More on law-enforcement and the Nashvile Christmas Day not-a-suicide-bomber who deliberately killed himself during a bombing

The story of the guy who blew himself up in his RV in downtown Nashvile in from of an AT&T building with bombs he'd been building in his back yard for apparently at least a year is emerging in more detail. We're not even a week out from the Christmas Day explosion in which the bomber killed himself that the press is so reluctant to call either a suicide bombing or a terrorist act.

The Nashville police are scrambling to explain why nobody made any mistakes when the guy's girlfriend and former lawyer gave them what turned out to be an accurate report about Mr. Not-A-Suicide-Bomber building a bunch of bombs in his RV. If they get enough heat, they'll probably find some civilian in their communications department whose boss doesn't especially like them anyway, fire him or her, then tell the public they fired someone responsible but can't say anything about it because it's a personnel matter. (Natalie Allison and Mariah Timms, Did Nashville police do enough to try to search bomber's home in 2019? Experts weigh in Nashville Tennessean 12/30/2020)

NBC News is reporting on one aspect of the investigation into the non-terrorism-non-suicide-bombing bombing. (Tom Winter et al, Feds probing whether Nashville bomber believed in lizard people conspiracy 12/30/2020)

It's important to remember it normally takes a while for incidents like this to be clarified, that we may never have explicit documentation of the not-a-suicide-bomber's motives, and the coulda-shoulda questions always involved some judgment. But this story is a reminder of an important point about US law enforcement's general neglect of the real danger of far-right terrorism from white guys:

[I]nvestigators are looking into the suspect’s previous trips to an undisclosed location in Tennessee where he would camp out in his recreational vehicle and, according to the suspect’s statements to others, hunt possible aliens, the officials said.

In addition, investigators are aware of statements the suspect made about an internet conspiracy that powerful politicians and Hollywood figures are actually lizards or other reptiles who have extraterrestrial origins and are taking over society, the officials said.

Which makes this story is a reminder of what "hate crimes" laws are actually designed to do, a large part of which is to educate local law enforcement to know what it is they are seeing and hearing.

The lizard-people-from-outer-space thing is something that has been promoted by Alex Jones, a popular broadcaster among the lunatic right. (Bob Cesca, Alex Jones Pretends to Be a Lizard Man from Space In Epic Display of Insanity Daily Banter 02/17/2016)

If the Nashville cops had taken the bomb report in 2019 seriously enough to actually find a way to talk to the guy - cops can usually do that if they want to - he might have told them he was worried because the world is being taken over by Demucrat lizard-people space-alien commonists. And if they had known that such talk particularly appeals to people in the violent white supremacist scene, they *might* have done a bit more checking. But he was some white guy with an Amurcan-sounding name, so maybe not.

Allison and Timms also report this statement by Memphis FBI spokesperson Joel Siskovic:

"The FBI does not make a practice of investigating and looking into individuals absent criminal charges, criminal allegations," Siskovic said. "So, I can't get too far into how our system works, but basically if there had been any reason to believe that there was a crime, specifically a federal crime, then we would have taken further steps."

So, is the FBI saying it's not a federal crime to build bombs in your RV in your back yard? Or that it's not a crime for white guys to do it? The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) seems to think it is, according to their official Fact Sheet-Illegal Explosive Devices dated May 2019: "Under federal explosives law, it is illegal to engage in the business of manufacturing explosives without a license; to improperly store explosives; to sell or distribute explosives to any person who does not hold an ATF license or permit."

A final thought on what we call terrorism. The definition does change over time. It does make some sense to take motives into account. But legal and popular understandings may diverge. A gang shooting with multiple casualties or family murder-suicides are horrible and tragic and deadly. But those aren't typically treated as terrorism in the press, nor do I think they should be. In the case of the Nashville bomber, that looks to me like an act of terror, i.e., an act meant to terrorize a lot of people, including the targeting of an important local communications center.

In any case, police and law enforcement should not be "blind in the right eye" when it comes to politically or religiously based terrorism. Including screening out cops who are found to support far-right violence-oriented groups.

Nashville cops on suicide bomber back in 2019: He's got an RV full of bombs? Aw, don't worry about it, it's probably no big deal

This is an amazing story on how the Nashville Metro police handled the white guy who blew himself up in an RV in downtown Nashville in a huge explosion but mainstream news outlets don’t want to call him either a “terrorist” or a “suicide bomber”. Even though he killed himself with explosives in a location designed to take out communications in the area and, uh, terrorize the entire city. (Ben Hall, Anthony Warner's girlfriend warned police he was building bombs in his RV last year News Channel 5 Nashville 12/29/2020) See also: Natalie Allison, Girlfriend warned Nashville police Anthony Warner was building bomb a year ago, report shows Nashville Tennessean 12/30/2020

Here's how the owner of a business in the affected area describes the we-don't-call-it-terrorism attack (Rachel and Mariah Timms, 'It's like war': Residents, business owners get first look at damage in Nashville bombing 12/30/2020):

Segroves Bergeron, a Nashville-based photographer and art curator, runs Studio 208, a gallery and art show room at 208 Third Avenue North in Nashville, just a block away from the site of a Christmas morning bombing that shook the city.

On Tuesday, she was one of dozens of residents and business owners allowed to retrieve needed supplies and assess the damage to their property that's been behind an investigative perimeter since Friday.

“I’ve been fortunate to never have to be in a war zone so I can’t be sure this is what it would be like, but it feels like war, it feels eerie, it feels surreal,” she said. “Everyone’s faces are dazed. The crew, the police, FBI, everyone. Just dazed and tired.”

The Channel 5 report is also a great example of why initial police statements on their own performance should be taken with a lot of skepticism. An event like this is a big PR opportunity for police departments to show off their bravery and heroism and remind people how glad they should be to have them around.

It's worth mentioning here that it's still early, so some of the details may vary. The Channel 5 report may give the impression that the girlfriend and the attorney were at the bomber's house when the cops showed up. But in the Natalie Allison, it sounds like the police spoke to the two of them at a separate house. And in that story, the attorney also says in the Natalie Allison story that he hadn't been the guy's attorney for a while.

We even had a story from one of the cops on the scene Christmas morning that he “literally” (his word) heard God tell him to turn around and walk away from the direction of the RV just before it exploded. Which would be entertaining in a "testimony" in a conservative church. But my first thought was, let me get this straight: the Nashville police department has an officer walking around with a gun and a license to kill who says publicly that he can “literally” hear a voice in his head that he knows is the voice of God?

Except now, a few days later, we find out that in August a year ago, the heroic and vigilant Nashville police were at the we-don’t-call-him-a-suicide-bomber’s house based on a call from the bomber’s girlfriend who was there and told them that the guy was building bombs in the RV setting right there in his yard. Funny, I’m pretty sure the cops were saying just a couple of days ago that, gee, we had no idea there was anything threatening about the guy. "Warner wasn’t on the radar of law enforcement before Friday’s explosion, ["authorities"] said, and officials have declined to deem the bombing an act of terrorism." (Natalie Allison, Anthony Quinn Warner, self-employed computer guru ID'd as lone Nashville bomber, killed in blast Nashville Tennessean 12/27/2020)

The bomber’s OWN ATTORNEY was on the scene and told the cops he thought her story about the bombs was credible. So they knocked on the house door a couple of times and the guy didn’t respond. They looked at the RV from outside the fence it was in and claimed they didn’t see anything suspicious. I guess if it doesn’t have BOMB FACTORY painted on the outside, it’s not worth the trouble.

So, they left to go to the donut shop or wherever. They filed a request for records with the FBI, who responded they had no information on him. (Don’t be surprised if we later hear the FBI had several gigabytes of data on him.)

To understand how problematic this is, we just have to imagine if they were out in a black neighborhood on a call like this. Or if the girlfriend and attorney had told the cops the guy's real name was something “Muslim-sounding” name like Hasan al-Bomba. Would they have even bothered to get a warrant before they sent a SWAT team to bust through the door?

This is a nationwide problem that authorities just don’t take white terrorism seriously enough, even though for years most deaths from terrorist attacks in the US have been due to far-right groups with some more-or-less white supremacist political ideology.

Lots of people (not just conservatives) claim to be upset by the protest slogan “Defund the Police”. But cops who get a credible complaint about a guy who’s going bonkers from the guy’s girlfriend and the man’s own attorney but just say, “Well, the girlfriend sounds kind of hysterical, it's probably her time of the month or something. And this is a white guy, so he’s probably just a good ole boy who ain’t really causing no trouble” – we shouldn’t be paying public money for that kind of cops.

Cops who say publicly that they are following orders from a “literal” voice in their head that they know is God's – nah, “defunding” cops like that sounds like a good idea, too. Police PR departments who put top priority on staging their officers as heroes immediately after a horrible terrorist attack but cheerfully try to avoid accountability for their own fecklessness about the perpetrator? No, that’s probably not the best use of public funds, either.

The US today and political polarization in Weimar Germany

Corey Pein did a report last year for The New Republic on a development that at this point is a small curiosity in American politics, , Antifa Is Arming Itself Against a Trump Crackdown 07/02/2019.

Armed far-right groups are hard to overlook in the US. Dave Neiwert recently wrote about a recent development in the Trump Administration's encouragement of such groups. Bureau of Land Management director's deference to 'constitutionalists' creates chaos in the West Daily Kos 02/12/2020:

The nexus of the law enforcement problem is the Constitutionalist Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, a far-right group that has been steadily recruiting sheriffs, deputies, and other police officers into their “constitutionalist” belief system. The CSPOA contends, like all such “radical localism” ideologues, that the county sheriff, and not any federal agency, is the highest law-enforcement authority in the land.

These beliefs, as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s disturbing investigation of the CSPOA’s reach explained, originated with the Posse Comitatus, a profoundly racist and anti-Semitic organization of the 1970s and ‘80s whose ideas had a kind of underground currency in rural America for awhile. The Posse’s leaders preached that the Constitution limited the federal government’s powers to raising a military and conducting foreign policy. The intent, as always, was to restrict if not nullify the government’s ability to enforce civil rights laws, as well as gun control laws, land use, and a host of other policies. In the end, the Posse was urging its followers to ready themselves for acts of terrorism and guerrilla warfare. [my emphasis]

The police and courts in the United States have generally always been less aggressive and less harsh toward violent far-right groups than toward left-wing ones. It's understandable, since the far-right seeks to preserve the established order of money, power, and privilege. Even when the groups' rhetoric is populist. Their version of the elite they claim to be fighting is likely to be some variation of The Jews, Hollywood, The Media, colleges, and Mean Libruls.

Understandable, but often dangerous even for law enforcement themselves. Because violent crackpot groups attract more than their share of fools and unstable characters. And groups like the "sovereign citizens" often target police who they see as representing illegitimate authority.

The main terrorism problem in the US recently has come from the white-supremacist far right, even more so than from Islamic fundamentalists, whose politics are also a different brand of far right. The extreme fundamentalist Christian Reconstruction ideology often plays a role in the thinking of violent far-right sects.

There is an occasional case of political terrorism in the US that more-or-less fits the profile of leftwing. But they are very rare.

The small groups on which Pein reported were antifa (antifascist) activists who organize and counter-protest against far-right groups who advocate and practice violence based on their ideologies. So they have good reason to be prepared to defend themselves, a right the NRA invokes incessantly to promote endlessly growing gun sales. (With no apparent regard to the ugly practical consequences.)

I don't foresee anything resembling the partisan militia groups of Germany and Austria in the 1920s and early 1930s becoming a significant factor in US politics in the immediately foreseeable future. In Germany, not only the Nazis but other rightwing parties had their militias, or at least goon squads, e.g., the NSDAP Brownshirts (SA). The Social Democrats and the Communists had their own militant groups who could put up a physical fight when it was called for.

In Austria, the conservative Christian-Social Party had an allied armed militia called the Heimwehr. The Social Democrats had their own militia-type group, the Republikanischer Schutzbund. And the Austrian Nazis had their own goon squad, too. The clashes between the Heimwehr and the Schutzbund resulted in what is known as the Austrian civil war of 1934, although that particularly intense phase of the clashes lasted only a few days. But it was a very significant event in Austrian history, which became a huge barrier to Austria having the possibility of a united resistance against the German invasion in 1938. The Austrian Nazis directed by Berlin also made an unsuccessful coup attempt in Austria in 1934 that included the (successful) assassination of the conservative dictator Engelbert Dollfuß.

In both Germany and Austria, the partisan militia phenomenon had a lot to do with the conditions in the two countries after the First World War. For one thing, there were millions of men who had served in the respective Imperial Armies who had training and experience with firearms. Another was the chaotic conditions following the war in both countries, Austria itself being created as a separate country for the first time. Both nations had new democracies, and both were under restrictions from the victories Allies on their official military armaments.

Military conflict actually continued for both Germany and Austria after the surrender. From the Wikipedia entry on the German Freikorps, the paramilitary groups supported by the German government:

Freikorps also fought against the communists in the Baltics, Silesia, Poland and East Prussia after the end of World War I, including aviation combat, often with significant success. Anti-Slavic racism was sometimes present, although the ethnic cleansing ideology and anti-Semitism expressed in later years had not yet developed. In the Baltics they fought against communists as well as against the newborn independent democratic countries Estonia and Latvia. In Latvia, Freikorps murdered 300 civilians in Mitau who were suspected of having "Bolshevik sympathies". After the capture of Riga, another 3000 alleged communists were killed, including summary executions of 50–60 prisoners daily. Though officially disbanded in 1920, some of them continued to exist for several years and many Freikorps' attempted, unsuccessfully, to overthrow the government in the Kapp Putsch in March 1920. Their attack was halted when German citizens loyal to the government went on strike, cutting off many services and making daily life so problematic that the coup was called off. [my emphasis]

In Germany, the bloody suppression of the mass demonstrations in 1919 that came to be known as the Spartacus Revolt and then the violent overturning of the leftwing Bavarian Soviet government that same year generated massive distrust between the Social Democrats and the Communists. The failed Kapp Putsch was a violent attempt at overthrowing the constitutional democracy that was thwarted by the massive general strike supported by the left. And the conservative parties never particularly trusted the whole idea of Weimar democracy anyway. So, the democracy's lack of political legitimacy in the eyes of many on the left and the right prevented the establishment of what these days we somewhat vaguely call a "monopoly of violence" for the government.

This is one aspect of the "lessons of Weimar" that is difficult to apply to the United States in 2020. Others, like the fatal austerity policies of 1930-32, have more obvious direct relevance.

NATO expansion and the Iraq War: two turning points for US foreign policy

Jeremi Suri has some observations about a couple of important turning points in Amrican foreign policy in recent decades in The Long Rise and Sudden Fall of American Diplomacy Foreign Policy 04/17/2019. Suri is commenting on a book by a former ambassdor to Jordan and foreign policy official, William Burns, currently president of the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Burns thought the Clinton Administration's decision to expand NATO was poorly conceived and inadequately thought out:

The militarization of U.S. diplomacy began, according to Burns’s account, when President Bill Clinton pushed for rapid NATO expansion into the former Soviet bloc, despite prior U.S. commitments to the contrary (as confirmed by Burns in his memoir) and strong Russian objections. Although Clinton offered strong personal support to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, he failed to address the growing sense of insecurity and grievance within Russia. It appeared that the United States was muscling into Russian geopolitical space, brandishing guns and dollars. Washington offered little to assure concerned Russians, other than continued aid to a drunk, pro-American figure in the Kremlin.

The former Soviet bloc states had good reason to seek NATO membership, but the United States needed to do more to accommodate Russian fears. Diplomacy of this kind received little attention among Clinton’s impatient advisors. Burns, then the U.S. minister-counselor for political affairs in Russia, recounts: “Sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-1990s, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst ... It was wishful thinking, however, to believe that we could open the door to NATO membership without incurring some lasting cost with a Russia coping with its own historic insecurities.”

It's too late to put that genie back in the bottle. But the post-1989 US foreign policy was strong on arrogance and short on realistic views of Russia.

And he cites Burns' view of the foreign policy disaster known as the Iraq War.

The United States isolated itself, antagonized allies and adversaries, and diverted its resources to a lengthy military occupation that further destabilized the region. The winner of the war was Iran, which saw a regional rival defeated and found new influence in Iraq. The United States was a clear loser, as the “war in Iraq sucked the oxygen out of the administration’s foreign policy agenda.” Mired in Iraq, facing opposition around the globe, Washington found its diplomatic leverage diminished in almost every region. Burns recounts how Russian President Vladimir Putin took advantage of this situation by throwing his weight around in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Southeastern Europe. The United States had cornered itself.   [my emphasis]

Sometimes commentators refer to the Iraq War as an unforced error. Unforeced disaster would be more appropriate.

Most damaging, the United States never recovered the diplomatic capital lost in Iraq. Burns recounts many skilled U.S. efforts to contain Russia and denuclearize Libya and Iran, but from military intervention to drone warfare Washington consistently “overrelied on American hard power to achieve policy aims and ambitions.” Even critics of the Iraq War presumed the United States had underused or misused military power; they did not address the diplomatic deficit. U.S. leaders failed to educate the public about the importance of forging compromise abroad, and they frequently encouraged more skepticism toward diplomacy. This was most evident during the Barack Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran, when members of Congress worked to undermine sensitive negotiations while they were still in process, calling recklessly for military intervention instead.  [my emphasis]

One of the poor assumptions behind the war on terror in the context of which the Cheney-Bush Administration justified the Iraq War was to conceive of terrorism as a problem of state-sponsored terrorism. Paul Pilar notes that this bad assumption has been unfortunately persistent (The Pensacola Shooting and the Misconceiving of Terrorism Responsible Statecraft 12/09/2019):

State sponsorship of terrorism has dropped significantly over the past three decades. At least that is true of governments either directly perpetrating or instigating terrorist operations. A persistent problem of states and terrorism involves the less direct malevolent effects of what certain states do, and Saudi Arabia is Exhibit A in that problem. It is no accident that fifteen of the nineteen men who carried out the mother of all of international terrorist attacks — 9/11 — were Saudis. ...

The Trump administration has put the latest attack, and terrorism in general, in the framework of its policy toward the Middle East, which rigidly takes sides in regional rivalries and is built around unrelenting hostility toward Iran. ...

The oft-repeated mantra about Iran being the “number one state sponsor of terrorism” is an anachronism. It was applicable in years past, when fifty U.S. diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran and in subsequent years when the Iranian regime conducted serial assassinations of exiled dissidents. That behavior stopped years ago. ... Iran has been heavily involved, especially in Iraq, in combating the most ominous terrorist movement of recent years - Islamic State - and has been the victim of major Islamic State attacks within Iran. [my emphasis]