Nevada not immune to terrorism

Terrorism is never far from the minds of congregants at Temple Emanu-El.

The conservative Jewish synagogue in Reno increased security because of two destructive attacks, one in November 1999, the second on New Year's Day. The first resulted in the convictions of five self-proclaimed white supremacists, but the second attack remains an open case.

"When it happens once, you might think of it as an isolated incident, but we have had two attacks," Rabbi Daniel Mehlman said. "Unfortunately, we have had to make security a priority, rather than celebrate times of joy."

As Nevadans focus on the scheduled June 11 execution of convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, this state has not been immune to terrorism or hate crimes.

The FBI defines terrorism as "the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives."

After the Oklahoma City bombing, federal, state and local authorities examined ways to beef up security in Nevada's public buildings. The George Federal Courthouse, which opened last year at 333 Las Vegas Blvd. South, was one of the nation's first federal buildings built with new blast-resistance standards resulting from the 1995 bombing.

Metro Police and other local law enforcement agencies and medical professionals also have benefited through training for employees to respond to terrorist attacks. The federally funded training involves biological, chemical and nuclear material.

Mike Myers, a training officer for the Las Vegas Fire Department, is preparing a valleywide medical response plan for terrorist and other mass-disaster incidents that he hopes to have operational by the end of 2002. As of now, only large cities -- New York City, Chicago and Atlanta, for example -- are prepared for large-scale terrorist attacks, he said.

"If it happened in Las Vegas today, there would be some difficulties," Myers said of medical response. "The worst problems would be with hospital overcrowding and lack of ability by the hospitals to handle decontamination on a mass scale."

Before militia-movement sympathizer McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and killed 168 people in April 1995, many Americans assumed that terrorism in this country was more likely to come from foreigners than from U.S. citizens.

Stereotyping

"Part of it was stereotyping," UNLV political science professor Mehran Tamadonfar said. "When the bombing in Oklahoma City happened, eyewitnesses said they saw Middle Eastern men running away."

After McVeigh was arrested, Tamadonfar said Americans realized that when it came to terrorism "we could do these things ourselves." In fact, McVeigh's convicted co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, lived in Las Vegas in 1993 and 1994.

With few exceptions, most terrorism on U.S. soil has been committed by domestic special-interest groups or individuals who once belonged to a cause, only to see it dissipate.

"Terrorism these days in the United States tends to be by racist and anti-Semetic groups or lone wolves," said political science professor Leonard Weinberg, a terrorism expert at the University of Nevada, Reno. "It has to do with the increasing cultural and social diversity in this country, which is certainly true of Las Vegas and Reno."

When anti-federal groups such as militia organizations and self-styled "sovereign citizens" emerged in the mid-1990s, Nevada found itself caught in that trend. These incidents occurred in Nevada:

* The Bureau of Land Management's headquarters in Reno were heavily damaged in October 1993 when a bomb exploded on the roof. The building was unoccupied.

* In March 1995 the U.S. Forest Service building in Carson City was heavily damaged while unoccupied when a pipe bomb exploded just outside the office of then-Ranger Guy Pence. Four months later another bomb exploded outside his home, destroying his van and peppering his house with shrapnel. He was eventually transferred for his safety to the Boise National Forest in Idaho.

* Two Gardnerville men were convicted for attempting to bomb the Internal Revenue Service building in Reno in December 1995. The men, Joseph Bailie and Ellis Hurst, placed the 100-pound bomb composed of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil in a plastic drum and left it in the parking lot. The fuse was lit, but it fizzled and there was no explosion.

Bailie declared he was a sovereign citizen and therefore the federal court had no jurisdiction over his case. Still, he was sentenced to 36 years in prison and ordered to pay $141,000 in restitution to the IRS. Hurst, who pleaded guilty and cooperated with authorities, received a 10-year sentence.

No one was arrested for the BLM or Forest Service bombings. But it has been widely speculated that the culprits may have been sympathetic to the Sagebrush Rebellion, a movement begun by Nevada ranchers in the 1970s to protest the federal control of 87 percent of Nevada's land.

Reported harassment of Forest Service employees was so commonplace in Northern Nevada that Supervisor Gloria Flora resigned in 1999 in protest. Forest Service spokeswoman Erin O'Connor said relations between her agency and Nevadans have since improved.

Great strides

"There have been great strides in Nevada in building relations between the Forest Service and local elected officials and members of local communities," O'Connor said. "Oftentimes, there are decisions that the Forest Service makes that some individuals don't like, so they express displeasure. But I'm not aware of any violent acts committed against Forest Service employees."

The anti-federal movement that drove much of the nation's domestic terrorism in the 1990s declined sharply. American groups dropped from 858 in 1996 to 194 last year, according to a recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Ala. The center reported that Nevada still had two "patriot" groups last year: the Center for Action in Sandy Valley and the Constitution Party in Sparks.

But the law center also found at least 602 hate groups in this country, including eight in Nevada. The known chapters in this state include Hammerskin Nation, National Socialist Movement and Nation of Islam, all in Las Vegas; World Church of the Creator in Carson City; National Alliance in Las Vegas and Reno; and Aryan National Alliance in Reno and Wellington.

Mark Potok, editor of the report, said that if not for law enforcement's crackdown on domestic terrorist groups, "we'd be looking at a body count of tens of thousands." He said the rise of hate groups, targeting mostly blacks and Jews, was troubling.

"The diminishing white majority has animated a lot of these groups, as has the increase in immigration," Potok said. "There is also a lot of economic rage."

Nevada has been touched by at least four high-profile incidents involving white supremacists in recent years:

* Larry Wayne Harris of Ohio and William Leavitt Jr. of Utah were arrested in Henderson in February 1998 when it was suspected that they illegally possessed the deadly anthrax germ. Harris, a microbiologist who had an earlier conviction for illegal possession of bubonic plague germs, was a lieutenant in the Nazi-affiliated Aryan Nations.

The 1998 federal case against Harris and Leavitt was dropped when tests revealed that what they were actually carrying was a harmless anthrax vaccine for animals. Because of Harris, Congress enacted laws making it tougher to obtain deadly germs.

* In July 1998 self-proclaimed Nazi skinhead John Edward Butler killed anti-racist skinheads Daniel Shersty and Lin Newborn in the desert northwest of Las Vegas. Butler was convicted in December and initially placed on death row. He awaits new sentencing in July because a judge ruled that the prosecution withheld information.

* White supremacist Buford O. Furrow surrendered to the FBI in Las Vegas after his August 1999 shooting rampage that injured four children and an adult at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, Calif. Furrow, who also killed a Filipino-American letter carrier in nearby Chatsworth, Calif., pleaded guilty in March and received two life sentences.

* The November 1999 attack on Temple Emanu-El involved a plastic bottle, filled with cement, that was hurled through a window, and a Molotov cocktail that scorched the sidewalk in front of the synagogue.

Convicted for that incident were self-proclaimed white supremacists Carl DeAmicis, Scott Hudson, Christopher Hampton, Daniel McIntosh and Joshua Kudlacek, all from Northern Nevada or California. Kudlacek, who supplied the gasoline can but didn't go to the temple, received a five-year sentence. The others were sentenced to 14 to 15 years in prison.

The synagogue was attacked again on New Year's Day, when its front door was set on fire.

"Unfortunately, attacks on Jews continue," Mehlman said. "It is not something that ended with the end of World War II.

"For us to heal, it is necessary to acknowledge something that is painful. We have to raise the consciousness of everybody and encourage everyone to speak up against hatred and bigotry."

FBI Special Agent Daron Borst of Las Vegas said it was against agency policy to discuss the presence of specific terrorist-prone groups.

"We won't go on the record in terms of what we're seeing here because we don't want the groups to know that we know about them," Borst said.

He said there has been a "dramatic increase" nationwide in the number of special-interest organizations, such as environmental and animal-rights groups, that have been linked to terrorism in this country. Their targets include laboratories that perform experiments on animals.

Seven animal-rights activists were arrested in Las Vegas in March and charged with trespassing, battery or obstruction for a protest of a conference by Stevens Inc., a banking group with a stake in an animal-testing lab.

Because of such incidents, Lt. Martin Lehtinen, Metro Police's emergency-management coordinator, said law enforcement likes to receive advance notice on conventions that could draw protests.

"We've got known groups that come through the valley on a regular basis, but there's nothing definitive right now," Lehtinen said of potential terrorists. "We're not going to know about someone like that unless we stumble onto them. We've stopped people who had pipe bombs. But just because people have weapons of mass destruction doesn't mean they will commit a terrorist act."

Political statement

Jeffrey Beatty, president of Total Security Services International Inc. of Marietta, Ga., and a featured speaker at a recent tourism safety conference in Las Vegas, said the type of convention topics that could draw opponents include genetic engineering, globalization, politics, medicine and World Bank issues.

"These are the types of things that would attract people to make a political statement," Beatty said. "It would be unwise for a city like Las Vegas to think that they didn't have to plan for such contested events. But I believe the police in Las Vegas are doing their job."

Lehtinen said another concern for law enforcement agencies is the potential for terrorism should the government select Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the nation's repository for high-level nuclear waste. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission also is studying this issue.

"If they start transporting nuclear waste into our valley, what's to stop somebody from blowing up one of (the) trucks?" Lehtinen said.

He said law enforcement agencies know that Las Vegas is a potential target for foreign terrorism because of the large number of non-Americans who visit.

Foreign terrorism on U.S. soil has been rare. Two notable exceptions are the deadly 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York City by Islamic extremists and the 1999 capture of an Algerian national who was smuggling explosives into Washington state.

Beatty said it is easier for foreign terrorists to strike American targets overseas, where they may be more vulnerable. Still, he did not discount the likelihood of a foreign terrorist attack on U.S. soil from the likes of Middle Eastern groups or Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult responsible for the 1995 chemical nerve agent sarin attack that killed 12 and injured 6,000 in a Tokyo subway.

"Domestic terrorist groups do not want to cause casualties among Ma and Pa Americans, so they do not target the general population," Beatty said. "But foreign terrorists don't give a damn."

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