Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service; professor emeritus of terrorism studies at the University of St Andrews; and the George H. Gilmore Senior Fellow at the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. His books include Inside Terrorism (third edition, 2017).
Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and at DeSales University. He serves on the editorial boards for the academic journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism and the Irregular Warfare Initiative at the Modern War Institute at West Point.
Hoffman and Ware applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about God, Guns, and Sedition at the Columbia University Press website.“Right-wing groups reached their zenith in the mid-1980s,” the report stated, before explaining that they had been in a free-fall since. The continuation of this decline was cited in the FBI’s annual report on domestic terrorism for 1994 as well. That year was noteworthy for the complete absence of any reported domestic terrorist incidents. Indeed, the only mention of any kind of threat from the far right were two nonlethal bombings of the NAACP office in Tacoma, Washington, perpetrated by an otherwise inconsequential skinhead gang.Page 99 of our book, God, Guns, & Sedition, is actually a very accurate snapshot of what the book is about. The page begins by highlighting an issue that has always been a problem in addressing the threat of far-right terrorism in the United States: underestimating the potential for violence and bloodshed from this movement. Page 99 quotes an FBI report from 1993 which asserted that not only did this movement no longer merit serious concern, but that it in fact had peaked around the middle of the previous decade and was therefore in a state of continued decrepitude. Page 99 thus goes on to describe how this dismissive assessment re-surfaced in the FBI's annual assessment of domestic terrorism for 1994. What the FBI had failed to detect, however, was a change in the movement's strategy that was deliberately adopted to frustrate law enforcement detection and interdiction. In 1992, violent, far-right extremists had shifted to a leaderless resistance or "lone wolf" model of terrorism of individuals either acting on their own or in concert with two or three like-minded co-conspirators . Page 99 goes on to introduce the reader to the foremost exemplar of this change: a twenty-seven-year-old U.S. Army veteran named TImothy McVeigh who, only a year later, would perpetrate the most lethal terrorist incident in the history of the United States—the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, that killed 168 persons. It was surpassed only by the attacks on September 11, 2001. With the Oklahoma City attack, McVeigh proved the viability of the leaderless strategy—which the movement continues to embrace today.
The attention of the FBI—and indeed all other law enforcement and national intelligence agencies for that matter—was thus fixated on organized groups and not lone individuals or two- or three-person cells operating independently of any existing or identifiable terrorist organization or command-and-control structure. The intense concern about threats from so-called lone wolves or lone actors was still a couple decades away and would emerge mostly in the context of the terrorist strategies pursued by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Accordingly, the lethally destructive potential of a real-life Earl Turner did not appear in any official domestic terrorism assessment of that era. A twenty-seven-year-old decorated combat veteran of the 1991 Gulf War named Timothy McVeigh would change all that in April 1995.•••“It is impossible to overstate the significance of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City—to America and Americans,” begins the introduction to April 19, 1995, 9:02 a.m.: The Historical Record of the Oklahoma City Bombing, compiled by Oklahoma Today magazine. It claimed the lives of 168 people—including nineteen children—and injured 850 others. The FBI has described the incident as “the worst act of homegrown terrorism in the nation’s history,” with a death toll eclipsed only by that of the attacks on September 11, 2001. A Ryder rental truck packed with 5,400 pounds of ammonium nitrate, mixed with racing fuel (nitromethane) and ignited by Tovex high-explosive gelatin “sausages,” was, in the words of an engineering assessment, “hurled broadside into three of four two-story exposed columns,” thus ini- tiating the successive collapse of half of the nine-story structure. It took two more weeks to recover the last of the bodies from beneath the rubble
The Page 99 Test: Bruce Hoffman's Anonymous Soldiers.
--Marshal Zeringue
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