Thread: As Okla. City date nears, militias seen as gaining strength

As Okla. City date nears, militias seen as gaining strength

Updated 49m ago
By Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY

In the months before the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, a new kind of protest movement was just beginning to find its voice in America's heartland.

Militias and "patriot" groups burst into the vanguard of a seething anti-government campaign, fueled by anger over the Clinton administration's push for landmark gun-control legislation and federal officers' aggressive tactics in high-profile standoffs with groups such as the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas.

On April 19, 1995, that anger erupted: Militia sympathizer Timothy McVeigh detonated a 5,000-pound truck bomb in front of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. At that time, it was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

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The controversial militia movement waned in the wake of the bombing, as groups sought to distance themselves from McVeigh. Fifteen years later, though, analysts say the militia movement is back, using some of the same, ominous anti-government rhetoric that preceded the Oklahoma City assault and first raised the specter of a larger domestic terror threat.

"It feels a lot like the run-up to Oklahoma City," says Mark Potok, Intelligence Project director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks U.S. hate groups. "Will we see another Oklahoma City? Nobody can really say."

Hair-trigger issues

Since 2008, Potok's group has reported dramatic growth in anti-government patriot groups and their militia organizations. Last year, those groups increased to 512 from 149 in 2008, the law center says.

"This is a broader-based and deeper kind of movement. Today, their ideas have penetrated into the mainstream," Potok says, adding that the groups have drawn strength in their call for tough enforcement against illegal immigration.

Last month, federal prosecutors charged nine members of an anti-government Christian militia group in Michigan, called the Hutaree, with plotting to kill a police officer and then attacking other officers who would gather for the funeral.

One of the leaders of the early anti-government movement, John Trochmann, whose Militia of Montana was formed in the early 1990s, says fresh domestic worries have led to a resurgence that has grown even stronger than the campaign of the '90s.

Trochmann says the financial crisis and related government bailout of the banking industry, passage of the Obama administration's controversial health care legislation and the United States' recent nuclear arms reduction agreement with Russia have brought a mass of "new faces" into the movement.

"Health care was one more straw in the camel's back," Trochmann says. "Perhaps it's the one that breaks it."

Trochmann does not advocate violence, including the threats against lawmakers after the $940 billion health care law passed last month, but he believes the U.S. government is now working against its own citizenry. "People are going to have to unite to save their own lives," he says. "We believe the federal government has a great plan afoot to bring us to the standard of a Third World country."

Anger is 'eerily similar'

Oklahoma attorney Stephen Jones, whose defense of McVeigh delved deeply into the anti-government movement and its influence in his client's life, agrees the movement is gaining strength.

Yet he says it lacks the "galvanizing events" that inspired violence 15 years ago.

The most significant of those events, Jones says, were the 1993 federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound that left more than 80 people dead, including four federal agents, and the federal government's 1992 standoff with Ruby Ridge, Idaho, white separatist Randy Weaver. Weaver's wife and son died in a shootout with FBI agents.

"I haven't seen the temperature rise like in the spring of 1995," Jones says. "I tend to think that the threat of international terrorism tends to (temper) some of the dissatisfaction that drives the patriot and militia groups" by unifying the country.

In Oklahoma City, where the site of McVeigh's attack has been transformed into a moving memorial, Kari Watkins says the current political climate is "eerily similar" to what preceded McVeigh's assault 15 years ago. Watkins is executive director of the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum.

"There is a similar frustration with government at all levels," she says. "There is some of the same anxiety. Our challenge is settling that anxiety down."

Watkins says Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano plans to address those concerns during the commemoration of the 15th anniversary of the bombing on Monday.

"I'm very anxious to hear what the secretary will say," Watkins says. "Because if we don't figure out a way to join together, we can't stop (terrorism). Nothing in this world would justify what happened here."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/201 ... rise_N.htm

They are starting to "make the case".

Amazing….how much credibility is given to a Communist front group.

Much like the ACLU, the SPLC is allowed to take our tax dollars to buy hammers to use against us. This is the beginning of an organized, orchestrated movement that will end in America being disarmed….

If anyone bothered to trace the ACLU to its roots…there you will find David Rockefeller…the same goes for the SPLC.


More truths exposed about the SPLC:

http://newsbusters.org/?q=blogs/lachlan ... iot-groups

Killing unarmed American children and adult civilians does NOT make you a patriot or a hero.

It make you a terrorist and a coward.

Regarding these incidents:

“The most significant of those events, Jones says, were the 1993 federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound that left more than 80 people dead, including four federal agents, and the federal government's 1992 standoff with Ruby Ridge, Idaho, white separatist Randy Weaver. Weaver's wife and son died in a shootout with FBI agentsâ€

Timothy McVeigh was not a "Militia".

But I am sure the SPLC and Morris Dees made lots of money off their phony report.

What about all of the Muslim militia training camps?They sound more like Oklahoma City to me.

Alert! Muslim terrorist training camps in the U.S.

While the Department of Homeland Security under Obama appointee Janet Napolitano focuses on nebulous so-called 'home-grown right wing extremist terrorist groups,' the real terrorists--you know, the ones who have vowed to annihilate us, the Islamic extremists--are training right under our noses within the U.S.

One begins to wonder if perhaps Obama and company are simply asking for another devastating terrorist strike with the decisions they have made, such as the decision to close Gitmo, bringing the most dangerous terrorists in the world to the mainland U.S. where they can be provided legal representation at taxpayer expense,and the discontinuation of interrogation techniques that have saved multi-thousands of lives.

And the Department of Homeland Security seems to be more concerned about a few good ole boys with guns than head-choppers who are training to kill us right in our own backyards.

No one in the nation does a better job at investigating and reporting the dangers of extremist Islam than Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs in New York. In a stunning recent report, Geller says this about Muslim terrorist training cells here in America:

This group, known as Jamaat ul-Fuqra (JF), was founded by Sheik Mubarak Ali Gilani during a 1980 visit to New York. In an effort to stop the perceived influence of Western ideology on Islam, JF uses violence to keep Islam from being ‘tainted’ by Western influences. JF will even wage violence upon members of their own faith, if they are suspected of not being faithful to Islam. In 1980, Gilani purchased 70 acres of land near the Catskill Mountains and founded Islamberg, in Hancock NY, a Muslim-only community where Muslim followers and converts could settle and reside in. Today, over 30 similar Muslim-only communities have sprung up all across the United States.

But that's not all. This group is behind a string of various violent crimes committed throughout the country. Here is a sample:

*Between 1979-90, there have been approximately 10 unsolved assassinations & 17 firebombing cases involving JF members [3] Some of the more publicized crimes involving JF include:
1983-High ranking JF member plants pipe bomb at Portland hotel
1984-3 South Asians killed in Tacoma, WA suburb by JF members
1985- Islamic mosque bombed, Houston TX
1989-storage locker search warrant in Colorado Springs revealed weapons cache and intelligence documents belonging to JF members. Documents included maps and potential targets to include military sites, oil and gas installations, and electrical facilities.
Geller states that sites for these training compounds and Muslim-only communities range from rural, sparsely populated areas to urban warehouses. These areas are closely guarded around the clock, and no one can gain entrance unless they are accepted members of the terrorist group.

Here is a partial list of the sites of these training camps:

JF Headquarters (Islamberg) are in Hancock, NY. Islamberg is known to have a mosque, school house, grocery store and reportedly a firing range at their compound.

JF has also set up communities/training compounds in the following areas:
• Marion, Alabama
• Augusta,Commerce,Macon & Jessup Georgia
• Talihina, Oklahoma
• York County, South Carolina
• Dover, Tenessee
• Red House; Roanoke Virginia
• Wayne County, Pennsylvania
• Tulane County, California
• Washington State
• Colorado
• Michigan
• Illinois

Locations have also been discovered in Canada, Venezuela & Trinidad [6]
More detailed information and descriptions of these terrorist groups, their membership profile, and the activities that go on inside the camps can be found at Atlas Shrugs.

Every American who is concerned about safety from the REAL threats within our nation rather than the trumped up diversionary tactics of Napolitano's DHS should read this article.

http://www.examiner.com/x-3704-Columbia ... -in-the-US
More at
http://islaminaction08.blogspot.com/200 ... lamic.html
Interview on Hannity:
http://faultlineusa.blogspot.com/2009/0 ... ining.html

NewMexican...

Good Post...and accurate. You cited more in Georgia. I personally know of two that are in a paramilitary mode and operate without interference.

I believe it was the Michael Savage Show...where a guest said over 800 were NOW here in the US. He claimed he had been able to enter many and ask questions...also, has pictures.