Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

ARYAN NATIONS • 51Otherside Lounge, injuring five people, but this time the secondarydevice was located and deactivated without harm to life or limb.Following the Otherside bombing, letters in the name of Units of theArmy of God claimed responsibility for the bombings and includedinvective against abortion providers, homosexuals, and federal lawenforcement authorities.On 29 April 1997 an Atlanta Bombing Task Force was established,comprised of FBI, ATF, and Georgia Bureau of Investigation personnel,and on 9 June 1997 this investigation was merged with that ofthe Olympic Park bombing. Similarities between these bombings andthe previous Olympic Park bombing led investigators to the conclusionthat all three bombings were the work of the same person, lateridentified as Eric R. Rudolph, who was arrested in May 2003 andconvicted for all three bombings in July and August 2005. See alsoANTIABORTION TERRORISM.ARYAN NATIONS. The Aryan Nations was a nonstate, revolutionaryorganization dedicated to the creation of an independent, whites-onlyhomeland in the Pacific Northwest states and to the overthrow of the“Zionist Occupation Government” of the United States. The visiblecorporate organ of the Aryan Nations was the Church of Jesus ChristChristian, headed by Richard Butler, a minister of the Identity Christianitymovement. While Butler’s church was headquartered on theAryan Nations compound outside Hayden Lake, Idaho, “Aryan Nations”referred also to Butler’s umbrella organization, which soughtto unite disparate right-wing groups sharing white-supremacist, anti-Semitic, or populist ideologies, such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK),American neo-Nazi groups, the Posse Comitatus, and The Covenant,the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA).The Aryan Nations achieved this coordination through conferencesheld at its Hayden Lake compound each year since 1979 andthrough the creation of the Aryan Nations Net, a computer bulletinboard system that allowed members of like-minded groups to shareideas and plans year-round. The Aryan Nations had an outreach ministryto the Aryan Brotherhood, itself a network of white supremacistprison gangs, whose members were recruited into the Aryan Nationsupon their release from prison.While the visible Butler organization itself did not directly participatein terrorist actions, it gave moral encouragement to such groups as the