TERRORISM BRIEF
United States: The Dangerous Shift to White Supremacist Cells
April 26, 2005 1715 GMT
Former U.S. Marine Shaun Walker, 36, released an April 25 statement
saying he is taking over as chairman of the neo-Nazi white supremacist
group National Alliance (NA). Former Chairman Erich Gliebe, Walker
said, has resigned and named Walker as his replacement. This change,
the latest in a series of reshuffles among the leaders of the main
neo-Nazi hate groups in the United States, is another indication of the
decline of these groups as cohesive organizations. Although their
splintering is all but complete, the result likely will cause law
enforcement further problems as investigators seek to keep track of
more and more smaller cells.
In November 2004, Stratfor said white hate groups would evolve toward
less formal, ad hoc organizations. This began prior to the July 2002
cancer death of strong NA leader William Pierce. Under Pierce, the
National Alliance had gained momentum and begun incorporating
disaffected members of other such groups. Before he died, however,
Pierce neglected to name a successor from among his lieutenants,
leaving a power vacuum at the highest levels of the group. Gliebe
eventually took over, proving to be an ineffectual leader who lacked
the skills needed to hold the organization together. If past history is
any indication, Walker will not be much more effective. In 2004, the
Texas National Alliance coordinator and the group's webmaster quit over
a beef with Walker, then the NA's chief operating officer, which
suggests he is not a unifying force.
The demise of the mainstream white hate groups can be attributed to
successful legal campaigns waged by the Southern Poverty Law Center
(SPLC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and others. Several
high-profile lawsuits resulting in large financial judgments damaged
many of the hate groups --and destroyed others. Under intense legal
pressure from the SPLC and ADL, as well as vigorous law enforcement
efforts to penetrate them, the white hate groups splintered.
The white supremacist group White Aryan Resistance (WAR), for instance,
effectively ceased to exist after it lost a civil lawsuit centered on
its involvement in the 1988 killing of Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian who
came to the United States to attend college. The SPLC sued the group
for instigating Seraw's death and won a $12.5 million judgment against
WAR and its leader, Tom Metzger, bankrupting the group. Another
notorious group, the Aryan Nations (AN), splintered after losing a $6.3
million lawsuit brought by the SPLC in 2000 that forced the group into
bankruptcy. Similarly, the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC) was
eviscerated when it lost a trademark infringement case in 2002. Leader
Matt Hale subsequently was convicted of soliciting the murder of the
federal judge in the case and sentenced to 40 years in prison.
The downside to the splintering of these groups is that their
membership and activities have become harder to track as their members
keep in touch mainly through the Internet. The same thing likely will
happen to the NA membership.
Large, membership-based groups are easier to monitor -- and to target
--precisely because they have membership lists, financial statements
and physical addresses of offices and compounds. This makes suing them
for illegal actions and appropriating their assets fairly easy. The
threat of further lawsuits, in fact, had forced the membership-based
organizations to pressure their members to "keep legal." In the absence
of organized groups, that pressure no longer exists -- and that could
free up the more militant members to act.
Moreover, groups such as the WCOTC and the AN were easier for law
enforcement to infiltrate. For example, an FBI informant who penetrated
the WCOTC and became the group's head of security was in large part
responsible for Hale's recent conviction.
This evolution toward leaderless resistance by hundreds of smaller,
less formal cells -- as advocated by former Ku Klux Klan leader Louis
Beam --makes if very difficult for law enforcement and watchdog groups,
such as the ADL and SPLC, to monitor the activities of such cells, let
alone infiltrate them. A surge of violence as competing factions
attempt to assert themselves as the true radical Aryan alternative is
possible.
In the leaderless resistance environment, the white hate cells are
adoptingthe practice of the radical environmental rights movement Earth
Liberation Front, which has a Web site, but no real membership. The Web
site serves toinform and unite, but individuals and small units plan
and conduct actionson their own.
The popularity of white nationalist message boards and Web sites, along
withthe movement's trademark "hatecore" music, indicates that although
the largegroups are dissolving, their former members remain committed
to a commonideology. They are not disappearing; they are simply going
to advance theircause using a new organization model.
The demise of the mainstream white hate groups could suggest that their
members no longer pose a threat. In actuality, they have taken another,
more nebulous -- and potentially more dangerous -- form.
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