The Albany Times-Union‘s photo of terror suspect Glendon Scott Crawford.
A sensational story of domestic terrorism is playing out in Albany, New York. Officials say two men—arraigned last June for terrorism charges, including conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction—planned to target Muslims with a diabolical weapon that would use high-powered X-rays to kill their victims silently and from a distance. Experts are divided on whether the device could have worked (Salon, 6/22/13; Huffington Post, 6/20/13), but officials assert that the suspects’ plot was well-advanced before it came to the attention of federal authorities.
Glendon Scott Crawford, a General Electric industrial mechanic, member of the Barkersville Christian Church and self-described Ku Klux Klan member, came up with the plan, according to investigators. He was shopping it in Upstate New York synagogues and Jewish organizations, they say, as a weapon that could be used by the Israeli government.
According to the indictment, Crawford met Eric Feight, an executive at an upstate industrial electronics firm, at a synagogue in Schenectady, N.Y., and the two decided to build the radiation weapon and use it on area Muslims. The conspiracy reportedly went awry when a North Carolina Klan official, whom Crawford and Feight allegedly approached for money, cooperated with federal investigators. Crawford took an undercover federal agent on a car ride to scout a local mosque, the Albany Times Union (6/21/13) reported.
Feight, who is expected to testify against Crawford, entered a guilty plea on Wednesday; Crawford plead not guilty (TimesUnion.com, 1/22/14).
Despite its compelling—not to say bizarre—details, there’s been little coverage of the story outside the Albany region. The New York Times, published 150 miles away, ran a single story (6/20/13) about the plot after the arraignments last June—on page 24.
It’s hard not to think back on previous undercovered terrorism stories and conclude that if suspects in this story were Muslims, and their alleged targets Christians or Jews, it would have dominated our media world for the past several months.
I can just see the daily screaming headlines in the New York Post, can’t you?
But don’t you find it interesting that these Jewish groups apparently didn’t contact law enforcement about this?
To be clear Doug, when Crawford approached the Jewish groups, he was pitching the weapons as something that might interest the Israeli government. Fiendish weapons of terror in the hands of odious individuals or groups, are A-OK in the hands of favored governments.
I’m literally speechless. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I will share this with as many people as i can.
It didn’t get much coverage because their diabolical plan was mostly imaginary. There have been several similar plots involving muslims who bought fake weapons from the FBI that got no more coverage, because it just isn’t as interesting when there was never any real potential for harm.
Though, I do agree that there’s a disparity in coverage elsewhere. In general, the news does not tend to classify them as “terrorists” if the accused are white non-muslims.
Being mostly imaginary is no barrier to a terror plot getting saturation coverage. Remember Jose Padilla and his “dirty bomb” plot?
Right, Steve, but still, don’t you find it odd that no one in these groups wondered why Crawford wasn’t pitching it directly to Israeli reps?
I imagine it’s not every day that someone shows up at a synagogue trying to pimp a weapons systems.
What impression was formed of him, and should it have raised any alarms as to what else he intended to do with this thing?
“Vigilante White Rights Group: Do We Need Their Protection From Islam?”
Matthew– as Jim says, FBI plots involving Muslim “terrorists” get far more coverage. But this is not one of those plots. These men had expertise in relevant fields and had already developed the remote triggering system before any FBI contact. That the FBI came in later and, through undercover agents, agreed to help procure an industrial x-ray machine for them, was well after the design and building had begun.
Crawford was a Klu Klux Klan member. I think his plan was to get some Jewish people involved in killing Muslims so he could kill 2 birds with one stone. Think about it…
This story interests me because I discovered it looking for information on x-ray weapons, having possibly been the target of one in 1980, which apparently came from a Honeywell facility near where I worked in Billerica, Mass.
I had bought a surplus Victoreen radiation detector, a yellow plastic Civil Defense type unit for $5. I took it to work, thinking I could see if it detected a possible spill from a nearby medical isotope company.
In the parking lot I was surprised to pick up anything, but the needle moved, and more so away from the ground! I moved the unit around and found that at head level, near my car, the needle registered in the top scale, around 3 or 4 milliroentgens/hr.
A further test was to take my big ring of keys off my belt and use it to shadow the radiation source, and it pointed to another facility in this industrial park, Honeywell.
The area of the beam’s greatest intensity was about 4″ in diameter.
Very curious, I called the local NRC (or was it AEC) office, and a helpful official recommended I call a professor at Northeastern University, which I did.
The NU prof said that it was most likely an X-ray beam (I had thought it was gamma rays, that’s what the detector was for) as he explained that it was possible to make a collimated X-ray beam, much harder with gamma rays, but they showed up the same in the ionization-type (not geiger) detector in the fallout-shelter surplus gadget.
I checked for this radiation on different days after this, and found the beam sometimes on. Wonder why it was aimed at head level by my car, where I’d stand while getting in or out?
I assumed it was a result of careless use of equipment, maybe a part of Honeywell’s star wars contracts, or the like, not because I was a target, though it was still weird. I wasn’t easily freaked out.
Strangely a few months later I drove home by the far end of Hanscom Field, where MIT and the Air Force play (Lincoln Labs is there) I felt a strange momentary electric-blue hot sensation in my head, and looked back towards the end of the runway–a portable trailer-mounted radar antenna was pointing at the spot I just drove by. It was Draper Labs’ Flight Facility, as the sign there said.
Later that evening, the news covered an anti-nuclear/ABM demonstration outside Draper’s Cambridge building. Coincidence?
Looks like electronic harassment is nothing new, and it figures this psycho felt empowered by the war on terra to go and kill him some moose limbs.
Obviously this is not a new idea! I had not even heard of this story.