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While terrorism in the U.S has been synonymous with Al Qaeda, for most of
this country's history, domestic white supremacist organizations like the Klu
Klux Klan were the greatest terrorism threat. Some believe they still may be
today. Today, In Mississippi, the trial begins of Edgar Ray Killen in connection
to the murder of three civil rights workers 41 years ago. Michael Schwerner,
Andrew Goodman and James Chaney -- were shot dead allegedly by the Ku Klux Klan.
And in Washington, the Senate is scheduled to vote today on a resolution to
apologize for its failure to enact anti-lynching legislation. An estimated 4,700
people -- mostly African-Americans -- were lynched between 1882 and 1968.
Another whistleblower just took on the FBI's approach to domestic terrorism.
Mike German worked for the agency for more than 15 years and quit last year. On
June 5th, he wrote an editorial in the Washington Post advocating that law
enforcement pay more attention to organizations that produce so-called lone wolf
extremists like Timothy McVeigh who was executed for the 1995 Oklahoma City
bombing and Eric Rudolph who planted bombs at the Atlanta Olympics, abortion
clinics and a gay nightclub. German writes that “lone extremists pose a
challenge for law enforcement because they are difficult to predict. It's like
searching every haystack for a needle. Perhaps we'd have better luck if we paid
more attention to the needle factories.”
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AMY GOODMAN: Today, we're joined by an ex-F.B.I. agent, Mike German, a
whistleblower. He resigned from the agency last year in protest of what he saw
as continuing failures in the F.B.I. counterterrorism program. German had worked
for years going undercover to infiltrate domestic terrorist organizations like
white supremacist skinhead groups and anti-government militias. On June 5, he
wrote an editorial in The Washington Post advocating law enforcement pay
more attention to groups that produce so-called lone wolf extremists like
Timothy McVeigh, executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, and Eric Rudolph who
planted the bombs at the Atlanta Olympics and women's health clinics, a gay
night club, as well. German writes, (quote), “Lone extremists pose a challenge
for law enforcement because they're difficult to predict. It's like searching
every haystack for a needle. Perhaps we'd have better luck if we paid more
attention to the needle factories.” He joins us now in our D.C. studio.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
MIKE GERMAN: Thank you, Amy. How are you?
AMY GOODMAN: It’s very good to have you with us. Well, can you talk
first about why you quit and what you see as the great domestic threats today,
terroristic threats in this country?
MIKE GERMAN: Well, I was -- had been involved in counterterrorism
operations for about a dozen years. And after 9/11, of course, the public became
aware of how dysfunctional the counterterrorism program was, but there were
problems that I knew about for years, so when things weren’t changing and the
F.B.I. wasn't fixing the internal problems that were causing the breakdowns in
communication that actually led to 9/11, if you read the 9/11 Commission Report,
I felt it was my obligation to come forward and report that there were
continuing failures.
AMY GOODMAN: Mike German, can you talk specifically about what you
wanted changed?
MIKE GERMAN: Well, I was involved in specific investigations, and
I’m not allowed to talk about those investigations, particularly, but
basically, if you look at the 9/11 Commission Report, kind of the diversion was
that it was a problem of intelligence, but it really wasn't a problem of
intelligence. You had agents in Phoenix who gathered the intelligence, who were
aware of one portion of the plot. You had agents in Minneapolis who were aware
of another portion of the plot. You had agents in New York who were aware of
another portion of the plot. And they all wanted to continue their
investigation. The agents on the street are doing their job, they're collecting
the information. It's when they report that information to headquarters and
request authority to continue their investigation, and that's where the
breakdown was. And basically, that was happening in my post-9/11 cases is that
that same mid-level bureaucracy was hampering counterterrorism efforts. So
that's why I reported it to Congress.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the groups that you think need to be
watched in this country? And if you can give us a thumbnail sketch of the
domestic terrorism attacks most famous one, of course, Oklahoma City bombing,
1995, Timothy McVeigh.
MIKE GERMAN: Right. Basically 19 -- that was actually in 1995, Timothy
McVeigh's bombing in Oklahoma City. And, you know, what that was was their
demonstration of the abilities that they had, and clearly, they can do a lot
damage in this country. Any extremist group can do damage. And I think that a
lot of the problem right now is we're in this kind of area where we're
categorizing who's the greater threat. Well, to me, the guy with the bomb today
is the greatest threat, and whether he is a white supremacist terrorist, an
Islamic terrorist or an eco-terrorist doesn't really matter to me. My job as a
criminal investigator out on the street is to try to stop the threat that’s
there today. And if we do this sort of ranking where we're only going to pay
attention to eco-terrorists because they're the number one threat or Islamic
terrorists because they're the bigger threat, we're probably going to drop the
ball in one of the other areas. So I think that the mission is let the agents on
the street find out what's happening, but we have to fix that mid-level
management area so we can manage the information that they're providing.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you infiltrate a group? Can you talk about your --
what you can talk about, your own history?
MIKE GERMAN: Well, I was involved in a case in Los Angeles in 1992,
and in that case, there was a cooperating witness that introduced me into the
group. And then I was involved in a second case in northwest Washington in 1996,
and that also involved a different cooperating witness, but it was introductions
into the group through public citizens, citizens who saw a problem and wanted to
help law enforcement protect the community. And once they introduced me in, then
it was up to me to try to figure out what -- who the criminals were within the
group and what the criminal activity was, and gather evidence of that criminal
activity.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk more specifically, like Los Angeles, what
exactly what that group was doing?
MIKE GERMAN: Well, in Los Angeles there were actually a number of
different groups that we had had gotten into, and they were white supremacist
groups. Los Angeles in 1992, of course, the community was suffering after -- the
aftermath of the racial unrest following the Rodney King police beating, so
there was a lot of racial animosity in the city. And the white supremacist
groups were attempting to take advantage of that situation to spark a race war.
So they were preparing for the race war by manufacturing machine guns and
explosives, and one of the cells that we got into was actually already involved
in a bombing campaign, and we were able to solve those bombings and recover more
explosive devices and stop ongoing conspiracies to bomb synagogues and churches
that were attended prominently by African Americans.
AMY GOODMAN: Looking at the piece that you did in The Washington
Post, "Behind the Lone Terrorist, a Pack Mentality," you talk
about every once in a while, a follower of these movements bursts violently into
our world with deadly consequences. McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, Buford Furrow, Jr.,
Paul Hill, to name just a few, all convicted murderers, identified as lone
extremists, the most difficult terrorists to stop, because they act
independently from any organization. Or do they? You write, “Tim McVeigh
seemed able to find a militia meeting wherever he went. He was linked to militia
groups in Arizona and Michigan, white supremacist groups in Oklahoma and
Missouri, and at gun shows he sold copies of The Turner Diaries, the
racist novel written by the founder of a neo-Nazi organization. No one finds
such groups by accident.” You talk about Eric Rudolph who planted the bombs at
the Atlanta Olympics, two abortion clinics, gay nightclub, grew up in the
Christian Identity Movement, which identifies whites as God’s chosen people
and encourages the faithful to follow the Biblical example of Phineas, by
becoming instruments of God’s vengeance. Aryan Nations, formerly of Hayden
Lake, Idaho, was the center of Christian Identity thought. Not incidentally,
Buford Furrow worked there as a security guard before going on a shooting
rampage at a Jewish day care center in Southern California. And you talk about
Paul Hill, wrote of the need to take Phineas actions to prevent abortions and
was so well known that the news media used to -- used him to speak in support of
Michael Griffin's killing of abortion doctor, David Gunn, that Hill later shot
an abortion provider himself should have surprised no one. Give us the landscape
of these groups. They're well known.
MIKE GERMAN: Sure, they're well known. And they're very well
organized, and they're very smart. They understand criminal conspiracy laws.
They understand the First Amendment. And they take advantage of those in
training their operatives to go out and do these activities. And the point I was
trying to make is -- is that we can’t look at these as isolated instances. It
would be as if we were investigating the mafia and looking at every mafia hitman
as a lone assassin and not looking at the underlying organization that was
producing these murders, you know. And these people are careful, the leadership
are careful about separating themselves from the actual criminal conspiracy, you
know. But they do set the motive. They set the method that's used, and I believe
that makes them part of the conspiracy. Now, I’m not saying necessarily you
can make a criminal case against them, but all I’m saying is if we're -- if
our number one priority is to prevent acts of terrorism, we have to pay
attention to these needle factories, because that's what they're producing is
these lone extremist terrorists. And it's not just random violence that occurs
once in a while, it's an organized pattern of activity.
AMY GOODMAN: I remember during President Bush, the first's presidency,
Planned Parenthood trying to get the administration to talk about the whole
movement of burning, bombing, attacking women's health clinics as a conspiracy,
because the same kinds of things were happening around the country, not to
mention the targeting of women's health professionals, and doctors who performed
abortions. They could hardly get an audience with the Justice Department at the
time, and the administration was adamant about not talking about conspiracy of
these groups. What is the significance of this?
MIKE GERMAN: Well, I think the problem is if you blind yourself to the
conspiracy, then the chances of them being successful in their next act of lone
extremist terrorism is more likely. So, you know, again I’m not saying that we
could necessarily take these leaders into court and convict them, because the
whole purpose of their methodology is to separate themselves from the actual
criminal activity, but what I’m saying is if we don't pay attention to those
leaders, you're going to insure that the next group is successful, just as if we
were only investigating the mafia one murder at a time and not looking at the
underlying organization. And frankly, you know, these groups, like the Ku Klux
Klan and Aryan Nations, have rich criminal histories just as deep as the Italian
mafia does, yet, you know, we tend to give them a political status that I don't
think is necessarily deserved.
Now, one thing to keep in mind, there are political groups within this
movement. It's a huge community. Like any community, there's a division of
labor, and these -- you know, there are completely law-abiding people within
these groups, and as a criminal investigator, when I went undercover, one of my
-- one of the things that I had to do was separate those two out, because there
are people who have very strong white supremacist beliefs but would never, ever
engage in violence. And my role as a criminal investigator, I was there to
gather evidence of criminal activity. So I had no interest in talking to those
people. I had to try to find who were the criminals. And I mean, that's the part
-- the hard part about law enforcement in a democratic society, but it's
something that has to be done. And, you know, in my cases, it was done very
effectively and, you know, I believe the F.B.I. should have replicated those
cases more than they did.
AMY GOODMAN: You write in your piece in The Washington Post of
last week, that just six weeks ago, self-avowed white supremacist, Sean
Gillespie, was convicted of firebombing an Oklahoma City synagogue. According to
a CNN report, Gillespie said he once had been a member of the white supremacist
group, Aryan Nations. He later left the group. At the time of his arrest, he
told authorities he was a racist skinhead acting on his own. But before the
attack, he videotaped himself stating, “I will film it for your viewing
enjoyment, my kindred white power.” If he’s all alone, who are his
“kindred”? “Neo-Nazi ideology is also a leading influence in rising school
violence,” you write. “The March 21 shooting at Minnesota’s Red Lake High
School was carried out by a Native American teen who praised Adolf Hitler, used
the name ‘Native Nazi’ in internet chat rooms, and the shooters at
Colorado’s Columbine High School reportedly greeted each other with Nazi
salutes and chose Hitler's birthday as the date of their attack. But you rarely
hear these incidents described as acts of domestic terrorism.” Who defines
whether it's terrorism or not?
MIKE GERMAN: Well, that's a big part of the problem, and you know, any
time they come up with numbers of terrorist attacks, you have got to realize
that there's a reporting problem there. You know, a white man beats a black man
on the street, is that just a random assault or is that a hate crime, or is that
an act of domestic terrorism, or is it nothing? Does it not get reported at all?
So, any time that the government talks about numbers of terrorism attacks, what
they're talking about is the number of attacks that were reported as acts of
terrorism. And like the school violence, sometimes it's not even thought of as
domestic terrorism, but if neo-Nazi influence is influencing these kids to act
out violently, I would argue that that’s part of the terrorist movement, and
that that, by paying attention to the neo-Nazi groups that are producing that
literature and those websites, we might have a better idea of who might be the
next lone extremist, so that we can stop him.
AMY GOODMAN: With people like Paul Hill, the abortion doctor killer,
the whole violent attack on women's health movement, is it also that the
administration with a very anti-choice point of view, brings politics into
defining who they will go after and who they don't? Is that fair to say?
MIKE GERMAN: No, I really don't think so. In my experience, the agents
on the street have really never let politics get involved, really are very
apolitical.
AMY GOODMAN: Not the agents on the street, but at the top.
MIKE GERMAN: Except that that's who actually does the investigation.
So, you know, I mean, kind of one of the misnomers about all this talk of
reforming the government for counterterrorism, it's not as if the director could
say, ‘Hey, agent in Des Moines, find me a domestic terrorist case today.’
You know, he can only deal with what's on the street in front of him. So, cases
actually get reported up from the street. And, you know, the agents on the
street are the ones that are actually making the cases, and where -- like what I
said before, where it breaks down is when it gets through management. And I
don't believe politics really plays a point in that. I -- you know, whether
politics plays a point in these kind of rankings of what terrorist groups are
most dangerous right now, that very well may be, but my whole point is that you
can’t really rank these guys based on their ideology. You have to worry about
who has got the bomb today.
AMY GOODMAN: Where are the white militia groups centered today in this
country, and how hard is it to infiltrate?
MIKE GERMAN: You know, they're everywhere. I think that one of the big
misperceptions about these groups is that they're only out West. They're only up
in the Northwest. You know, once you're kind of attuned to their language and
their codes and their symbols, I see that kind of stuff everywhere I go. I have,
you know, traveled all over the United States and have been able to find
something that gives me an indication that there's a community there. When a
community gets leafleted, typically that's a sign that there is a group that is
at least trying to start operating in that community. And if you, you know, look
at these groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League,
they keep track of this kind of information, you will see that they're spread
out everywhere, and keep in mind that they're clandestine groups, so they do
their best to hide. So of the ones we know about, there's probably -- you know,
that's probably just the tip of the iceberg. There's probably, you know, two or
three times that many that nobody has ever heard of. When I was working
undercover in the Los Angeles case, the one group that we found that was
actually involved in the bombing campaign, nobody even knew about them. You
know, the Huntington Beach Police Department had done a very nice job helping --
assisting us in that case, in identifying some of these young people, but it was
basically a group that was operating completely under the radar.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to former F.B.I. man, Mike German, who quit
the F.B.I. in 2004, had been there for 16 years, quit over how the F.B.I. was
dealing with domestic terrorism. Do you expect an attack soon in this country?
MIKE GERMAN: An attack from domestic terrorists?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
MIKE GERMAN: Or --
AMY GOODMAN: Or, well, no, let's broaden it to: Do you expect a
terrorist attack in this country?
MIKE GERMAN: Of course. I don't think that, you know, you're ever
going to stop terrorism. You know, and part of the problem is, we use one word
to describe very many different things, you know, whether it's the Unabomber,
Ted Kaczynski, or the D.C. snipers or, you know, organized white supremacist
groups and organized foreign terrorist groups. We're certainly never going to
stop terrorism altogether. You know, I think we just have to try to do the best
we can to prevent as many acts as we can, and it requires really a lot of
proactive work. And I think one of the big problems is after 9/11, there was
generated this idea that criminal law enforcement is somehow ineffective in
preventing terrorist attacks.
Well, my two cases prove that you could prevent terrorist attacks. I mean, in
both of my cases, we actually used criminal law enforcement techniques to
prevent acts of terrorism. And unfortunately, the way the intelligence reform
has gone has moved from criminal law enforcement to this intelligence model.
Well, you know, basically the problem in 9/11 was the American public had no
idea how dysfunctional the F.B.I. counterterrorism program had become, but now
we're under this intelligence model, we actually know even less about what the
government is doing to protect us from terrorism. You know, there's less
accountability in the F.B.I., and I certainly know that there are problems, and
I reported those problems to Congress, but so far, Congress hasn't been able to
even get to the bottom of what I reported to them over a year ago.
So, there's just no oversight, and those things are really the problems. And
until we fix what is internally wrong in the F.B.I., I don't think it's going to
change. I think that we're still at great risk. You know, the 9/11 Commission
found that the big problems were the F.B.I. had a poor ability to analyze
intelligence that was coming in from the street, that they didn't share
information well, and they didn't have a computerized system to share
information, even among agents. And just last week, the 9/11 Commission
discourse project came out and told us that -- gave us their report card, and it
was that the F.B.I. still doesn't have an analytic capability, it still isn’t
sharing information in the intelligence community, and it still doesn't have a
computer system. That's four years after 9/11.
So, you know, the problem -- these are all symptoms of one problem, and the
problem is mismanagement within the F.B.I., yet none of the recommendations that
of the 9/11 Commission addressed that mismanagement. Former Attorney General
Richard Thornburg at the 9/11 discourse project last Monday said that, you know,
one of the things that bothered him as he was trying to review information about
the F.B.I. is through the course of the time that he was there, every time he
went to a meeting, it was a different F.B.I. supervisor he was meeting with,
that the turnover among supervisors is so rapid that they really don't have an
opportunity to learn their job before they're moving to the next one.
AMY GOODMAN: Mike German, last question. That is, the latest report
that under pressure from the White House, the F.B.I. has agreed to adopt
recommendations of a presidential commission to allow the Director of National
Intelligence, John Negroponte, to help choose the powerful new intelligence
chief at the F.B.I. The appointment would for the first time in the Bureau’s
history give an outsider a significant role in the selection of a high level
official in the F.B.I. What do you think about this?
MIKE GERMAN: Well, it’ll depend on who it is and whether he has the
ability to force the managers below him to reform their conduct. And you know, I
mean, it's kind of perfume on a pig to keep changing these top people, because I
don't think the top people are the problem.
AMY GOODMAN: Mike German. On that note, I’m going to say thanks very
much for joining us. Again, Mike German, with the F.B.I. for more than 15 years,
quit last year, did a piece in The Washington Post last week called,
"Behind the Lone Terrorist, a Pack Mentality."
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