The terrorist attack of 9/11 and the terrorist attacks against Israel, London, Madrid, Bali, Beslan, and Baghdad have historical precedence in the early 20th century. Virtually identical Bolshevik terror tactics were used against America and the western democracies in 1919-1920. The Bolsheviks launched a campaign of bombing and assassination against American officials, judges, and prominent citizens. Europe was also subject to the Bolshevik terror back then as it faces jihadist terror today.

On June 2, 1919, at virtually the same time of the day, eight American cities were bombed by Bolsheviks who had already softened up the country a month earlier with a series of violent and coordinated riots unleashed on May Day, 1919. A year later, September 1920, Bolsheviks would detonate a bomb on Wall Street. This would occur in the shadow of the future World Trade Center. The Wall Street bomb killed 40 innocent commuters and injured over 400. In 1919-1920, the enemy combatants, most of whom had recently emigrated from Europe, tried to destabilize America with a new kind of warfare. Their form of “direct action” is all too familiar today.

The Administration of Woodrow Wilson responded to the threat by breaking the back of the terrorist infrastructure and, by doing so, secured a large measure of peace for several generations. Contrary to the overheated paroxysms of left-leaning historians and commentators, this was done with an astonishing degree of restraint under the circumstances. Terrorists were deported, the threat was suppressed, and civil liberties were preserved. What did we do right back then, and where did we go wrong in the years leading up to 9/11?

On August 20, 1918, about 75 years before Osama bin Laden launched his jihad against the western democracies, Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin issued his version of a fatwa against what he and his cohorts perceived to be the “great Satan” United States of America. In his “Letter to American Workers” Lenin called on Americans to “play an exceptionally important role as uncompromising enemies of American imperialism” by joining the “world-wide slaughter of nations for the division of capitalist profits.” The vast majority of Americans rejected the totalitarian rant, which was why the Bolsheviks had to import their terrorists.

Lenin’s call to terror found its echo chamber eight decades later when the jihadist terrorist bin Laden told ABC News correspondent John Miller, in an interview published in Newsweek, May 1998... “Any effort directed against America and the Jews yields positive and direct results -- Allah willing. It is far better for anyone to kill a single American soldier than to squander his efforts on other activities.” Again, the terrorists had to be imported due to lack of interest on the part of Americans.

In the early 20th century, alien enemy combatants, mostly from Russia and Germany, set up sleeper cells in preparation for their “revolution” just as Mohammed Atta and his cohorts set up shop in the 1990’s as documented by the 9/11 Commission.

April 28, 1919 saw the first fruits of the Bolshevik plot when a bomb was dismantled at the home of Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson. The next day, a Bolshevik bomb ripped the hands off of an employee of Georgia Senator Thomas Hardwick as she opened the deadly package and severely burned his wife. A few days later, May Day, thirty-four bombs were intercepted before reaching their intended targets which included, among others, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, North Carolina Senator Lee S. Overman, Utah Senator William H. King, Postmaster General Albert Berlson, and John D. Rockefeller. On that same May Day, coordinated and violent riots of a seditious nature were launched in several cities, notably Boston, and a bomb wrecked a municipal building in Brownsville, Pennsylvania on May 2.

One month later, June 2, 1919, bombs were simultaneously set to blow up in eight American cities. On that day, bombs exploded at the homes of Boston Judge A. F. Hayden and at the Newtonville Massachusetts home of State Representative Leland W. Powers. A bomb was intercepted and defused at the office of Cleveland Mayor H.L. Davis and two bombs exploded in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, one next to the home of Federal Judge J. Thomson and the other next to the home of immigration official W.W. Sibray. In New York City, the home of Judge Charles C. Nott was bombed. Night patrolman William Goshner was killed by what the New York Times referred to as an “infernal killing machine” as was an unidentified man trying to defuse the bomb intended for Judge Nott.

In Philadelphia, the Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church and the Frankfort Arsenal were bombed. Bombs also exploded at the homes of prominent citizens in Patterson and East Orange New Jersey.

Most significantly, from a political standpoint, a huge bomb ripped off the front of the Georgetown home of President Woodrow Wilson’s Quaker pacifist U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The terrorist planting the bomb at Palmer’s door was killed when he tripped trying to flee the scene. Palmer and his young family were not hurt in the assassination attempt. The massive explosion caused windows to shatter at the neighboring home of Palmer’s close friend and political associate, Under Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Palmer acted swiftly by establishing a special unit of the FBI to investigate the terrorists, putting 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover in charge. The FBI proceeded to round up over ten thousand suspected alien terrorists over the next seven months. By January of 1920, 247 alien terrorists had been deported. Those who could not be deported, partially due to insufficient evidence, were freed. The Bolshevik terrorist infrastructure was virtually destroyed in America due to swift action.

The Wilson administration response to the emergency went a long way toward sparing this country from the type of chaos and violence that was plaguing Europe at the time. President Wilson articulated his policy in his December 1919 message to Congress: “Let us be frank about this solemn matter, the evidences of the world-wide unrest which manifest themselves in violence throughout the world bid us pause and consider the means to be found to stop the spread of this contagious thing before it saps the very vitality of the nation itself.” During this time, the vitality was rapidly being sapped out of old Europe as the terrorists softened the continent up for Communism and Nazism.

Terror is a tactic used to weaken the social order of the targeted nation. The terrorists create a hopeless atmosphere of fear and death. Soon the targeted populace yearns for the re-establishment of order and is open to the authoritarian schemes the terrorists themselves sell as social progress. The way it usually works is that the criminals who caused the terror ride in on a white horse as the champions of peace.

Europe’s failure to deal with the threat led to the ascendance of “progressives” such as Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin, and to “social advances” such as World War II, the Holocaust, tens of millions of casualties, forced starvation, poverty, and more collective suffering than the world had ever known. The end of the tunnel for Europe didn’t actually arrive until 1990 when the hammer and sickle was lowered over Moscow.

The violent threat to America, on the other hand, was quickly broken by the Wilson administration policy of swift action against alien terrorists. America has a long tradition of democracy and individual freedom and thus, this country was considerably less susceptible to the tender ministrations put forth by the Bolsheviks and later by the Nazis. The terror threat would be virtually eradicated by Wilson and Palmer and it would not re-emerge again until the 1990’s and the 9/11 attacks.

The last hurrah for the Bolshevik terrorists occurred on September 16, 1920 with the bombing of Wall Street, a short distance from where the World Trade Center would be destroyed decades later. That bloody Bolshevik attack on commuters in lower Manhattan caused the deaths of 40 innocent people. Over 300 were maimed and injured. The street was littered with dismembered corpses and puddles of blood.

Fast forward to 1986, over a half a century later. President Ronald Reagan faced a similar crisis, as Wilson faced in 1919 with the influx of radical Islamic terrorists. Reagan’s National Security team, responding to information gathered by the CIA that indicated that terrorists were setting up sleeper cells in the United States, established the Alien Border Control Commission to coordinate an investigation much as Palmer had set up Hoover’s special unit at the FBI. The ABCC was charged with coordinating the efforts of the FBI, CIA, and other security agencies with the goal of deporting the terrorists and preventing their entry.

In March 1987, the ABCC assisted the FBI in the detention of eight alien terror suspects in Los Angeles, members of the PFLP, a Palestinian terrorist organization that had previously been implicated in assassinations, bombings, and the infamous hijacking of an Air France jet to Entebbe Airport in 1976. Reagan, in precedents set by Wilson, was moving swiftly toward ending the alien terrorist threat.

If Reagan had been allowed to proceed as Wilson had in 1919, the government would’ve been in a better position to break the back of the emerging terror infrastructure, thus potentially preventing the two World Trade Center attacks and numerous other terror incidences. Instead, Congress short-circuited Reagan’s good faith and legal efforts by passing into law an amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act.

This new and unprecedented law, named for its chief sponsor, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, placed a roadblock before the federal government with regard to denying suspected terrorists entry into the country. The government would henceforth have to have a “reasonable ground to believe” that the applicant had engaged in “terrorist activities” before denying entry or before proceeding with deportation. The Frank amendment repealed “the ideological grounds for exclusion.”

The result was that the floodgates were opened to alien terrorists and extremists of all stripes. According to the congressional testimony of terrorism expert Steven Emerson, terrorists began arriving in droves in the 1990’s. Clinton administration CIA Director R. James Woolsey wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Congress had made it “illegal to deny visas to members of terrorist groups.” Before the Frank amendment, a foreigner could be denied entry due to political association and deported due to political activities.
 
The post-Frank amendment arrivals did engage in such political activities as raising funds for overseas “charities” that went to support suicide bombers, preaching anti-American and anti-Semitic hatred, and fomenting violence. All of this was done under the color of the new law. Attending a flight school, for example, and other technically legal actions were not to be viewed as “terrorist activities.” Terrorists, operating with legal visas, would proceed to turn passenger jets into missiles and to use those missiles to blow up the twin towers in Manhattan.

Rep. Curt Weldon, (R-PA), vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, claims that several of the 9/11 hijackers had been identified as terrorists in 1999 by a classified military intelligence unit known as "Able Danger." According to Weldon, U.S. defense intelligence officials identified ringleader Mohammed Atta and three other hijackers as part of an al-Qaida sleeper cell more than a year before the hijackings but didn't forward the information to law enforcement.

Weldon said that in September of 2000, Able Danger recommended that its information on the hijackers be given to the FBI "so they could bring that cell in and take out the terrorists." However, Weldon said, Pentagon lawyers rejected the recommendation because Atta and the others were in the country legally so therefore information on them could not be shared with law enforcement. Their legal visas protected them from a full investigation and prevented the exchange of information by government agencies.

In 1919, President Wilson, operating within the constitution, responded to the terrorist threat of his day by arresting and deporting the aliens who plotted and carried out acts of war against America. Like al-Qaida, the Bolsheviks believed that they had a right to use violence as a means of altering American society to fit their own totalitarian image.

Those who harbored a romantic view of the 1919-1920 assassins leveled much criticism against the government and those of the same mindset are leveling virtually the same criticism today. The claim is that the government violated civil liberties in pursuit of the threat; yet if the threat had come from alien Nazis, that criticism would have hopefully been more circumspect. Lenin aptly called the terrorist sympathizers “useful idiots.”

The irony is that had the Bolsheviks been successful in their program to undermine America, all rights and civil liberties would have been abolished. By 1919, the Wilson administration, the American people, and the world had enough knowledge of the bloody events in Russia to draw conclusions regarding what the Bolsheviks actually meant when they made reference to civil liberties.

No doubt mistakes were made by the FBI in the 1919-1920 crackdown of suspected alien terrorists. The same could be said regarding the FBI crackdown on the domestic terrorist group known as the Ku Klux Klan in the 1930’s under President Franklin D. Roosevelt and again in the 1960’s under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Like the Bolsheviks and the jihadists, the Klan used the terror tactic of bombing and burning buildings. The Klan terrorized and murdered African Americans.

No group or individual has a right to kill innocent people or to destroy property. America has the legal right and the moral responsibility to take vigorous action to defend life and property. Stopping potential foreign terrorists from entering the country by denying them visas, and by deporting those who are suspected of planning terror or fomenting violence, is not a violation of civil liberties. In fact, such action protects civil liberties.

Chuck Morse is a Republican candidate for Congress in Massachusetts.

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