Lone Wolf Terrorism (35 page)

Search and rescue crews attend a memorial service in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Until the September 11, 2001, hijacking-suicide attacks in the United States, this bombing by Timothy McVeigh on April 19, 1995, which killed 168 people, represented the worst act of terrorism on American soil. (AP Photo/Bill Waugh)

McVeigh being escorted by law-enforcement officials from the Noble County Courthouse in Perry, Oklahoma. The fact that the perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing was a homegrown terrorist surprised and shocked many Americans. McVeigh, who was a right-wing, antigovernment extremist, would later say: “The truth is, I blew up the Murrah Building. And isn't it kind of scary that one man could reap this kind of hell?” (AP Photo/David Longstreath)

Eric Rudolph was responsible for a bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta as well as a series of bombings in subsequent years at abortion clinics and a gay nightclub. He was finally apprehended in May 2003. (
Huntsville Times, Dave Dieter
)

FBI agents wearing biohazard suits pour a liquid into a drum outside the American Media Inc. building in Boca Raton, Florida. Envelopes filled with anthrax spores were sent to several targets in September and October 2001, including media and congressional facilities. Five people died and seventeen others were infected due to the attacks. (AP Photo/Steve Mitchell)

The FBI and the US Postal Service released a reward poster offering up to $2.5 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for the anthrax letter attacks. The poster included copies of the envelopes with handwritten addresses used in some of the attacks. (AP Photo/Brian Branch-Price)

Bruce Ivins was a microbiologist at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, located at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. He was working on an anthrax vaccine at the time of the letter attacks. The US Justice Department concluded that he sent the letters, in part, to increase interest and funding for his vaccine. Ivins committed suicide in July 2008. (AP Photo/
Frederick News Post
, Sam Yu)

One of the oldest terrorists in history was James von Brunn. A longtime neo-Nazi and white supremacist, he opened fire inside the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, on June 10, 2009, killing a guard. Brunn was eighty-eight at the time of the shooting. (Talbot County Sheriff Office)

Major Nidal Malik Hasan was responsible for the worst terrorist attack ever to take place at a US domestic military installation. He shot and killed thirteen people and injured thirty-two others at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009. Hasan was partly influenced via the Internet by Anwar al-Awlaki, an Islamic extremist cleric living in Yemen at the time. (Bell County Sheriff's Department)

Emergency personnel transport one of the soldiers from the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, where the mass shooting took place. Hasan, who was wounded by return fire, did not expect to survive the attack. (AP Photo/
Killeen Daily Herald
, David Morris)

A memorial service was held at Fort Hood on November 10, 2009, for the victims of the shooting. Here, chaplain of III Corps, Col. Michael Lembke, addresses the audience. (Department of Defense Photo/Cherie Cullen)

The US military collected biometrics from civilians, detainees, and others throughout Iraq and Afghanistan during the wars in those two countries. The information was used, in part, to identify known or potential terrorists. Here, an Afghan woman is having her iris scanned in September 2010, prior to being seen at a hospital in the Parwa province of Afghanistan. (Department of Defense Photo/Spc. Kristina L. Gupton, US Army)