Chapter XVII: The Battle of Washington, 2004-2006.
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The peaceful political revolution of European integration would affect the United States Presidential election that would take place only a few weeks later. The campaign, of course, was already in full swing with rallies, debates and so on and had already commenced the previous year. Though a Republican victory seemed unlikely in 2004 given President Cassius Clay’s popularity, the GOP prepared to put up a serious offensive as opposed to fielding paper candidates again like they had previously in elections deemed inopportune for the party. They did so because 2004 might not be so inopportune according to their own calculations: a black President wouldn’t do well in the Deep South. The recently passed Universal Healthcare Act was denounced as “communism” because it was funded through a “medtax” that unfairly punished the higher incomes in Republican eyes, and this position seemed to be gaining traction among right-wing voters in the upper middle class. Realizing its popularity among the lower income classes, the Republicans didn’t want to abolish it but intended to reform it. They planned a system of income independent insurance premiums and co-pay through semi-private health insurance companies, with seriously reduced coverage under the guise that people wouldn’t be insured for stuff they didn’t use (the downside, of course, was that additional coverage meant a higher premium). Secondly, they intended to give individual states much more control over Medicaid. The Clay Administration’s economy policies were seen as overly careful and regulatory, and were compared to a mothering “helicopter parent” by the financial and banking sector. The Republicans promised tax reductions, privatization and deregulation. Besides that the Republicans knew Clay was good at inspiring reverend like speeches promising greener pastures, but wasn’t good at details and therefore could be made to stumble in televised debates.
The winner of the GOP primaries, who was subsequently adopted as the nominee at the Republican National Convention in, was Governor of Michigan Mitt Romney. He was the first ever Presidential candidate ever to adhere to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormons. He was the son of George W. Romney, who had thrown his hat into the ring into the May 1963 gubernatorial elections (originally scheduled for November 1962, but postponed for six months because of WW III) against incumbent John B. Swainson. George Romney, a spokesperson of the automobile industry, won despite the enormous popularity of the Democrats at the time. He focused much of his energies on rebuilding the damaged car industry of Detroit, the main hub of car manufacturing in the US where almost all domestically produced cars in the US were built pre-1962 (about 90% of cars in the US were domestically built, which increased as European competition virtually disappeared in WW III). He was re-elected in 1966.
Rather than challenging Johnson in 1968 in what he correctly predicted would be a Democratic victory, Romney ran for a third term as Governor of Michigan in 1970. He retired after the end of his third term in January 1975. His youngest son Willard Mitt Romney was 21 years old when his father won his third term and was concentrating on his education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he pursued a degree in engineering. With WW III taking place when he was 15 years old, he remembered its aftermath vividly as it dominated his adolescence and early adulthood. The town where the Romney family lived, Bloomfield Hills, was spared nuclear destruction but they’d seen the mushroom cloud over Detroit and later the desperate refugees and some intermittent looting. Watching his father rebuild the automotive industry, a cornerstone of Michigan’s economy, inspired him to go to MIT to study engineering and specialize in mechanical engineering, getting his PhD in 1975. After a two decade career with Chrysler, during which he became CEO, he decided to step into his father’s footsteps by running for office. In 1998, he was elected Governor of Michigan and was re-elected in 2002 before running to become the Republican candidate for the Presidency. By then, the LDS Church or Mormonism, had evolved from a fringe pioneer religion to one associated with reconstruction as well as free market thought and American business values.
Mitt Romney campaigned on a wide-ranging platform of across the board income tax cuts, lower taxes for major corporations, deregulation, privatization, reducing social security, healthcare reform exchanging government based universal healthcare for semi-public health insurers, outlawing abortion through a new constitutional amendment, opposition to same-sex marriage and civil unions (favouring domestic partnership legislation instead), reducing American dependence on oil imports, and a foreign policy that treated China as America’s “number one geopolitical opponent.” He knew his socially conservative and economically neoliberal positions would put off swing voters sympathizing with the Democrats. He picked the fairly liberal New Hampshire Senator John E. Sununu as his running mate to draw in said swing voters. Given his mixed El Salvadorean, Lebanese Greek Orthodox Christian and Palestinian descent he appealed to a serious range of minorities. It made the race closer cut.
In the first televised debate they had in October, President Clay had some trouble holding his own against Romney who had a whole list of concerns against the administration’s policies, most of them stemming from the circles of big business, banking and the top incomes. Romney additionally appeared to be very well informed about certain drawbacks of the current left-wing policies and had compiled an extensive list of examples of social security fraud that took advantage of the generous system Clay had set up, of people abusing Universal Healthcare to score drugs, and of overly meddlesome government policies that hampered business choices and investments. Clay, having become complacent perhaps, was unprepared for this onslaught as he thought his bigger picture greener pastures rhetoric would cut it. In the second he was better prepared, possessing documents showing that in most cases the system worked. Additionally, Mario Cuomo proved superior in his vice-presidential debate against Sununu, portraying his superior experience.
Clay lorded the good economy and the success of his foreign policy regards to European integration – itself a product of European reconstruction kickstarted by Robert F. Kennedy – over the Republicans. They in return argued the economy was strong despite and not because of the current leftist policies and believed that with a small government approach growth would be even faster. In regards to foreign policy, they denounced Clay’s relaxation of relations with China as weak. The result was that Cassius Clay, the first black President of the United States, won a second term by carrying 22 states plus DC, getting 284 electoral votes and raking in 50% of the popular vote. The Romney/Sununu ticket carried 28 states, won 254 electoral votes and got 49% of the popular vote. The Democrats’ sway over Congress also grew: the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives grew; they also gained another seat in the Senate, reducing the Republican majority there to exactly fifty plus one.
The start of Clay’s second term more than anything was dominated by a single event. Initially, it seemed like his second term would be unperturbed smooth sailing with foreign and domestic policies being a continuation of those of his first term, supported by a strong economy. The year 2005 was one of those rare years of almost complete tranquillity in the greater scheme of things, with the economy continuing to grow steadily and no major events or incidents in foreign politics. Furthermore, in purely economic terms, i.e. disregarding international controversies, the early to mid-00s are considered to be part of a golden age that some say stretched back to the 80s and was only interrupted by two sharp recessions (1990-1992 and 1999-2000).
By summer the year 2006 was shaping up to be a very good year, but President Clay was about to face a ghost from his past that would threaten to ruin the domestic peace. This ghost was directly related to his unsuccessful ’96 Presidential campaign, a rare product of the US justice and prison system: Timothy McVeigh. After being sentenced to ten years for assault and battery with a deadly weapon in 1997, minus time served, he was scheduled to be released in 2006. McVeigh appeared to be a model prisoner as he ostensibly seemed to distance himself from extreme right prison gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood even though such groups adored him. He spent much of his time reading law books he checked out from the prison library so he could adequately represent himself in his parole hearings.
McVeigh was released for good behaviour after seven years, having served two thirds of his prison term, and became a free man again in 2003. That would prove to be a mistake as prison had done nothing to deradicalize him. He moved back to the city of Manhattan in Riley County, Kansas, close to his old army base. He immediately poured over extreme right-wing writings from Mein Kampf to white supremacist interpretations of the bible. Using the burgeoning interweb, he created a website that was basically his online diary that he kept adding to, in effect one of the first blogs, and from which any reader could easily discern his political views (the site was taken down shortly after the 2006 attacks). The site contained comments and diatribes on current politics interlaced with anti-tax, anti-immigration, racist, antisemitic, survivalist, gun rights, sovereign citizen, libertarian, land rights and conservative Christian views. His daily posts ranged from arguing that federal taxes were unconstitutional to declaring America to be “the dominion of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant man” and dismissing white people in interracial relations as “traitors of their race and of God.” Besides his website, he used an old-fashioned CB radio to spread his views as well. The fact that he was attacked on the streets and that at one point a Black Power activist threw a Molotov cocktail into his house didn’t discourage him.
He joined the Sovereign Kansas Militia, which shared his views. His far reach through the interweb had earned him a following outside the militia consisting of neo-Nazi activist groups, the Aryan Brotherhood and the Ku Klux Klan (after a first incarnation had flourished in the 1920s, a second incarnation had risen in the 50s and had become a force to be reckoned with after WW III, lasting all the way until the late 80s before slowly declining again). In promoting the Sovereign Kansas Militia (SKM), he helped increase its membership tenfold to 10.000 people and organized it along military lines. Its members were involved in numerous racially motivated crimes like assault, assault with a deadly weapon, arson, theft, vandalism and harassment. Furthermore, members of the organization were involved in drugs to finance the organization and in gun running to arm it. In no instance were prosecutors able to prove McVeigh had ordered any of it. As chapters of the SKM were formed outside of Kansas, its name was changed to the Sovereign Militia. The organization appeared on the radar of the FBI, the DEA and the ATF, who painstakingly tried to dismantle cells for lack of enough evidence to tackle the entire group. It was treated as a criminal organization just like the Mafia and the Mexican cartels, not as a domestic terrorist organization which it was fast becoming. Ultimately a foreign policy decision by the Clay Administration concerning South Africa was his motivation to go from the “propaganda phase” to the “action phase.”
South Africa had known a system of institutionalized racial segregation for many years. The political culture was authoritarian and facilitated the political, social and economic dominance of the country’s white minority. Minority rule began to emerge in the 1940s with phenomena like segregation of public facilities and events as well as housing and employment opportunities based on skin colour. Interracial marriages and sexual relations became de facto illegal in the 1950s. The entire population was divided into four racial groups (Black, White, Coloured and Indian) and racial classification determined place of residence, with blacks being forced out of their original homes and into de facto ghettos in mass forced evictions. Of course, domestic militant opposition to Apartheid swelled in the 70s, 80s and 90s, prompting brutal crackdowns by the National Party government and increasing sectarian violence. Some reforms were made to grant Indian and Coloured representation, but this didn’t appease most activist groups.
Simmering discontent continued until it escalated into civil war in the early 2000s, in part thanks to a reorientation in US foreign policy vis-á-vis the cape: despite petitions to do so from domestic and foreign individuals and organizations, for years the United States had quietly tolerated the Apartheid regime for fears that it’d request Chinese support if the Americans supported the opposition. Days after his inauguration in January 2000, President Clay denounced South Africa’s segregationist system and condemned its disproportional violence against opponents and dissidents whilst urging it to reform. He economically embargoed the regime and froze its assets whilst starting deliveries of arms and ammunitions to the opposition. In the first phase of the South African Civil War between 2002 and 2004 the National Party tried to stay in control of the entire country. After 2004, the civil war became a secessionist conflict, with separate Afrikaner, Zulu and Bantustan based republics emerging and trying to conquer as much territory as possible for a good hand in future peace negotiations. The breakup of the country and peace in South Africa wouldn’t be settled until after Clay’s presidency. Meanwhile, the fear of South Africa’s nuclear weapons coming into play remained.
McVeigh was infuriated by American intervention in favour of the South African opposition. He viewed the Apartheid model of a racially segregated society dominated by white men as the example the United States ought to follow, with the specific addition that state governments and not the federal government should decide on such policies. Additionally, he supported an isolationist course in foreign politics and believed the US shouldn’t interfere in the domestic policies of any country, including South Africa. He saw President Clay’s anti-Apartheid move as confirmation that DC had been infiltrated by a “socialist elite of secret un-Christian, Jewish, Black and Asian interests” and detested it. It encouraged him to escalate from “propaganda” to “action” to prevent the feared enslavement and possible extermination of the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants).
This threat only existed in the fantasies of McVeigh and his following, but encouraged them to plan violent action. They felt they had to wipe out the President, his cabinet and the Democratic representation in Congress, though they realized this was an ambitious and possibly unattainable goal. The worst terrorist attack in US history was in the making nonetheless, planned with military precision as McVeigh had organized the Sovereign Militia based on his military experience and had actively sought to attract disillusioned veterans like himself to it. This diluted but didn’t remove the criminal element and gave them heavier weapons and specialist training that made these criminals heavy hitters, something that other criminal organizations copied. This would in turn force a militarization of the police, with assault rifles, rocket propelled grenades and armoured vehicles.
They chose the symbolic date of July 4th 2006, Independence Day, probably America’s most important holiday. The reason was that they believed they were going to ignite a “second war of independence” with white Christian America fighting against the federal government, allegedly controlled by foreign and Jewish interests. They fully expected a race war to erupt after their attacks. Orders were distributed in a low-key, low tech style: by hand written notes passed from one Sovereign Militia cell to the next, telling them where to go and what objectives to take. McVeigh knew his plot would quickly be discovered and foiled if all of this communication would take place by phone and email, suspecting that he was under surveillance from the FBI and taking every conceivable countermeasure against it.
More than one thousand militiamen arrived at New Washington DC as tourists in the days and weeks prior to the attacks, wearing civilian garb rather than the usual uniforms they liked to show off and arriving in their private cars. They had three objectives: the White House, the Capitol Building and the Pentagon. At noon, teams assembled light artillery guns and mortars around the Capitol Building and the Pentagon within minutes and opened fire. This distracted from the heavy trucks smashing through the light fences and anti-vehicle obstacles and parked as close to the buildings as possible. These trucks were wired to explode with dynamite attached to barrels filled with ammonium nitrate fertilizer, nitromethane and diesel fuel mixture with acetylene filled canisters added for brisance. Whilst these attacks were underway, twenty minutes later at 12:20 PM, three hundred men with pistols, assault rifles and RPGs took down the fences and tried to storm the White House.
The Sovereign Militia terrorists had arrogantly expected that they’d storm their targets and seize control through the element of surprise, overwhelming the “complacent elites.” The bombs they’d set off at the Capitol Building certainly caused major damage and killed hundreds, but they’d wildly overestimated by how much the surprise would throw off their opponents. The Pentagon alone was staffed by thousands of experienced military personnel while the White House was protected by the Secret Service, and both fought off the attack. US Marines stationed close to New Washington DC had been mobilized and were on their way by 12:30 PM while attack helicopters and jetfighters became airborne. With their guns and missile pods, the helicopters decimated the attackers on the White House lawn and at the Pentagon. The marines only had to mop up. On Capitol Hill, the attackers managed to enter the building and take hostages and posed impossible demands, which led to SWAT units storming the building.
The attack had been fended off with disastrous results for the attackers, and without the desired result of provoking a race war. Out of the 1.011 deadly casualties of that day, 320 were civilians and the rest terrorists. Thousands more were injured, both innocent civilians and terrorists. The great irony was that they could never have caught and killed President Clay even if they had managed to enter the White House because he wasn’t there. He’d chosen to celebrate Independence Day private with his family in the privacy of the presidential country retreat Camp David in Maryland. President Clay returned to New Washington to visit the wounded in the hospitals and to address the nation about this tragedy, proclaiming three days of national mourning.
Chapter XVII: The Battle of Washington, 2004-2006.
The peaceful political revolution of European integration would affect the United States Presidential election that would take place only a few weeks later. The campaign, of course, was already in full swing with rallies, debates and so on and had already commenced the previous year. Though a Republican victory seemed unlikely in 2004 given President Cassius Clay’s popularity, the GOP prepared to put up a serious offensive as opposed to fielding paper candidates again like they had previously in elections deemed inopportune for the party. They did so because 2004 might not be so inopportune according to their own calculations: a black President wouldn’t do well in the Deep South. The recently passed Universal Healthcare Act was denounced as “communism” because it was funded through a “medtax” that unfairly punished the higher incomes in Republican eyes, and this position seemed to be gaining traction among right-wing voters in the upper middle class. Realizing its popularity among the lower income classes, the Republicans didn’t want to abolish it but intended to reform it. They planned a system of income independent insurance premiums and co-pay through semi-private health insurance companies, with seriously reduced coverage under the guise that people wouldn’t be insured for stuff they didn’t use (the downside, of course, was that additional coverage meant a higher premium). Secondly, they intended to give individual states much more control over Medicaid. The Clay Administration’s economy policies were seen as overly careful and regulatory, and were compared to a mothering “helicopter parent” by the financial and banking sector. The Republicans promised tax reductions, privatization and deregulation. Besides that the Republicans knew Clay was good at inspiring reverend like speeches promising greener pastures, but wasn’t good at details and therefore could be made to stumble in televised debates.
The winner of the GOP primaries, who was subsequently adopted as the nominee at the Republican National Convention in, was Governor of Michigan Mitt Romney. He was the first ever Presidential candidate ever to adhere to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormons. He was the son of George W. Romney, who had thrown his hat into the ring into the May 1963 gubernatorial elections (originally scheduled for November 1962, but postponed for six months because of WW III) against incumbent John B. Swainson. George Romney, a spokesperson of the automobile industry, won despite the enormous popularity of the Democrats at the time. He focused much of his energies on rebuilding the damaged car industry of Detroit, the main hub of car manufacturing in the US where almost all domestically produced cars in the US were built pre-1962 (about 90% of cars in the US were domestically built, which increased as European competition virtually disappeared in WW III). He was re-elected in 1966.
Rather than challenging Johnson in 1968 in what he correctly predicted would be a Democratic victory, Romney ran for a third term as Governor of Michigan in 1970. He retired after the end of his third term in January 1975. His youngest son Willard Mitt Romney was 21 years old when his father won his third term and was concentrating on his education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he pursued a degree in engineering. With WW III taking place when he was 15 years old, he remembered its aftermath vividly as it dominated his adolescence and early adulthood. The town where the Romney family lived, Bloomfield Hills, was spared nuclear destruction but they’d seen the mushroom cloud over Detroit and later the desperate refugees and some intermittent looting. Watching his father rebuild the automotive industry, a cornerstone of Michigan’s economy, inspired him to go to MIT to study engineering and specialize in mechanical engineering, getting his PhD in 1975. After a two decade career with Chrysler, during which he became CEO, he decided to step into his father’s footsteps by running for office. In 1998, he was elected Governor of Michigan and was re-elected in 2002 before running to become the Republican candidate for the Presidency. By then, the LDS Church or Mormonism, had evolved from a fringe pioneer religion to one associated with reconstruction as well as free market thought and American business values.
Mitt Romney campaigned on a wide-ranging platform of across the board income tax cuts, lower taxes for major corporations, deregulation, privatization, reducing social security, healthcare reform exchanging government based universal healthcare for semi-public health insurers, outlawing abortion through a new constitutional amendment, opposition to same-sex marriage and civil unions (favouring domestic partnership legislation instead), reducing American dependence on oil imports, and a foreign policy that treated China as America’s “number one geopolitical opponent.” He knew his socially conservative and economically neoliberal positions would put off swing voters sympathizing with the Democrats. He picked the fairly liberal New Hampshire Senator John E. Sununu as his running mate to draw in said swing voters. Given his mixed El Salvadorean, Lebanese Greek Orthodox Christian and Palestinian descent he appealed to a serious range of minorities. It made the race closer cut.
In the first televised debate they had in October, President Clay had some trouble holding his own against Romney who had a whole list of concerns against the administration’s policies, most of them stemming from the circles of big business, banking and the top incomes. Romney additionally appeared to be very well informed about certain drawbacks of the current left-wing policies and had compiled an extensive list of examples of social security fraud that took advantage of the generous system Clay had set up, of people abusing Universal Healthcare to score drugs, and of overly meddlesome government policies that hampered business choices and investments. Clay, having become complacent perhaps, was unprepared for this onslaught as he thought his bigger picture greener pastures rhetoric would cut it. In the second he was better prepared, possessing documents showing that in most cases the system worked. Additionally, Mario Cuomo proved superior in his vice-presidential debate against Sununu, portraying his superior experience.
Clay lorded the good economy and the success of his foreign policy regards to European integration – itself a product of European reconstruction kickstarted by Robert F. Kennedy – over the Republicans. They in return argued the economy was strong despite and not because of the current leftist policies and believed that with a small government approach growth would be even faster. In regards to foreign policy, they denounced Clay’s relaxation of relations with China as weak. The result was that Cassius Clay, the first black President of the United States, won a second term by carrying 22 states plus DC, getting 284 electoral votes and raking in 50% of the popular vote. The Romney/Sununu ticket carried 28 states, won 254 electoral votes and got 49% of the popular vote. The Democrats’ sway over Congress also grew: the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives grew; they also gained another seat in the Senate, reducing the Republican majority there to exactly fifty plus one.
The start of Clay’s second term more than anything was dominated by a single event. Initially, it seemed like his second term would be unperturbed smooth sailing with foreign and domestic policies being a continuation of those of his first term, supported by a strong economy. The year 2005 was one of those rare years of almost complete tranquillity in the greater scheme of things, with the economy continuing to grow steadily and no major events or incidents in foreign politics. Furthermore, in purely economic terms, i.e. disregarding international controversies, the early to mid-00s are considered to be part of a golden age that some say stretched back to the 80s and was only interrupted by two sharp recessions (1990-1992 and 1999-2000).
By summer the year 2006 was shaping up to be a very good year, but President Clay was about to face a ghost from his past that would threaten to ruin the domestic peace. This ghost was directly related to his unsuccessful ’96 Presidential campaign, a rare product of the US justice and prison system: Timothy McVeigh. After being sentenced to ten years for assault and battery with a deadly weapon in 1997, minus time served, he was scheduled to be released in 2006. McVeigh appeared to be a model prisoner as he ostensibly seemed to distance himself from extreme right prison gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood even though such groups adored him. He spent much of his time reading law books he checked out from the prison library so he could adequately represent himself in his parole hearings.
McVeigh was released for good behaviour after seven years, having served two thirds of his prison term, and became a free man again in 2003. That would prove to be a mistake as prison had done nothing to deradicalize him. He moved back to the city of Manhattan in Riley County, Kansas, close to his old army base. He immediately poured over extreme right-wing writings from Mein Kampf to white supremacist interpretations of the bible. Using the burgeoning interweb, he created a website that was basically his online diary that he kept adding to, in effect one of the first blogs, and from which any reader could easily discern his political views (the site was taken down shortly after the 2006 attacks). The site contained comments and diatribes on current politics interlaced with anti-tax, anti-immigration, racist, antisemitic, survivalist, gun rights, sovereign citizen, libertarian, land rights and conservative Christian views. His daily posts ranged from arguing that federal taxes were unconstitutional to declaring America to be “the dominion of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant man” and dismissing white people in interracial relations as “traitors of their race and of God.” Besides his website, he used an old-fashioned CB radio to spread his views as well. The fact that he was attacked on the streets and that at one point a Black Power activist threw a Molotov cocktail into his house didn’t discourage him.
He joined the Sovereign Kansas Militia, which shared his views. His far reach through the interweb had earned him a following outside the militia consisting of neo-Nazi activist groups, the Aryan Brotherhood and the Ku Klux Klan (after a first incarnation had flourished in the 1920s, a second incarnation had risen in the 50s and had become a force to be reckoned with after WW III, lasting all the way until the late 80s before slowly declining again). In promoting the Sovereign Kansas Militia (SKM), he helped increase its membership tenfold to 10.000 people and organized it along military lines. Its members were involved in numerous racially motivated crimes like assault, assault with a deadly weapon, arson, theft, vandalism and harassment. Furthermore, members of the organization were involved in drugs to finance the organization and in gun running to arm it. In no instance were prosecutors able to prove McVeigh had ordered any of it. As chapters of the SKM were formed outside of Kansas, its name was changed to the Sovereign Militia. The organization appeared on the radar of the FBI, the DEA and the ATF, who painstakingly tried to dismantle cells for lack of enough evidence to tackle the entire group. It was treated as a criminal organization just like the Mafia and the Mexican cartels, not as a domestic terrorist organization which it was fast becoming. Ultimately a foreign policy decision by the Clay Administration concerning South Africa was his motivation to go from the “propaganda phase” to the “action phase.”
South Africa had known a system of institutionalized racial segregation for many years. The political culture was authoritarian and facilitated the political, social and economic dominance of the country’s white minority. Minority rule began to emerge in the 1940s with phenomena like segregation of public facilities and events as well as housing and employment opportunities based on skin colour. Interracial marriages and sexual relations became de facto illegal in the 1950s. The entire population was divided into four racial groups (Black, White, Coloured and Indian) and racial classification determined place of residence, with blacks being forced out of their original homes and into de facto ghettos in mass forced evictions. Of course, domestic militant opposition to Apartheid swelled in the 70s, 80s and 90s, prompting brutal crackdowns by the National Party government and increasing sectarian violence. Some reforms were made to grant Indian and Coloured representation, but this didn’t appease most activist groups.
Simmering discontent continued until it escalated into civil war in the early 2000s, in part thanks to a reorientation in US foreign policy vis-á-vis the cape: despite petitions to do so from domestic and foreign individuals and organizations, for years the United States had quietly tolerated the Apartheid regime for fears that it’d request Chinese support if the Americans supported the opposition. Days after his inauguration in January 2000, President Clay denounced South Africa’s segregationist system and condemned its disproportional violence against opponents and dissidents whilst urging it to reform. He economically embargoed the regime and froze its assets whilst starting deliveries of arms and ammunitions to the opposition. In the first phase of the South African Civil War between 2002 and 2004 the National Party tried to stay in control of the entire country. After 2004, the civil war became a secessionist conflict, with separate Afrikaner, Zulu and Bantustan based republics emerging and trying to conquer as much territory as possible for a good hand in future peace negotiations. The breakup of the country and peace in South Africa wouldn’t be settled until after Clay’s presidency. Meanwhile, the fear of South Africa’s nuclear weapons coming into play remained.
McVeigh was infuriated by American intervention in favour of the South African opposition. He viewed the Apartheid model of a racially segregated society dominated by white men as the example the United States ought to follow, with the specific addition that state governments and not the federal government should decide on such policies. Additionally, he supported an isolationist course in foreign politics and believed the US shouldn’t interfere in the domestic policies of any country, including South Africa. He saw President Clay’s anti-Apartheid move as confirmation that DC had been infiltrated by a “socialist elite of secret un-Christian, Jewish, Black and Asian interests” and detested it. It encouraged him to escalate from “propaganda” to “action” to prevent the feared enslavement and possible extermination of the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants).
This threat only existed in the fantasies of McVeigh and his following, but encouraged them to plan violent action. They felt they had to wipe out the President, his cabinet and the Democratic representation in Congress, though they realized this was an ambitious and possibly unattainable goal. The worst terrorist attack in US history was in the making nonetheless, planned with military precision as McVeigh had organized the Sovereign Militia based on his military experience and had actively sought to attract disillusioned veterans like himself to it. This diluted but didn’t remove the criminal element and gave them heavier weapons and specialist training that made these criminals heavy hitters, something that other criminal organizations copied. This would in turn force a militarization of the police, with assault rifles, rocket propelled grenades and armoured vehicles.
They chose the symbolic date of July 4th 2006, Independence Day, probably America’s most important holiday. The reason was that they believed they were going to ignite a “second war of independence” with white Christian America fighting against the federal government, allegedly controlled by foreign and Jewish interests. They fully expected a race war to erupt after their attacks. Orders were distributed in a low-key, low tech style: by hand written notes passed from one Sovereign Militia cell to the next, telling them where to go and what objectives to take. McVeigh knew his plot would quickly be discovered and foiled if all of this communication would take place by phone and email, suspecting that he was under surveillance from the FBI and taking every conceivable countermeasure against it.
More than one thousand militiamen arrived at New Washington DC as tourists in the days and weeks prior to the attacks, wearing civilian garb rather than the usual uniforms they liked to show off and arriving in their private cars. They had three objectives: the White House, the Capitol Building and the Pentagon. At noon, teams assembled light artillery guns and mortars around the Capitol Building and the Pentagon within minutes and opened fire. This distracted from the heavy trucks smashing through the light fences and anti-vehicle obstacles and parked as close to the buildings as possible. These trucks were wired to explode with dynamite attached to barrels filled with ammonium nitrate fertilizer, nitromethane and diesel fuel mixture with acetylene filled canisters added for brisance. Whilst these attacks were underway, twenty minutes later at 12:20 PM, three hundred men with pistols, assault rifles and RPGs took down the fences and tried to storm the White House.
The Sovereign Militia terrorists had arrogantly expected that they’d storm their targets and seize control through the element of surprise, overwhelming the “complacent elites.” The bombs they’d set off at the Capitol Building certainly caused major damage and killed hundreds, but they’d wildly overestimated by how much the surprise would throw off their opponents. The Pentagon alone was staffed by thousands of experienced military personnel while the White House was protected by the Secret Service, and both fought off the attack. US Marines stationed close to New Washington DC had been mobilized and were on their way by 12:30 PM while attack helicopters and jetfighters became airborne. With their guns and missile pods, the helicopters decimated the attackers on the White House lawn and at the Pentagon. The marines only had to mop up. On Capitol Hill, the attackers managed to enter the building and take hostages and posed impossible demands, which led to SWAT units storming the building.
The attack had been fended off with disastrous results for the attackers, and without the desired result of provoking a race war. Out of the 1.011 deadly casualties of that day, 320 were civilians and the rest terrorists. Thousands more were injured, both innocent civilians and terrorists. The great irony was that they could never have caught and killed President Clay even if they had managed to enter the White House because he wasn’t there. He’d chosen to celebrate Independence Day private with his family in the privacy of the presidential country retreat Camp David in Maryland. President Clay returned to New Washington to visit the wounded in the hospitals and to address the nation about this tragedy, proclaiming three days of national mourning.
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Attacking multiple targets in the US capital and killing 300+ innocent people in a futile and suicidal attempt to start a race war on Independence Day no less is going to result in the government's law enforcement agencies going after the Sovereign Militia with a vengeance and the great majority of the American citizenry turning against radical right militia groups in general for a long time to come!