Two weeks ago, New York Police Commissioner Howard R. Leary, testifying before a Senate subcommittee, said that 368 explosive or incendiary devices have been detonated in New York since January 1969. This compares with a total of only 113 during the entire five year period from the beginning of 1960 through 1964. Moreover, during the period from January 1, 1969, to April 15, 1970, there were at least 4,330 successful bombings, 1,475 bombing attempts that failed and 35,129 bombing threats.

Although I would not want to conclusively say that there is a connection between the rise of the Weathermen and the increased number of bombings, the recent announcement by the Attorney General that he will prosecute 11 members of the anarchist faction indicates that evidence of the connection is there. Bombings are clearly a serious problem in our Nation and are growing more serious with each passing day. Present state laws in almost all cases are weak and ineffective.

Federal law does little to control explosive devices. To meet the need for legislation that would permit our law enforcement agencies to apprehend more readily these terrorist bombers, I have introduced H.R. 17529, which would amend the Gun Control Act to require that records be kept regarding the sale or delivery of explosives, and H.R. 17530, which would strengthen the law concerning the illegal transportation, possession or use of explosives.

For a revolutionary, the threat of a one year jail sentence means little in the fanatical pursuit of his cause. Too often these radicals find a ready supply of explosives at construction sites and Army bases for use in their terrorist tactics. The law that is finally enacted should not inhibit legitimate users of dynamite and other explosives, but yet be strong enough to deter the self-proclaimed revolutionary from including dynamite in his arsenal of anti-society weapons.

H.R. 17530 accomplishes this by imposing greater penalties on the illegal use, transportation or possession of explosives. In addition, it recognizes that when persons are injured or killed as a result of a bombing, the crime is more serious. Thus higher penalties will be incurred when death or injury result from the bombings.

Another deficiency in federal law is the lack of adequate legal sanctions for bombing of federal buildings and other property. Such cases of arson and bombing increased by 170 percent between 1969 and 1970. The bill to the federal government for this damage went up from $10,500 to $728,000. H.R. 17530 would provide stiff penalties for any person convicted of bombing, setting fire to or possessing an incendiary or bombing device in a federal building.

H.R. 17529 would require licensing of importers, manufacturers, distributors and dealers of explosives and also would require that records be kept relating to the sale or delivery of such items. These requirements closely parallel the controls now applicable to firearms and ammunition. Sales and transfers would be limited to licensees and records would be required with respect to purchasers. Thus, explosives would be available for legitimate purposes but sales for illegal use would be restricted.

These bills would provide the necessary federal regulation of interstate traffic in explosives. The states, operating on the basis of these measures, could then move to strengthen their own laws for the handling and use of explosives within their respective jurisdictions.

I would hope that in drafting such laws, legislators would place intra-state regulatory powers in the hands of the local law enforcement agencies. After 23 years on the New York Police Force, I can confidently say that this would be the most logical place for such control. Further, since the local police departments already regulate gun permits, there would be no need for establishing a second bureaucracy to handle explosives permits.

Mr. Chairman, revolutionaries and anarchists may always be with us. However, with increasing concentrations of population, the threat of substantial loss of lives and property is far greater today than ever before. It is absolutely necesary that we provide our law enforcement officials with these essential tools to stop what could be a national tragedy before it happens. I sincerely hope that a handful of radicals will not be permitted to continue their attempts at destroying our American society.

I strongly urge this committee to report favorably on these two measures so that they may be acted upon by the full House membership before the close of the present Congress. These measures are urgently needed and any delay may spell disaster for some unfortunate victim of a terrorist rampage.

Thank you.

STATEMENT OF HON. CLARENCE J. BROWN, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF OHIO

"This is a Weatherman. Listen close. I'll only say it once. We have just bombed the Bank of America. We left a Vietcong flag. We did it in honor of the Cuban revolution . . . Tell (Attorney General) John Mitchell that no matter what he does, we cannot be stopped."

An anonymous caller gave the above message to a New York City newspaper last Sunday (July 26) five minutes after a pipe bomb wrapped in what appeared to be a Vietcong flag exploded outside an office of the Bank of America in Wall Street. The bomb shattered the glass entrance doors, but fortunately no one was injured.

During the fifteen month period from January 1, 1969, to April 15, 1970, there were 4,330 bombings in the United States; 1,475 attempted bombings; and 35,129 bomb threats. Bomb blasts killed 43 persons, and injured 384 persons, many of whom lost their eyesight and arms and legs. Property damage totaled $21,800,000. Evacuations because of bomb threats caused the loss of additional millions of dollars ($2.2 million was reportedly lost in the last half of the above fifteen month period due to evacuations in federal buildings alone).

The situation has become so critical that the Selective Service System has been virtually blacklisted by landlords in many cities because of violence and terrorist bombings.

The Administration through the Department of Justice has taken prompt action to combat this problem. But state and federal law in this area is inadequate and incomplete. Congress must take action to remedy this serious inadequacy. HR 18594 (regulation of importation, manufacture, distribution, storage and possession of explosives, blasting agents and detonators) and HR 16700 (providing criminal penalties for illegal transportation, use or possession, threats, or false information; an amendment to section 837 of 18, United States Code) provide effective measures to help check the illegal use of explosives.

These bills, originaly introduced by Mr. McCulloch, and which I am cosponsoring, will attack this crisis by regulating the use and sale of expolsives, and by increasing the criminal penalties for those who wrongfully use explosives to injure others and destroy property.

HR 18594 is a result or an intensive study by a task force from the Departments of Justice, Interior, Treasury, Transportation, Commerce, the Office of Management and Budget, and industry representatives.

The bill regulates the use of explosives in four major provisions:

1. Those who manufacture or deal in explosives would have to be federally licensed;

2. Buyers would have to provide positive identification and state the intended use of the explosives purchased;

3. Safe and secure storage of explosives would be required by all those handling the explosives; and

4. Unlawful use of explosives would become a federal offense, as would transport of explosive material by persons knowing or having reasonable cause to believe that it was stolen.

The proposed law would be administered by the Department of the Interior, whose Bureau of Mines has been authorized since 1910 to investigate explosions. The bill would prohibit license holders from knowingly transferring explosive materials to anyone who: 1. has been convicted of a crime or is under indictment for a crime, punishable by imprisonment for more than a year; 2. a fugitive from justice; 3. an unlawful user of drugs; 4. a person legally classed as a mental defective; or 5. is under 21 years of age.

H.R. 16700 amends section 837 of title 18, United States Code. The proposed revisions broaden and increase the categories of prohibited actions and increase in certain instances the severity of the penalties. Major improvements include: 1. Expansion of the definition of "explosives" in subsection (a) to include incendiary devices such as "Molotov Cocktails." This is especially needed in that incendiary devices represented over 77% of all reported bombings in this country during a 15 month period from January 1, 1969, to April 15, 1970.

2. Subsection (b) of the new legislation increases the coverage of the Act to include receipt as well as transport of explosives in interstate commerce for specified unlawful purposes. The present law requires proof of knowledge or intent to use explosives for a specific illegal purpose. This proposal would ease this strict

requirement of specific intent and substitute a general knowledge or intent to use explosives illegally.

3. Subsection (c) expands our capacity to handle bomb threats by again eliminating the necessity of proving "specific intent."

4. Subsections (d) (e) deal with malicious damage or destruction of federal property by means of an explosive and with unauthorized possession of explosives in a government building. We especially need these sections since federal buildings are increasingly becoming targets for bombings and bomb threats.

5. Subsection (f) covers malicious damage or destruction by means of an explosive of any property used for business purposes by a person engaged in commerce or any activity affecting commerce.

6. Congress would express an intent in subsection (h) not to preempt state law or deprive state or local law enforcement authorities of their responsibilities for investigating and prosecuting crimes involving the use of explosives.

7. Subsection (i) states that no investigation or prosecution shall be undertaken unless approval is first given by the Attorney General, or an Assistant Attorney General designated by the Attorney General. This subsection insures that only investigations or prosecutions that are of major interest will be pursued and will enable the Justice Department to achieve maximum economy of effort so that federal law enforcement assists, but does not displace, the efforts of state and local officials in dealing with crimes involving explosives.

Premediation is present in all malicious bombing incidents. In fact, it can be argued that malicious bombing represents the highest degree of premeditation of all serious crimes since so much advance planning is required to accumulate the materials necessary to produce explosives.

I feel that strengthening the federal law in this area will act as a deterrent. H.R. 16700 and H.R. 18594 together will provide an effective framework to combat the illegal use of explosives.

These bills may not be a total solution to the problem; bombings of private residences, schools and police and fire stations could possibly fall outside the jurisdiction of this legislation unless interstate or foreign commerce is involved (see N.L.R.B. v. Reliance Fuel Corp., 371 U.S. 224, 226, 1963, for federal jurisdictonal definition of the term affecting commerce). Vigorous legislative and police action from the states must complement these bills to insure that the jurisdictional and enforcement problems in this area do not hinder effective action.

The Congress, however, must take the lead in this area and pass effective and comprehensive legislation. This legislation should be a model for all levels of government to combat the illegal use of explosives.

H.R. 18594 and H.R. 16700 provide this model. These bills represent an effective and maximum solution permitted under the Constitution to this problem. I strongly urge this Committee take prompt and favorable action on these billsthe country cannot afford inaction.

STATEMENT OF HON. J. HERBERT BURKE, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF FLORIDA

Mr. Chairman, it is indeed a pleasure for me to accept your invitation to appear before this Subcommittee in behalf of my bill, H.R. 16818, which would substantially increase the penalties for the illegal use or possession of explosives. In the first half of this year alone, bombings have maimed, injured and killed hundreds of persons and destroyed property in the millions of dollars, and I would like to cite some of the individual tragedies.

Last February a time bomb saturated with staples blasted the police station in the Height-Asbury section of San Francisco. It was the second such bombing in four days in that student-riot torn city. Police Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell, 45, suffered a total loss of his right eye, blinding injury to his left eye and a severed jugular vein. Had he lived, he would have suffered permanent brain damage from fragments which lodged in his brain. Mercifully, however, Sgt. McDonnell didn't live. Seven police officers were also injured and three cars on the police parking lot demolished also by the bomb. The San Francisco Police Department has offered a reward of $35,000 for the arrest and conviction of the bombers.

Three days after the San Francisco incident, across the Bay in Oakland, 24 sticks of dynamite were found leaning against the wall of a paint plant. In

Berkeley, this same day, incendiary bombs exploded one night in a department store.

Also this year, in Cleveland, Ohio, an explosion attributed to a bomb, demolished the Shaker Heights police station, injuring 15 persons including a Judge, several clerks of the Court, and a number of police officers. Two detectives were seriously injured when they were blown through the window.

In New York, Justice John M. Murtagh and his wife and four children were awakened at 4:30 a.m. by an explosion that ripped through their home in the Inwood Section of Manhattan. Only a miracle prevented their deaths. Scrawled outside were the slogans "Free the Panther 21" and "The Viet Cong Have Won." In Denver, 10 school buses were destroyed by bombs as they sat in their parking lot.

In New York, total bombings and bombing threats amounted to an astonish. ing 2,587 for the first three months of this year.

The most highly-publicized of the bombings was the destruction of a $250,000 townhouse in Greenwich Village, which belonged to the father of one of the survivors, Cathlyn Wilkerson. Three persons were killed in the explosion including Theodore "Ted" Gold, 23, leader of the campus rebellion at Columbia University and a militant radical. Evidence indicates the house was being used as a bomb factory by radical leftists. Sixty sticks of dynamite, various homemade bombs, and literature from the "Weathermen", a splinter group which has been sometimes associated with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), were found in the wreckage.

Prior to this, explosions rocked the Manhattan offices of the Mobil Oil Company, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) and the General Telephone and Electronics Corporation. An anonymous note sent to New York City Police Headquarters credits the Weathermen with these bombings.

The violence in New York reached such a crescendo that "The Militant", a weekly publication of a group calling themselves the "Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party", whether meaning it or not, took to citing Lenin and Trotsky as opponents of such acts of terror and warned its readers that the concept of individual terror was counter-productive, hampering the winning over of the masses to a Socialistic program.

Mr. Chairman, one can only ask: What type of person or people play with highly volatile explosives as casually as a 10-year old youngster builds a model airplane? Obviously, they are amateurs in the art of explosives, although perhaps not so in the art of subversion. These bombings, many of which have destroyed the makers, are certainly not the work of professional explosives handlers but by students whose ability will someday be professional.

During the old gangland days of the Twenties and Thirties, we were told of the man called the "peterman". He was the gang's explosives handler, charged with the job of blowing up bank safes. He was an expert and he was as methodical and skilled in the handling of bombs as is a jeweler. He worked with precision and was fully knowledgeable of the potency of his explosive.

A careful appraisal of the list of those who have been arrested in connection with bombings, or those who have maimed or blown themselves to bits by their own ineptness, reveals that they are in the main Left Wing extremists. Many come from wealthy families, as in the case of two of the survivors of the demolished townhouse in New York, both of whom were young women graduates of highly rated colleges, Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr. I might add that it is interesting to note Bryn Mawr College last fall appointed to the post of Professor of Black Studies, Herbert Aptheker, noted "theoretician" of the Communist Party in the United States.

Records indicate that most of those involved in these bombings traveled to Cuba, or rioted in Chicago, Berkeley, or elsewhere, and most belong to either the Weathermen or some other ultra violent segment of the Students for a Democratic Society.

These facts are often denied by some of the press and they seem to startle the public, but they are no surprise to those who have become aware of the growing radical New Left and the aims of their radical tutors.

Mr. Chairman, bombings by anarchists are not new. In 1866, during the Chicago Haymarket riots, a bomb exploded among a crowd of demonstartors for an 8-hour workday. During the 1919 anarchist scares someone mailed bombs to 36 prominent Americans, but fortunately only one exploded. As a result nearly 10,000 person were arrested and some were deported. The 1950's and 1960's saw bombings of churches and automobiles against civil rights activities. The

anarchists in the United States have so far not followed the Central European pattern of the 19th Century anarchists who sought their way into power to enforce their version of the ideal society by the use of fear, force, coercion and bombs.

We here today owe it to our fellow Americans to make certain that today's anarchists find their activities subject to severe punishment and this is the purpose of the legislation before us, H.R. 16818, passage of which I advocate. Since 1968, 8300 pounds of explosives-enough to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge-have been stolen in the State of California. Seven thousand highly volatile explosive detonators were stolen in Maryland shortly after the death by explosion of two associates of H. Rap Brown.

Although all 50 States have laws relating to explosives, most pertain to safety regulation and the use of explosives by known criminals. Unfortunately, most laws can be enforced only after explosives are converted into a device plainly intended to harm persons or property.

Because TNT, nitroglycerin and other explosives have legitimate and necessary functions, particularly among builders and farmers, the sale of small amounts are routine and subject to little or no control. Similarly, formulas for the manufacture of home-made bombs are unfortunately readily available and can be learned from hobby magazines, scientific journals and even encyclopedias. Even the Federal Government has technical manuals which explain how to make explosives of varying kinds and qualities.

Don Sisco, a member of the National Socialist White Peoples Party, formerly the American Nazi Party, who sold through the mails manuals on manufacturing home-made bombs, lost his left hand and sustained severe eye injury in testing one of his own devices. He continues to offer his manual for sale.

Mr. Chairman, the situation is now critical. We cannot afford to delay any longer the imposition of stringent penalties upon those who illegally possess, make or use bombs. Action must be taken as a protective measure to guard our citizens and their property against the actions of emotionally unstable radicals. I strongly urge this Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, the full Committee, and both branches of the Congress of the United States Congress to act swiftly and pass this much needed deterrent against any further such crimes against the American people.

STATEMENT OF HON. R. LAWRENCE COUGHLIN, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA

Mr. Chairman, I testify in favor of H.R. 16699, a bill to toughen laws on illegal use, transportation, or possession of explosives and the penalties.

The use of the bomb-often equated with social justice is not a new phenomenon in the United States. It is, in fact, an old weapon, that has been used through the years in the name of one cause or another.

Whether a bomb is thrown in the name of social justice or for any other reason, the result is the same-injury, death and/or property destruction.

While we all hold compassion for the downtrodden and disadvantaged, while we all wish for a social order in which every person can fulfill his potential, while we all strive to achieve equality of opportunity, we must not rationalize nor justify dynamiting or bomb throwing.

The act of violence does violence to our American citizen and impugns the rights and lives of others.

It is not enough to say that we should not enact laws which may infringe on the rights of citizens, but we must say that we have to act to safeguard the rights of all citizens.

In testifying for this bill which I have co-sponsored, I recognize that we are, in fact, resorting to the age-old deterrent of fear of punishment and death. I do not apologize for this approach, but only regret that it is necessary.

This bill is not intended to place the Federal Government into the position of usurping state or local laws.

It does two things:

1. It enables the Federal Government to act if necessary whether there be difficulties with local laws or problems of jurisdiction;

2. It signifies the Federal Government's concern over the resort to violence by imposing new, stringent and justified penalties on the perpetrators of bombings.