This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR

By Fred Burton and Ben West

In the evening of March 4, as U.S. Department of Defense workers were wrapping up their day, a man wearing a suit and displaying what guards later referred to as a “nervous intensity” approached the entrance to the Pentagon. As he walked up to the guard booth, he reached into his pocket and took out a semi-automatic 9 mm pistol and began firing at the two security personnel stationed at the entrance. The guards retreated behind ballistic glass and returned fire at the man, who rushed the entrance. Seconds later, a third guard armed with a .40-caliber submachine gun confronted and shot the gunman, delivering a fatal head wound that ended the incident.

The gunman in this case was John Patrick Bedell, a native Californian who had driven from California to Washington to carry out his one-man attack on the Pentagon. Given the available details (e.g., a cross-country trek, business attire), it appears that Bedell had planned his attack well ahead of time. He had a history of mental illness as well as minor criminal offenses, such as growing marijuana and resisting arrest. More notable, though, is a series of recordings and writings he posted on the Internet in November 2006 in which he criticized the federal government and said the 9/11 attacks were a government-led conspiracy.

The March 4 shooting came right on the heels of another attack against the U.S. government, this one in Austin, Texas, where software engineer and pilot Joseph Stack crashed his single-engine Piper Cherokee into a building Feb. 18 that housed offices of the Internal Revenue Service. In another previous attack, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, opened fire at a troop processing facility at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. While many government officials are denying that these incidents were terrorist acts, we at STRATFOR disagree. Arguments used to not classify these attacks as terrorism include the failure to generate large numbers of casualties, a lack of foreign ties and the absence of a larger conspiracy. This dismissal of terrorism as a factor in these attacks ultimately has a long-term impact on past and future investigations, and it also seems to ignore the legal definition, as set out in Title VIII, Section 802 of the USA PATRIOT Act:

[An] act of terrorism means any activity that (A) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life that is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State; and (B) appears to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping.

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