Known Domestic Terrorists
Timothy McVeigh: Oklahoma City Bombing
Timothy James McVeigh (April 23, 1968 - June 11, 2001) was a United States Army veteran and security guard who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on the second anniversary of the Waco Siege, April 19, 1995, as revenge against what he considered to be a tyrannical federal government. The bombing killed 168 people, and was the deadliest act of terrorism within the United States prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks.
He was convicted of 11 federal offenses, sentenced to death, and executed on June 11, 2001.
Working at a lakeside campground near McVeigh's old Army post, he and Nichols constructed an ANNM explosive device mounted in the back of a rented Ryder truck. This site was regarded as suitable because a moving truck would not seem out of place, given the transient population of the area. The bomb consisted of about 5,000 pounds (2,300 kg) of ammonium nitrate (an agricultural fertilizer) and nitromethane, a motor-racing fuel.
On April 19, 1995 McVeigh drove the truck to the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building just as its offices and day care center opened for the day. Prosecutors said McVeigh ran away from the truck after he ignited two time fuses; one was a two-minute fuse, and another was a backup of five minutes. At 9:02 a.m., a massive explosion destroyed the north half of the building. The explosion was so powerful that McVeigh, who was jogging away from the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was lifted two inches off the ground. The explosion killed 168 people, and 450 were injured. Nineteen of the victims were small children in the day care center on the ground floor of the building. McVeigh did not express remorse for the deaths, what he referred to as "collateral damage", but said he might have chosen a different target if he had known the day care center was open.
According to the Oklahoma City Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), more than 300 buildings were damaged. More than 12,000 volunteers and rescue workers took part in the rescue, recovery, and support operations following the bombing.
In reference to theories that he had assistance from others, McVeigh responded, "You can't handle the truth. Because the truth is, I blew up the Murrah Building, and isn't it kind of scary that one man could wreak this kind of hell?"
Unibomber: Ted Kaczynski
Theodore Kaczynski (born May 22, 1942) is an American terrorist who attempted to fight against what he perceived as the evils of technological progress by engaging in an almost eighteen-year-long campaign of sending mail bombs to various people, killing three and wounding 29.
Before his identity was known, the FBI referred to him as the UNABOM (from "university and airline bomber"). Variants of the codename appeared when the media started using the codename, including Unabomer, Unabomber, and Unibomber.
The Bombings
The first mail bomb was sent in late May 1978 to Prof. Buckley Crist at Northwestern University. The package was found in a parking lot at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with Prof. Crist's return address (and a send to address of Prof. E.J. Smith at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York state). The package was sent 'back' to Crist. Suspicious of a package he never sent, Crist notified campus police. A campus police officer by the name of Terry Marker opened the package, and it exploded; Marker sustained minor injuries.
The initial 1978 bombing was followed by bombs to airline officials and bombs designed to explode on airplanes. Initially, the bombs were of amateur quality and did not cause much harm.
The first serious injury occurred in 1985, when a Berkeley graduate student lost four fingers and vision in one eye. The bombs were all hand crafted and carried the inscription "FC" -- at one point reported to stand for "Fuck Computers," but later found to mean "Freedom Club". A Californian computer store owner was killed by a nail and splinter loaded bomb lying in his parking lot in 1985. A similar attack against a computer store occurred in Salt Lake City, Utah on February 20, 1987.
After a six-year break, Kaczynski struck again in 1993, mailing a bomb to David Gelernter, a computer science professor at Yale and developer of the Linda distributed programming system. Gelernter has written a book on the subject, Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber. Another bomb in the same year maimed the geneticist Charles Epstein. Kaczynski wrote a letter to The New York Times claiming that his "anarchist group" called FC was responsible for the attacks.
In 1994, an advertising executive was killed by another mail bomb. In a letter, Kaczynski justified the killing by pointing out that the public relations field is in the business of developing techniques for manipulating people's attitudes. This was followed by the murder of a forestry association president in 1995.
The Unibomber Manifesto