October 04, 2010

Home-grown militias make comeback

We've seen that headline before, of course. Just last spring the right-wing angrily pushed back on a Department of Homeland Security report which said as much. But Time Magazine just conducted a six-month investigation of some of them and determined they are quite real.

"We call it somewhat of a perfect storm," says a high-ranking FBI official who declined to speak on the record because of the political sensitivities of the subject. With an economy in free fall and rising anger about illegal immigration, Obama became "a rallying point" for dormant extremists after the 2008 election who "weren't willing to act before but now are susceptible to being recruited and radicalized."

Theirs is not Tea Party anger, which aims at electoral change, even if it often speaks of war. In the world of armed extremists, war is not always a metaphor. Some of them speak with contempt about big talkers who "meet, eat and retreat." History suggests that even the most ferocious, by and large, will never get around to walking the walk. Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center observes that "there are huge numbers of people who say, 'We're going to have to go to war to defend the Constitution or defend the white race,' but 'That will be next week, boys.' "

And yet there are exceptions, and law-enforcement officials say domestic terrorists are equally the products of their movements. Those most inclined toward violence sometimes call themselves three percenters, a small vanguard that dares to match deeds to words. Brian Banning, who led local and interagency intelligence units that tracked radical-right-wing violence in Sacramento County, California, says, "The person who's interested in violent revolution may be attracted to a racist group or to a militia or to the Tea Party because he's antigovernment and so are they, but he's looking on the fringe of the crowd for the people who want to take action."

There are a couple of detailed examples in this article, including a guy who had $2M in inherited money and had bought uranium and beryllium which, combined with thorium he cooked out of tungsten electrodes, can be exploded into airborne particles which cause cancer. He also had the ingredients for TATP, a high explosive often used in the Middle East by terrorist organizations.

This is frightening stuff.

Posted by Linkmeister at October 4, 2010 12:01 AM | TrackBack
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