Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

550 • POWER LAWwas variously estimated between 1,000 and 3,000 nationwide, but WisconsinPosse leaders claimed to have more than 2,000 members in theirchapter alone. The Posse found a major portion of its potential recruitsfrom Midwestern farmers who suffered as a result of unfavorable marketconditions and bank foreclosures on mortgaged farms. One LouisHarris poll commissioned by the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Leagueof rural residents of Iowa and Nebraska in February 1986 found that 25percent of this sample of Midwesterners followed the activities of PosseComitatus even if they were not openly affiliated with it and essentiallyaccepted its core beliefs.The heyday of Posse Comitatus activity appears to have been duringthe farming crisis of the 1980s. Several Posse members have joinedother similar movements, including the “common-law courts” andthe militia movement, and a few have surfaced in various schemesto defraud creditors, whether banks or the IRS. James P. Wickstrom,who was both a Posse leader in Michigan and an Identity Christianminister, was tried in 1991 for attempting to distribute counterfeitcurrency during a 1988 Aryan Nations event and sentenced to 38months’ imprisonment. Terry Nichols, later convicted for his rolein the Oklahoma City bombing, attempted to pay credit card billsusing bogus financial instruments proceeded by the Wisconsin PosseComitatus affiliate, the Family Farm Preservation society.Following his release from prison, James P. Wickstrom tried to revivethe Posse Comitatus movement. After the death of Aryan Nationsfounder Richard Butler in 2004, the leader of the Pennsylvania-basedfaction of the Aryan Nations, Charles Juba, appointed Wickstrom as“chaplain” of the group. Other members of the far-right patriot movementviewed Wickstrom and the Posse as outdated and defunct.POWER LAW. Contemporary terrorism appears to follow a powerfunction, or power law, which is a mathematical relation betweennumbers of events, such as military attacks, and intensity of events,such as fatalities or other measures of destruction due to an attack. In1948 when mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson plotted the fatalitystatistics for 82 wars, from the Napoleonic wars to World War II,he found that there was an inverse curvilinear relationship betweennumbers of wars (classified according to their size by numbers ofcombatants) and their corresponding lethality when the figures wereplotted as logarithms. The almost straight-line inverse relationship in