Monday, April 5, 2010

What is it about Michigan that makes it a militia hotbed and fertile breeding ground for the lunatic fringe?

First we had co-conspirator Terry Lynn Nichols in the April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing with Timothy McVeigh which killed 168 people, including 19 children in a daycare.

Nichols didn’t get up one day and build a bomb. Fourteen months he knew about this. Jurors convicted Nichols on Dec. 23, 1997, of conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and eight counts of involuntary manslaughter.

Nichols, a 1973 Lapeer High School graduate who attended Central Michigan University, on June 4, 1998, was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole in ADX, a maximum security prison in Florence, Colo.

On May 26, 2004, Nichols was further convicted on Oklahoma charges of 161 counts of first-degree murder.

Now the nuts fall even farther from the tree.

Over in Adrian, Hutaree, a self-proclaimed group of “Christian warriors” – the ultimate oxymoron – wanted to stockpile a weapons cache and were plotting to kill police officers in hope of sparking anti-government revolution.

David Brian Stone seemed to make even other militia groups nervous with his delusions. “These guys may have felt in their mind that they were a part of this brotherhood. The reality is I don’t think they’ve got a whole lot of support,” commented Detroit FBI head Andrew Arena. Stone, his two sons, wife and five others were arrested after raids in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio and charged with seditious conspiracy and attempting to use weapons of mass destruction, among other crimes.

A federal judge in Michigan April 2 ordered eight suspects, including Stone, to stay locked up pending trial.

Hutaree members have been meeting for paramilitary training in rural Michigan since at least 2008, authorities said, but their outreach for a larger movement was rebuffed by the Lenawee Volunteer Michigan Militia. The Ohio Valley Freedom Fighters, considered Kentucky’s largest and most active militia, characterized the government crackdown on Hutaree as “intended to scare the citizenry into not joining the more mainstream, public militias such as ours.” The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, distinguishes between most militias, which concern themselves more with out-of-control federal government than religion. Hutaree embraces a Christian apocalypse vision.

The FBI lured them to a warehouse for a phony memorial service so they would be unarmed. The ruse March 27 in Ann Arbor was part of a series of weekend raids in several states to break up the alleged conspiracy to overthrow the government.

Prosecutors claim Hutaree plotted to make a fake 911 call, murder responding police officers and set off bombs at the funeral to kill more.

“Christians” plotting to assassinate law enforcement officers, as a federal indictment alleges, are not followers of Christ, they’re drinking haterade. You don’t kill people to uphold “Christian” values. Thank goodness this group was infiltrated and dismantled before it could do Oklahoma City-style damage. Federal prosecutors also filed terrorism charges April 2 against a pregnant American woman in the so-called Jihad Jane case.

Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, originally from Colorado, flew from Ireland Friday to Philadelphia, where she was arrested by agents with the joint terrorism task force there. Her son, 6, flew with her and was placed in protective custody.

Two American women are accused of plotting online to attend terror training camp.
Paulin-Ramirez and six others were detained last month by authorities in Ireland investigating an alleged plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist who offended Muslims.

Those seven suspects in Ireland were linked to Colleen LaRose, 46, who traveled to Europe, only to be arrested last fall when she returned to the United States.

Let it remind us every April that the worst act of domestic terrorism ever committed in this country was by McVeigh, that hatriots haven’t gone away and it only seems like Michigan cornered the market.