The warning, from the FBI Director, Robert Mueller, came as the former President Clinton drew parallels between the Oklahoma City tragedy and a recent upsurge in anti-government rhetoric.
Fifteen years after the Oklahoma City bombing, the specter of domestic terrorism has returned to haunt the Obama administration, with a warning from the FBI that “home-grown and lone-wolf extremists” now represent as serious a threat as Al Qaeda and its affiliates, The Times reported on Saturday.
The warning, from the FBI Director, Robert Mueller, came as the former President Clinton drew parallels between the Oklahoma City tragedy and a recent upsurge in anti-government rhetoric, while American television audiences heard Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, describe the “absolute rage” that drove him to plan an attack that killed 168 men, women and children.
An FBI spokesman said Friday that Mueller was referring to right-wing extremist groups and anti-government militias, as well as American Islamists, in his testimony to the Senate committee that must approve the FBI’s $8.3 billion budget.
Last month federal agents arrested nine members of a Christian militia based in Michigan, calling itself the Hutaree. They have been charged with plotting to murder local police with a stash of guns, knives and grenades.
Since the passage of President Obama’s health reforms, the FBI has also made arrests in Seattle and San Francisco after death threats were sent to Democratic senators.
“It’s one thing to express dissatisfaction with the Government but once you cross the line with a violent threat, that’s a violation that we take extremely seriously,” Bill Carter, the bureau’s spokesman, said.
The Oklahoma bombing was followed by an exhaustive civilian trial in which McVeigh became a hate figure to most but a hero to some members of the survivalist fringe on which he was radicalized.
He was executed in 2001, but not before granting 45 hours of death-row interviews to the authors of a book, American Terrorist, whose tapes will be broadcast for the first time on Monday.
McVeigh never confessed to the bombing in court but he appears to do so on the tapes.
“I feel no shame for it,” he says. “This was something that I saw as a larger good, and I know that, as I analyzed the history of not just the U.S., but all nations throughout the history of mankind. People have killed for what they believed was the greater good, and it’s accepted. Sometimes killing is accepted.”
The White House was careful to emphasize that the threat of external terrorism remained acute but senior officials are privately confident that military operations in Afghanistan are going well and putting Al Qaeda on the back foot.
Few people in Washington are as confident about the domestic threat.
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Home-grown, solo terrorists as bad as Al-Qaeda: FBI chief
Al-Qaeda still aims to strike inside the United States but home-grown or unaffiliated extremists now "pose an equally serious threat," FBI chief Robert Mueller warned US lawmakers Thursday.
"Al-Qaeda and its affiliates are still committed to striking us in the United States," Mueller told a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, pointing to plots to bomb New York City subways and the failed Christmas airline attack.
"Home-grown and lone-wolf extremists pose an equally serious threat," the Federal Bureau of Investigation director said, citing the shootings at the sprawling Fort Hood army base in Texas.
Experts have warned that a "lone wolf" -- an extremist acting alone, without connections to an established network like Al-Qaeda -- may be the most difficult threat for authorities to thwart.
"We have also seen US-born extremists plotting to commit terrorism overseas," such as Mumbai attacks planner David Headley, the US-born son of a former Pakistani diplomat and American woman, said Mueller.
"These terrorist threats are diverse, far-reaching and ever-changing, and to combat these threats, the FBI must sustain our overseas contingency operations and engage our intelligence and law enforcement partners both here at home and abroad," he said.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano noted a rise in US citizens seeking to carry out acts of home-grown terrorism over the past 15 months, since she took the cabinet position in early 2009.
Individuals that have been radicalized enough to travel oversees to learn "the tradecraft of a terrorist and then return," or even learn at home on the Internet, are a focus of her department, working with local law enforcement to spot the threats, she told a luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington.
The key question, she said, surrounds "when someone is moving from First Amendment (freedom of speech) activity -- plain old angry rhetoric, which we have had in this country since we began -- to actually playing a violent act."
The proper "exchange of threat information," between national and local agencies, enables authorities to minimize the risk of attacks from materializing, she said
