FIRE—A TERRORIST WEAPON

FIRE—A TERRORIST WEAPON

SPECIAL RISK FIRES

An Analysis of the MOVE Confrontation as a Terrorist Attack

In May of 1985, the City of Philadelphia experienced a fire of such devastating proportions and preceded by such violent political upheaval, that history may, in time, include this conflagration with those of the cities of London and Chicago as examples of unparalleled tragedy.

Although much has been written, televised, and said about the reaction of the City of Philadelphia to the small, activist group which set these events in motion, comparatively little has been written or aired about the group itself. This article attempts to rectify that imbalance, with the dual purpose of providing a clearer picture of what actually occurred, and assisting fire personnel in recognizing what may constitute a terrorist threat and what ramifications it may have, in the hopes that they may be better prepared to offset it.

According to Lieutenant Commander Douglas S. Derrer in his article “Countering Terrorism” (PROCEEDINGS, January and February 1986 issues), preparation and knowledge are the best survival tactics…in the effort to prevent and defuse terrorism.

Domestic terrorism always…we repeat always holds the risk of fire, be it used as a primary weapon, or as in the MOVE incident, as the consequences of an explosive situation and explosive devices. As firefighters and fire officers, we will find ourselves brought into the crisis management, pre-planning phase of a municipality’s dealings with the threat of a terrorist attack. It is as strategists and thinkers that we in the fire service must acquire and absorb whatever knowledge is available about terrorist mentality, so that should a situation develop, we will be able to provide valuable input about the psychological, tactical, and operational nature of the threat.

“To counter terrorism effectively,” Lieutenant Commander Derrer states, “it is imperative to understand how terrorists think, plan, and operate—‘know thy enemy’.”

As firefighters, we are on the front lines in defending against such an enemy. Knowledge enables us to act, instead of just react. Knowledge is our power.

A Then you come here it ain’t gonna be swift and clean, it’s gone be a mess…If MOVE go down, not only will everybody in this block go down, the knee joints of America will break and the body of America will soon fall and we mean it…If them try anything next door, we gone burn ’em back out, and if they succeed in commin’ through the walls, they are goin’ to find smoke, gas, fire and bullets.”¹

“Before we let you -make an example of us, we will burn this -house down and burn you up with us.”¹

“They will never think that anything is beyond what the MOVE organization can do…”2

In the early 1970s in Philadelphia, a small group of so-called anti-technology, back-to-nature activists, led by a man who took the name John Africa, began its evolution from non-violent protesters, to an armed and fortified band. By the mid-1980s, MOVE had broken with society in an effective secession from the United States of America. MOVE claimed that its members were continually harassed and threatened by the City of Philadelphia and the police. “We ain’t gonna respect no goddamn authority. That badge don’t mean shit to us. All that badge is to us is a -target. All that authority is to us is a -bullseye.”3

* All vulgar language has been deleted from this article.

MOVE proclaimed, loudly and often, that it just wanted to be left alone, and as it did so, it proceeded to violate the rights of its fellow citizens and neighbors. MOVE declared that no law existed but MOVE law. ”John Africa teach us that the law ain’t got to be enforced.”3

In 1978, during the administration of Mayor Frank Rizzo, when the Philadelphia, PA, Police Department blockaded MOVE headquarters in an effort to make arrests for illegal weapons possession, MOVE members shot Police Officer James Ramp to death and wounded four other policemen and four firefighters: “You couldn’t assassinate nobody, could you -bum or the rest of you cops, you know why? Cause MOVE is right and you -is wrong, that’s why James Ramp is dead today.”

As a result of that shoot-out, nine MOVE members were sentenced to prison terms of 30 to 100 years each for the killing of Officer Ramp. John Africa was not among those either tried or convicted.

Subsequent to the August 1978 incident, MOVE adults and children relocated to 6221 Osage Avenue, the home of John Africa’s sister, Louise James.

This relocation to Osage Avenue marked the beginning of the MOVE initiative to coerce the City of Philadelphia into releasing their convicted cohorts via a persistent and systematic program of harassing, intimidating, and terrorizing their neighbors.

In effect, the MOVE group held the residents of Osage Avenue hostage. It was against these neighbors that MOVE’S wrath was expelled. By July of 1984, even John Africa’s own sister was afraid of MOVE, going to the mayor to advise him that the MOVE members had become more violenceprone, and were prepared to use weapons against the police.4 “We willing to go down six feet under for y’all —. We willing to take six -bullets to get one of y’all — ,”2

Despite the ever escalating threats and harassment, however, the City of Philadelphia, headed up first by Mayor William Green and then by the new and popular Mayor Wilson Goode, refused to act, fearing a repeat of the 1978 incident and wanting to avoid any additional deaths.

For seven years, the City of Philadelphia lived with the persistent menace of the MOVE people and the nagging fear of a violent escalation of MOVE’S policy of confrontation.

Although the mayor and the City of Philadelphia did not want any more violence, MOVE did. It was part and parcel of MOVE’S manifesto that “a catastrophic confrontation with ‘the system’ was necessary, if not inevitable.”4

MOVE’S neighborhood harangues, delivered by loudspeaker and blasted onto Osage Avenue night and day, became more and more aggressive. “This confrontation gonna snowball, this — gonna burst and before you look when one of these days you gonna look up and you gonna be looking down at the — barrel of a gun…by the time the MOVE organization move, MOVE finally decide to get down on this -city, this — gonna be a goddamn ghost town.”3

MOVE’S threats became more and more violent. “Y’all gonna get something and we ain’t talking about no goddamn talking on no microphone either, –. When y’all get ready to attack this -house, y’all might as well kiss Philadelphia goodbye, cause this — is gonna go the -up in smoke…John Africa gonna put this goddamn city in the ground.”3

MOVE’S hostility and intent to implement violence became more and more overt. “We are letting y’all know that we put gas in each one of the houses on both sides of us, and if you come in here we gonna…burn you the — up.”3

On the morning of May 13,1985, the MOVE group finally succeeded in provoking violence via the confrontation that they had, for such a long time, been imposing upon the local population. To quote from the MOVE Commission report:

“Years of tension and intermittent conflict between the City of Philadelphia and a small, urban cult known as MOVE ended in a violent day-long encounter between some of the group’s members and the Philadelphia police.

“The confrontation began at dawn, when there was resistance to attempts by the police to serve arrest warrants on four members of MOVE who were barricaded with others inside a fortified row house at 6221 Osage Avenue, in West Philadelphia.

“Eighteen hours later, 11 occupants of the house, including five children, were dead. Nearly two square blocks of a residential neighborhood lay wasted by fire. Sixty-one families, some 250 men, women, and children, were homeless.

“It was one of the most devastating days in the modern history of the city.”4

WHAT IS TERRORISM?

The MOVE members have been called everything from advocates to activists to cultists. Although the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission, which was set up to investigate the MOVE incident, stated in its report that “through this use of terror, MOVE, in some respects, held Osage Avenue ‘hostage’ for nearly two years…”4, the Commission does not say that MOVE members themselves were actually terrorists.

There has been speculation and controversy as to whether or not MOVE fits the criteria to be called a terrorist group. What follows is an analysis of the commonly accepted definitions and descriptions of terrorist groups and terrorist acts, and an effort to see if MOVE fits into these parameters, and if the MOVE confrontation with the City of Philadelphia was a terrorist event.

In the book TERROR-VIOLENCE by Robert A. Friedlander (Oceana Publications, 1983), terrorism is defined as “the use of force or the threat of force directed against third parties for primarily ideological, financial, or psychological purposes.”

Mr. Friedlander goes on to explain that “Innocence is the quintessential condition of terrorist victimology, for the terrorist victim is not the ultimate target. When political terrorists strike out at innocent third parties, their real intent is the destabilization of governments and demoralization, or even panic, among the public-at-large.”

Continued on page 32

Photos courtesy ot Philadelphia, PA, Fire Department Visual Communications Unit.

Continued from page 27

The innocent third parties who were victimized by MOVE in its attack on “this goddamn system”³ were, specifically, the neighbors and neighborhood directly adjacent to MOVE headquarters on Osage Avenue, and, more generally, the entire citizenry of Philadelphia.

To expand the definition of terrorism to include the terrorists’ use of hostages to achieve their goals, let’s look at the three basic elements involved in a hostage situation. According to Ronald D. Crelinsten and Denis Szabo in their book HOSTAGE-TAKING (D.C. Heath & Co., 1979), these three basic elements are:

1. “The hostage.” The hostage is the means by which
2. “The hostage-taker” can get something from
3. “The third party.”

In commonly accepted terminology, the terrorist or hostage-taker has two victims. The “passive victim,” who is the hostage and the “actual victim,” who is the party of whom the demands are made.

In tape recordings made of MOVE harangues to its neighbors, MOVE exhibits a classical display of the mechanics of a terrorist/hostage situation. Remembering that the three elements of a hostage situation are the hostage/passive victim (Osage Avenue), the hostagetaker/terrorist (MOVE), and the third party /actual victim (the City of Philadelphia as a political entity), we can hear MOVE boasting to the people on Osage Avenue that “We gonna spill your — blood, since you -want to come out here and try to back up what these politicians is trying to do to MOVE, then we gonna hold you -to blame. We gonna cut through you -to get to these goddamn politicians.”

TERRORIST STRATEGIES AND TECHNIQUES

Accepting that the MOVE members fulfill the criteria of terrorists, it is interesting to look at typical terrorist techniques and see whether or not MOVE has also resorted to their use.

Some, but not all, of these terrorist strategies include:

• Disregard of law, of due process, and of representational government. An attack on politics, per se.
• The advocacy of hopeless and often incomprehensible causes.
• The effective refusal to negotiate by making impossible demands and/or changing demands in mid-negotiation.
• The staging of dramatic situations designed to have public impact.
• The dependence upon, and often manipulation of, the news media to draw attention to their terrorist cause.
• The deliberate intention to provoke tyranny in order to use their opponent’s strength against him.
• The use of political and psychological warfare against their targets.
• The refusal to recognize ethical or humanitarian limits to their use of violence.

Looking at each strategy and technique individually, it is interesting to note how completely MOVE embraced the terrorist behavior.

Disregard of law

“The insidiousness of terrorism,” states an article “On Law” in the December 14, 1984 issue of COMMONWEAL MAGAZINE, “lies equally in the fact that it is an attack on politics—on the whole process of public mobilization, deliberation, appeals to reason and affection, and in many cases resort to the ballot, that allows the messy but peaceful resolution of differences.”

According to MOVE, there is no law but MOVE law5, and John Africa is its…prophet. If this sounds remarkably like a religious dictum, it brings up the interesting question, when dealing with terrorists, of where and when they stopped being a philosophy and became a cult or a religion; and when and why they turned from believers to fanatics to terrorists.

“We ain’t coming in this goddamn system…we coming from MOVE law and you freaks don’t know nothing about MOVE law, but goddammit by the time confrontation is over, everyone of you — is gonna be impressed by the power of MOVE law.”³

Hopeless causes

Christopher Higgins, in “Minority Report” (THE NATION, August 3/ 10, 1985), states that one of the hallmarks of the terrorist is his affinity for the hopeless cause. He must be “without a realizable manifesto, program or objective…violence must be his end as well as his means.”

MOVE, by the 1980s, had begun to consider themselves outside and above the laws, customs, and social contracts of society. They threatened violence to anyone who attempted to enforce society’s laws, and made the unconditional demand that all imprisoned MOVE members be released.⁴

Donald J. Glassy, at the trial of John Africa, testified that “(John Africa) told me that…I was to go to London…that when I was in London I was to take a…timing device and plant it in the hotel and call the prime minister, who was to call Mayor Rizzo and tell him about the confrontation; that I was to get in touch with the newspaper and tell them that the reservoir would be poisoned in England, and that the embassy in Washington would be blown up.”

Refusal to negotiate

Part and parcel of MOVE’S support of hopeless causes was its presentation of its goals in such a manner that negotiation was not possible. In other words, MOVE would set up a situation in which they, themselves, would sabotage the attainment of their own goals.

The article “Terrorism Pure and Complex” in the December 14, 1984 issue of COMMONWEAL MAGAZINE explains that “Again and again, terrorists strike in situations where the political realm, however recalcitrant, does offer possibilities—which the terrorists, damning such political efforts as illusion and betrayal, want to foreclose.”

“…don’t come here talking that peaceful shit. Don’t come out here promising the moon…you made all kind of -promises to the Indians …You can’t fool us with that — political bullshit, talking about you gonna solve it…”³

Staging dramatic situations for political impact

“The theatrical effect of terrorism is a means to an end, the end being the disruption, if not destruction, of a free society,” states Robert H. Kupperman and Darrell M. Trent in their book TERRORISM (Hoover Institute Press, 1979). “We all walk a tightrope: The media are obliged to report the news, yet they can incite terror; government, by overreacting to the threat of terrorism, can appear ridiculous or repressive; and a government that has done little or nothing to prepare for the serious terrorist incident may cause irreparable injury to its people. You’re damned-if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t. That’s the paradox of terrorism.”

Taking advantage of local government’s inertia in response to this paradox, MOVE had done the following prior to the confrontation in 1985:

• Blocked the public alleyway behind the houses on Osage Avenue, denying access to and from neighboring houses;
• Barricaded its house, including putting slats on all the windows;
• Affixed an amplifier to the front of the MOVE headquarters, through which it ceaselessly harangued and threatened its neighbors;
• Exhibited a hooded MOVE member on the roof on the MOVE house, brandishing a shotgun;
• Constructed a rooftop bunker, in violation of city building codes, and otherwise fortified the MOVE house for armed combat and military action.⁴

Manipulation of the news media

According to Lieutenant Commander Douglas S. Derrer’s article “Countering Terrorism,” “Terrorism is dependent upon the news media to amplify its political and psychological ‘fire power,’ to provide publicity, carry its message, garner support, and to influence public opinion.”

MOVE not only knew how to stage “media events,” it even endeavored to manipulate and organize the specific coverage of these events: “If you people got something to say…to MOVE…say it to Jerry Africa. We want our brother Jerry Africa to be accompanied by Irv Homer, Barbara Grant of WDAS, and Harvey Clark of Channel 10 “³

PROVOKING TYRANNY

In the book TERRORISM, R.H. Kupperman and D.M. Trent point out that “the strategy of terrorism can be compared with the strategy used in various martial arts: the aim is to turn an opponent’s strength against him…” In achieving this, the terrorist will “deliberately provoke tyranny in the mad hope that this will bring about the necessary preconditions for revolution.”

It is obvious from the actions previously described that MOVE strategy and terrorist strategy were at one in this regard. As revealed in the 1981 trial of John Africa, MOVE members, in May of 1977, wearing military-type uniforms and parading with guns, provoked a predictable reaction from police, who told them they could do no such thing.

In response, a MOVE member handed the police a letter stating, in part, “Don’t attempt to enter MOVE headquarters or harm MOVE people…we are prepared to get reservoirs, empty out towns and apartment houses, close factories and tie up traffic in the major cities in Europe.”

Political and psychological warfare

One of the most interesting aspects of psychological warfare used as a terrorist weapon is a kind of a wearing-down process described by Lieutenant Commander Douglas S. Derrer in his article “Countering Terrorism,” Part I, that appeared in the January 1986 issue of PROCEEDINGS. Derrer states that “a sequence of debilitating psychological events takes place when personnel are exposed to a high threat of terrorist attacks. These events comprise the anxiety-fatalism cycle that can be seriously detrimental both to morale and combat readiness…the psychological effects of the anxiety-fatalism cycle” impair the effective use of intelligence, interfere with decisionmaking, reduce preparedness, and increase vulnerability.

Taken in context, the above goes a long way to explain the condition of municipal employees, from the mayor on down, who had been both targeted by MOVE threats and unable or in some way inhibited from responding to those threats with action.

In effect, these politicians, police officers, and firefighters lived with the constant fear of MOVE terrorism from the beginning of the MOVE confrontation in 1978, when one police officer was killed and eight other police and firefighters were wounded, to its explosive climax on May 13, 1985, which resulted in the conflagration of an entire neighborhood.

“Ain’t no sense in you hanging around smoking them goddamn cigarettes and acting like you all calm trying to make some goddamn small talk with your partner …your goddamn partner gonna be lying on the goddamn ground gulping on his goddamn blood…

“We gonna let you see how it feels to have a bullet ripping through your — head. That’s right, hot lead. Tearing all through, tearing all through your -eyes.

“All you -is filthy…your wife don’t like cops, ’cause you is a -cop. She -with your — ass because she got that -paycheck that you gonna get. When every day she hoping that you – get killed. Every day she just praying that somebody knocks on the — door and tell her that you…laying on a — stretcher. See, not in tears of sadness, but in tears of joy to get rid of your crazy — ass.”³

Refusal to limit use of violence

“Terrorists recognize no ethical or humanitarian limits to their use of violence,” states Paul Wilkenson in “Terrorist Movements” from the book TERRORISM, THEORY AND PRACTICE (Westview Press, 1979). “Any means are permissible and everyone (including civilians, women, children, and neutrals) is expendable…Thus, terrorists neither recognize nor observe any rules or conventions of war. They assume a license to savagery.”

In the 1981 trial of John Africa on conspiracy charges, Special Agent Walter Waysluk of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms testified that the following was discovered in a foot locker in the basement of a MOVE house and in two automobiles being driven by MOVE members: 12 pipe bombs, 24 readily assembled bombs, 17 hooking devices to wire bombs together…comprising components for 41 complete bombs, which included 15 pounds of black powder. Also found were nine long guns, plus ammunition.

In the May 1985 MOVE incident, although MOVE members fortified their own home for the armed confrontation which they provoked, barricading windows, hauling gasoline cans to their roof, building bunkers and threatening gun play as well as fire, they at no point, and despite continued efforts on the part of the police and neighborhood groups, would permit their own children to be removed from the premises. In effect, the children of MOVE became MOVE hostages, and, like the City of Philadelphia and the citizens on and around Osage Avenue, they became MOVE victims.

Much has been written and said to attribute blame for the catastrophy which occurred as a result of the MOVE confrontation of last year. Little, however, has been written or said about if and how MOVE itself provoked and caused the violent devastation which resulted in their own loss of life.

An exception to this was the recent opinion that was handed down by Judge Samuel M. Lehrer on January 6,1986 on the appeal of the conviction of Alphonso Robbins Africa for terroristic threats. This opinion, written after the fire that took 11 lives and destroyed an entire community, stated that “History is replete with incidents of delusional psychopaths choosing death and suicide rather than a surrender in which they will be seen in a manner other than in the delusional role of grandeur and leadership in which they had hitherto clothed themselves. The manner of their own death is their ultimate weapon of absolute control.

“As long as John Africa had a breath of life in him, no one, man, woman or child could leave that home alive no matter what was occurring outside.”

It is part and parcel of terrorist strategy to “liberate and legitimize violence,” says Robert A. Friedlander in TERROR-VIOLENCE. MOVE, by its violations of the law and its victimization of its neighbors, has already succeeded in liberating violence.

It is only through our knowledge and awareness of MOVE’S and other terrorist groups’ strategy and psychology that we can prevent them from further liberating and legitimizing violence.

¹Ramona Africa letter—delivered by MOVE members to police on May 11, 1985.

²From opinion by Judge Samuel M. Lehrer on Appeal to Conviction for Terrorist Threats.

³Tape recordings of MOVE on Osage Avenue, May 12 and 13, 1985.

⁴The Findings, Conclusions and Recommendations of The Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission.

⁵Tria testimony of Special Agent Walter Waysluk, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms In trial of John Africa, 1981.