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Biography: Oscar Benjamin Liddell
Part 3
by Chris Oakley


The end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s led to a paradigm shift for right-wing hate groups in America. Where in the past the boogeyman for these organizations had been Communism, now the primary targets of their rage were radical Islam and illegal immigrants from Central and South America. And the Brotherhood of White Unity was particularly well-equipped to exploit these new demons. The organization’s Texas branch, for one, regularly published pamphlets and magazines full of lurid stories about crimes both real and imagined by illegal immigrants against native-born U.S. citizens; more often than not these same publications also carried long, paranoid anti-Muslim diatribes which would have made the most fanatical Middle Ages crusader shake his head in disbelief at their vitriolic tone. One of the most consistent themes in these tracts was the assertion that American Muslims constituted a “fifth column” whose primary agenda was to help their terrorist brethren in the Middle East establish a so-called “global caliphate” that would oppress the Anglo- Saxon peoples of the world.

   These accusations brought heated protests from American Muslim advocacy groups and ridicule from non-Muslims who questioned the BWU’s paranoid take on Islam. They also brought concerns from the FBI’s hate crimes division that the Brotherhood was trying to incite anti-Muslim violence in U.S. cities; while the odds of such violence were slimmer than popularly believed on the left, the bureau wasn’t about to take a chance of such a threat becoming reality. For the first time they put the Brotherhood under full-time surveillance, looking for a signal of any possible intention to launch organized attacks on American Muslim individuals and institutions.

   The Brotherhood responded by devising an elaborate system of code phrases and numbers meant to keep law enforcement personnel in the dark about their true intentions. The code was invented by Liddell himself drawing on what he’d learned from the business courses which he’d taken in college, and breaking it took the FBI months of mentally (and physically) exhausting work. And even after the code was cracked, the bureau’s anti-terrorism branch had its hands full tracking all of the activities and movements of Liddell’s supporters. When the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed in April of 1995, it was at first erroneously assumed a Brotherhood chapter or splinter group had carried out the attack. A few Brotherhood chapter leaders had in fact proposed mounting some sort of operation within the Oklahoma City area, but Liddell had vetoed the idea on the grounds the organization lacked sufficient resources for any activity there.

  It would be six months after the Murrah Building bombing before the Brotherhood established its first chapter in Liddell’s former home state, but after that they would quickly make up for lost time. By the spring of 1996 there would be five BWU chapters in place in the Sooner State and a sixth chapter in the process of being organized. Shortly after that sixth chapter was founded, one of the Brotherhood’s older branches was implicated in the killing of an aide to the commandant of the West Virginia state police and an attempt to murder the state police commandant himself. This brought the organization a great deal of unwanted attention from the Justice Department-- and things would only get worse for them on that score when, just three weeks after the West Virginia killing, a member of the Brotherhood’s Maryland state chapter was arrested in connection with a sniper attack on the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington. The Saudi embassy shooting prompted the FBI to turn up the heat on Liddell’s organization, and furthermore it drew scrutiny from anti-terrorism agents at the State Department who wanted to keep the sniper attack from escalating into an international incident.

   In June of 1996 the West Virginia state legislature began debating on a bill which if passed would outlaw the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Around this same time two Brotherhood supporters were arrested in California after they were caught casing the Marine Corps naval air station in El Toro, California. Those arrests would further increase the unwanted attention being focused on Liddell and the BWU; one Brotherhood state branch closed down operations altogether rather than run the risk of having its offices raided by the FBI. Those BWU state chapters which remained open became increasingly paranoid on the matter of internal security.

A textbook example of this paranoia surfaced in mid-July of 1996 when police in Altoona, Pennsylvania found a BWU member beaten into a state of near-unconsciousness and dumped on the outskirts of the city. Upon questioning the unfortunate man, police investigators learned he had been accused of leaking information about illegal BWU gun stashes to the FBI and viciously clubbed with baseball bats when he wouldn’t “confess” to his alleged sins. In spite of the vicious assault he had suffered, however, he was initially adamant about not answering police detectives’ questions; it took them nearly a day and a half to finally get even vague responses to their questions about his attackers.

The incident further reinforced the reputation for ruthlessness Liddell and his supporters had sought to cultivate since the BWU was first established. Wanting to get his followers within the group and potential converts among the public in the proper frame of mind for what he still considered an inevitable race war, Liddell portrayed the man as a closet Marxist who had infiltrated the Brotherhood for the express purpose of causing chaos within its ranks; while Justice Department investigators might have found this premise a bit hard to swallow, Liddell’s disciples accepted it as unvarnished gospel truth. The man became a pariah among his former comrades in the white power movement and eventually had to go into the FBI’s Witness Protection Program to avoid being assassinated by a vengeful BWU.

 

 

 

 


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