#“Cliven Bundy: American Terrorist Patriot” | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

reading-writing-revolution · 4 years

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Why the police crack down hard on black protestors (and others) but not white terrorists. Juan Cole's latest on the mark piece. Tom

"My social media feeds have been full of comparisons between the treatment by police of Reopener mobs, some of whom invaded the Michigan state house while fully armed with assault weapons, and the treatment of protesters in Minneapolis regarding the killing of George Floyd by a policemen who kept his knee on his neck.

"Why does the Far Right all too often get a pass by American law enforcement?

"1. The white supremacists and other far right elements are armed to the teeth. There are about 255 million guns in the US, but something like 75 percent of Americans say they don’t own a gun. So between 22% and 31% of Americans, about 80 to 100 million people, own all the guns. Then 3 percent of the population, some 10 million people, own 100 million guns.

Let me underline that. About 40 percent of all guns in the United States are owned by about 10 million people, some 3 percent of the population. So owning guns is legal, and I’m from a family of farmers who hunted with them, and I’m not knocking gun ownership. And I’m sure there are perfectly innocent hobbyists who collect guns the way other people collect vintage automobiles. But a tiny percentage within that percentage of super-gun-owners are far right wing extremists, and law enforcement is understandably reluctant to get them het up.

"2. White supremacists are very good about playing passive aggressive games and nursing and sharing grievances. In the 1990s, Federal agencies like the FBI and Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms were called in to deal with heavily armed white terrorists. A 1992 stand off at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, between gun nut Randy Weaver (whose family was with him) ended in tragedy when FBI snipers took out Weaver and his wife. Weaver had refused to show up for his trial on weapons charges (he had sawed off a shotgun, which is illegal in Federal law).

"Then the following year the David Koresh splinter of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, was investigated for stockpiling weapons, and a raid left 4 ATF agents and 6 Branch Davidians dead, with many agents wounded. That firefight led to an FBI siege of the compound and ultimately to the deaths of 76 members, including Koresh, in fires that they may have set themselves.

"Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, both on the fringe of white supremacy and conspiracy theories, cited Ruby Ridge and Waco when they blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklohama City in 1995 with a fertilizer bomb (and ended up targeting the day care center on the first floor). They killed 168 people and wounded hundreds more. They killed more persons per capita than any other terrorists in American history up to that point.

"It isn’t usually said out loud, but the Oklahoma City bombing was the most successful act of terrorism in American history. It led the FBI and other Federal agencies, as well as local law enforcement in many instances, to back off the white supremacists, neo-Nazis and kindred groups, leaving them be unless they did something really egregious. Terrorism was defined at the time in the US Federal code as the use of violence by a non-state actor against civilians to change politics. So that worked.

3. This is one of the reasons for which the Obama administration did not take the bait when Cliven Bundy, whom I compared to the Taliban, staged a standoff over his refusal to pay fees for grazing on Federal land. People like Bundy were looking for further ammunition to grow their “sovereign citizen” movement, and a violent crackdown would have helped them.

4. White supremacists, militia movement members, and other fringe groups of the far right may make up 10 percent of the US population. They form a key if unspoken part of the Republican Party and provide the margin for Republicans in many tight congressional races. This is why Sarah Palin and other GOP leaders engage in codespeak, talking about the “patriots,” which sounds inoffensive until you realize about whom exactly she was speaking. In the zeroes of this century, Republicans in Congress actually stopped Federal agencies from keeping tabs and good statistics on far right extremism, lest one of their constituencies be upset. Trump is the first major national Republican leader openly to cultivate the far right constituency, but he has plenty of predecessors who did it more gingerly.

5. Likewise, Trump and his Neo-Nazi black shirts are looking for trouble so as to depict the normal people as tyrants and enlist more discontents. This is why Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer merely complained about the mob that came for her having confederate flags and assault weapons, but did not order them dealt with by law enforcement. The Michigan state legislature actually just shut down to accommodate these white terrorists. But if any of them had been shot by police, you know that it would just have brought more gangs to Lansing and that Trump would have been whipping up the fringe into a lather. Whitmer handled the situation wisely, even at the cost of ceding ground to far right wing thugs on the right of democratically elected legislators to meet in the state house.

The point isn’t that Whitmer and others are wrong. They are doing the right thing. The point is that African-Americans with grievances should also be cut some slack.

6. African-Americans are made to look big and menacing by the white media and many political figures, but they are a minority. They are only 12 percent of the population. If you had a gathering of 100 representative Americans, only 12 of them would be of African heritage. They are systematically discriminated against on employment, which keeps them poor. They have only 10 cents for every dollar a white person has. As a disadvantaged minority they are still, despite the supposed end to Jim Crow, subjected to enormous amounts of surveillance and are incarcerated at a rate many times more than whites.

It is systematic racism that allows the authorities to treat African-Americans like pariahs and to crack down hard on them if they protest. In 1985 the city of Philadelphia actually bombed the facilities of the Black nationalist MOVE organization. At Ferguson, Mo. in 2014, the shooting of a black youth led the Justice Department to uncover a racket on the part of the town’s white elite that used police fines and jailings systematically to extract wealth from the African-Americans.

In fact, it is this systematic racism (which is very different from the occasional piece of prejudice that most whites imagine to be the problem), that has led African-Americans to suffer disproportionately from the coronavirus.

In order to redress the injustices here, it isn’t enough to raise a hue and cry about individual instances of racism. The establishment, of systematic racism, in everything from school resegregation to residential segregation to employment discrimination, needs to be addressed through a second generation of civil rights legislation. 1964 and 1965 did not go nearly far enough."

https://www.juancole.com/2020/05/authorities-protesters-supremacist.html

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phroyd · 5 years

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LENDON SCOTT CRAWFORD was a mechanic at General Electric in Schenectady, New York. A tall, slender, middle-aged man with rectangular eyeglasses, he was married with three children. By appearances, he was an unremarkable middle-class American.

But beneath Crawford’s vanilla exterior lurked a white supremacist angry about President Barack Obama’s election and contemptuous of upstate New York’s sizable Muslim community. And he had ambitious plans to transform his hatred into violence.

He wanted to build a “death ray,” a portable, remote-controlled radiological weapon made from medical equipment and off-the-shelf electronics. He’d load the weapon into a van with tinted windows, drive it to a nearby mosque, scurry away to a safe distance, and switch it on remotely using a smartphone. Anyone in its path would be radiated and left to die a slow, mysterious death. He even had a pithy nickname for his weapon: “Hiroshima on a light switch.”

Crawford’s killing machine was never built. He was convicted at trial in August 2015 of attempting to use a radiological dispersal device and a weapon of mass destruction. He is serving 30 years in prison.

His case is remarkable not so much for its absurdity — federal agents admitted that his imagined weapon was likely impossible to make — but for how prosecutors handled it. Crawford’s co-defendant, an engineer named Eric J. Feight who had agreed to build the weapon’s remote control, pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorism — the first and only time federal prosecutors have used the material support law against a domestic extremist since 9/11, according to a review of federal prosecutions by The Intercept.

The material support law is prosecutors’ tool of choice for hauling international terrorists into federal court — more than 400 international terrorism defendants have faced material support charges since 9/11. But the Justice Department has been reluctant to use this expansive and powerful law, which allows defendants to be prosecuted for providing minimal, and at times, inconsequential, support to a violent plot, against domestic terrorists.

The rarity of such charges has helped drive a false narrative that domestic terrorism is not punishable under existing anti-terrorism laws. “Why is there no criminal statute for domestic terrorism?” CBS News asked in October 2017. “Americans Are Surprised Domestic Terrorism Isn’t A Federal Crime,” HuffPost declared last April.

In fact, the government has ample room to go after domestic terrorism under existing laws. The material support law has two parts. The first can be applied to anyone who commits or assists with a terrorist attack, including one rooted in a domestic ideology, so long as the crime involves one of about 50 proscribed offenses, including bombing government buildings, murdering government employees, using weapons of mass destruction, and hostage taking. The second and more controversial allows the Justice Department to prosecute anyone supporting or working with a State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization, however minor their role in an attack or plot, including even unwitting targetsof FBI undercover stings who never were in contact with actual terrorists. Civil libertarians have for two decades criticized the material support law, but primarily for the abuses possible in the more expansive provision for international terrorists. The more limited provision for domestic terrorism is harder for prosecutors to abuse.

Although the part of the material support law that can be used against domestic extremists is limited in some important ways — mass shootings not involving the death of government employees are notably absent from the list of offenses eligible for material support charges — Feight’s conviction in the “death ray” plot shows that domestic extremists can in many cases be prosecuted using the same aggressive laws that federal prosecutors wield against international terrorists. But the Justice Department has been reluctant to use that authority against white supremacists and followers of other domestic ideologies.

This double standard has little to do with existing laws. Instead, it is a result of decisions within the Justice Department, which since 9/11 has prioritized international terrorism prosecutions at the expense of domestic ones.

“After 9/11, the FBI’s and the Justice Department’s resources were directed to international terrorism. The prosecutions against domestic terrorists suffered,” said Henry E. Hockeimer Jr., a former federal prosecutor who served on the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Task Force in the 1990s. “I follow the domestic terrorism cases, and I sometimes wonder why prosecutors aren’t going after more significant statutes with these guys, using the anti-terrorism laws. On one hand, I suspect the average person thinks of terrorism in the international sense, and to some degree, the Justice Department has come to think of terrorism in that way as well.”

A Domestic Anti-Terrorism Law

Among the first known instances of the material support law being used against domestic extremists came in 1996, when federal prosecutors charged seven men with assembling explosives and plotting to blow up an FBI building. Prosecutors filed material support charges against two of the seven men, Floyd Raymond Looker and James R. Rogers. Looker, the leader of a group known as the West Virginia Mountaineer Militia, and Rogers, a lieutenant in a local fire department who provided blueprints of the FBI building, pleaded guilty.

Five years later, in February 2001, federal prosecutors brought material support charges against Connor Cash, an environmental activist accused of being a leader of the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group that had claimed responsibility for arsons and vandalism throughout the United States. The Justice Department alleged that Cash had assisted in the arson of five homes under construction on Long Island, as well as an unsuccessful plot to burn down a duck farm and release the animals. A jury acquitted Cash of all counts in May 2004.

After the 9/11 attacks, when federal prosecutors began to turn to the material support law as the statute of choice in prosecuting international terrorists, the Justice Department created the National Security Division, which absorbed the counterterrorism and counterespionage sections and created a powerful bureaucratic node responsible for national security prosecutions. Under a policy created at the time, and still in effect today, all terrorism-related charges — including material support and the use of weapons of mass destruction — must be approved by the National Security Division. After the policy took effect, the Justice Department’s tentative experiments with using the material support law against domestic terrorists hit a wall.

In the years immediately following the 9/11 attacks, the Justice Department and the FBI reoriented to focus significant resources on international terrorism threats, with the prevention of another terrorist attack from Al Qaeda or other groups as the top priority for both agencies. White supremacists, right-wing extremists, and other domestic terrorists were not a pressing concern. “If you took yourself back to 2006, when the National Security Division was first started, the country was still in the throes of responses to 9/11,” said Mary B. McCord, the Justice Department’s acting assistant attorney general for national security from 2016 to 2017 and a principal deputy assistant attorney general for its National Security Division from 2014 to 2016.

McCord and other former federal prosecutors maintain that the Justice Department has always taken domestic terrorism seriously. But in the years since 9/11, the difference between how domestic and international terrorists are prosecuted and punished has been striking.

The case of William “Bill” Keebler is an example. He came to the FBI’s attention after spending two weeks in Nevada during the 2014 armed standoff between the Bureau of Land Management and rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters. Keebler helped organize Bundy’s supporters by posting on social media and YouTube under the handle “Th3Hunt3r.” After returning home to Utah, Keebler started organizing a militia of his own, recruiting like-minded people on Facebook and at local gun shows. “We are now being taken by a rogue government,” he wrote in a May 2014 Facebook post.

Keebler called his militia the Patriots Defense Force. FBI informants who joined the group told federal agents that members were preparing for future standoffs with the government, operations to rob drug dealers at the U.S.-Mexico border, and violent attacks targeting Muslims. The FBI then inserted two undercover agents into Keebler’s militia. One agent told Keebler that he had experience with explosives.

By June 2016, the Patriots Defense Force had eight members, including two FBI undercover agents and a government informant. Members of the militia had talked about killing Muslims, and Keebler and the undercover agents drove to a mosque to consider it as a target. But Keebler was most interested in an attack on the Bureau of Land Management. He and one of the FBI agents concocted a plot to bomb a cabin in Utah used by the bureau. The FBI built the bomb, which was fake, and Keebler planted it in the cabin. The bomb simply fizzled, as designed, and in July 2016, Keebler was charged with attempting to damage federal property with an explosive device. Despite a federal prosecutor describing Keebler as a “would-be terrorist,” the militia leader did not face terrorism-related charges.

Because Keebler had tried to bomb a government building, the material support law could have applied and with it, a possible 15-year prison sentence. Instead, Keebler spent two years in prison while his case was pending, and after pleading guilty to the lesser charge federal prosecutors had chosen, he was sentenced to time served and three years of probation. Prosecutors did not ask for a “terrorism enhancement” at sentencing — a request that, if approved by the judge, could have resulted in a more significant sentence. Keebler, now on probation in Utah, declined to comment for this article.

By contrast, federal prosecutors charged Nicholas Young, a 36-year-old Muslim police officer in Washington, D.C., with material support when he sent a $245 gift card to a man he believed was with the Islamic State. The gift card recipient was in fact an FBI informant. Young was found guilty at trial and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Last month, an appeals court vacated his convictions on two charges of attempting to obstruct justice, but upheld his conviction for material support. Young will be re-sentenced soon, but his original 15-year term was in line with those of the more than 400 other Muslim terrorism defendants convicted of material support.

Current federal prosecutors, including Thomas E. Brzozowski, the Justice Department’s counsel for domestic terrorism, declined to comment for this article. In an interview with The Intercept, McCord said that in retrospect, she and other prosecutors had underutilized the material support law for prosecuting and punishing domestic terrorists.

“I’ve been a cheerleader for the fact that, hey, this is the same stuff — extremism is extremism,” McCord said. “The white supremacist extremism we’re seeing right now, they’ve taken the playbook from the foreign terrorist organizations in terms of who they’re trying to recruit and who can be easily drawn to feel like they’re working for something bigger than themselves. To me, the parallels are very close.”

Despite the material support law being used predominantly against Muslim extremists during her tenure at the Justice Department, McCord said religion was never a factor in charging decisions. “I think, frankly, because of 9/11 and Al Qaeda and ISIS and Islamic extremism, we have been overly focused on those threats,” McCord said. “But I would be a happy to call a domestic terrorist a domestic terrorist. I will shout it from the rooftops.”

Phroyd

#terrorism #domestic #white supremacy

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trueconservativepundit · 6 years

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Bundy Ranch Update: Surveillance, Wiretapping, Bundy Threat Assessments, and a Hit List

By Lyle Rapacki

STAND OFF AT BUNKERVILLE:

The events associated with the stand-off in Bunkerville, Nevada in April of 2014, supporting the protection of sovereignty came seriously close to the U.S. Government agencies gathered there opening fire on their own citizens; yes, citizens of the United States. Among the citizens present and supporting a “cease and desist” against infringement upon…

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#“Cliven Bundy: American Terrorist Patriot”#Bundy Ranch mistrial #Bundy Ranch trial #Bundy Ranch trial laptop missing #Christian news #Dan Love Bundy Ranch #news #Politics #snipers at Bundy Ranch #the Bundy Ranch standoff #wiretapping at Bundy Ranch

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samanthasroberts · 6 years

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If the Oregon militiamen were Muslim or black, they’d probably be dead by now | Wajahat Ali

Extremism comes in different colors, ethnicities, beards and head coverings which is why racial profiling cannot protect us from all extremist violence

If, in a vacuum, I told you that a bearded man with his head covered had posted a video on social media calling on his followers to leave their homes with weapons, migrate to a new area, take over government property as long as necessary and use violence if confronted by law enforcement, youd probably assume that I was talking about the latest propaganda video released by Isis, filmed in Iraq or Syria and intended to recruit violent Muslim extremists.

But that exact call was recently issued on Facebook by white rancher Ammon Bundy, the son of Cliven Bundy who also engaged in an armed standoff with law enforcement in 2014 and who currently owes the government more than $1m in fees. The younger Bundys goal this time was to encourage his fellow American patriots to take up arms against the US government in protest of the arson convictions of ranchers Dwight Hammond Jr and his son, Steven.

Militia leaders claim approximately 150 followers accepted Ammon Bundys call, although reporters on the ground are saying its far fewer. The armed men are currently occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Burns, Oregon to, in their words, assist in helping the people of Harney County claim back their lands and resources. Ammon Bundy has said that his people wont rule out violence if law enforcement tries to remove them.

But, dont worry America: he promised everyone that we are not terrorists. What a relief.

Of course theyre not terrorists: Bundy and his followers are just your average angry white freedom fighters, who use weapons and ammunition to protect the US constitution and American values from the government and other Americans who want them to abide by federal laws like everyone else.

But if Bundy and his followers were like the 38% of Americans who arent white, people across America wouldnt be watching this surreal, dangerous episode unfold and wondering what they could do to be labeled a militia when occupying a federal area with guns instead of terrorists, thugs, extremists or gangs.

If one black man holding a plastic toy gun even walked in the direction of a federal building, let alone with 150 other black men all holding loaded rifles, hed be shot dead by law enforcement, no questions asked. If 15 Muslims occupied a 7-Eleven with BB guns and masala Slurpees, federal law enforcement would probably roll up with six MRAPs and immediately take everyone out Waco-style (but without a congressional investigation).

Sorry, your browser is unable to play this video.

Armed militia to occupy Oregon wildlife refuge as long as necessary

We dont need to racially profile individuals who look like these armed militiamen (white men with bushy beards and beer bellies), but its time for mainstream politicians to at least acknowledge and confront this dangerous threat within our borders.

Since 9/11, more people in America have been killed by rightwing terror attacks than violent jihadists (48 deaths to 45 deaths). America witnessed an unprecedented rise in radical rightwing, anti-government groups after the election of President Barack Hussein Obama. Yet, the Department of Homeland Security buried an analysts early 2009 warning about the growing threat of rightwing terror groups to focus solely on Muslim extremists, caving to conservative pundits who complained the DHS was demonizing rightwing speech by targeting these groups.

And although the number of people involved has reduced in the past two years, it has not dampened the level of criminal extremism, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Such groups, some of whom have been involved in armed hostilities since the report was withdrawn, are also often openly white supremacist, hostile to immigrants, Islamophobic and prone to anti-government conspiracies.

In other words, they are not unlike Donald Trumps base. And while this is the time that we would normally expect calls for all moderate militiamen to stand up and condemn the violent extremism within their midst, dont hold your breath. Republican Senator and presidential candidate Ted Cruz will probably not ignore political correctness and ask, How can we defeat radical white terrorism with presidential candidates who refuse to utter the words radical white terrorists? Trump, who recently said that hes in favor of killing the families of terrorists to defeat extremists, will assuredly not apply the same standard to white American militia members, even if they do employ the violence theyve promised.

The sad truth is that extremists both at home and abroad are often disaffected, frightened and angry people desperately searching for purpose, validation and meaning in a world they feel has left them behind. Its a sickness that can infect almost anyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or gender.

Its certainly taken hold of Jon Ritzheimer, a US marine veteran involved in the Oregon stand-off . Hes a member of the Three Percenter club, which alleges that their armed and trained members are defenders of the constitution willing to protect our rights against a tyrannical government and foreign invaders. (Like Bundy, they do not condone any threats or intimidation tactics unless an action is warranted.) Ritzheimer also led the armed, anti-Muslim mosque protests earlier this year in Arizona.

Before taking over the wildlife refuge, Ritzheimer like other extremists before him posted a goodbye video for his family rationalizing his actions as defending freedom against a tyrannical government. I didnt come here to shoot, I came here to die, echoed another militia member, who identified himself only as Captain Moroni.

Extremism comes in different colors, ethnicities, beards and head coverings which is why racial profiling cannot protect us from all extremist violence. Maybe its time for politicians and law enforcement to acknowledge inconvenient truths and confront the extremists with American names and grievances as they would any other. The security of our homeland or at least our national wildlife refuges might depend on it.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/if-the-oregon-militiamen-were-muslim-or-black-theyd-probably-be-dead-by-now-wajahat-ali/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/11/18/if-the-oregon-militiamen-were-muslim-or-black-theyd-probably-be-dead-by-now-wajahat-ali/

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adambstingus · 6 years

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If the Oregon militiamen were Muslim or black, they’d probably be dead by now | Wajahat Ali

Extremism comes in different colors, ethnicities, beards and head coverings which is why racial profiling cannot protect us from all extremist violence

But, dont worry America: he promised everyone that we are not terrorists. What a relief.

Sorry, your browser is unable to play this video.

Armed militia to occupy Oregon wildlife refuge as long as necessary

And although the number of people involved has reduced in the past two years, it has not dampened the level of criminal extremism, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/if-the-oregon-militiamen-were-muslim-or-black-theyd-probably-be-dead-by-now-wajahat-ali/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/180253419102

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