriving U.S. citizens of their civil rights and pandering to interests suggested by vast global-conspiracy theories such as the 'New World Order,' under which United Nations-led foreign troops will impose a despotic rule over the U.S."

"Such extremist groups may therefore feel affronted if the FBI is granted more extensive powers of surveillance and detection," continued Ackerman and Loeb. "Ditto, the increase of federal law-enforcement and military personnel at airports, sporting events, metro stations and other public venues. They may believe that the proposed plan for a system of national identification cards is just another way for the government to subjugate U.S. citizens to its 'oppressive' rule. The plan for NATO surveillance planes to patrol American skies will only further cement the beliefs of these groups that the government is illegally imposing its 'tyrannical' rule on the people."

It's important to note that Ackerman and Loeb's argument is constructed in such a way that truth offers no defense for critics of government policies. All of the measures they describe represent dramatic -- and in some instances, unconstitutional -- enlargements of the federal government's police power, and a co-mingling of the roles of law enforcement and the military. The NATO surveillance planes they refer to are under the command of a UN regional affiliate and manned by crews of foreign troops. But under the logic -- such as it is -- offered by Ackerman and Loeb, by merely pointing Out such facts, one identifies himself as a "domestic enemy" of the U.S. government.

"America, of course, needs to increase its security," they concluded. "But new measures do raise the specter of a possible backlash from U.S. extremists. Continued attention to these groups is called for. While fighting the enemy without, we must not forget the enemy within."

Who is the "Enemy Within"?

Who exactly is the "enemy within"? In scores of post-Black Tuesday media reports, potential "right-wing" domestic terrorists have been referred to by the curious designation "such groups" -- with the word "such" used to imply an undefined association with hate groups of the neo-Nazi variety.

The November 22nd Christian Science Monitor article cited above offers a useful example of this tactic. Asserting that "white supremacists, Christian Identity adherents, neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists, skinhead groups, and other extremists" have used the Black Tuesday tragedy to recruit new members, the article reports that "338 such groups" are active across the Midwest. In the same fashion, the November 11th Chicago Sun-Times informed its readers: "There are 56 such groups in Illinois, with 22 in the Chicago area...." The November 19th Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel cited reports from "watchdogs" that "there are as many as 25 hate groups in Wisconsin" and that "such groups [are]... pounding on immigration, civil liberties and anti-Israel themes...."

A chart accompanying the Journal-Sentinel article, entitled "A Geography of Hate," displayed a map of Wisconsin on which were marked the locations of various "hate groups." Included in that category were various Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, and skinhead groups, several self-styled "militia" units, a handful of "Christian patriot" associations, the Wisconsin branch of the U.S. Constitution Party, and the home office of The John Birch Society (of which THE NEW AMERICAN is an affiliated publication).

Clearly, the only thing this collection of organizations has in common is the fact that they are all, for various reasons, despised by the far left -- thereby illustrating that a "hate group" is any group the left hates.

The source of the "Geography of Hate" map, as well as the statistics on "hate groups" breathlessly cited by newspapers and wire services across the country, is a report entitled "State of Hate: White Nationalism in the Midwest, 2001-2002," produced by a Chicago-based leftist group called the Center for New Community (CNC). The chief author of that report is Devin Burghart, director of the CNC's "Building Democracy Initiative" and former research analyst for a Seattle-based "watchdog" group called the Coalition for Human Dignity. Not surprisingly, Burghart has been extensively cited as an expert on the supposed danger of "rightwing" terrorism in the wake of Black Tuesday.

Burghart's debut as one of the media's favorite "experts" came in early 2001, when he released a report alleging that former Missouri Senator John Ashcroft, who is now attorney general, harbored secret "neo-Confederate" sympathies. "The Senate Judiciary Committee should focus on Sen. Ashcroft's endorsement of Southern Partisan [magazine]," declared Burghart in a press release. Accusing Ashcroft of giving "legitimacy to one of the leading white nationalist groups in the country," Burghart insisted that "Southern Partisan and its publisher have a long history of promoting bigotry."

Whatever one thinks of the relative merits of Southern Partisan (which, in fact, does not promote bigotry of any variety), it is worth noting that Burghart made these accusations at about the same time one of Britain's most notorious leftwing journals published an article he cowrote with Leonard Zeskind, a veteran Marxist agitator.

Zeskind is a spokesman for the Atlantabased Center for Democratic Renewal (CDR), which orchestrated -- and profited handsomely from -- the "black church arson" hoax of 1996. Prior to 1986, the CDR was called the National Anti-Klan Network, which in 1982 was described by a rival left-wing group as a "loose coalition" of radical leftist groups organized around a nucleus of "pro-Peking Stalinists." Zeskind himself was an organizer of the Sojourner Truth Organization, a 1970sera revolutionary group that sought to create "schools of communism" throughout the midwestern United States. One of the group's organizing manuals, "Towards a Revolutionary Party: Ideas on Strategy and Organization' described the group's work as that of "linking [the] fragmentary autonomous elements and socializing them into a new culture of struggle."

Burghart and Zeskind collaborated on an article published in the February 2001 issue of Searchlight, a British publication dedicated to "anti-fascist" activism. Searchlight was founded in the 1970s by Maurice Ludmer and Gerry Gable. Ludmer was a former reporter for the Daily Morning Star, the English Communist Party newspaper; Gable was a former member of the Young Communist League, a former Communist Party political candidate, and a convicted felon. Clearly, using Burghart's own standards as applied to John Ashcroft's trivial association with the Southern Partisan magazine, we would have to conclude that Burghart has lent "legitimacy" to individuals with a "long history" of promoting Marxist subversion and crime.

But the content of the article co-written by Burghart is even more revealing than the publication that carried it. Burghart and Zeskind lamented the fact that with Ashcroft's confirmation as attorney general, "anti-fascist groups" -- that is, hardcore Marxist groups who seek to criminalize conservative activism -- "failed to find a voice inside DC [and] also failed to mobilize their own constituencies in the Northwest, Midwest and South into active opposition." As a result, "anti-fascist-type groups have yet to develop an adequate national fightthe-right apparatus."

The crisis that began with the Black Tuesday terrorist attack gives Burghart and his comrade "watchdogs" a new opportunity to build their "national fight-the-right apparatus" -- even if it means cooperating with a Justice Department under the direction of John Ashcroft.

Patriots as Terrorists?

The influence of leftist "watchdog" groups on federal counter-terrorism efforts was illustrated by the 1999 release of the FBI's Project Megiddo report, which described "religious motivation and the N.W.O. [new world order] conspiracy theory [as] the two driving forces behind the potential for millennial violence." Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates has acknowledged that Project Megiddo did little more than "recapitulate previously released reports and conference papers" produced by several leftist "watchdog" groups, including his own.

As Y2K commemorations approached, the FBI warned police agencies across the country to keep an eye on people who displayed "excessive" distrust of the federal government or concern about our growing entanglement in the United Nations. While "right-wing extremists" were kept under intense scrutiny as potential terrorists, officials made one significant arrest of a potential terrorist -- Ahmed Ressam, a member of Osama bin Laden's alQaeda network. Ressam was intercepted at the Canadian border with a carload of explosives he intended to use in an attack on Los Angeles International Airport.

As it happens, Ressam had no connections of any kind to American "right-wing" groups. He did, however, have a bogus passport issued by radical Muslim elements within the Bosnian government, which was installed by the Clinton administration and has been kept in power by a United Nations "peacekeeping" force. Predictably, the same "experts" who strain to find a "right-wing" connection to every terrorist threat have entirely ignored the UN connection to Ressam's aborted terror attack.

Project Megiddo's "strategic assessment" of terrorist threats ignored the subject of radical Islamic terrorism completely. The same curious omission was made by the author of a counter-terrorism pamphlet produced by the Phoenix FBI office in 1999. That pamphlet, which was distributed in 1999 but made public in late 2001 by internet-based firearms activist Angel Shamaya, instructed police officers: "If you encounter any of the following, call the Joint Terrorism Task Force." Several categories of terrorist suspects are then listed, including "Hate Groups" such as Nazis, Black Separatists, Klansmen, and the like; "Single Issue Terrorists," such as animal rights radicals, eco-terrorists, and "insurgents"; and "Left-Wing Terrorists" motivated by "Marxist/Leninist philosophy."

But the very first category listed in the document -- and, presumably, the single greatest danger -- was "Right Wing Extremists," specifically "'defenders' of US Constitution against federal government and the UN (Super Patriots)." Police were also warned about "Common Law Movement Proponents," who run the gamut from eccentrics who refuse to obtain drivers' licenses and license plates to people who simply "make numerous references to [the] US Constitution."

Once again, the pamphlet entirely ignored the possibility of radical Islamic terrorism. This oversight is even more remarkable in light of the fact that Middle Eastern terrorists 'just walk across" Arizona's increasingly porous border with Mexico, according to a federal counter-terrorism official who did not wish to be identified. "They just blend in with the illegal immigrants from Mexico, pretending to speak Spanish," the source told THE NEW AMERICAN.

Another federal law enforcement officer, Ed Hall of the Phoenix FBI office, sought to play down the importance of the 1999 counter-terrorism pamphlet. "The categories and traits listed in that pamphlet are historic in nature," Agent Hall explained to THE NEW AMERICAN. "We were not saying that everyone who meets any of the criteria should be considered a terrorist, but rather that these are traits that have been recorded in people who have been arrested for criminal activity. So we distributed that pamphlet as a way of offering guidance to police officers." The federal counter-terrorism official contacted by THE NEW AMERICAN offered a slightly different assessment of the pamphlet. "It reflects the same mind-set that led to the Megiddo report, which was very anti-Christian and made some ridiculous assertions about the nature of the potential threat," commented the source.

Following the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, all 56 U.S. attorney's offices were instructed to create a Joint Terrorism Task Force like the one that distributed the notorious Arizona pamphlet. Each of those bodies is a prime target for subversion by leftist "watchdogs" who seek nothing less than the criminalization of conservative political activism -- and both the Megiddo report and the 1999 Phoenix counter-terrorism pamphlet illustrate that this process is well underway.

With the onset of the post-Black Tuesday anthrax incidents, comments the counter-terrorism official, "there has been a big push to link the anthrax letters to domestic rather than international terrorists. I don't know how they reached that conclusion, because to me it looks like the work of foreign terrorists." The "big push" he describes suggests that elements of the Justice Department share the eagerness of leftist "watchdogs" to create a "national fight-the-right apparatus."

(*) See especially "OKC's Mideast Connection" by William F. Jasper, available at:

www.thenewamerican.com/focus/okc/