(MintPress)— Last week, several members of the Michigan Militia were loosed into the American populous after a federal judge deemed the US government’s case against them didn’t have enough merit to warrant locking up the extremist group’s leaders.
The government’s case against seven members of the gun-toting, anti-government Christian militia was dismissed by US District Judge Victoria Roberts.
Militia in the Clear
The US Attorney’s Office charged that members were plotting a violent revolt against the US government with weapons of mass destruction. If found guilty, the seven members, including father and son duo David and Joshua Stone, faced a sentence of life in prison. The pair, from Lenawee County, Mich., were held in custody without bond for two years leading up to the trial.
Roberts wrote in her 28-page decision that the assertion that the militia members had specific plans for public destruction and chaos was not apparent, saying that the government’s case was “built largely of circumstantial evidence.”
The organization, which describes itself as a “non-profit corporation…focusing on freedom, organization (and) legitimacy” has a webpage detailing that the group is dedicated “to promoting the training, development, and growth of a well-armed body of citizenry that is capable of defending our Constitution and the American way of life” and a large banner across the home page informs visitors that on Nov. 7, 2012 a “Militiapocylpse” will occur, which the group describes as “the day America will change forever”.
Government prosecutors had described the group as a homegrown bunch of rural extremists poised for war.
Stone said in the records made by FBI that he was willing to kill police officers and their families, the Huffington Post reported. “He considered them part of a ‘brotherhood’ – a sinister global authority that included federal law enforcers and United Nations troops.”
Meanwhile, defense attorneys argued that the members’ anti-government speech was protected under the First Amendment. They had explained the militia’s gun and survivalist training exercises in the woods as activities normal to any social club, the Washington Times reported.
In 2008, the FBI secretly planted informants with the Hutaree militia, a spinoff of the Michigan Militia which David Stone was the leader of. The surveillance produced a great deal of documented anti-government audio and video which became the cornerstone of the government’s case.
But Roberts said the members’ expressed hatred of government was not enough proof to find evidence for a conspiracy to rebel against the government.
“The court is aware that protected speech and mere words can be sufficient to show a conspiracy. In this case, however, they do not rise to that level,” Roberts ruled.
Same Story for Non-Whites or Non-Christians?
MintPress previously reported on the story of Amine El-Khalifi, a 29-year old Moroccan Muslim who was arrested in February for plotting an alleged suicide attack on the US Capitol. He thought he was wearing an explosive device. El-Khalifi was unaware that the explosives were actually inoperable and provided by undercover FBI agents, not al-Qaeda operatives. El-Khalifi is currently in prison awaiting trial.
However, the El-Khalifi case raises questions about the role the government should play in its efforts toward national security. In the case of the Michigan Militia, government operatives were embedded with the group in pursuit of gathering information.
But the ethical motivations of El-Khalifi’s case are being called into question, as whether or not the US government should engage in entrapment by inducing someone to commit a crime that he or she would have otherwise not committed is proper.
David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington has said that claiming entrapment is “extremely difficult” to do. And James Wedick, a former FBI agent, told the news service that providing “foolhardy people” the tools needed to become bombers and “calling that a case and telling the American public they should feel safe now” is a disturbing trend emerging in many alleged US domestic terrorism cases, Omar Karmi reports in The National.
Wedick said that he believed only a very few of the more than 500 terrorism-related cases in the US since September 11, 2001 were “real terrorism cases”, adding that he thinks some day, “the bureau will see that these cases are at least unethical, and may be illegal”.
However, of those “over 100 involved sting operations with government agents or paid informers providing some inducement to the alleged terrorist.” Cited cases include plots to bomb the Washington subway system, the New York City subway, the Sears Towers in Chicago, a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore., as well as Jewish institutions and military installations across the country, the news service said.
FBI Targeting
“Rather than looking for real plots being hatched, critics say, the FBI is targeting the weak and vulnerable, often in America’s Muslim communities. Sometimes those efforts are led by informers, some receiving as much as US$100,000 for their efforts,” Karmi reports.
Another example of non-whites being tried for a similar offense but treated differently than Stone and his cohorts includes the case of the Liberty City Seven. Seven men of Hatian and African American heritage were convicted of conspiring to aid Al-Qaida to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower and FBI offices in Miami and other cities. Key evidence at their trial was a recording of an oath of allegiance they made to Al-Qaeda.
In 2009 those sentenced in the case include Narseal Batiste, 37, the ringleader, to 13½ years; his self-described “No. 1 soldier,” Patrick Abraham, 32, to just over nine years; Stanley Phanor, 36, to eight years; Burson Augustin, 26, to six years; and Rotschild Augustine, 27, to seven years.
The group lost an appeal Tuesday in a federal appeals court to move for a new trial.
A 2011 report conducted by New York University’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) documents several cases in the US where law enforcement has used policing practices that conjure imaginary terrorism plots, which are used to target and entrap American Muslims.
In each of the three cases detailed in the report, defendants were sentenced to 25 years to life “for planning terrorist plots that didn’t exist prior to the police or FBI goading them into existence. The FBI and NYPD designed the plots, pushed them on vulnerable young men who had not been involved terrorist organizations and, once the previously law-abiding young men were hooked, triumphantly foiled the supposed danger,” ColorLines reports.
CHRGJ also calls upon the US government to implement several recommendations with respect to law enforcement and counterterrorism investigations, “particularly those that involve the use of extensive surveillance and paid informants without particularized suspicion of criminal activity,” the group said. Measures including rejecting “radicalization” theories that “threaten the rights to freedom of religion, opinion, and expression, and should put an end to the preventative policing and prosecution methods that rely on such theories,” and Congress passing the End Racial Profiling Act, proposed federal legislation to ban racial profiling by law enforcement.