Garland: ‘Our target is violence’

New Attorney General announces strategy to combat domestic terrorism

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Editorials

June 22, 2021 - 11:26 AM

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. (Alex Wong/Getty Images/TNS)

On a sunny spring morning in 1995, a 7,000-pound bomb hidden in a Ryder rental truck blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. The blast killed 168 people, including 19 children enrolled in a day care center on the second floor. The bomber, a young white supremacist named Timothy James McVeigh had perpetrated the worst domestic terrorism attack in American history.

The highest-ranking Justice Department official dispatched to Oklahoma City in the aftermath of the bombing was an attorney named Merrick B. Garland. The Oklahoma City case, he has said, was “the most important thing I have ever done in my life.”

McVeigh was executed in 2001.

That horrific act not only provided a human face to the then-shadowy phenomenon of domestic terrorism; it also prompted the federal government to focus attention and law-enforcement resources on the disaffected among us who were more than ready to kill to further their fanatical political, racial, economic or ideological aims. They, and their extremist grievances against minorities, gun regulation, government authority and other perceived threats, were more numerous and widespread than many Americans imagined.

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