Here is the Right-Wing Anthrax connection (1998)

Amarillo Globe News ^ | Feb 22, 1998

[MichaelDammit]

.....William Leavitt Jr. of Nevada and Larry Wayne Harris of Lancaster,Ohio, will remain in jail at least until a preliminary hearing Monday

Agents also seized other biological material in Ohio from houses owned by Harris, a former Aryan Nations member. That material was still being tested at Fort Dietrick, and those tests will not be completed before Monday.

.....Harris, 46, pleaded guilty in 1995 to wire fraud after his arrest for obtaining three vials of freeze-dried bubonic plague bacteria through the mail. He was put on 18 months of probation.

[MichaelDammit]

This was also highlighted in the book "Biological Weapons and America's Secret War GERMS", by Judith Miller, Stephen Engleberg, and William Broad. I believe this was written and out just before Sept 11, but their timing couldnt have been better.....I picked it up at COSTCO for $15 last week.....It is a GREAT read for the techno geek.

[Sunshine55]

Good God, I REMEMBER this...Lancaster is 30 miles south of me. I had completely forgotten about it till now.

[virtualreb]

I don't know if this thread should be allowed to remain on the page. If crazy right wing fanatics are a subject of investigation for the anthrax threat then they could possibly be members of this page. God knows intelligent, rational, patriotic Americans are not the only readers of the Free Republic. Why tip the whackos off to the investigation. Getting these right wing maniacs is as important as getting Bin Laden, they are both threats to our way of life.

[Free the USA]

Good find
I can remeber the story but did not know where to find it.

[Always Right]

What the heck does the Aryan Nations have to do with the Right Wing????? There is nothing left or right about racism.

[L`enn]

Also consider that most of the racism in the country (the racism of diminished expectations, affirmative action) is promulgated by the left.

[Bill Rice]

I just saw something about the guy from Lancaster the other day. Interestingly enough, the piece I saw also had Iraqi ties. Even if these goofballs are involved, so is Iraq.

[spycatcher]

One guy makes a whole wing I guess!

[ninenot]

the Aryan Nations

...are NOT right-wing. They are the same as fanatic Muslims, or fanatic blacks who hate/killwhites, or fanatic women who hate/kill men (it happened here in Wisconsin about 10 years ago...)

Of course, if you are the Press, or Hildebeeste, you can define the term 'right wing' any way you please...

I prefer to be a conservative, but patriotism is part of that, not killing fellow citizens.

[chance33_98]

In February 1998, Harris boasted to an informant that he had enough military-grade anthrax to wipe out all of Las Vegas. Eight bags marked biological had been found in the back of a car he and his accomplice were driving.17 Several days later, federal authorities learned that the anthrax Harris had brought to Las Vegas was a vaccine strain not harmful to human health. Nevertheless, the incident frightened many people and sparked a proliferation of anthrax hoaxes and threats in the second half of 1998 continuing into 1999 by groups including Identity Christians and other antigovernment groups, extortionists, anti- abortion activists, and presumed prochoice groups. In many cases, the perpetrator s motives were unknown, but some incidents appear to have been student pranks, demon- strating the extent to which the threat of anthrax has entered U.S. consciousness

[x]

Does calling these Nazis or racialists "Right Wing" really add anything descriptive? Do we call Theodore Kaczynski "left-wing"? Was Jim Jones, "left-wing"? What of the Aum cult in Japan, "right-wing" or "left-wing"? Are we any closer to understanding what motivated Timothy McVeigh once we have labled him "right-wing"? How closely does that label fit and what does it supply that we wouldn't otherwise have known? David Koresh and the ATF: who was "right-wing" and who was "left-wing"? Not that Koresh was a terrorist, but Reno may have been.

My point is that sometimes these lables obscure rather than clarify, or they tell you more about the beliefs of those who use the lables than about those they are applied to.

Hitler was called a rightist, because he was against the Communists who had defined themselves as left-wing, and because once his party had members in parliament they had to be seated somewhere. But at the extremes of politics the comfortable terms developed for the center lose their meaning. Just as someone who only knew the land by the Thames would find it hard to find words to describe the lands of the Amazon or the Congo.

[chance33_98]

The prospect of Domestic Bioterrorism by Jessica Stern, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). It is worth reading on this issue.

[chance33_98]

Timothy McVeigh operated according to this model. His bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building was originally conceived of by CSA, although it is not clear that McVeigh knew of CSA s earlier plot.

From the previouslt mentioned article

[MichaelDammit]

But the plague bust appears good.....this guy just looks like a mad scientist nutbag....

[MichaelDammit]

I am merely pointing out that THIS STORY may be the source of all of this latest CRAP from NBC and others about a right wing connection.

[L_Von_Mises]

I am a little curious about the article cited. It states that there were 37 incidents in the United States in 1998 affecting 5,529 people where anthrax was the weapon used. This caused 1,202 people to be either decontaminated, treated for the disease, or simply quarantined. Maybe I don't get out much, but I don't recall hearing about even one of them.

They say the targets of these attacks were: "Government buildings and officials, individuals, clinics, religious institutions, antiabortion activists, financial institutions, schools, retail establishments, office buildings, media, nightclub."

They cite the source as "press reports" but I would be curious to see what a NEXIS search came up with for that year. My guess is that they are including threats and hoaxes in with their data. Based on their figures, the average number of people affected by each attack was 149.4 and the average number of people requiring some type of attention was 23.5 , so at least one attack had to affect 150 people and require that 35 receive some type of medical treatment. Considering that this is an average number, it is more likely that at least one outlier must have occurred affecting hundreds. I would have thought that this would be a major news story at the time. If it was, I would be interested in reading about it, or at least some specifics.

The article does reference two incidents, one where Larry Wayne Harris made some threats and was found in possession of anthrax vaccine - not anthrax, and the other is where the group named CSA had obtained a drum of cyanide and had plans to poison a city's water supply. Their plan was thwarted when their group was infiltrated by the FBI.

The rest of the article appears to be pure pontification about who likely biological terrorists might be. Considering that the actual source of the article (while written by someone from CFR) is the Center for Disease Control, I would consider it to be much like their gun control studies - fiction at best, but mostly propoganda.

[MichaelDammit]

The prospect of Domestic Bioterrorism by Jessica Stern, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). It is worth reading on this issue.

Thanks....that was excellent.