Over the weekend in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio, eight men of the “Hutaree Militia” were arrested (a ninth turned himself in Monday), and all have been charged with “seditious conspiracy,” “attempting to use weapons of mass destruction,” and firearms violations. Two of the nine are charged with “instructing” others how to make bombs. The indictment [.pdf] charges that these member of the so-called Hutaree Militia had plans to lure cops into various ambushes in furtherance of their plan for war against the Antichrist.
All the rest of the Michigan militias are telling the press that they had nothing to do with the accused, having long considered them trouble, and they reportedly even refused some of the Hutarees sanctuary once the arrests began.
A safe first guess on a case like this is that the Feds have just made up another one. The formula is always the same for them: Find a person or a small group of people who are gullible and bordering on criminal, then trick them into saying, or sometimes even doing, something stupid and/or evil. See for example the Miami 7, the Detroit 5, the Lodi 1, the NY 2, the NY 4…
In this case it seems that the self-proclaimed militia leader and his son somehow joined up with a very strange character named Khristopher Sickels and a few others and planned to make IEDs and use them against local police.
The funny part is, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported Monday, “The FBI had infiltrated the group for several months,” attributing this information to Detroit News 4, though the closest thing this writer can find to that on their Web site is the assertion that “federal authorities had been monitoring the Hutaree members for some time.”
I’m betting Maddow’s interpretation that they had actually been infiltrated is accurate and that the worst of whatever these people actually did was at the urging of said federal agent.
(By the way, does “weapons of mass destruction” have a definition at all these days? It started out as a cute way for the empire to conflate mustard gas with hydrogen bombs, but now rifles and homemade land mines – at least in the hands of non-U.S. government employees – are included as well.)
Maddow, as Lew Rockwell pointed out on Monday, was beside herself with glee at the prospect of these citizens being tried by the federal government for “seditious conspiracy,” which, as she put it, is an “obscure 19th-century law” which allows the national government to imprison people who haven’t actually done anything. Wow, that really is “interesting.”
And if you stay tuned for the next segment, you can watch Maddow push her expert guest to conflate everyone to the right of her into the imminent threat of the right-wing populist, Patriot, neo-Nazi, End Timeser, abortion-doctor killer, Republican, Tea Party Armed Insurrection of Danger! He refused, but this Maddow lady is only getting started. Just wait till she becomes director-for-life of the New National Homeland FEMA Camp, Northern Command. We’ll all be seditious terrorist-hate-crime-enemy-belligerents.
You’ll wish you’d joined a militia then.
But anyway…
Over at the Reason blog Brian Doherty caught more liberals cheering on the police state and recommended a great article, “The Paranoid Center,” by Jesse Walker. And at LRC, Anthony Gregory asks why Maddow left out the role of end times beliefs in mass support for the government’s aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East.
Update: See, the FBI orchestrated the whole thing. They had infiltrated the group for at least 8 months, and it was their guy who was offering explosives expertise, etc. Long live the right to confront one’s accusers.