The mystery of the Spokane bomb

By Laura Conaway

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Wed Jan 19, 2011 10:11 AM EST

From the Northwest Front's Homeland Blog.

National coverage of the bomb planted in Spokane, Washington, on MLK Day remains almost as mysterious as the fairly sophisticated bomb itself. The FBI says the case falls "in the sphere of domestic terrorism" and involved "some political or social agenda." By the time that news gets to my local paper, the New York Times, it's on page A15, which means buried.

It's important to remember that we don't know anything yet about who did this or why, whether they're connected to a larger group or what motivated them. In the Pacific Northwest, an attempted assault like this immediately brings to mind the region's thriving Aryan movement. In 1996, white supremacists were indicted for a 1996 bomb at Spokane City Hall, the same month someone bombed a Spokane newspaper and bank.

More recently, across the Idaho line in Coeur D'Alene, white supremacists been picketingMexican food carts and generally making a ruckus. That doesn't mean they had anything to do with the MLK bomb, by any measure. But the white supremacists are certainly watching, and they know they're being watched. Rachel Maddow tweeted this posting about it from the white supremacists of the Northwest Front, on their Homeland Blog. As she pointed out, they provided a link to our story with no other comment. Their post is filed under "activism," whatever that indicates.

All of this has so far played out to very, very little response outside the region. The localSpokane Spokesman-Review is asking its readers whether the news of a remote-control bomb that appeared to target the city's Martin Luther King Jr. Unity March should in fact be of national interest, since so far it isn't. Short answer? Yes.

Longer? "An anti-personel explosive device planted along the route of a parade honoring a fallen civil rights leader (THE greatest civil rights leader) in a region with a history Aryan and neo-Nazi activity," the second of two commenters writes. "Yeah…..I personally think that to be just a LITTLE more newsworthy than Sarah Palin trying to paint herself as the true victim of Tucson."