When FBI agents raided the home and storage facilities of William Krar in Noonday, a small town in East Texas, two years ago, they stumbled upon a small arsenal. There were about 2 pounds of deadly sodium cyanide, 65 pipe bombs and several remote-control briefcase bombs. They also recovered more than 500,000 rounds of ammunition and a collection of white supremacist books. If mixed with some of the other chemicals Krar had, the cyanide compound could have created enough poison gas to kill everyone inside a large office building.
In the decade since the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, local police and federal agents have foiled roughly 60 right-wing extremist terrorist plots, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. While homeland security and intelligence officials understandably focus today on terrorism threats from abroad, hate-group experts say the danger from homegrown extremists like Krar, now in federal prison, shouldn’t be ignored. “The fact that the only chemical weapon incident in the United States involved a domestic extremist suggests that domestic terrorism is still a serious threat,” says Mark Pitcavage, director of fact finding at the Anti-Defamation League. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s estimates that 762 extremist right-wing hate groups were active in the United States last year, up slightly from the 751 groups tallied the year before.
