We should we have invaded Texas instead!

I was randomly surfing the other day, when I found this article from 2003 on the Christian Science Monitor website

Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the home and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and anti-government literature.

"Without question, it ranks at the very top of all domestic terrorist arrests in the past 20 years in terms of the lethality of the arsenal," says Daniel Levitas, author of "The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right."

I never heard of this, did you? A WMD in Texas, 175 miles from Crawford? The good people of Law Enforcement who caught this wacko and his friends before they could do us harm were surely feted in the media and basked in the gratitude of the nation.

Well, they weren't, and they didn't, and there's an explanation:

But outside Tyler, Texas, the case is almost unknown. In the past nine months, there have been two government press releases and a handful of local stories, but no press conference and no coverage in the national newspapers.

Experts say the case highlights the increased cooperation and quicker response by US agencies since Sept. 11. But others say it points up just how political the terror war is. "There is no value for the Bush administration to highlighting domestic terrorism right now," says Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas in Austin. "But there are significant political benefits to highlighting foreign terrorists, especially when trying to whip up support for war."

Now hold on Mr. Journalism Professor! We all knew that while this was a scary bunch of hombres, the big threat was those Muslim nutjobs who hate us: the Hamas, Hezbollahs, al Qaedas, Iranians, Shias, Sunnis, Wahabbis, Salafists, Taliban, and others among the 42 foreign terrorist organizations listed by the State Department, and that's where we focused.

But wait, there's more:

Experts say the case is important not only because of what it says about increased government cooperation, but also because it shows how serious a threat the country faces from within. "The lesson in the Krar case is that we have to always be concerned about domestic terrorism. It would be a terrible mistake to believe that terrorism always comes from outside," says Mark Potok at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.

The fact is, the number of domestic terrorist acts in the past five years far outweighs the number of international acts, says Mark Pitcavage of the fact-finding department at the Anti-Defamation League. "We do have home-grown hate in the United States, people who are just as ill-disposed to the American government as any international terrorist group," he says.

Levitas estimates that there are approximately 25,000 right-wing extremist members and activists and some 250,000 sympathizers. The Southern Poverty Law Center counted 708 hate groups in 2002.

I had to check that out, and it's true. According to the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, of the 115 incidents of terrorism in the US since they started tracking domestic terrorism in 1998, 110 were the work of Americans.

Was Jensen on to something? There's been a lot of attention given to foreign terrorists in our media and public debate, but not so much to the domestic ones. Plus, the people most worked up about foreign terrorists were the ones in favor of invading Iraq.

How would your views on the War on Terror have been different had you known about this?

And you pro-war folks, were you misled?