Bombs for the Final Battle

The gunfire, the uniforms, the military demeanor: None of that surprised the neighborhood. David Stone and his wife Tina had never made an issue out of belonging to an armed militia in the first place. The New York Times quoted neighbor Tom McDormett as saying, “In Michigan, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal to be in a militia.”

But it didn’t stop at military maneuvers in the woods and target practice behind the Stones’ two mobile homes. Last weekend, the FBI arrested the Stones along with their 21 year old son, as well as other men from Ohio and Indiana. The Stones’ second son, 19 years old, was still at large.

The Christian warriors, who gave their paramilitary cell the fanciful name “Hutaree,” imagined themselves at war with the United States government. The government charged the Hutaree with conspiring to murder a police officer and then bombing the police funeral cortege to kill other police officials. Attorney General Eric Holder called it “an insidious plan.”

The group is reported to have been near putting their assassination plans into action. Over time, Stone (who refers to himself as “Captain Hutaree”) and his followers had sunk further and further into religious delusion. The group had been training for the final battle against “anti-Christians,” including how to build and detonate bombs. When police searched the Stones’ quarters, they found guns and large stocks of ammunition, along with bomb-building materials. “Jesus wanted us to be ready to defend ourselves using the sword,” Hutaree claims on its website. They claim that the police are the anti-Christ’s hated foot soldiers. The showdown with police for which they were preparing themselves was intended to be a “catalyst” for a nation-wide revolution against the godless government.

So far, so confused; but nobody takes it so lightly here. Militant, right-wing religious groups flourish in America. FBI agent Andrew Arena took part in exposing the Hutaree and says, “this is an example of radical and extremist fringe groups which can be found throughout our society.”

A year ago, the Department of Homeland Security said the rise in extremist groups was due to the economic crisis, as well as to the fact that America had elected its first African American president. According to the civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the number of paramilitary and violence-prone “patriotic groups” had tripled to 127 since Obama’s election. “We saw a real explosion in militias and the larger anti-government patriot movement,” said the center’s Mark Potok. At the same time, those groups have developed a racist and xenophobic outlook, convinced that the government in Washington seeks to enslave free American citizens.

Violence as “the only answer”

At the end of February, John Bendell gunned down two police officers near the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., without warning, before he was also killed in a hail of bullets. According to an investigation by the Christian Science Monitor newspaper, Bendell was a right-wing extremist with a deep hatred of government. Joseph Stack was inspired by similar motives when he flew his airplane into an Internal Revenue Service office in Austin, Texas. Two government employees in the building perished along with the pilot; thirteen others were wounded in the attack. Stack left a suicide note saying “violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.”

Cases such as these motivated Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano to say, “we must protect the country from terrorism, whether foreign or homegrown, and regardless of the ideology that motivates its violence.” If the Hutaree are convicted, they face life sentences.