Social Causes

T he tactics of terrorism have occasionally been used to tryto achieve social or political changes not meant to result in the complete overhaul of the government. Periodically in U.S. history, causes have arisen that have seemed important enough to certain individuals to motivate them to violent action. Slavery, the environment, and abortion are the three causes that have most often moved people to take up terrorist tactics.

Terrorism and race in America

Slavery is an economic and social system in which one individual owns another and the owner forces the slave to work on his behalf. The first slaves came to North America with Spanish explorers in the mid-sixteenth century. Captured in Africa, they were sent to work on small farms in South Carolina and Florida. African slaves were not brought in large numbers to the British colonies of mainland America until about 1675. During the 1700s slavery became vital to the economies of the Southern states, where slaves lived under harsh conditions as they provided cheap labor on the vast plantations of tobacco, rice, and, later, cotton. Slavery was less important to the industrial North, though the profit from the slave trade did finance the industries connected with the trade, such as shipbuilding and sail making.

Challenges to slavery in the United States, and, later, efforts to maintain racial segregation, a goverment-endorsed system in which black people and white people did not share public services such as schools or transportation, resulted in 150 years of terrorism. The terrorist acts were mostly aimed at black people, but occasionally slave owners were targeted as well.

Slavery had been banned since the early 1800s in the Northern states, and some black slaves, in search of freedom, escaped to the North. Slavery wasn't outlawed throughout the country until the end of the Civil war, in 1865. Prio to teh freeing of the slaves, some white Americans worked to outlaw slavery, and some helped black slaves to escape to Canada. (Slavery was abolished throughout the British empire, including Canada, on August 1, 1834. By that time, there were very few slaves still held in Canada.) A few slaves escaped to live with nearby groups of Native Americans. But some slaves, rather than running away, seized guns and attacked white slave owners.

Nat Turner's rebellion

In 1831 Nat Turner (1800–1831), an African American slave in Virginia, planned and led an armed uprising. With half a dozen other slaves, Turner murdered his owner and the owner's family in their beds and then raided an armory, a strong house for weapons. Turner hoped his revolt would launch a widespread uprising of slaves, but only sixty or seventy other slaves joined him.

This small group of rebellious slaves wandered the Virginia countryside for two days and nights. Slave owners and their families on nearby plantations were attacked and murdered. In all, about sixty white people died. Frightened whites responded with an armed militia of three thousand men to hunt down Turner and his fellow rebels. Because the whites were so terrified by the uprising, many innocent slaves were killed as well. Turner himself avoided capture for about six weeks but was eventually caught and hanged.

The revolt badly scared whites in the slave states, and they passed strong measures that made slavery more difficult to bear than ever. These "slave codes" made it illegal for slaves to gather in groups or to learn how to read and write. This in turn helped build support for abolitionism, the movement to outlaw slavery.

Bleeding Kansas

In the mid-nineteenth century the political debate over slavery was heating up. In 1854 Kansas was organized as a territory, which meant that it could apply to become a state. What was at issue was whether the lands that now constitute the states of Kansas and Nebraska would become slave states or free states. Both the pro-slavery (Southern) and antislavery (Northern) sides wanted to maintain the existing balance of free and slave states represented in Congress. Almost immediately a struggle began over whether Kansas would be "slave" or "free." Both sides descended on the state, hoping to influence the outcome. The result was a virtual civil war from 1854 to 1859, during which both sides used violence to help their cause.

Abolitionists in New England helped antislavery settlers move into Kansas. The abolitionists hoped that by getting people who were opposed to slavery to settle in the state, they could get enough antislavery voters to help Kansas become a free state. One of the main organizers was Dan Anthony, whose sister Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) was a strong abolitionist and later became famous fighting for women's suffrage, the right of women to vote.

Meanwhile, the pro-slavery forces were developing their own tactics to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave state. In elections held in the territory in 1854 and 1855, thousands of men crossed the border from the neighboring slave state of Missouri to vote for pro-slavery candidates.

Bushwhackers vs. Jayhawkers The battle over slavery in Kansas was carried out by armed gangs who said they were fighting for a cause. But it was sometimes a fine line between defending principles and simply committing crimes.

The antislavery forces were called Jayhawkers. The pro-slavery forces were called Bushwhackers. The Bushwhackers, often from Missouri, attacked antislavery settlers in Kansas Territory. Among the Bushwhackers were Frank James (1843–1915) and his young brother Jesse (1847–1882), who raided settlements of antislavery settlers. After the Civil War (1861–65), the James brothers, like some other Bushwhackers, began robbing banks, stagecoaches, and trains. Jesse James became one of the most famous outlaws of the frontier. The Jayhawkers were mostly from Kansas; one of their leaders, James Henry Lane, later served in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.

Both the Jayhawkers and the Bushwhackers used terrorist tactics including surprise attacks, which often came at night, to drive away settlers on the other side of the debate. Murder was common. In 1855 Kansas held elections for a territorial legislature. At the time there were fewer than three thousand settlers in Kansas. When the election came, armed bands of men who supported slavery invaded the territory, took over the polling places, and drove off the settlers. Then the pro-slavery raiders cast their own votes for the legislature, resulting in more than six thousand ballots, roughly twice the number of settlers in the entire territory. The anti-slavery forces refused to acknowledge the results of these elections and set up their own state government. This resulted in two competing governments in Kansas during these years.

The loosely organized "armies" of the two sides met in a lengthy struggle near Lawrence, Kansas, in late November 1855. The "War of Wakarusa" (Wakarusa was an earlier name for Lawrence) started with the murder of an antislavery settler by a pro-slavery settler. Over the next six months pro- and antislavery forces clashed, ending in a battle in May 1856 in which pro-slavery forces attacked the town with a cannon. Two people were killed in the attack. This, in turn, drew a fierce abolitionist to the scene: John Brown.

John Brown: American terrorist or American hero?

Among the most famous of the antislavery figures in Kansas was John Brown (1800–1859). Brown had been born in Connecticut and grew up in Ohio. His parents, who owned a tannery (a place where leather is made), were both abolitionists, and strongly religious.

While living in New York state in the early 1850s, Brown joined the abolitionist movement and became a "conductor" on the "Underground Railroad." (The Underground Railroad was a system to help slaves trying to escape the South; conductors provided shelter to runaway slaves making their way to freedom in Canada.) Brown's beliefs about slavery combined with his religious upbringing, and he came to see freeing slaves as a divine mission.

In 1855 Brown took five of his sons and settled along the Osawatomie River in Kansas. After the 1856 attack on the antislavery town of Lawrence, Brown and his raiders attacked a pro-slavery community along Pottawatomie Creek, west of Osawatomie. They dragged out five male settlers and hacked them to death with swords. "Old Brown of Osawatomie," as he was nicknamed, became famous after this attack.

Brown then returned to Ohio and began planning to free slaves throughout the South, starting with raids on slave plantations in Missouri. Supported financially by abolitionists from New England, Brown formed an "army" of twenty-one people in Maryland. On October 16, 1859, he and his men raided a federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and took about sixty hostages. His plan was to seize weapons stored at the armory and provide them to slaves, starting a mass revolt. Instead, Colonel Robert E. Lee (1807–1870) moved in on Brown and his army, killing some and capturing others, including Brown. Brown and the surviving members of his army were found guilty of treason against Virginia and were hanged.

Religion and Terrorism

The strong religious feelings that John Brown experienced are not uncommon among terrorists. The belief that God has sent them on their mission is found in many terrorists, including the Islamic groups operating in the Middle East and Afghanistan. By believing they are serving a divine purpose, terrorists find it easier to justify criminal acts.

Most Southerners who were sympathetic to slavery strongly disapproved of Brown's actions. The term terrorism was not used in 1859, but his use of violence to bring about social change fits the definition. But many in the North saw Brown as a hero. John Brown's campaign against slavery, and the sympathy it stirred up in the North, had a part in driving apart the North and South. That split resulted in the Civil War.

Terrorism and American civil rights

On January 1, 1863, about three years after John Brown was hanged and in the middle of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which granted freedom to slaves in the rebellious Confederate (Southern) states. (The states had seceded from the Union to form their own government once the anti-slavery Lincoln was elected.) Two years later, in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment formally ended the practice of slavery everywhere in the United States, and the Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth Amendments (1870) guaranteed equal rights for all male residents of the United States.

These amendments, plus laws passed after the Civil War to help strengthen the new status of former slaves, created an enormous outcry among whites in the former Confederacy. One result was the formation, in 1866, of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which has the longest history of any terrorist organization in the United States. In fact, there have been three different organizations known as the Ku Klux Klan over the century and a half since the Civil War.

The Ku Klux Klan

"Ku Klux Klan" is the name adopted by different organizations since 1866. Many separate groups have used the name. These groups have arisen and declined in three distinct periods: the years after the Civil War, when the first Ku Klux Klan became an organization for undermining the rights given to newly freed African American slaves; the period after 1920, when a new organization was formed with the Klan name in reaction to a large influx of immigrants; and after World War II (1939–45), when organizations emerged to resist the drive for equal rights by African Americans.

Although the "Klans" over the years were separate groups, they all shared a dislike of African Americans.

The first Klan: 1866–71 At the end of the Civil War, the eleven states of the Confederacy (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia) were under military rule. The Republican Party, which controlled Congress, wanted to make sure that former slaves would be given equal rights. The Republicans insisted that to be admitted back into the United States, the former states of the Confederacy had to adopt new constitutions based on universal male suffrage (the right of all men, black or white, to vote). The Republicans also passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which ended slavery, guaranteed equal rights, and gave black men the vote.

These conditions created a lot of bitterness among southern whites. Adding to these bad feelings were the actions of northern whites who came to the South to earn their fortunes, hoping to take advantage of the chaos there. These northern whites were sometimes called "carpetbaggers," a reference to the luggage they used to bring in their goods from the North. The Ku Klux Klan was one result of these tensions.

The original KKK was organized in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866. At first it was a social group formed by six Confederate

veterans of the Civil War. For fun, they took to galloping around town at night, dressed as ghosts. When they heard this was making newly freed slaves in the area uneasy, they decided to turn their group into a weapon to frighten blacks.

In April 1867 members of the group met in Nashville, Tennessee, to set up a formal organization. At that meeting, former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821–1877) was elected as "Grand Wizard" (or leader) of the KKK. He reorganized the KKK as a paramilitary organization (a group that is independent of the national military forces but that uses a similar structure) to fight the state government of Tennessee and defend white supremacy. (White supremacy is the belief that the white race is superior to the other races, particularly blacks.) As other state governments were organized under Reconstruction laws (Reconstruction was the period following the Civil War, in which Congress attempted to reunite the country), which were designed to support the political rights of freed slaves, other branches of the KKK were founded in those states. The KKK's main technique was intimidation, or using fear to control people's behavior. Members would drape white cloths over their horses, dress themselves in hooded white robes, and put human skulls on their saddles. Riding at night, they would set up wooden crosses in front of the houses of African Americans who were active in politics, or their white supporters, and set them on fire, as a clear death threat. It was understood that people threatened by the KKK should leave if they did not want to be murdered. When threats failed, the KKK was also known to beat, torture, and murder its opponents, both black and white.

In Washington the Radical Republicans (the antislavery Republicans who controlled Congress) passed legislation in 1870 and 1871 designed to control the KKK. These laws, sometimes called the Ku Klux Klan Acts and sometimes called the Force Acts, said that federal troops could take over areas in the South to protect the civil rights of blacks there. The Force Act of April 20, 1871, was specifically aimed at the KKK. It said that actions by armed groups were the same as rebellion and gave the president extraordinary powers to arrest people suspected of belonging to the Klan. President Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) used the powers in parts of South Carolina, where hundreds of people were fined and imprisoned.

In 1869 General Forrest, who was upset about the group's increasing use of violence, had tried to disband the Ku Klux Klan and resigned as its head. But the organization persisted, and it was very effective in preventing blacks from voting or running for office. By the time Congress passed the Force Acts, whites had taken back power in most southern states, just as enthusiasm for Reconstruction was falling in the North.

The success of white southerners in regaining power and the increased federal punishments for Klan activities quickly led to the decline of the KKK.

The second Klan: 1915–44 In 1915 a former Methodist minister named William J. Simmons organized the second version of the Ku Klux Klan near Atlanta, Georgia. Simmons's KKK was similar in some ways to the first—he also used the white robes and hoods and shared the first Klan's hatred of blacks—and in some ways was quite different.

The second KKK sometimes engaged in "night riding" and lynching (lynching is the execution of someone by a mob) of African Americans, but it was also an aboveground organization that had significant political power, especially in the South and the Midwest. The second Klan had a broader agenda than the first. It appealed to lower-middle-class citizens who had a vision of what American society should be: white, Protestant, conservative, and opposed to the cultural and social changes that were sweeping the United States at the time. The second Klan, like the first, opposed equal rights for African Americans, the Roman Catholic Church, Jews, alcoholic beverages, pacifists, people who are opposed to war, and Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) theory of evolution, which claims all humans evolved from apes. It even had two U.S. presidents as members: Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) and Harry S. Truman (1884–1972).

The start of an economic depression in the early 1930s led to a rapid drop in membership. In 1944 the federal government sued the Klan for failure to pay taxes, and it was formally disbanded.

The third Klan: Terrorism and civil rights in the 1960s The KKK emerged a third time in 1945, founded by Georgia physician Samuel Green, but it did not succeed as a national organization. Within a year the Klan had broken up into a number of state and local organizations, all using the name Ku Klux Klan and all opposed to granting equal rights to black citizens.

In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the segregated public school system (in which white students and African American students attended separate schools) violated African Americans' constitutional rights. This ruling once again launched the struggle for equal rights, especially in the South.

As the civil rights movement grew stronger in the early 1960s, so did some local chapters of the Klan. Among the most active in this period were the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, headed by Robert Shelton. Other Klan chapters were active in Jacksonville and St. Augustine in Florida and Birmingham and Montgomery in Alabama. In Alabama and Mississippi, elected white officials conducted an aboveground anti–civil rights campaign, while the KKK operated at night. It was a classic example of how elected officials and terrorist organizations sometimes work together.

The Ku Klux Klan and Others

The Ku Klux Klan was one of several terrorist organizations that sprang up in the southern states after the Civil War. Besides the Klan, there were the Knights of the White Camellia, the White Brotherhood, the Order of the White Rose, the Pale Faces, and the Constitutional Union Guards. The Klan soon became the largest such group, with local chapters throughout the former Confederacy.

The Klan borrowed terms and symbols from ancient mythology to give itself an air of mystery. The name itself comes from a Greek word, kyklos (which means "circle") and the English word "clan." The leader of the Klan was called the "Grand Wizard." His assistants were called "Genii." State leaders were called "Grand Dragons," assisted by "Hydras." The next level down was led by a "Grand Titan" assisted by "Furies." A single county was led by a "Grand Giant," plus "Night Hawks." The lowest level was led by a "Grand Cyclops," who had two "Night Hawks" to assist him. An individual Klan member was called a "Ghoul."

Some Klansmen used the same terrorist tactics used by the original Klan to deny African Americans their constitutional rights. Some African American leaders and white civil rights workers were murdered. Terrorist murders of civil rights leaders during the era included:

• April 23, 1963: William Moore, a white postman from Baltimore, Maryland, is shot to death on an Alabama road while carrying a sign reading "Equal Rights for All."

• June 12, 1963: Medgar Evers, chairman of the Mississippi chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), is assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi.
• September 15, 1963: A bomb explodes at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young African American girls.
• June 21, 1964: Three civil rights workers—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney—are kidnapped and murdered in Mississippi. Their bodies are found on August 4, 1964, in a shallow grave near Philadelphia, Mississippi. A local sheriff had arrested them and briefly held them before they were released, apparently in order to give terrorists time to put together a murder squad.
• March 25, 1965: Viola Liuzzo, a white civil rights worker from Detroit, Michigan, is shot to death in Alabama while driving protesters from Montgomery to Selma. The next day President Lyndon Johnson (1908–1973) announces that four Klan members have been arrested for murdering Liuzzo.
• January 10, 1966: Vernon Dahmer, a civil rights leader in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, dies from severe burns after Ku Klux Klansmen firebomb his house.
• June 6, 1966: James Meredith, a civil rights leader who was the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi, is shot and wounded at the start of a "march against fear" from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi.
• April 4, 1968: Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) is shot to death in Memphis, where he was supporting a strike by sanitation workers. James Earl Ray (1928–1998) is convicted of his murder. Although it is suspected that other people were involved in the shooting, no one else is charged.

The Ku Klux Klan also used the aboveground tactics of the 1920s by parading through southern towns in their hooded white robes to show their opposition to the civil rights movement. This pattern was similar to terrorist groups elsewhere: a "respectable" organization in the political arena and a secret, violent underground branch, which was sometimes helped by local police or sheriffs.

Ecoterrorism

Ecoterrorism grew out of the environmental protection movement that began in the early 1970s in the United States. The movement started as a reaction to uncontrolled air and water pollution, particularly by factories and other businesses. Some environmentalists were unhappy with the slow progress the movement was making. They decided to use more direct methods to limit industry in wild areas.

To slow industrial growth in the mid-1980s and 1990s some environmentalists began using terrorist tactics. Apparently frustrated that their political efforts to preserve nature and protect animals through government channels had not been successful, the so-called "ecoterrorists" began to target logging companies in the Pacific Northwest, new home construction in areas the attackers wanted to protect, and research laboratories that experimented on animals.

In 1979 the United States Forest Service, bowing to pressure from the logging industry, announced it had decided to preserve only fifteen million acres of undeveloped public land from industrial use. This decision opened sixty-five million acres of public land to various for-profit industries, including logging. Some supporters of the environmental movement decided that the logging of the public land had to be stopped. They turned to a novel called The Monkey Wrench Gang written in 1975 by a former forest ranger named Edward Abbey. It told the story of four environmentalists who went around the United States committing acts of sabotage. Although the book was fiction, ecoterrorists in the 1980s used it as a guide for destroying the property of businesses that damaged the environment.

Ten years after The Monkey Wrench Gang was published, an environmental activist named Dave Foreman published a booklet called Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. The book provided detailed instructions on how to carry out acts of sabotage, which ecoterrorists called "monkeywrenching," such as damaging roads, burning machinery, and sabotaging computers. The environmental terrorist movement developed as several very small groups, each operating independently from the others.

Among the organizations that used ecological terrorism were Earth First!, the Earth Liberation Front, and the Animal Liberation Front.

Earth First!

Earth First! was founded in 1979 by environmental activist Dave Foreman, author of Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching.

To avoid detection, Earth First! had no staff or members who could be identified. Without membership lists, police could not use the organization to trace suspected ecoterrorists. Earth First! has been blamed for introducing "tree spiking" to the environmental movement. In tree spiking, long metal spikes, like large nails, are driven into tree trunks. The spikes do not harm the trees, but make it more difficult and more costly for lumber companies to harvest the trees. One worker in California was reportedly injured when his saw hit a spike. Other tactics they used include burning machinery, destroying billboards, cutting livestock fences, and damaging houses. In the 1990s Earth First! decided to stop using criminal acts to fight environmental destruction. However, other organizations soon sprang up that were willing to use violence to achieve their goals.

Earth Liberation Front (ELF)

The Earth Liberation Front (ELF), organized in 1997 after Earth First! announced it was dropping violence, has been one of the most active, and most destructive, violent environmental groups. Setting fires is a common tactic used by ELF ecoterrorists. In 1998 ELF claimed responsibility for destroying a hotel under construction in Vail, Colorado, causing damage estimated at $12 million. It was accused of pouring gasoline in the home swimming pool of a lumber company executive and lighting it on fire. The organization also claimed responsibility for attacking research laboratories in Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. ELF has been blamed for ecoterrorist actions in Kentucky, Indiana, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Colorado, Massachusetts, Canada, England, and elsewhere in Europe. ELF says its goals are to cause economic damage to businesses that harm the environment, educate the public about environmental damage, and prevent their activities from taking lives. Opponents of ELF say it is one of the leading terrorist organizations in the United States.

Animal Liberation Front (ALF)

The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) is similar to the ELF, but it focuses on scientific and medical experiments carried out on animals. Research laboratories, and the companies that supply them with animals, are favorite targets. The ALF has also been blamed for attacks on popular restaurants, like McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken, that serve meat. The ALF has broken into research laboratories that use animals, freeing the animals and destroying laboratory records. Like the ELF, the ALF calls itself an informal alliance of like-minded people; it has no formal office, board of directors, or financial resources.

Ecoterrorism in the 1990s

Following is a partial list of ecoterrorist activities during the 1990s:

• August 13, 1991: The ALF claims responsibility for breaking into a Washington State University research facility, damaging the interior, and freeing mink, mice, and coyotes.
• December 22, 1991: An anonymous caller says the ALF set a fire that destroyed a building at a mink ranch in Yamhill, Oregon. The ranch was working with Oregon State University on mink research.
• February 28, 1992: The ALF says it started a fire and damaged a mink laboratory at Michigan State University, destroying three decades of research data.
• October 24, 1992: The ALF says it burned a Utah State University facility doing research on coyotes.
• November 27, 1993: Nine devices cause fires in three Chicago department stores; a device in a fourth store fails to go off. The ALF claims responsibility, criticizing the sale of clothing that uses animal fur.
• March 1994: The ELF claims responsibility for setting fires at Allan Wirkkala Logging Company in Olympia, Washington, and at Tobin Logging in Quinnault, Washington.
• April 1994: The ELF claims responsibility for a fire at Bill Burgess Logging in Snoqualmie Pass, Washington.
• May 10, 1994: The ALF says it set fire to a building at Carolina Biological Supply Company, which supplies animals used for research and for dissection, or cutting apart a dead animal to study it scientifically.
• July 27, 1994: Logging equipment valued at more than $200,000 is destroyed at Dave Littlejohn Logging Company near Olympia, Washington. Four days later, another piece of equipment is damaged. On August 9, 1994, a phone call to the Washington Contract Loggers Association claims that Earth First! was responsible.
• July 11, 1995: A mail bomb sent to Alta Genetics in Calgary, Alberta, in Canada explodes, causing major damage. The company does research on cattle and sheep. The Canadian police suspect Earth First! and the ALF, but their suspicions are not proved.
• October 27, 1996: The ELF sprays graffiti on U.S. Forest Service buildings and vehicles and sets fire to a truck in Detroit, Oregon.
• March 11, 1997: The ALF takes credit for bombing the Utah Fur Breeders Agricultural Cooperative in Sandy, Utah. Damages are estimated at $1 million.
• March 19, 1997: An Ogden, Utah, store that sells supplies for trapping animals is set on fire while a watchman is inside. He is not hurt. The Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade, an antifur group, claims the attack was on behalf of the ALF.

• April 26, 1997: Animal activists try to force their way into the Yerkes Regional Primate Center, an animal research center in Atlanta, Georgia. More than fifty protesters are arrested.
• July 21, 1997: A horse rendering plant in Redmond, Oregon, is set on fire, causing $1 million in damage. The plant provided horse tissue used in medical research. The ALF takes responsibility.
• November 29, 1997: A fire destroys the offices and equipment of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Burns, Oregon. The ALF and the ELF claim responsibility.
• July 3, 1998: Facilities of the U.S. Department of Natural Resources in Washington state are bombed, causing almost $2 million in damage.
• July 5, 1998: Dozens of woodchucks, used in human medical research, are released from a laboratory at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The ALF also claims it destroyed laboratory records.
• October 18, 1998: A ski resort in Vail, Colorado, is set on fire, at a cost of $12 million. It was one of the most expensive ecoterrorism raids ever. The ELF said the ski resort was harming the natural habitat of the lynx.
• April 5, 1999: Someone steals 116 animals used in medical research and destroys laboratory computers, microscopes, and other equipment at the University of Minnesota.
• December 25, 1999: Fire destroys the offices of the Boise Cascade Corporation in Monmouth, Oregon, which managed timberlands so they could be harvested for lumber. The ELF claimed credit for the fire, which did about $1 million in damage.

Violent opposition to abortion: Is it terrorism?

In 1973, the United States Supreme Court ruled (in the case Roe v. Wade) that women had the right to end a pregnancy through a medical procedure called abortion. The decision sparked what has remained one of the most controversial social issues since the debate over slavery.

On the one hand, many people argue that having a baby is an intensely personal decision. If a woman becomes pregnant accidentally—or through a crime—she should not be required to go through the full nine months of pregnancy and give birth to an unwanted child, especially if having a child might endanger the health or life of the mother.

On the other hand, many others argue that the fetus growing inside the mother's uterus is already a human being entitled to continue growing until it is born. In their view, abortion amounts to killing the fetus, and is therefore a form of murder, even if it is legal. For some, abortion is such a moral effrontery that they have turned to violence to stop it.

Between these two positions are people who think abortion is sometimes permissible—in the first three months of a nine-month pregnancy, for example, but not in the final months.

An Old Debate

The debate over abortion is an old one in the United States. Before 1870, abortion was generally allowed in the United States, usually without much controversy. It was widely regarded as an acceptable solution to a problem thought to involve young, unmarried women. Beginning in the 1860s, doctors sparked a campaign against abortion, in part as a means of eliminating non-doctors from participating in medical procedures and partly because abortions were viewed as a violation of a husband's "right" to decide whether his wife should bear a child. Physicians realized that many abortions were performed on married women, rather than on those who were unmarried.

In response to a long (1866–77) campaign by the leader of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Anthony Comstock (who also campaigned against other "moral" issues like pornography and prostitution), the federal government banned advertising of abortion services and many states banned the procedure. The ban on abortion was often accompanied by a ban on other birth-control methods, and was largely in place until the early 1960s.

In the 1960s, women generally won the right to acquire birth-control medications, which blocked pregnancies. Starting with Alaska in 1967, four states (Alaska, Hawaii, New York, and Washington) passed laws making abortions legal, and thirteen other states permitted abortions if a pregnant woman's life was in danger. It was not until 1973 that the United States Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that bans on abortions were an unconstitutional invasion of a woman's privacy. (The case involved a pregnant woman in Texas who said she could not afford to go to a state where abortion was legal in order to terminate her pregnancy.)

The Supreme Court decision touched off a new campaign to ban abortions. This campaign started—and continues—as largely a political effort to pass new legislation, or a constitutional amendment, to overturn the effects of Roe v. Wade. The campaign has also been directed towards women contemplating having an abortion, and against clinics and doctors who offer abortions. This campaign has often involved picketing outside abortion clinics, urging clients to forego an abortion and carry through with a pregnancy.

For a decade, these campaigns, largely limited to writing letters to legislators and staging peaceful demonstrations, appeared to have limited effectiveness. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, some passionate foes of abortion, many with ties to conservative religious movements, concluded that stronger measures had to be taken, including violence. To them, abortion was equivalent to the immoral killing of babies, and had to be stopped by whatever means possible—including murder.

Is it terrorism?

Violence associated with opposition to abortion has taken two main forms: arson attacks against buildings housing abortion clinics, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words used to describe such attacks differ completely between those who defend abortion rights and those who condemn them.

Use of the term "terrorism" to describe attacks against clinics and doctors is largely limited to people who believe that abortion should be legal. For a long time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) did not investigate such attacks, considering them to be isolated incidents of arson, murder, or attempted murder that were best left to local law enforcement authorities. It was not until 1994 that U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno (1938– ) ordered the FBI to launch an investigation into a string of attacks and murders to determine whether there was a pattern of terrorism.

Starting as early as 1978, abortion clinics and doctors who perform abortions have been the targets of hundreds of fire bombings, arson attacks, death threats—and at least eight murders. One of the earliest attacks occurred in August 1982 in Granite City, Illinois, where Dr. Hector Zevallos, an abortion-provider, and his wife were kidnapped for eight days and threatened with death by a group calling itself the Army of God, until Dr. Zevallos agreed not to perform more abortions.

Opponents of abortion (who generally prefer the term "pro-life" rather than anti-abortion) are passionate in their condemnation of institutions and people who provide the medical procedure, referring to them as "baby-killers" and "murderers." In publications and on Web sites, they have praised the murders of abortion providers and attacks against clinics as a moral defense of defenseless, unborn babies. Many have drawn connections between Christianity and opposition to abortions.

Anti-Abortion Violence

A list of deadly attacks against abortion providers and clinics includes:

• 1993: Abortion foe Michael Griffin shoots and kills Dr. David Gunn outside an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida. Griffin is convicted of murder.
• 1993: Dr. Wayne Patterson is shot and killed outside a clinic in Mobile, Alabama.
• 1994: Abortion opponent Paul Hill shoots and kills Dr. John Bayard Britton and an escort, James Barrett, at a clinic in Pensacola. Hill had organized and signed a statement supporting Griffin's act a year earlier. At his murder trial, Hill tried to defend himself by declaring his act "justifiable homicide."
• 1994: John C. Salvi III kills two receptionists at abortion clinics in the Boston suburb of Brookline, Massachusetts—Leanne Nichols and Shannon Lowney—and wounds five other people. The following month, January 1995, President Bill Clinton orders U.S. attorneys, the Marshals Service, and the Justice Department to become active in combating anti-abortion violence.
• 1998: An off-duty policeman dies and two other people are hurt in a bombing of an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama.
• 1998: Dr. Barnett Slepian of Amherst, New York (near Buffalo), who performed abortions, is shot and killed by a sniper while standing in his kitchen. James Kopp, a known abortion opponent with the nickname "Atomic Dog," is accused of the crime and is tracked to France, where he was arrested in early 2001 and extradited (sent back) to the United States to stand trial for murder.
• In addition to the killings, authorities have recorded many attempted murders aimed at abortion providers, including some that resulted in life-long disabilities. In a period of slightly over twenty years, starting in the early 1980s, almost two thousand violent attacks against abortion clinics and staff were recorded in the United States.

Of course, not all abortion opponents engage in violence—far from it. Some organized groups opposing abortion have actively denounced violence committed in the name of their cause. Other abortion opponents, however, have remained silent in the wake of shootings of physicians and other attacks, or have organized support for people accused of murder (or attempted murder) and arson.

Some abortion opponents have published booklets or sponsored Web sites that provide detailed instructions on how to vandalize or destroy an abortion clinic, and have published lists of abortion providers including their home addresses, phone numbers, and details about their families. The most notorious such Web site, called "Nuremburg Files" (an allusion to trials of Nazis accused of killing Jews during the reign of Adolf Hitler in Germany from 1932 to 1945) has listed the names of murdered abortion providers with their names crossed out (or in light gray), denoting those who have been killed. The Web site has repeatedly been denied a home on American Internet service providers, but has found a service in Europe willing to host it.

The combination of a pattern of violence—and threats of violence—directed against abortion clinics and abortion providers, combined with efforts to discourage remaining clinics and providers by publishing details that would make it easier for an attacker to find them, seems to fit the basic definition of terrorism: the use of violence and threats of violence to achieve a social or political goal, in this case the end of abortion.

On the other hand, in 1984 the director of the FBI, William Webster, declared on a television program (Face the Nation) that bombing a "bank or a post office is terrorism. Bombing an abortion clinic is not an act of terrorism." Webster's opinion reflected the policy of the FBI for another decade.

Whether the links between different people who have carried out violent attacks are enough to lead to the conclusion that they are part of an organized conspiracy is largely a matter of opinion. Most defenders of abortion rights, and many law enforcement authorities, think there is an active network of people willing to commit murder, arson, or other forms of violence. Nonviolent opponents of abortion attribute the attacks to individual acts of outrage and deny any connection to them.