* *
Editor note: I remeber being on the air at AM720KDWN LasVegas when this story broke the evening after Christmas 1996! Still a mystery. My feeling always was a parent did it for whatever reason.
* * * * *
Police Plan New Interviews in JonBenet Ramsey Case
Boulder police plan new round of interviews in JonBenet Ramsey case
Police investigating the death of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey are conducting a new round of interviews, based on recommendations from an advisory committee.
The committee, which included investigators from several state and federal agencies, met in 2009 after police took the lead in the case back from Boulder County prosecutors.
Members reviewed evidence in the death of 6-year-old JonBenet, whose body was found bludgeoned and strangled in her family's home in Boulder on Dec. 26, 1996. Former District Attorney Mary Lacy said in 2008 that evidence suggests the killer was an unknown stranger, not a family member.
Police Chief Mark Beckner wouldn't reveal details about the continuing investigation or who police want to interview now.
"We continue to work the Ramsey case and have tailored our investigation based on recommendations from our 2009 advisory committee," Beckner told the Camera newspaper. "This has included additional contacts and interviews with those who may have information pertinent to the case."
JonBenet's older brother Burke, who was 9 when JonBenet died, was contacted by police but hasn't been interviewed yet, Ramsey family attorney Lin Wood said.
"I understand that they met with Burke and gave him a card and said, 'If you want to talk to us, here's how you would contact me,'" Wood said. "But the police have not interviewed Burke."
JonBenet Ramsey's mother, Patsy, died of cancer in 2006. Her father, John, made a public plea last December for people to share any suspicions they had around the time JonBenet died.
"Whatever the reason for any type of approach with Burke, it would have nothing to do with the case other than with the reality that John and Burke could help the Boulder police as witnesses in the investigation," Wood said. "For all I know, they have gotten some tip and think Burke could give them some information."
Denver defense attorney and legal analyst Scott Robinson said it would be premature to assume that police have new information.
"But it would be absolutely accurate to say they're not letting this case lie," he said.
Associated Press
Saturday, October 02, 2010
California Reduces Pot Penalty
California is getting closer to legalizing marijuana.
A month before voters make the final decision, the state has approved a bill that will put possession of small amounts of pot on par with speeding on the freeway. Holding up to one ounce is punishable by a $100 fine. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has come out against legalizing the drug, argued that he signed the bill into law primarily as a budget measure. “In this time of drastic budget cuts, prosecutors, defense attorneys, law enforcement and the courts cannot afford to expend limited resources prosecuting a crime that carries the same punishment as a traffic ticket,” Schwarzenegger said.
Analysts say the change will be especially significant for black men, who were being arrested for possession at a far higher rate than white men. “It’s important because it ends an epidemic of race-based targeting of misdemeanor marijuana arrests in California,” one advocate said.
The New York Times
A month before voters make the final decision, the state has approved a bill that will put possession of small amounts of pot on par with speeding on the freeway. Holding up to one ounce is punishable by a $100 fine. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has come out against legalizing the drug, argued that he signed the bill into law primarily as a budget measure. “In this time of drastic budget cuts, prosecutors, defense attorneys, law enforcement and the courts cannot afford to expend limited resources prosecuting a crime that carries the same punishment as a traffic ticket,” Schwarzenegger said.
Analysts say the change will be especially significant for black men, who were being arrested for possession at a far higher rate than white men. “It’s important because it ends an epidemic of race-based targeting of misdemeanor marijuana arrests in California,” one advocate said.
The New York Times
Dems pounce as Murdoch goes live
Rupert Murdoch appeared before a House Judiciary Committee panel Thursday as just another businessman hoping to convince lawmakers that a broad immigration overhaul — including a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants — is good for the economy.
But Murdoch is not just any businessman. As the chairman and CEO of News Corp., Murdoch is in charge of the Democratic Party’s most powerful media nemesis — Fox News — and for Democrats on the committee, it was an opportunity they could not pass up.
Rep. Linda Sanchez of California asked Murdoch how he feels about the “anti-immigrant positions” promoted on Fox. Rep. Maxine Waters of California questioned why Murdoch hasn’t done more to promote his views through his various news outlets, which include The Wall Street Journal.
It took a Republican — Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas — to defend Fox, pointing to studies that reveal Americans perceive it as the “most fair” of all the television news networks.
Murdoch’s response to Waters and Sanchez was that Fox is simply misunderstood. “We are not anti-immigrant on Fox News,” Murdoch said, adding later that “I have no trouble in supporting what I’m saying here today on Fox News, nor would a great number of the commentators on Fox News.”
In fact, according to Michael Wolff, a frequent critic of Fox News and author of the Murdoch biography “The Man Who Owns the News,” the immigration issue, at times, creates tension between Murdoch and Fox News Channel President Roger Ailes.
“Rupert is an internationalist,” Wolff said. “His wife is Chinese, remember. I have actually heard Ailes say that this is one of Rupert’s issues and add, ‘because of the marital situation.’ And then scowl.”
Fox News, though, seems to have had a mixed approach to the immigration debate — at least by one measure.
“The term ‘illegals’ is used on Fox all the time,” said Ivan Roman, executive director of National Association of Hispanic Journalists. “It’s part of the rhetoric that is used by people who are anti-immigrant.”
Roman, whose group has argued against the use of “illegals” in the news media, said the term has appeared on many other news outlets, including on CNN in 2006 during the height of the immigration debate, but that Fox has been the most ready to give “a megaphone” to anti-immigrant voices.
Fox’s on-air talent also uses the preferred term “undocumented” on its broadcasts, though far less often than “illegal immigrant” or “illegal aliens.”
A spokesman for Fox declined to discuss Roman’s criticism, deferring to Murdoch’s testimony.
During the debate this summer over Arizona’s controversial immigration law, Fox News contributors, such as Steven Crowder and Mike Gallagher, supported the measure, while “Fox News Sunday” moderator Chris Wallace expressed concerns.
“I’m not sure I like the idea that law enforcement can go up to anybody and [say], ‘Show me your identity card,’” Wallace said on Gallagher’s program.
Also appearing with Murdoch before the House committee was New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Earlier this year, the two billionaires launched Partnership for a New American Economy, a coalition of business and big-city mayors working to convince Congress that a vibrant economy is dependent on sweeping immigration reform.
Testifying together Thursday, Murdoch and Bloomberg made a similar argument — that immigrants are vital to the economy and comprehensive immigration reform is a critical component of shoring it up.
Bloomberg, an independent, told lawmakers that New York has weathered the recession, in large part, because of its immigrant community; 40 percent of its residents were born outside the U.S. And he said immigrants pay more in taxes than they use in benefits.
“Our broken system of immigration is undermining our economy, slowing our recovery and hurting millions of Americans,” Bloomberg said. “We believe that immigration reform needs to become a top national priority. We’re urging members of both parties to help us shift the debate away from emotions and towards economics, because the economics couldn’t be any clearer.”
Murdoch said he supports sealing the U.S. borders to illegal immigrants but also creating a path to citizenship for responsible, law-abiding immigrants who already live in the United States.
“It is nonsense to talk of expelling 12 million people,” said Murdoch, who emigrated to the U.S. from Australia. “Not only is it impractical, it is cost prohibitive.”
Murdoch cited a study that shows a path to legalization would contribute about $1.5 trillion to the gross domestic product over the next decade. And he argued that immigrants have produced some of the nation’s most productive scientists, entrepreneurs and educators.
But he also spoke of his own personal experience.
“As an immigrant, I chose to live in America because it is one of the freest and most vibrant nations in the world. And as an immigrant, I feel an obligation to speak up for immigration policies that will keep America the most economically robust, creative and freedom-loving nation in the world,” he said.
“Over the past four decades, I have enjoyed all the benefits of living, working and building a business in America.”
The hearing took place on a day when Democratic Sens. Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Patrick Leahy of Vermont rolled out a comprehensive immigration reform bill that includes a path to legalization, a temporary worker program, workplace and border enforcement measures and the DREAM Act, which failed to pass in the Senate last week.
The legislation, introduced early Thursday morning, just hours before Congress adjourned for the fall campaign, is seen by Republicans as a political stunt to drive Hispanics and the liberal base to the polls this November. Senate Democrats are short the 60 votes needed to advance the bill and are expected to lose seats in the midterm elections.
Scott Wong and Keach Hagey
POLITICO
But Murdoch is not just any businessman. As the chairman and CEO of News Corp., Murdoch is in charge of the Democratic Party’s most powerful media nemesis — Fox News — and for Democrats on the committee, it was an opportunity they could not pass up.
Rep. Linda Sanchez of California asked Murdoch how he feels about the “anti-immigrant positions” promoted on Fox. Rep. Maxine Waters of California questioned why Murdoch hasn’t done more to promote his views through his various news outlets, which include The Wall Street Journal.
It took a Republican — Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas — to defend Fox, pointing to studies that reveal Americans perceive it as the “most fair” of all the television news networks.
Murdoch’s response to Waters and Sanchez was that Fox is simply misunderstood. “We are not anti-immigrant on Fox News,” Murdoch said, adding later that “I have no trouble in supporting what I’m saying here today on Fox News, nor would a great number of the commentators on Fox News.”
In fact, according to Michael Wolff, a frequent critic of Fox News and author of the Murdoch biography “The Man Who Owns the News,” the immigration issue, at times, creates tension between Murdoch and Fox News Channel President Roger Ailes.
“Rupert is an internationalist,” Wolff said. “His wife is Chinese, remember. I have actually heard Ailes say that this is one of Rupert’s issues and add, ‘because of the marital situation.’ And then scowl.”
Fox News, though, seems to have had a mixed approach to the immigration debate — at least by one measure.
“The term ‘illegals’ is used on Fox all the time,” said Ivan Roman, executive director of National Association of Hispanic Journalists. “It’s part of the rhetoric that is used by people who are anti-immigrant.”
Roman, whose group has argued against the use of “illegals” in the news media, said the term has appeared on many other news outlets, including on CNN in 2006 during the height of the immigration debate, but that Fox has been the most ready to give “a megaphone” to anti-immigrant voices.
Fox’s on-air talent also uses the preferred term “undocumented” on its broadcasts, though far less often than “illegal immigrant” or “illegal aliens.”
A spokesman for Fox declined to discuss Roman’s criticism, deferring to Murdoch’s testimony.
During the debate this summer over Arizona’s controversial immigration law, Fox News contributors, such as Steven Crowder and Mike Gallagher, supported the measure, while “Fox News Sunday” moderator Chris Wallace expressed concerns.
“I’m not sure I like the idea that law enforcement can go up to anybody and [say], ‘Show me your identity card,’” Wallace said on Gallagher’s program.
Also appearing with Murdoch before the House committee was New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Earlier this year, the two billionaires launched Partnership for a New American Economy, a coalition of business and big-city mayors working to convince Congress that a vibrant economy is dependent on sweeping immigration reform.
Testifying together Thursday, Murdoch and Bloomberg made a similar argument — that immigrants are vital to the economy and comprehensive immigration reform is a critical component of shoring it up.
Bloomberg, an independent, told lawmakers that New York has weathered the recession, in large part, because of its immigrant community; 40 percent of its residents were born outside the U.S. And he said immigrants pay more in taxes than they use in benefits.
“Our broken system of immigration is undermining our economy, slowing our recovery and hurting millions of Americans,” Bloomberg said. “We believe that immigration reform needs to become a top national priority. We’re urging members of both parties to help us shift the debate away from emotions and towards economics, because the economics couldn’t be any clearer.”
Murdoch said he supports sealing the U.S. borders to illegal immigrants but also creating a path to citizenship for responsible, law-abiding immigrants who already live in the United States.
“It is nonsense to talk of expelling 12 million people,” said Murdoch, who emigrated to the U.S. from Australia. “Not only is it impractical, it is cost prohibitive.”
Murdoch cited a study that shows a path to legalization would contribute about $1.5 trillion to the gross domestic product over the next decade. And he argued that immigrants have produced some of the nation’s most productive scientists, entrepreneurs and educators.
But he also spoke of his own personal experience.
“As an immigrant, I chose to live in America because it is one of the freest and most vibrant nations in the world. And as an immigrant, I feel an obligation to speak up for immigration policies that will keep America the most economically robust, creative and freedom-loving nation in the world,” he said.
“Over the past four decades, I have enjoyed all the benefits of living, working and building a business in America.”
The hearing took place on a day when Democratic Sens. Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Patrick Leahy of Vermont rolled out a comprehensive immigration reform bill that includes a path to legalization, a temporary worker program, workplace and border enforcement measures and the DREAM Act, which failed to pass in the Senate last week.
The legislation, introduced early Thursday morning, just hours before Congress adjourned for the fall campaign, is seen by Republicans as a political stunt to drive Hispanics and the liberal base to the polls this November. Senate Democrats are short the 60 votes needed to advance the bill and are expected to lose seats in the midterm elections.
Scott Wong and Keach Hagey
POLITICO
News Corp. gave pro-GOP group $1M ( IF YOU DON'T THINK THIS is WRONG YOU HAVE NO CLUE) The Russians had a word "PROPAGANDA"
News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, contributed $1 million this summer to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the business lobby that has been running an aggressive campaign in support of the Republican effort to retake Congress, a source close to the company told POLITICO.
It was the second $1 million contribution the company has made this election cycle to a GOP-aligned group. In late June it gave that amount to the Republican Governors Association.
The parent companies of other media companies such as Disney (which owns ABC) and General Electric (which owns NBC) have also made political contributions, but typically in far smaller chunks, and split between Democrats and Republicans.
In the past, News Corp. has also spread its donations between candidates of both parties. The huge gift to the RGA raised questions among some media critics about whether News Corp. had crossed over an inappropriate line for a media company. The second donation is likely to rekindle that debate – and to make both News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch and Fox News even more of a liberal target.
In the past, Murdoch’s political leanings were considered to be pragmatic rather than strictly ideological. Although known as a conservative, he turned his right-leaning British papers behind Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair and flirted with support for Senator Hillary Clinton when she was a Democratic presidential candidate. But his political giving have been sharply aligned with the Republican Party this year.
Spokesmen for News Corp. and for Fox declined to comment on the chamber contribution, or on whether Fox chief Roger Ailes, a former GOP political operative, had a role in it.
After the News Corp. donation to the RGA became known in August, the company denied that Ailes was involved, and a spokesman told POLITICO at the time that the contribution was made to support the Republican committee’s “pro-business agenda.”
A spokesman for the chamber, J.P. Fielder, declined to discuss or confirm a specific contribution – the chamber is fighting to continue to keep contributions secret — but responded to a question about the Fox donation by characterizing the chamber’s agenda.
“What I can tell you is that the chamber has been and will continue to be engaged in the issue debate in this election cycle, focusing our efforts on educating voters about where candidates stand on policies that create jobs,” Fielder said.
Specifically, the chamber has said it plans to spend $75 million in connection with the 2010 election, and has so far has directed substantial amounts to Republican Senate candidates. As of Sept. 15th, the group had spent $6,747,946 airing more than 8,000 ads on behalf of GOP Senate candidates, according to a study from the Wesleyan Media Project.
That figure made the chamber the biggest spender on congressional races of any interest group, and the second biggest-spending national group after the RGA.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce operates a range of lobbying and advocacy programs, and News Corp. has in the past given even larger sums to it to support more general business advocacy, according to a second source close to the company.
Company officials wouldn’t comment directly on the purpose of this year’s contribution.
News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, contributed $1 million this summer to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the business lobby that has been running an aggressive campaign in support of the Republican effort to retake Congress, a source close to the company told POLITICO.
It was the second $1 million contribution the company has made this election cycle to a GOP-aligned group. In late June it gave that amount to the Republican Governors Association.
The parent companies of other media companies such as Disney (which owns ABC) and General Electric (which owns NBC) have also made political contributions, but typically in far smaller chunks, and split between Democrats and Republicans.
In the past, News Corp. has also spread its donations between candidates of both parties. The huge gift to the RGA raised questions among some media critics about whether News Corp. had crossed over an inappropriate line for a media company. The second donation is likely to rekindle that debate – and to make both News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch and Fox News even more of a liberal target.
In the past, Murdoch’s political leanings were considered to be pragmatic rather than strictly ideological. Although known as a conservative, he turned his right-leaning British papers behind Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair and flirted with support for Senator Hillary Clinton when she was a Democratic presidential candidate. But his political giving have been sharply aligned with the Republican Party this year.
Spokesmen for News Corp. and for Fox declined to comment on the chamber contribution, or on whether Fox chief Roger Ailes, a former GOP political operative, had a role in it.
After the News Corp. donation to the RGA became known in August, the company denied that Ailes was involved, and a spokesman told POLITICO at the time that the contribution was made to support the Republican committee’s “pro-business agenda.”
A spokesman for the chamber, J.P. Fielder, declined to discuss or confirm a specific contribution – the chamber is fighting to continue to keep contributions secret — but responded to a question about the Fox donation by characterizing the chamber’s agenda.
“What I can tell you is that the chamber has been and will continue to be engaged in the issue debate in this election cycle, focusing our efforts on educating voters about where candidates stand on policies that create jobs,” Fielder said.
Specifically, the chamber has said it plans to spend $75 million in connection with the 2010 election, and has so far has directed substantial amounts to Republican Senate candidates. As of Sept. 15th, the group had spent $6,747,946 airing more than 8,000 ads on behalf of GOP Senate candidates, according to a study from the Wesleyan Media Project.
That figure made the chamber the biggest spender on congressional races of any interest group, and the second biggest-spending national group after the RGA.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce operates a range of lobbying and advocacy programs, and News Corp. has in the past given even larger sums to it to support more general business advocacy, according to a second source close to the company.
Company officials wouldn’t comment directly on the purpose of this year’s contribution.
Ben Smith POLITICO
It was the second $1 million contribution the company has made this election cycle to a GOP-aligned group. In late June it gave that amount to the Republican Governors Association.
The parent companies of other media companies such as Disney (which owns ABC) and General Electric (which owns NBC) have also made political contributions, but typically in far smaller chunks, and split between Democrats and Republicans.
In the past, News Corp. has also spread its donations between candidates of both parties. The huge gift to the RGA raised questions among some media critics about whether News Corp. had crossed over an inappropriate line for a media company. The second donation is likely to rekindle that debate – and to make both News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch and Fox News even more of a liberal target.
In the past, Murdoch’s political leanings were considered to be pragmatic rather than strictly ideological. Although known as a conservative, he turned his right-leaning British papers behind Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair and flirted with support for Senator Hillary Clinton when she was a Democratic presidential candidate. But his political giving have been sharply aligned with the Republican Party this year.
Spokesmen for News Corp. and for Fox declined to comment on the chamber contribution, or on whether Fox chief Roger Ailes, a former GOP political operative, had a role in it.
After the News Corp. donation to the RGA became known in August, the company denied that Ailes was involved, and a spokesman told POLITICO at the time that the contribution was made to support the Republican committee’s “pro-business agenda.”
A spokesman for the chamber, J.P. Fielder, declined to discuss or confirm a specific contribution – the chamber is fighting to continue to keep contributions secret — but responded to a question about the Fox donation by characterizing the chamber’s agenda.
“What I can tell you is that the chamber has been and will continue to be engaged in the issue debate in this election cycle, focusing our efforts on educating voters about where candidates stand on policies that create jobs,” Fielder said.
Specifically, the chamber has said it plans to spend $75 million in connection with the 2010 election, and has so far has directed substantial amounts to Republican Senate candidates. As of Sept. 15th, the group had spent $6,747,946 airing more than 8,000 ads on behalf of GOP Senate candidates, according to a study from the Wesleyan Media Project.
That figure made the chamber the biggest spender on congressional races of any interest group, and the second biggest-spending national group after the RGA.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce operates a range of lobbying and advocacy programs, and News Corp. has in the past given even larger sums to it to support more general business advocacy, according to a second source close to the company.
Company officials wouldn’t comment directly on the purpose of this year’s contribution.
News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, contributed $1 million this summer to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the business lobby that has been running an aggressive campaign in support of the Republican effort to retake Congress, a source close to the company told POLITICO.
It was the second $1 million contribution the company has made this election cycle to a GOP-aligned group. In late June it gave that amount to the Republican Governors Association.
The parent companies of other media companies such as Disney (which owns ABC) and General Electric (which owns NBC) have also made political contributions, but typically in far smaller chunks, and split between Democrats and Republicans.
In the past, News Corp. has also spread its donations between candidates of both parties. The huge gift to the RGA raised questions among some media critics about whether News Corp. had crossed over an inappropriate line for a media company. The second donation is likely to rekindle that debate – and to make both News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch and Fox News even more of a liberal target.
In the past, Murdoch’s political leanings were considered to be pragmatic rather than strictly ideological. Although known as a conservative, he turned his right-leaning British papers behind Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair and flirted with support for Senator Hillary Clinton when she was a Democratic presidential candidate. But his political giving have been sharply aligned with the Republican Party this year.
Spokesmen for News Corp. and for Fox declined to comment on the chamber contribution, or on whether Fox chief Roger Ailes, a former GOP political operative, had a role in it.
After the News Corp. donation to the RGA became known in August, the company denied that Ailes was involved, and a spokesman told POLITICO at the time that the contribution was made to support the Republican committee’s “pro-business agenda.”
A spokesman for the chamber, J.P. Fielder, declined to discuss or confirm a specific contribution – the chamber is fighting to continue to keep contributions secret — but responded to a question about the Fox donation by characterizing the chamber’s agenda.
“What I can tell you is that the chamber has been and will continue to be engaged in the issue debate in this election cycle, focusing our efforts on educating voters about where candidates stand on policies that create jobs,” Fielder said.
Specifically, the chamber has said it plans to spend $75 million in connection with the 2010 election, and has so far has directed substantial amounts to Republican Senate candidates. As of Sept. 15th, the group had spent $6,747,946 airing more than 8,000 ads on behalf of GOP Senate candidates, according to a study from the Wesleyan Media Project.
That figure made the chamber the biggest spender on congressional races of any interest group, and the second biggest-spending national group after the RGA.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce operates a range of lobbying and advocacy programs, and News Corp. has in the past given even larger sums to it to support more general business advocacy, according to a second source close to the company.
Company officials wouldn’t comment directly on the purpose of this year’s contribution.
Ben Smith POLITICO
Friday, October 01, 2010
USA Infected Guatemalans With Syphilis
US Apologizes for 1940s STD Study That Infected Guatemalans With Syphilis
President Obama Calls Guatemalan President to Offer Nation's Apology
In 1946, American researchers performed an appalling experiment, infecting unwitting Guatemalans with a potentially deadly disease in the name of public health.
In an effort to see if penicillin could prevent or treat syphilis, government scientists went to the impoverished Central American country to deliberately infect nearly 700 men and women -- including prisoners, inmates in insane asylums, and even some soldiers -- with the potentially fatal sexually transmitted disease.
The researchers used prostitutes to infect the men and hypodermic needles to infect the women.
Watch "World News" for more on this story tonight on ABC.
The experiments, which lasted from 1946 to 1949, were uncovered last year by Susan Reverby, a professor at Wellesley College, as she was researching a book.
When she came across the Guatemala study, her first reaction was, "Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh, my God," Reverby told ABC News today.
"The evidence is clear that [the subjects] didn't know. The authorities were told something, but the people didn't know," she said.
U.S. Officials Apologize for Guatemala Research
President Obama himself spoke with the president of Guatemala, Alvaro Colom, via phone today to express "deep regret" over the study, the White House said in a statement.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius also issued a joint apology today in a written statement.
"Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health. We deeply regret that it happened," the statement read.
A U.S. government official told ABC News today that the National Institutes of Health will launch two panels to examine the Guatemala study.
Guatemala's Ambassador to the United States, Francisco Villagran de León said today that he appreciated the decision for a full investigation.
"We don't even know if there is a list of these individuals. If there are any survivors, which is not likely, we should make sure that they should receive care," the ambassador said.
Guatemala Experiments Similar to Tuskegee Syphilis Study
The experiments are eerily similar to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments on African Americans, also run by the U.S. Public Health Service. Reverby was researching the case when she came across the records from Guatemala.
In the Tuskegee study, which ran from 1932 to 1972, the same American Public Health service researchers studied 400 poor black men in Alabama who already had syphilis. But the men never were told they were sick, and they never were treated for it. Some participants died from the disease.
The effects of the Tuskegee study continues to have a widespread effect on African Americans' confidence in the public health system. A 2008 study found that black Americans are less likely to participate in research studies than whites, a factor that researchers attributed to fears -- rooted in the Tuskegee tests -- that research participants could incur harm.
In the Guatemalan study, run by the same American Public Health Service doctor as Tuskegee, the subjects were given the antibiotic penicillin, though it's not clear whether they received enough and what exactly became of them.
ABC News' Dr. Richard Besser, a former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said both experiments were highly unethical.
"I think there's absolutely no difference between the Tuskegee experiment and what took place in Guatemala," Besser said. "You had two populations that were mistreated for the benefit of medical knowledge."
Although it was common practice to use unwitting subjects for medical experiments in those days, then-Surgeon General Thomas Parran said about the Guatemala study, "You know, we couldn't do this in this country."
"It used to be that the idea of informed consent -- asking permission -- was unheard of," said Besser. "Sixty years ago, there weren't ethical boards, there weren't institutional review boards reviewing studies determining what you could and couldn't do. It's a different world today."
President Obama Calls Guatemalan President to Offer Nation's Apology
In 1946, American researchers performed an appalling experiment, infecting unwitting Guatemalans with a potentially deadly disease in the name of public health.
In an effort to see if penicillin could prevent or treat syphilis, government scientists went to the impoverished Central American country to deliberately infect nearly 700 men and women -- including prisoners, inmates in insane asylums, and even some soldiers -- with the potentially fatal sexually transmitted disease.
The researchers used prostitutes to infect the men and hypodermic needles to infect the women.
Watch "World News" for more on this story tonight on ABC.
The experiments, which lasted from 1946 to 1949, were uncovered last year by Susan Reverby, a professor at Wellesley College, as she was researching a book.
When she came across the Guatemala study, her first reaction was, "Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh, my God," Reverby told ABC News today.
"The evidence is clear that [the subjects] didn't know. The authorities were told something, but the people didn't know," she said.
U.S. Officials Apologize for Guatemala Research
President Obama himself spoke with the president of Guatemala, Alvaro Colom, via phone today to express "deep regret" over the study, the White House said in a statement.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius also issued a joint apology today in a written statement.
"Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health. We deeply regret that it happened," the statement read.
A U.S. government official told ABC News today that the National Institutes of Health will launch two panels to examine the Guatemala study.
Guatemala's Ambassador to the United States, Francisco Villagran de León said today that he appreciated the decision for a full investigation.
"We don't even know if there is a list of these individuals. If there are any survivors, which is not likely, we should make sure that they should receive care," the ambassador said.
Guatemala Experiments Similar to Tuskegee Syphilis Study
The experiments are eerily similar to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments on African Americans, also run by the U.S. Public Health Service. Reverby was researching the case when she came across the records from Guatemala.
In the Tuskegee study, which ran from 1932 to 1972, the same American Public Health service researchers studied 400 poor black men in Alabama who already had syphilis. But the men never were told they were sick, and they never were treated for it. Some participants died from the disease.
The effects of the Tuskegee study continues to have a widespread effect on African Americans' confidence in the public health system. A 2008 study found that black Americans are less likely to participate in research studies than whites, a factor that researchers attributed to fears -- rooted in the Tuskegee tests -- that research participants could incur harm.
In the Guatemalan study, run by the same American Public Health Service doctor as Tuskegee, the subjects were given the antibiotic penicillin, though it's not clear whether they received enough and what exactly became of them.
ABC News' Dr. Richard Besser, a former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said both experiments were highly unethical.
"I think there's absolutely no difference between the Tuskegee experiment and what took place in Guatemala," Besser said. "You had two populations that were mistreated for the benefit of medical knowledge."
Although it was common practice to use unwitting subjects for medical experiments in those days, then-Surgeon General Thomas Parran said about the Guatemala study, "You know, we couldn't do this in this country."
"It used to be that the idea of informed consent -- asking permission -- was unheard of," said Besser. "Sixty years ago, there weren't ethical boards, there weren't institutional review boards reviewing studies determining what you could and couldn't do. It's a different world today."
stimulus package gets high marks dispite public dumbing down by GOP
The massive economic stimulus package President Obama pushed through Congress last year is coming in on time and under budget - and with strikingly few claims of fraud or abuse - according to a White House report to be released Friday.
Coming barely a month before November's midterm elections, which will determine whether Democrats retain control of Congress, the report challenges public perceptions of the stimulus aid as slow-moving and wasteful - an image that has fueled voter anger with the dominant party. Even some former skeptics who predicted that the money would lead to rampant abuse now acknowledge that the program could serve as a model for improving efficiency in government.
By the end of September, the administration had spent 70 percent of the act's original $787 billion, which met a White House goal of quickly pumping money into the nation's ravaged economy, the report says. The administration also met nearly a dozen deadlines set by Congress for getting money out the door.
Meanwhile, lower-than-anticipated costs for some projects have permitted the administration to stretch stimulus money further than expected, financing an additional 3,000 projects, according to the report.
Despite the speedy spending, the report says that stimulus contracts and grants have so far been relatively free of the fraud charges that plague more routine government spending programs. Complaints have been filed on less than 2 percent of awards under the program.
"Certainly, the fraud and waste element has been smaller than I think anything anybody anticipated," said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group. "You can certainly challenge some projects as questionable economically. But there haven't been the examples of outright fraud where the money is essentially lining somebody's pocket."
The report, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post, is one in a series of assessments prepared by Vice President Biden, who was charged with overseeing implementation of the stimulus money, the largest effort in U.S. history to counteract the effects of a recession. The Congressional Budget Office originally estimated the package of tax cuts, state aid and direct federal spending would cost $787 billion over the next decade, a figure that has since been revised to $814 billion.
Biden delivered the report to Obama on Thursday during the president's daily economic briefing. In addition to assessing how the stimulus program has been carried out, the study restates the administration's case that the package has been effective economically, arguing that it staunched the worst bleeding in employment and led the economy to rebound late last year.
Many prominent economists agree with that assessment. The CBO has forecast that the package may be on track to meet the administration's goal of preserving 3.5 million jobs by the end of the year.
Congressional Republicans and many conservatives challenge those claims, arguing that the stimulus package led to record budget deficits while doing little to improve the economy. With the unemployment rate stuck at 9.6 percent, polls show that about two-thirds of voters agree with that view.
"The administration predicted that unemployment wouldn't rise above 8 percent if the trillion-dollar stimulus became law. We know how that turned out," Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Friday. "Unemployment, now at 9.6 percent, has hovered near double digits since the stimulus passed; we took on an additional trillion dollars in debt, and Americans' confidence in the administration's economic arguments never recovered."
Signed into law by Obama in February 2009, the package was designed to stimulate economic activity and preserve jobs at a time when private-sector activity had virtually collapsed and employers were shedding an average of 750,000 jobs a month. Speed was of paramount importance, and the administration vowed to get 70 percent of the money out the door within 18 months.
The report shows that the administration has met that target, spending $551 billion of the original $787 billion. That figure includes $242 billion in tax breaks to families and businesses and $232 billion in payments to states, unemployed workers and other victims of the recession, the report says. The administration has also written $77 billion in checks for thousands of public works projects, with an additional $127 billion unspent but committed, the report says.
Meeting the 70 percent goal "is an important accomplishment," said Jared Bernstein, Biden's chief economist. "The fact that the impact of this program was quickly felt in the economy and quickly went to work breaking the back of the great recession is something we wanted to take note of."
Administration officials also highlighted the relatively small number of complaints about contracts related to the stimulus package. An independent board established to provide oversight has received just 3,806 complaints - less than 2 percent of more than 200,000 awards. Prosecutors have initiated 424 criminal investigations, representing 0.2 percent of all awards.
Typically, 5 to 7 percent of government contracts attract complaints, Bernstein said.
Stan Soloway, president of the Professional Services Council, which represents government contractors, said the unprecedented focus on oversight clearly paid off and should be analyzed for lessons that could be applied throughout the government.
"Given the ambitious nature of the stimulus, the fact that things have gone relatively smoothly suggests that they did put appropriate and adequate resources" into program oversight, said Soloway, an early skeptic of the package. "They definitely deserve credit for that," he said.
Bernstein said "people's feelings about the recovery act or the role of government in society" are unlikely to change because of Friday's report. "We have a ton more work left to do," he said.
But the report serves to verify, he said, that "the recovery act has accomplished much of what it set out to do."
Lori Montgomery Washington Post
Coming barely a month before November's midterm elections, which will determine whether Democrats retain control of Congress, the report challenges public perceptions of the stimulus aid as slow-moving and wasteful - an image that has fueled voter anger with the dominant party. Even some former skeptics who predicted that the money would lead to rampant abuse now acknowledge that the program could serve as a model for improving efficiency in government.
By the end of September, the administration had spent 70 percent of the act's original $787 billion, which met a White House goal of quickly pumping money into the nation's ravaged economy, the report says. The administration also met nearly a dozen deadlines set by Congress for getting money out the door.
Meanwhile, lower-than-anticipated costs for some projects have permitted the administration to stretch stimulus money further than expected, financing an additional 3,000 projects, according to the report.
Despite the speedy spending, the report says that stimulus contracts and grants have so far been relatively free of the fraud charges that plague more routine government spending programs. Complaints have been filed on less than 2 percent of awards under the program.
"Certainly, the fraud and waste element has been smaller than I think anything anybody anticipated," said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group. "You can certainly challenge some projects as questionable economically. But there haven't been the examples of outright fraud where the money is essentially lining somebody's pocket."
The report, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post, is one in a series of assessments prepared by Vice President Biden, who was charged with overseeing implementation of the stimulus money, the largest effort in U.S. history to counteract the effects of a recession. The Congressional Budget Office originally estimated the package of tax cuts, state aid and direct federal spending would cost $787 billion over the next decade, a figure that has since been revised to $814 billion.
Biden delivered the report to Obama on Thursday during the president's daily economic briefing. In addition to assessing how the stimulus program has been carried out, the study restates the administration's case that the package has been effective economically, arguing that it staunched the worst bleeding in employment and led the economy to rebound late last year.
Many prominent economists agree with that assessment. The CBO has forecast that the package may be on track to meet the administration's goal of preserving 3.5 million jobs by the end of the year.
Congressional Republicans and many conservatives challenge those claims, arguing that the stimulus package led to record budget deficits while doing little to improve the economy. With the unemployment rate stuck at 9.6 percent, polls show that about two-thirds of voters agree with that view.
"The administration predicted that unemployment wouldn't rise above 8 percent if the trillion-dollar stimulus became law. We know how that turned out," Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Friday. "Unemployment, now at 9.6 percent, has hovered near double digits since the stimulus passed; we took on an additional trillion dollars in debt, and Americans' confidence in the administration's economic arguments never recovered."
Signed into law by Obama in February 2009, the package was designed to stimulate economic activity and preserve jobs at a time when private-sector activity had virtually collapsed and employers were shedding an average of 750,000 jobs a month. Speed was of paramount importance, and the administration vowed to get 70 percent of the money out the door within 18 months.
The report shows that the administration has met that target, spending $551 billion of the original $787 billion. That figure includes $242 billion in tax breaks to families and businesses and $232 billion in payments to states, unemployed workers and other victims of the recession, the report says. The administration has also written $77 billion in checks for thousands of public works projects, with an additional $127 billion unspent but committed, the report says.
Meeting the 70 percent goal "is an important accomplishment," said Jared Bernstein, Biden's chief economist. "The fact that the impact of this program was quickly felt in the economy and quickly went to work breaking the back of the great recession is something we wanted to take note of."
Administration officials also highlighted the relatively small number of complaints about contracts related to the stimulus package. An independent board established to provide oversight has received just 3,806 complaints - less than 2 percent of more than 200,000 awards. Prosecutors have initiated 424 criminal investigations, representing 0.2 percent of all awards.
Typically, 5 to 7 percent of government contracts attract complaints, Bernstein said.
Stan Soloway, president of the Professional Services Council, which represents government contractors, said the unprecedented focus on oversight clearly paid off and should be analyzed for lessons that could be applied throughout the government.
"Given the ambitious nature of the stimulus, the fact that things have gone relatively smoothly suggests that they did put appropriate and adequate resources" into program oversight, said Soloway, an early skeptic of the package. "They definitely deserve credit for that," he said.
Bernstein said "people's feelings about the recovery act or the role of government in society" are unlikely to change because of Friday's report. "We have a ton more work left to do," he said.
But the report serves to verify, he said, that "the recovery act has accomplished much of what it set out to do."
Lori Montgomery Washington Post
Rupert Murdoch refuses to to hold Fox News accountable
Maybe YOU & The PRESS should?
It must be nice to work for Rupert Murdoch.
Every so often, the News Corp. CEO is questioned about Fox News' programming. His responses reveal that he either does not watch his own network and is therefore clueless about his flagship news property, or he instead chooses to play dumb about his network's role in poisoning the national discourse.
Yesterday, while testifying before a House subcommittee hearing, Murdoch spoke in favor of comprehensive immigration reform. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) expressed support for Murdoch's proposal, but noted that she was "oftentimes stunned" by the anti-immigrant rhetoric on Fox News. Murdoch responded by saying that "we are home to all views on Fox," and that "we are not anti-immigrant on Fox News."
Of course, Fox News is a hotbed of anti-immigrant rhetoric. Not only do hosts and guests regularly distort the threat posed by illegal immigration and fight against rights already held by immigrants, but their coverage of the issue sometimes veers into thinly-veiled "white people are under attack!" xenophobia.
For example, in May of 2007, Bill O'Reilly, Fox News' top-rated host, fearmongered that the "unintended consequences" of immigration reform was that it would make America less white. On an April, 2006, edition of his syndicated radio show, O'Reilly suggested that the "hidden agenda" of the immigrant rights movement was to bring about the "browning of America." In 2006, former Fox host John Gibson exhorted white viewers to do "your duty" and "make more babies" in response to population growth by minorities.
Though Murdoch proudly proclaimed that Fox is "home to all views" on immigration, this welcoming mentality apparently includes mainstreaming anti-immigrant groups like the American Immigration Control Foundation, which has been classified as a "hate group" by the Anti-Defamation League.
And while Murdoch mocked the idea of "expelling 11 or 12 million people" as "nonsense," Fox host David Asman - while filling in for Neil Cavuto in April of 2006 - suggested that it may have been "the perfect time to round up" illegal immigrants and "ship them out."
To top it all off, Fox News has recently begun hosting disgraced former CNN host Lou Dobbs to repeatedly mislead on immigration issues, despite his long history of making incendiary and false claims about the topic.
But they "are not anti-immigrant on Fox." Right.
Murdoch's obliviousness - feigned or not - when it comes to Fox News' coverage of immigration follows a clear pattern.
On the subject of climate change, Murdoch has aligned himself with the vast majority of climate scientists and stated unequivocally that "climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats."
In 2007, Murdoch announced an initiative to make News Corp. carbon neutral in an attempt to "set an example" and inspire their "audiences" to fight climate change. While News Corp.'s initiative is commendable, its potential benefits and ability to "set an example" are undermined by Fox News' ongoing war on climate science and climate scientists. Fox hosts and personalities regularly mock climate change and any efforts to combat it.
A perfect example of how Fox News fails to "set an example" came during Earth Day this year. Rather than spend the day promoting environmentalism and conservation, Fox & Friends marked the occasion by rehashing smears of climate scientists with noted climatologist L. Brent Bozell.
Murdoch was right when he said that the carbon footprint of News Corp.'s audience is "10,000 times bigger than" the company's, which is why the benefits of his company's attempt to become carbon neutral pale in comparison to the damage done by the network's ongoing war on climate science. In fact, Murdoch's admission that he agrees with the "99 percent of scientists" on climate change makes him part of the "climate change cult," according to Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin.
Murdoch has also frequently promoted the phony distinction between Fox's news and opinion programming. Last year, Murdoch implied that Your World with Neil Cavuto and Fox & Friends (among others) are Fox shows that don't traffic in "commentary." This was false at the time - Fox News executives have included those shows as part of its "opinion" lineup -- and has become even more so as the network has continued its trip down the rabbit hole.
Neil Cavuto is the network's Senior Vice President of Business News, which, according to Fox, means he "oversees all business coverage for FNC" and "directs content and business news coverage for the FOX Business Network." If we are supposed to view Cavuto as some sort of business journalist, then he likely holds the distinction of being the only business journalist in the country with his own "Campaign Platform."
This week, Cavuto unveiled his "2010 Campaign Platform," which consisted of right-wing proposals like "No Tax Hikes On Anyone For Any Reason" and "A 10 Percent Across-The-Board Cut In Every Gov't Program." In addition to having a "Campaign Platform," Cavuto regularly promotes falsehoods that benefit the GOP and Tea Party at the expense of progressives and Democrats.
Murdoch's confusion about Fox & Friends' programming may be slightly more understandable. After all, Steve Doocy and Co. put on a show for their boss when he visited earlier this year, significantly toning down their usual rhetoric about immigration during his appearance, only to return to their usual antics as soon as he left the show.
Of course, the idea that Fox & Friends does not do "commentary" is a farce. Not only does the show spend three hours every morning misinforming their viewers about a wide range of issues, they have recently become the de facto launching pad for GOP general election campaigns.
Which brings us to Murdoch's most infamous "see no evil" moment. In April, Media Matters VP Ari Rabin-Havt questioned Murdoch about Fox's promotion of the Tea Party. Murdoch responded that Fox News shouldn't be "supporting the Tea Party or any other party." He added, "I'd like to investigate what you are saying before I condemn anyone." Almost six months later, we're still waiting to hear back.
As we detailed at the time, Fox's promotion of the Tea Party was beyond question - the network had aggressively encouraged viewers to attend tea parties, and even hosted several "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties" starring leading Fox personalities like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.
In the intervening months, Fox's Tea Party boosterism has continued unabated. Notably, in the past few weeks, Fox has gone all-in supporting Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell. In addition to giving her a safe haven from being inconvenienced by exposure to actual journalism, numerous hosts on the network have misleadingly claimed that her opponent has labeled himself a "bearded Marxist."
And what about that "other party" -- the GOP -- that Fox News shouldn't be "supporting," according to their boss? Well, in addition to lavishing coverage on the GOP's legislative agenda, Fox News hosts and personalities have raised millions of dollars for the GOP, supported GOP candidates with almost uniformly positive coverage, and, as always, spent every day smearing Democrats and progressives with blatant falsehoods.
In April, we argued that Fox News had basically become an arm of the GOP. It seems we may have had that backwards. At this point, the GOP is basically just an arm of Fox News.
As we detailed in a report this week, Fox News employs no less than five potential 2012 GOP presidential candidates. The Fox candidates have appeared on the network at least 269 times, appearances a GOP strategist reportedly called an "in-kind contribution."
Murdoch's network actually goes beyond just giving "in-kind contributions" to the GOP. Recently, they've discarded that relative subtlety and started spending boatloads of money in the hopes of helping to elect GOP candidates this fall.
Earlier this summer, News. Corp donated an unprecedented $1 million to the Republican Governors Association with the express purpose of supporting the "RGA's pro-business agenda." Last night, Politico's Ben Smith reported that News. Corp also donated $1 million to the GOP-aligned Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber has reportedly devoted millions of dollars this cycle to running political ads on behalf of Republican Senate candidates.
Fox News' political activism is becoming more and more brazen. Unfortunately the network is enabled by the rest of the media's reluctance to call them out on their behavior. At this point, it is clear that the CEO of News. Corp has no plans to act responsibly, so it is up to the press to hold Fox News accountable.
Fox News makes a mockery of the idea of journalism, and it's time for media outlets that actually care about the craft to speak out and say so.
This weekly wrap-up was compiled by Ben Dimiero, a research fellow at Media Matters for America.
It must be nice to work for Rupert Murdoch.
Every so often, the News Corp. CEO is questioned about Fox News' programming. His responses reveal that he either does not watch his own network and is therefore clueless about his flagship news property, or he instead chooses to play dumb about his network's role in poisoning the national discourse.
Yesterday, while testifying before a House subcommittee hearing, Murdoch spoke in favor of comprehensive immigration reform. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) expressed support for Murdoch's proposal, but noted that she was "oftentimes stunned" by the anti-immigrant rhetoric on Fox News. Murdoch responded by saying that "we are home to all views on Fox," and that "we are not anti-immigrant on Fox News."
Of course, Fox News is a hotbed of anti-immigrant rhetoric. Not only do hosts and guests regularly distort the threat posed by illegal immigration and fight against rights already held by immigrants, but their coverage of the issue sometimes veers into thinly-veiled "white people are under attack!" xenophobia.
For example, in May of 2007, Bill O'Reilly, Fox News' top-rated host, fearmongered that the "unintended consequences" of immigration reform was that it would make America less white. On an April, 2006, edition of his syndicated radio show, O'Reilly suggested that the "hidden agenda" of the immigrant rights movement was to bring about the "browning of America." In 2006, former Fox host John Gibson exhorted white viewers to do "your duty" and "make more babies" in response to population growth by minorities.
Though Murdoch proudly proclaimed that Fox is "home to all views" on immigration, this welcoming mentality apparently includes mainstreaming anti-immigrant groups like the American Immigration Control Foundation, which has been classified as a "hate group" by the Anti-Defamation League.
And while Murdoch mocked the idea of "expelling 11 or 12 million people" as "nonsense," Fox host David Asman - while filling in for Neil Cavuto in April of 2006 - suggested that it may have been "the perfect time to round up" illegal immigrants and "ship them out."
To top it all off, Fox News has recently begun hosting disgraced former CNN host Lou Dobbs to repeatedly mislead on immigration issues, despite his long history of making incendiary and false claims about the topic.
But they "are not anti-immigrant on Fox." Right.
Murdoch's obliviousness - feigned or not - when it comes to Fox News' coverage of immigration follows a clear pattern.
On the subject of climate change, Murdoch has aligned himself with the vast majority of climate scientists and stated unequivocally that "climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats."
In 2007, Murdoch announced an initiative to make News Corp. carbon neutral in an attempt to "set an example" and inspire their "audiences" to fight climate change. While News Corp.'s initiative is commendable, its potential benefits and ability to "set an example" are undermined by Fox News' ongoing war on climate science and climate scientists. Fox hosts and personalities regularly mock climate change and any efforts to combat it.
A perfect example of how Fox News fails to "set an example" came during Earth Day this year. Rather than spend the day promoting environmentalism and conservation, Fox & Friends marked the occasion by rehashing smears of climate scientists with noted climatologist L. Brent Bozell.
Murdoch was right when he said that the carbon footprint of News Corp.'s audience is "10,000 times bigger than" the company's, which is why the benefits of his company's attempt to become carbon neutral pale in comparison to the damage done by the network's ongoing war on climate science. In fact, Murdoch's admission that he agrees with the "99 percent of scientists" on climate change makes him part of the "climate change cult," according to Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin.
Murdoch has also frequently promoted the phony distinction between Fox's news and opinion programming. Last year, Murdoch implied that Your World with Neil Cavuto and Fox & Friends (among others) are Fox shows that don't traffic in "commentary." This was false at the time - Fox News executives have included those shows as part of its "opinion" lineup -- and has become even more so as the network has continued its trip down the rabbit hole.
Neil Cavuto is the network's Senior Vice President of Business News, which, according to Fox, means he "oversees all business coverage for FNC" and "directs content and business news coverage for the FOX Business Network." If we are supposed to view Cavuto as some sort of business journalist, then he likely holds the distinction of being the only business journalist in the country with his own "Campaign Platform."
This week, Cavuto unveiled his "2010 Campaign Platform," which consisted of right-wing proposals like "No Tax Hikes On Anyone For Any Reason" and "A 10 Percent Across-The-Board Cut In Every Gov't Program." In addition to having a "Campaign Platform," Cavuto regularly promotes falsehoods that benefit the GOP and Tea Party at the expense of progressives and Democrats.
Murdoch's confusion about Fox & Friends' programming may be slightly more understandable. After all, Steve Doocy and Co. put on a show for their boss when he visited earlier this year, significantly toning down their usual rhetoric about immigration during his appearance, only to return to their usual antics as soon as he left the show.
Of course, the idea that Fox & Friends does not do "commentary" is a farce. Not only does the show spend three hours every morning misinforming their viewers about a wide range of issues, they have recently become the de facto launching pad for GOP general election campaigns.
Which brings us to Murdoch's most infamous "see no evil" moment. In April, Media Matters VP Ari Rabin-Havt questioned Murdoch about Fox's promotion of the Tea Party. Murdoch responded that Fox News shouldn't be "supporting the Tea Party or any other party." He added, "I'd like to investigate what you are saying before I condemn anyone." Almost six months later, we're still waiting to hear back.
As we detailed at the time, Fox's promotion of the Tea Party was beyond question - the network had aggressively encouraged viewers to attend tea parties, and even hosted several "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties" starring leading Fox personalities like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.
In the intervening months, Fox's Tea Party boosterism has continued unabated. Notably, in the past few weeks, Fox has gone all-in supporting Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell. In addition to giving her a safe haven from being inconvenienced by exposure to actual journalism, numerous hosts on the network have misleadingly claimed that her opponent has labeled himself a "bearded Marxist."
And what about that "other party" -- the GOP -- that Fox News shouldn't be "supporting," according to their boss? Well, in addition to lavishing coverage on the GOP's legislative agenda, Fox News hosts and personalities have raised millions of dollars for the GOP, supported GOP candidates with almost uniformly positive coverage, and, as always, spent every day smearing Democrats and progressives with blatant falsehoods.
In April, we argued that Fox News had basically become an arm of the GOP. It seems we may have had that backwards. At this point, the GOP is basically just an arm of Fox News.
As we detailed in a report this week, Fox News employs no less than five potential 2012 GOP presidential candidates. The Fox candidates have appeared on the network at least 269 times, appearances a GOP strategist reportedly called an "in-kind contribution."
Murdoch's network actually goes beyond just giving "in-kind contributions" to the GOP. Recently, they've discarded that relative subtlety and started spending boatloads of money in the hopes of helping to elect GOP candidates this fall.
Earlier this summer, News. Corp donated an unprecedented $1 million to the Republican Governors Association with the express purpose of supporting the "RGA's pro-business agenda." Last night, Politico's Ben Smith reported that News. Corp also donated $1 million to the GOP-aligned Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber has reportedly devoted millions of dollars this cycle to running political ads on behalf of Republican Senate candidates.
Fox News' political activism is becoming more and more brazen. Unfortunately the network is enabled by the rest of the media's reluctance to call them out on their behavior. At this point, it is clear that the CEO of News. Corp has no plans to act responsibly, so it is up to the press to hold Fox News accountable.
Fox News makes a mockery of the idea of journalism, and it's time for media outlets that actually care about the craft to speak out and say so.
This weekly wrap-up was compiled by Ben Dimiero, a research fellow at Media Matters for America.
Why can't news reporters just be reporters instead letting ego confuse their function?
CNN Fires Sanchez After He Calls Stewart a Bigot
NEW YORK (AP) — CNN fired news anchor Rick Sanchez on Friday, a day after he called Jon Stewart a bigot in a radio show interview where he also questioned whether Jews should be considered a minority.
Sanchez, who was born in Cuba and had worked at CNN since 2004, was host of the two-hour "Rick's List" on CNN's afternoon lineup. He did a prime-time version of that show in recent months, but that ended this week because the time slot is being filled by a new show featuring former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and columnist Kathleen Parker.
Stewart had frequently poked fun of Sanchez on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," most recently for saying on the air that his show had received a tweet from House Republican leader John Boehner. Stewart called it a case of "send a twit a tweet."
"He's upset that someone of my ilk is almost at his level," Sanchez said during a satellite radio interview with Pete Dominick. Details of the interview were posted on the Mediaite website Friday and quickly became a topic of conversation in the media world.
Sanchez said that Stewart is bigoted toward "everybody else that's not like him." He said Stewart "can't relate to what I grew up with," saying his family had been poor and he had seen prejudice directed at his father.
Sanchez dismisses it when Dominick points out that Stewart, who is Jewish, is also a minority.
"I'm telling you that everyone who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they, the people in this country who are Jewish, are an oppressed minority?" Sanchez said, adding a sarcastic "yeah."
"I can't see someone not getting a job these days because they're Jewish," he said.
CNN issued a statement late Friday that said Sanchez "is no longer with the company." In it, the network also thanked Sanchez "for his years of service" and wished him well.
Sanchez did not immediately return an e-mail or call to his mobile phone seeking comment, though it was unclear whether the CNN-issued phone or e-mail address were still active.
Stewart had no comment on Sanchez's statements, a Comedy Central spokesman said.
Three times in the past few months Stewart had used a Sanchez clip for the mocking "moment of Zen" feature on "The Daily Show," including once where Sanchez mispronounced the world "annals" in a story about Vice President Joe Biden.
He also made fun of Sanchez questioning a reporter who was stationed in a California gay bar for a report on the court case there involving gay marriage and hadn't found anyone at the bar who opposed the idea.
Sanchez spent much of his career as a reporter and anchor in Miami, where he won an Emmy Award in 1983 for a story on why he left Cuba. He has also worked at MSNBC and CNBC.
During the interview with Dominick, Sanchez told about a CNN executive whom he would not name telling him that he saw Sanchez not as an anchor but a reporter like ABC's John Quinones. He implied that this was a subtle form of bias.
Later in the interview Sanchez, indicated that "bigot" may be too strong a word to describe Stewart, saying he was "prejudicial" instead.
"He's not just a comedian. ... He can make and break careers," Sanchez said. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK (AP) — CNN fired news anchor Rick Sanchez on Friday, a day after he called Jon Stewart a bigot in a radio show interview where he also questioned whether Jews should be considered a minority.
Sanchez, who was born in Cuba and had worked at CNN since 2004, was host of the two-hour "Rick's List" on CNN's afternoon lineup. He did a prime-time version of that show in recent months, but that ended this week because the time slot is being filled by a new show featuring former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and columnist Kathleen Parker.
Stewart had frequently poked fun of Sanchez on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," most recently for saying on the air that his show had received a tweet from House Republican leader John Boehner. Stewart called it a case of "send a twit a tweet."
"He's upset that someone of my ilk is almost at his level," Sanchez said during a satellite radio interview with Pete Dominick. Details of the interview were posted on the Mediaite website Friday and quickly became a topic of conversation in the media world.
Sanchez said that Stewart is bigoted toward "everybody else that's not like him." He said Stewart "can't relate to what I grew up with," saying his family had been poor and he had seen prejudice directed at his father.
Sanchez dismisses it when Dominick points out that Stewart, who is Jewish, is also a minority.
"I'm telling you that everyone who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they, the people in this country who are Jewish, are an oppressed minority?" Sanchez said, adding a sarcastic "yeah."
"I can't see someone not getting a job these days because they're Jewish," he said.
CNN issued a statement late Friday that said Sanchez "is no longer with the company." In it, the network also thanked Sanchez "for his years of service" and wished him well.
Sanchez did not immediately return an e-mail or call to his mobile phone seeking comment, though it was unclear whether the CNN-issued phone or e-mail address were still active.
Stewart had no comment on Sanchez's statements, a Comedy Central spokesman said.
Three times in the past few months Stewart had used a Sanchez clip for the mocking "moment of Zen" feature on "The Daily Show," including once where Sanchez mispronounced the world "annals" in a story about Vice President Joe Biden.
He also made fun of Sanchez questioning a reporter who was stationed in a California gay bar for a report on the court case there involving gay marriage and hadn't found anyone at the bar who opposed the idea.
Sanchez spent much of his career as a reporter and anchor in Miami, where he won an Emmy Award in 1983 for a story on why he left Cuba. He has also worked at MSNBC and CNBC.
During the interview with Dominick, Sanchez told about a CNN executive whom he would not name telling him that he saw Sanchez not as an anchor but a reporter like ABC's John Quinones. He implied that this was a subtle form of bias.
Later in the interview Sanchez, indicated that "bigot" may be too strong a word to describe Stewart, saying he was "prejudicial" instead.
"He's not just a comedian. ... He can make and break careers," Sanchez said. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Locked and Loaded: The Secret World of Extreme Militias
Camouflaged and silent, the assault team inched toward a walled stone compound for more than five hours, belly-crawling the last 200 yards. The target was an old state prison in eastern Ohio, and every handpicked member of Red Team 2 knew what was at stake: The year is 2014, and a new breed of neo-Islamic terrorism is rampant in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio ... The current White House Administration is pro-Muslim and has ordered a stand-down against Islamic groups. The mission: Destroy the terrorist command post — or die trying. The fighters must go in "sterile" — without name tags or other identifying insignia — as a deniable covert force. "Anyone who is caught or captured cannot expect extraction," the briefing officer said.
At nightfall the raiders launched their attack. Short, sharp bursts from their M-16s cut down the perimeter guards. Once past the rear gate, the raiders fanned out and emptied clip after clip in a barrage of diversionary fire. As defenders rushed to repel the small team, the main assault force struck from the opposite flank. Red Team 1 burst through a chain-link fence, enveloping the defense in lethal cross fire. The shooting was over in minutes. Thick grenade smoke bloomed over the command post. The defenders were routed, headquarters ablaze. (Watch TIME's video "Homeland Security Tradeshow.")
This August weekend of grueling mock combat, which left some of the men prostrate and bloody-booted, capped a yearlong training regimen of the Ohio Defense Force, a private militia that claims 300 active members statewide. The fighters shot blanks, the better to learn to maneuver in squads, but they buy live ammunition in bulk. Their training — no game, they stress — expends thousands of rounds a year from a bring-your-own armory of deer rifles, assault weapons and, when the owner turns up, a belt-fed M-60 machine gun. The militia trains for ambushes, sniper missions, close-quarters battle and other infantry staples.
What distinguishes groups like this one from a shooting club or re-enactment society is the prospect of actual bloodshed, which many Ohio Defense Force members see as real. Their unit seal depicts a man with a musket and tricorn hat, over the motto "Today's Minutemen." The symbol invites a question, Who are today's redcoats? On that point, the group takes no official position, but many of those interviewed over two days of recent training in and around the abandoned Roseville State Prison near Zanesville voiced grim suspicions about President Obama and the federal government in general. (See Obama's troubled first year.)
"I don't know who the redcoats are," says Brian Vandersall, 37, who designed the exercise and tried to tamp down talk of politics among the men. "It could be U.N. troops. It could be federal troops. It could be Blackwater, which was used in Katrina. It could be Mexican troops who are crossing the border."
Or it could be, as it was for this year's exercise, an Islamic army marauding unchecked because a hypothetical pro-Muslim President has ordered U.S. forces to leave them alone. But as the drill played out, the designated opponents bore little resemblance to terrorists. The scenario described them as a platoon-size unit, in uniform, with "military-grade hardware, communications, encryption capability and vehicle support." The militia was training for combat against the spitting image of a tactical force from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), FBI or National Guard. "Whoever they are," Vandersall says, "we have to be ready."
As militias go, the Ohio Defense Force is on the moderate side. Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement agencies and outside watchdogs. A six-month TIME investigation reveals that recruiting, planning, training and explicit calls for a shooting war are on the rise, as are criminal investigations by the FBI and state authorities. Readier for bloodshed than at any time since at least the confrontations in the 1990s in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, the radical right has raised the threat level against the President and other government targets. With violence already up on a modest scale, FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and state agencies point to two main dangers of a mass-casualty attack: that a group of armed radicals will strike out in perceived self-defense, or that a lone wolf, trained and indoctrinated for war, will grow tired of waiting. Even the most outspoken militia commanders worry about the latter scenario. Kevin Terrell, a self-described colonel who founded a group of "freedom fighters" in Kentucky and predicts war with "the jackbooted thugs" of Washington within a year, says he has to fend off hotheads who call him a "keyboard commando." Some are ejected from his group, he says, and others are willing to wait a little longer. "You have to have the right fuel-air mixture, the piston has to be in the right position, the spark has to be perfectly timed," he says. "The day will come — sooner than later."
Twisted Patriots
Within a complex web of ideologies, most of today's armed radicals are linked by self-described Patriot beliefs, which emphasize resistance to tyranny by force of arms and reject the idea that elections can fix what ails the country. Among the most common convictions is that the Second Amendment — the right to keep and bear arms — is the Constitution's cornerstone, because only a well-armed populace can enforce its rights. Any form of gun regulation, therefore, is a sure sign of intent to crush other freedoms. The federal government is often said in militia circles to have made wholesale seizures of power, at times by subterfuge. A leading grievance holds that the 16th Amendment, which authorizes the federal income tax, was ratified through fraud. (Read "America's New Patriotism.")
In a reversal of casting, the armed antigovernment movement describes itself as heir to the founders. As they see it, the union that the founders created is now a foreign tyrant. "It's like waking up behind enemy lines," says Terrell. He says he smelled a setup when the FBI arrested nine members of Michigan's Hutaree militia in March and charged them with plotting to kill police. (Their trial is set to begin in February.) Terrell and other leaders put their forces on alert, anticipating a roundup. "There was a lot of citizens out there in the bushes, locked and loaded," he says. "It's only due to miracles I do not understand that civil war did not break out right there."
Some groups, though not many overtly, embrace the white-supremacist legacy of the Posse Comitatus, which invented the modern militia movement in the 1970s. Some are fueled by a violent stream of millennial Christianity. Some believe Washington is a secondary foe, the agent of a dystopian new world order.
Read "The Threat from the Patriot Movement."
See "Five Great Reads on Patriotism."
A small but growing number of these extremist groups, according to the FBI, ATF and state investigators, are subjects of active criminal investigations. They include militias and other promoters of armed confrontation with government, among them "common-law jurors," who try to make their own arrests and convene their own trials, and "sovereign citizens," who respond with lethal force to routine encounters with the law. In April, for example, Navy veteran Walter Fitzpatrick, acting on behalf of a group called American Grand Jury, barged into a Tennessee courthouse and tried to arrest the real grand-jury foreman on the grounds that he refused to indict Obama for treason. In May, Georgia militia member Darren Huff was arrested by Tennessee state troopers after telling them that he and other armed men intended to "take over the Monroe County courthouse," free Fitzpatrick and "conduct arrests" of other officials, according to Huff's indictment and his own account in an interview posted online. Investigators are keeping a wary eye on a related trend, which has yet to progress beyond words, in which law officers and military service members vow to refuse or resist orders they deem unconstitutional. About a dozen county sheriffs and several candidates for sheriff in the midterm elections have threatened to arrest federal agents in their jurisdictions.
Group distinctions are seldom clear because of overlapping memberships and alliances. The Ohio exercise, for example, included a delegation from the 17th Special Operations Group led by Colonel Dick Wolf, a former Army drill sergeant who previously took a unit to join Arizona militia leader Chris Simcox in armed patrols along the Mexican border. Wolf travels around the country to train other groups in such skills as knife fighting and convoy operations. He does not ask about their philosophies. "That's their business," he says.
The Obama Factor
None of these movements are entirely new, but most were in sharp decline by the late 1990s. Their resurgence now is widely seen among government and academic experts as a reaction to the tectonic shifts in American politics that allowed a black man with a foreign-sounding name and a Muslim-born father to reach the White House. (See pictures of Muslim in America.)
Obama's ascendancy unhinged the radical right, offering a unified target to competing camps of racial, nativist and religious animus. Even Patriots who had no truck with white supremacy found that they could amplify their antigovernment message by "constructing Obama as an alien, not of this country, insufficiently American," according to Michael Waltman, an authority on hate speech at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Perennial features of extreme-right scare lore — including imagined schemes to declare martial law, abolish private ownership of guns and force dissidents into FEMA concentration camps — became more potent with Obama as the Commander in Chief.
Threats against Obama's life brought him Secret Service protection in May 2007, by far the earliest on record for a presidential candidate. At least four alleged assassination plots between June and December — by militiamen in Pennsylvania, white supremacists in Denver, skinheads in Tennessee and an active-duty Marine lance corporal at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune — led to arrests and criminal charges before Obama was even sworn in.
"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." (See the top 10 inept terrorist plots.)
The Supremacist
One such man was James Von Brunn. On June 10, 2009, he pulled up to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, raised a .22-caliber rifle and shot security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns in the chest. Part of Von Brunn's story is now well known, but police, FBI and Secret Service investigators held back a startling epilogue.
Von Brunn was an avowed white supremacist with a history of violence that reached back decades. He had spent six years in prison after an attempt to take hostages at the Federal Reserve in 1981. After finding only disappointment in organized groups, Von Brunn retreated to his website and railed against passive comrades. "The American Right-wing with few exceptions ... does NOTHING BUT TALK," he wrote. At 88 and hospitalized with a gunshot wound he suffered at the museum, Von Brunn did not loom large in the public eye as a figure of menace. He was profiled as a shrunken old man, broke and friendless, who ended another man's life in an empty act of despair. He died seven months later in prison before he could be tried.
What authorities did not disclose was how close the country had come to a seismic political event. Von Brunn, authoritative sources say, had another target in mind: White House senior adviser David Axelrod, a man at the center of Obama's circle. The President was too hard to reach, in Von Brunn's view, but that was of no consequence. "Obama was created by Jews," he wrote. "Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do."
See the top 10 crime stories of 2009.
Read "How Obama's Enemies May Give Him a Boost."
The episode sent a jolt through the FBI and DHS. Von Brunn had demonstrated motive, means and intent to kill one of the President's closest aides. The Secret Service assigned Axelrod a protection detail and took other, undisclosed steps to broaden its coverage. The DHS put out bulletins to state and local law-enforcement agencies on the tactics, warning signs and other lessons of the case. FBI agents need to understand, a senior supervisor says, that "it isn't just the threat from Islamic extremists but also from homegrown or domestic terrorists" with antigovernment agendas — as the bureau had already seen in a small town in Maine.
The Dirty Bomber
The first thing Jeff Trafton noticed at 346 High Street was a "big swastika flag in the living room." Upstairs, where a man lay dead in his bedroom, there were photographs of the victim posed in a black Gestapo trench coat. Any murder was unusual in Belfast, Maine, a town of 7,000 where Trafton is chief of police. This one kept getting stranger. (See the top 25 crimes of the century.)
Who did it was not a mystery. Amber Cummings, then 31, shot her husband James, 29, to death, dropped the Colt .45 revolver and walked to a neighbor's to dial 911. Evidence of her torment at the dead man's hands during years of domestic abuse would later persuade a judge to spare her a prison sentence. (Comment on this story.)
On the day of the shooting, Dec. 9, 2008, the story she told and an initial search of the house brought an FBI forensic team running. James Cummings appeared to have accumulated explosive ingredients and radioactive samples. He had filled out an application to join the National Socialist Movement and declared an ambition to kill the President-elect.
It was hard to tell how seriously to take that threat. On Jan. 19, 2009, WikiLeaks made public the FBI search inventory, which was distributed to security planners for Obama's Inauguration. State police assured reporters, in response, that the Cummings home lab had posed no threat to public safety. (Watch TIME"s video "WikiLeaks Founder on History's Top Leaks.")
A much more sobering picture emerged from the dead man's handwritten notes and printed records, some of which were recently made available to TIME. Fresh interviews with principals in the case, together with the documents, depict a viciously angry and resourceful man who had procured most of the supplies for a crude radiological dispersal device and made some progress in sketching a workable design. In this he was far ahead of Jose Padilla, the accused al-Qaeda dirty-bomb plotter, and more advanced in his efforts than any previously known domestic threat involving a dirty bomb. Cummings spent many months winning the confidence of online suppliers, using a variety of cover stories, PayPal accounts and shipping addresses. He had a $2 million real estate inheritance and spent it freely on his plot.
"He was very clever," says Amber Cummings, who until now had not spoken publicly about her late husband's preparations. "There's a small amount of radioactive material he can legally buy for research purposes. He'd call those companies, and he had various stories. He'd claim he was working as a professor."
On Nov. 4, 2008 — Election Day — Cummings placed his last two orders for uranium, at a total cost of $626.40, from United Nuclear Scientific Equipment & Supplies. The Michigan-based company, which declined to answer questions, offers uranium for sale online in "medium, high, super high and ultra high radiation" blends. In an ironic twist on customer service, United Nuclear wrote with regret to inform Cummings that one of the samples he ordered that day "was already purchased by Homeland Security for training purposes." By way of apology, the company sent a larger quantity, in two chunks.
A vendor in Colorado sold Cummings radioactive beryllium. Cummings produced a third radiation source at home. From standard references and technical manuals, Cummings learned how to extract thorium from commercially available tungsten electrodes by soaking them in a peroxide bath.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, all three metals — uranium, thorium and beryllium — are highly toxic when ingested and cause cancer if inhaled as fine airborne particles. Cummings had none of them in large quantity, and none had the high output of gamma rays that would make for the most dangerous kind of dirty bomb, but he was looking for more-lethal ingredients. A shopping list, under the heading "best for dirty bombs," named three: cobalt-60, cesium-137 and strontium-90. (See pictures of the Times Square car-bomb scare.)
Cummings made his best progress on high explosives. He bought large quantities of 3% hydrogen peroxide, which is commonly sold in pharmacies, then concentrated it on his kitchen stove to 35%. With acids on hand, Cummings had a recipe and all the required ingredients for TATP, a hellishly energetic explosive favored by Middle Eastern suicide bombers.
In 2001, when shoe bomber Richard Reid came close to downing American Airlines Flight 63, he had several ounces of TATP in his hiking boots. Cummings had the ingredients to make many times that much, as well as aluminum powder, thermite, thermite igniter and other materials used to detonate the explosive and amplify its effects. Crude designs Cummings sketched on lined paper suggest that he had a lot to learn about efficient dispersal of radioactive particles. Even so, he was aware of the gaps in his knowledge. "His intentions were to construct a dirty bomb and take it to Washington to kill President Obama," Amber Cummings says. "He was planning to hide it in the undercarriage of our motor home." She says her husband had practiced crossing checkpoints with dangerous materials aboard, taking her and their daughter along for an image of innocence.
Maine state police detective Michael McFadden, who participated in the investigation throughout, says he came to believe that James Cummings posed "a legitimate threat" of a major terrorist attack. "When you're cooking thorium and uranium under your kitchen sink, when you have a couple million dollars sitting in the bank and you're hell-bent on doing something, I think at that point you become someone we want to sit up and pay attention to," he says. "If she didn't do what she did, maybe we would know Mr. Cummings a lot better than we do right now."
See pictures of crime in Middle America.
Read "How Should America Try Terror Suspects?"
Who Would They Fight?
The abandoned state prison in Roseville, with its broken cinder-block walls and crumbling stairwells, made a suitably apocalyptic set for the Ohio militia's August exercise. In the officers' ready room, where back issues of Shotgun News and Soldier of Fortune lay on folding tables, an ancient graffito reading "KKK" had been painted over by one of Kenneth Goldsmith's men. "The Klan in this area, they don't like me at all," Goldsmith says. "They came to me a few years ago to join forces ... I told the guy, 'You think you are from a superior race, is that it?' He said yes. I said, 'You don't look so superior to me.' "
Members of militias around the country say, like Goldsmith, that they resent comparison with white supremacists like Cummings and Von Brunn. They complain of being tarred as members of hate groups by watchdogs at the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. "I can't tell you how much I enjoy being lumped in with sociopathic organizations like neo-Nazis, antiabortion extremists and Holocaust-denial groups," says Darren Wilburn, a private detective in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., who trains with a hard-core militia he preferred not to name. He cites his motto, "Life, liberty and the pursuit of anyone who threatens it," as evidence that he is not looking for trouble as long as trouble keeps clear of him.
The same two points — a defensive posture and ill will toward no one — were repeated with sincerity by many of Goldsmith's men. There were layers of meaning beneath those words, which peeled back as the weekend progressed. The Ohio Defense Force charter declares two missions, which may sound the same to outside ears but mean very different things. One is to help state and local law enforcement upon request. The other is to "assist in the protection of local citizens in emergencies."
An example of the first mission, the most recent one Goldsmith could think of, came after flooding struck Columbiana County six years ago. Chief Deputy Sheriff Allen Haueter says the militia helped direct traffic, leaving sheriff's officers free to respond to emergencies. But Haueter did not authorize them — "Oh, no, no," he says — to carry guns. They could as easily have done the job garbed as candy stripers. (See pictures of America's gun culture.)
Why, then, the paramilitary training that takes up nearly all the militia's time? That question bothers Sheriff Matt Lutz of Muskingum County, where the militia is headquartered. "There is no correlation with them saying they're there to help us in any way and them running around with assault rifles in the woods," he says. "That's what scares people. That just tells me they're preparing for the worst."
As indeed they are. The militia's second mission, protecting local citizens, requires no invitation from the likes of the sheriff. An officer named Ken, who asked that his last name and hometown go unmentioned, says, "You can be a civilized human being and defend yourself without being a bad guy." Against what? "Most likely it will start when the government tries to take our guns," he says.
Craig Wright, 50, a consulting engineer from Mansfield, was one of the face-painted raiders who ambushed the Blue Team's rear-perimeter guards. He learned something important, he says, when he went drinking with fellow members of force Red. "Some of these people are, quite honestly, quite scary," he said. "They might not be well educated, they might not listen to Beethoven, but they can take care of themselves."
And that is what Wright is looking for.
"We're not planning to overthrow the government," he said. "We're planning for what could happen." He proceeded to list, among other scenarios, a pandemic; economic collapse; hunger-driven big-city refugees; a biological, chemical or nuclear terrorist attack; an electromagnetic pulse from the sun that wrecks earthly machinery; invasion by Mexican drug cartels; and an eruption of ash from Yellowstone that "wipes out the breadbasket of the United States." Any one of those would likely give Washington the excuse to declare martial law. If so, Wright and his brothers in arms would fight back. "Hopefully," he said, "if they rule the cities, we'll rule the countryside." (Read "A Brief History of Civil War Reenactment.")
This is a frame of mind that law-enforcement and counterterrorism officials have seen before, and it worries them. "There are a number of militias out there that we call almost defensive in nature, right?" a senior national-security official says. "So they train. They're pulling in arms or pulling in weapons. They're pulling in food. They're preparing bunkers ... They're preparing for confrontation, but they will call it defensive." The official paused as if to play out a scene in his mind's eye. A well-equipped paramilitary force with "a perception of being confronted would strike out and strike out pretty hard," he says. "For a small or even a medium-size law-enforcement agency — anybody, really — there would be some serious, serious issues."
War on the Feds
On the sidelines of the disparate antigovernment movement, its philosophers are edging their followers closer to violence.
Bob Schulz, a leading exponent of the view that the IRS and much of the government it funds are operating illegally, has reached the brink of calling for war. The moment is significant because he is an influential voice among militia groups.
After more than a decade of conventional legal battles, Schulz and a network of allies organized by the We the People Foundation began filing hundreds of petitions for redress of grievances. Schulz had come to believe that the First Amendment's petition clause required governors, legislatures and federal agencies to provide specific and satisfactory answers to accusations of wrongdoing. He filled government dockets with thousands of questions — one petition, for instance, asked the IRS to "admit or deny" 116 allegations of fraud in the 1913 debate that ratified the 16th Amendment. When his petitions went ignored and the Supreme Court declined to hear his case in 2007, he wrote a formal brief accusing the court of "committing treason to the Constitution." The IRS, meanwhile, revoked his foundation's tax-exempt status, alleging that he used it to promote an illegal "tax termination plan" and bringing tax-evasion charges against some of the people who followed Schulz's advice.
See the top 10 tax dodgers.
Read "American Discontent: Why Washington Is Tied Up in Knots."
Last year Schulz convened hundreds of delegates to a second Continental Congress in St. Charles, Ill., drafting Articles of Freedom with "instructions" that state and federal governments halt unlawful operations. Refusal to comply would be "an act of WAR," the delegates wrote, and "the People and their Militias have the Right and Duty to repel it." Several militia leaders are among the authors.
Then, in November and March, Schulz staged vigils at the White House in which he and some of his followers dressed in the mask of the menacing "V" from the film V for Vendetta. (In the movie's final scene, the oppressive seat of government erupts in spectacular flames to the swelling strains of the 1812 Overture.) "If the First Amendment doesn't work," Schulz says, "the Second Amendment would." He asks, "What does a free man do" when all other avenues are closed? "I am struggling with my conscience."
Regardless of what conscience tells them, what chance do would-be armed rebels possibly have of prevailing against the armed might of the U.S.?
One answer comes from former Alabama militia leader Mike Vanderboegh, who wrote an essay that is among the most widely republished on antigovernment extremist sites today. In "What Good Is a Handgun Against an Army?" Vanderboegh says the tactical question is easy: Kill the enemy one soldier at a time. A patriot needs only a "cheap little pistol and the guts to use it," he writes, to shoot a soldier in the head and take his rifle; with a friend, such a man will soon have "a truck full of arms and ammunition." Vanderboegh is hardly a man of action himself, living these days on government disability checks. Even so, when he wrote a blog post in March urging followers to protest the health care bill by breaking windows at Democratic Party offices, they did so across the country. (Read "The War Over Patriotism.")
Another answer comes from Richard Mack, who is holding constitutional seminars for county sheriffs from coast to coast, urging them to resist what he describes as federal tyranny by force. In his presentations, he shows movie clips to illustrate his point, like a scene from The Patriot in which Mel Gibson says, with fire in his eyes, "You will obey my command, or I will have you shot."
Citing a long list of antecedents, beginning in 11th century England, Mack asserts that each of the nation's county sheriffs is the supreme constitutional authority in his or her jurisdiction. A sheriff has the power to arrest and, if necessary, use lethal force against federal officers who come uninvited, and he may "call out the militia to support his efforts to keep the peace in the county."
In his term as sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, Mack became famous for fighting and winning a legal battle against a provision of the Brady Bill that required him to enforce federal gun-control laws. He now says he wishes he had stayed out of court and simply drawn a line in the sand with the ATF. "I pray for the day when the first county sheriff has the guts to arrest the real enemy," he says. Among the enemy, he numbers "America's gestapo," the IRS. Steve Kendley, a Lake County, Montana, deputy sheriff who is running for the top office there on Mack's platform, says he expects federal agents to back off when threatened with arrest, but he is prepared for "a violent conflict" if "they are doing something I believe is unconstitutional." (See TIME's photo-essay "Profiles of 'Open Carry' Gun-Law Advocates.")
The nearest antecedent to Mack's argument, and the only one known to scholars interviewed for this story, is the Blue Book of the Posse Comitatus, by white-supremacist militia leader Henry Lamont Beach, whose organization disintegrated after leading members were convicted of felonies or killed in 1983 during shoot-outs in Arkansas and North Dakota with federal marshals and uncooperative sheriffs. Beach used nearly identical language, saying the county is "the highest authority of government in our Republic" and the sheriff "the only legal law-enforcement office." After TIME emailed Mack extracts of Beach's book, he replied that it "sounds exactly like Jefferson."
Beware the Lone Wolf
Federal law-enforcement agencies want no part of a conversation about angry antigovernment extremists and refused in virtually every case to speak on the record. A few injudicious passages from career analysts at the DHS in an April 2009 report titled "Rightwing Extremism" — which could be misread to suggest danger from ordinary antigovernment opinions or military veterans in general — brought a ferocious backlash. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano distanced herself from the report and forbade further public discussion of the subject. Shortly afterward, the National Security Council staff canceled plans for a working-group meeting on the surge of violent threats against members of Congress.
Yet the months that followed brought fresh support for the study's central finding, that rising "rightwing radicalization and recruitment" raised the risk that lone wolves would emerge from within the groups to commit "violent acts targeting government facilities, law-enforcement officers, banks and infrastructure sectors."
Within 90 days came the Von Brunn shooting; a triple murder of police officers in Pittsburgh by white supremacist Richard Andrew Poplawski; and a double murder of sheriff's deputies in Florida by a National Guardsman, Joshua Cartwright, who attributed his rage to Obama's election.
The specter of the lone-wolf terrorist is what most worries law-enforcement officials, who return again and again to the searing example of Timothy McVeigh. Before destroying the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, McVeigh cycled through several white-supremacist groups and militias. In the end he decided to act alone, abetted by his friend Terry Nichols.
A top FBI counterterrorism official says the bureau's "biggest concern" is "the individual who has done the training, has the capability but is disenchanted with the group's action — or in many cases, inaction — and decides he's going to act alone." A high-ranking DHS official added that "it's almost impossible to find that needle in a haystack," even if the FBI has an informant in the group. James Cavanaugh, who recently retired from a senior post at the ATF and took part in some of the bloodiest confrontations with the radical right in the 1990s, says the creation of monsters in their midst is the greatest danger posed by organized groups.
The ceaseless talk of federal aggression — and regular training to repel it — "becomes a hysteria where you constantly, constantly practice and nothing happens," he says. "Now most of them wouldn't go out offensively, O.K.? But generally why they're dangerous is that some people can't stand that rhetoric and just wait for it to happen. And they go off the rails, à la McVeigh."
TIME By Barton Gellman
At nightfall the raiders launched their attack. Short, sharp bursts from their M-16s cut down the perimeter guards. Once past the rear gate, the raiders fanned out and emptied clip after clip in a barrage of diversionary fire. As defenders rushed to repel the small team, the main assault force struck from the opposite flank. Red Team 1 burst through a chain-link fence, enveloping the defense in lethal cross fire. The shooting was over in minutes. Thick grenade smoke bloomed over the command post. The defenders were routed, headquarters ablaze. (Watch TIME's video "Homeland Security Tradeshow.")
This August weekend of grueling mock combat, which left some of the men prostrate and bloody-booted, capped a yearlong training regimen of the Ohio Defense Force, a private militia that claims 300 active members statewide. The fighters shot blanks, the better to learn to maneuver in squads, but they buy live ammunition in bulk. Their training — no game, they stress — expends thousands of rounds a year from a bring-your-own armory of deer rifles, assault weapons and, when the owner turns up, a belt-fed M-60 machine gun. The militia trains for ambushes, sniper missions, close-quarters battle and other infantry staples.
What distinguishes groups like this one from a shooting club or re-enactment society is the prospect of actual bloodshed, which many Ohio Defense Force members see as real. Their unit seal depicts a man with a musket and tricorn hat, over the motto "Today's Minutemen." The symbol invites a question, Who are today's redcoats? On that point, the group takes no official position, but many of those interviewed over two days of recent training in and around the abandoned Roseville State Prison near Zanesville voiced grim suspicions about President Obama and the federal government in general. (See Obama's troubled first year.)
"I don't know who the redcoats are," says Brian Vandersall, 37, who designed the exercise and tried to tamp down talk of politics among the men. "It could be U.N. troops. It could be federal troops. It could be Blackwater, which was used in Katrina. It could be Mexican troops who are crossing the border."
Or it could be, as it was for this year's exercise, an Islamic army marauding unchecked because a hypothetical pro-Muslim President has ordered U.S. forces to leave them alone. But as the drill played out, the designated opponents bore little resemblance to terrorists. The scenario described them as a platoon-size unit, in uniform, with "military-grade hardware, communications, encryption capability and vehicle support." The militia was training for combat against the spitting image of a tactical force from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), FBI or National Guard. "Whoever they are," Vandersall says, "we have to be ready."
As militias go, the Ohio Defense Force is on the moderate side. Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement agencies and outside watchdogs. A six-month TIME investigation reveals that recruiting, planning, training and explicit calls for a shooting war are on the rise, as are criminal investigations by the FBI and state authorities. Readier for bloodshed than at any time since at least the confrontations in the 1990s in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, the radical right has raised the threat level against the President and other government targets. With violence already up on a modest scale, FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and state agencies point to two main dangers of a mass-casualty attack: that a group of armed radicals will strike out in perceived self-defense, or that a lone wolf, trained and indoctrinated for war, will grow tired of waiting. Even the most outspoken militia commanders worry about the latter scenario. Kevin Terrell, a self-described colonel who founded a group of "freedom fighters" in Kentucky and predicts war with "the jackbooted thugs" of Washington within a year, says he has to fend off hotheads who call him a "keyboard commando." Some are ejected from his group, he says, and others are willing to wait a little longer. "You have to have the right fuel-air mixture, the piston has to be in the right position, the spark has to be perfectly timed," he says. "The day will come — sooner than later."
Twisted Patriots
Within a complex web of ideologies, most of today's armed radicals are linked by self-described Patriot beliefs, which emphasize resistance to tyranny by force of arms and reject the idea that elections can fix what ails the country. Among the most common convictions is that the Second Amendment — the right to keep and bear arms — is the Constitution's cornerstone, because only a well-armed populace can enforce its rights. Any form of gun regulation, therefore, is a sure sign of intent to crush other freedoms. The federal government is often said in militia circles to have made wholesale seizures of power, at times by subterfuge. A leading grievance holds that the 16th Amendment, which authorizes the federal income tax, was ratified through fraud. (Read "America's New Patriotism.")
In a reversal of casting, the armed antigovernment movement describes itself as heir to the founders. As they see it, the union that the founders created is now a foreign tyrant. "It's like waking up behind enemy lines," says Terrell. He says he smelled a setup when the FBI arrested nine members of Michigan's Hutaree militia in March and charged them with plotting to kill police. (Their trial is set to begin in February.) Terrell and other leaders put their forces on alert, anticipating a roundup. "There was a lot of citizens out there in the bushes, locked and loaded," he says. "It's only due to miracles I do not understand that civil war did not break out right there."
Some groups, though not many overtly, embrace the white-supremacist legacy of the Posse Comitatus, which invented the modern militia movement in the 1970s. Some are fueled by a violent stream of millennial Christianity. Some believe Washington is a secondary foe, the agent of a dystopian new world order.
Read "The Threat from the Patriot Movement."
See "Five Great Reads on Patriotism."
A small but growing number of these extremist groups, according to the FBI, ATF and state investigators, are subjects of active criminal investigations. They include militias and other promoters of armed confrontation with government, among them "common-law jurors," who try to make their own arrests and convene their own trials, and "sovereign citizens," who respond with lethal force to routine encounters with the law. In April, for example, Navy veteran Walter Fitzpatrick, acting on behalf of a group called American Grand Jury, barged into a Tennessee courthouse and tried to arrest the real grand-jury foreman on the grounds that he refused to indict Obama for treason. In May, Georgia militia member Darren Huff was arrested by Tennessee state troopers after telling them that he and other armed men intended to "take over the Monroe County courthouse," free Fitzpatrick and "conduct arrests" of other officials, according to Huff's indictment and his own account in an interview posted online. Investigators are keeping a wary eye on a related trend, which has yet to progress beyond words, in which law officers and military service members vow to refuse or resist orders they deem unconstitutional. About a dozen county sheriffs and several candidates for sheriff in the midterm elections have threatened to arrest federal agents in their jurisdictions.
Group distinctions are seldom clear because of overlapping memberships and alliances. The Ohio exercise, for example, included a delegation from the 17th Special Operations Group led by Colonel Dick Wolf, a former Army drill sergeant who previously took a unit to join Arizona militia leader Chris Simcox in armed patrols along the Mexican border. Wolf travels around the country to train other groups in such skills as knife fighting and convoy operations. He does not ask about their philosophies. "That's their business," he says.
The Obama Factor
None of these movements are entirely new, but most were in sharp decline by the late 1990s. Their resurgence now is widely seen among government and academic experts as a reaction to the tectonic shifts in American politics that allowed a black man with a foreign-sounding name and a Muslim-born father to reach the White House. (See pictures of Muslim in America.)
Obama's ascendancy unhinged the radical right, offering a unified target to competing camps of racial, nativist and religious animus. Even Patriots who had no truck with white supremacy found that they could amplify their antigovernment message by "constructing Obama as an alien, not of this country, insufficiently American," according to Michael Waltman, an authority on hate speech at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Perennial features of extreme-right scare lore — including imagined schemes to declare martial law, abolish private ownership of guns and force dissidents into FEMA concentration camps — became more potent with Obama as the Commander in Chief.
Threats against Obama's life brought him Secret Service protection in May 2007, by far the earliest on record for a presidential candidate. At least four alleged assassination plots between June and December — by militiamen in Pennsylvania, white supremacists in Denver, skinheads in Tennessee and an active-duty Marine lance corporal at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune — led to arrests and criminal charges before Obama was even sworn in.
"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." (See the top 10 inept terrorist plots.)
The Supremacist
One such man was James Von Brunn. On June 10, 2009, he pulled up to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, raised a .22-caliber rifle and shot security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns in the chest. Part of Von Brunn's story is now well known, but police, FBI and Secret Service investigators held back a startling epilogue.
Von Brunn was an avowed white supremacist with a history of violence that reached back decades. He had spent six years in prison after an attempt to take hostages at the Federal Reserve in 1981. After finding only disappointment in organized groups, Von Brunn retreated to his website and railed against passive comrades. "The American Right-wing with few exceptions ... does NOTHING BUT TALK," he wrote. At 88 and hospitalized with a gunshot wound he suffered at the museum, Von Brunn did not loom large in the public eye as a figure of menace. He was profiled as a shrunken old man, broke and friendless, who ended another man's life in an empty act of despair. He died seven months later in prison before he could be tried.
What authorities did not disclose was how close the country had come to a seismic political event. Von Brunn, authoritative sources say, had another target in mind: White House senior adviser David Axelrod, a man at the center of Obama's circle. The President was too hard to reach, in Von Brunn's view, but that was of no consequence. "Obama was created by Jews," he wrote. "Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do."
See the top 10 crime stories of 2009.
Read "How Obama's Enemies May Give Him a Boost."
The episode sent a jolt through the FBI and DHS. Von Brunn had demonstrated motive, means and intent to kill one of the President's closest aides. The Secret Service assigned Axelrod a protection detail and took other, undisclosed steps to broaden its coverage. The DHS put out bulletins to state and local law-enforcement agencies on the tactics, warning signs and other lessons of the case. FBI agents need to understand, a senior supervisor says, that "it isn't just the threat from Islamic extremists but also from homegrown or domestic terrorists" with antigovernment agendas — as the bureau had already seen in a small town in Maine.
The Dirty Bomber
The first thing Jeff Trafton noticed at 346 High Street was a "big swastika flag in the living room." Upstairs, where a man lay dead in his bedroom, there were photographs of the victim posed in a black Gestapo trench coat. Any murder was unusual in Belfast, Maine, a town of 7,000 where Trafton is chief of police. This one kept getting stranger. (See the top 25 crimes of the century.)
Who did it was not a mystery. Amber Cummings, then 31, shot her husband James, 29, to death, dropped the Colt .45 revolver and walked to a neighbor's to dial 911. Evidence of her torment at the dead man's hands during years of domestic abuse would later persuade a judge to spare her a prison sentence. (Comment on this story.)
On the day of the shooting, Dec. 9, 2008, the story she told and an initial search of the house brought an FBI forensic team running. James Cummings appeared to have accumulated explosive ingredients and radioactive samples. He had filled out an application to join the National Socialist Movement and declared an ambition to kill the President-elect.
It was hard to tell how seriously to take that threat. On Jan. 19, 2009, WikiLeaks made public the FBI search inventory, which was distributed to security planners for Obama's Inauguration. State police assured reporters, in response, that the Cummings home lab had posed no threat to public safety. (Watch TIME"s video "WikiLeaks Founder on History's Top Leaks.")
A much more sobering picture emerged from the dead man's handwritten notes and printed records, some of which were recently made available to TIME. Fresh interviews with principals in the case, together with the documents, depict a viciously angry and resourceful man who had procured most of the supplies for a crude radiological dispersal device and made some progress in sketching a workable design. In this he was far ahead of Jose Padilla, the accused al-Qaeda dirty-bomb plotter, and more advanced in his efforts than any previously known domestic threat involving a dirty bomb. Cummings spent many months winning the confidence of online suppliers, using a variety of cover stories, PayPal accounts and shipping addresses. He had a $2 million real estate inheritance and spent it freely on his plot.
"He was very clever," says Amber Cummings, who until now had not spoken publicly about her late husband's preparations. "There's a small amount of radioactive material he can legally buy for research purposes. He'd call those companies, and he had various stories. He'd claim he was working as a professor."
On Nov. 4, 2008 — Election Day — Cummings placed his last two orders for uranium, at a total cost of $626.40, from United Nuclear Scientific Equipment & Supplies. The Michigan-based company, which declined to answer questions, offers uranium for sale online in "medium, high, super high and ultra high radiation" blends. In an ironic twist on customer service, United Nuclear wrote with regret to inform Cummings that one of the samples he ordered that day "was already purchased by Homeland Security for training purposes." By way of apology, the company sent a larger quantity, in two chunks.
A vendor in Colorado sold Cummings radioactive beryllium. Cummings produced a third radiation source at home. From standard references and technical manuals, Cummings learned how to extract thorium from commercially available tungsten electrodes by soaking them in a peroxide bath.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, all three metals — uranium, thorium and beryllium — are highly toxic when ingested and cause cancer if inhaled as fine airborne particles. Cummings had none of them in large quantity, and none had the high output of gamma rays that would make for the most dangerous kind of dirty bomb, but he was looking for more-lethal ingredients. A shopping list, under the heading "best for dirty bombs," named three: cobalt-60, cesium-137 and strontium-90. (See pictures of the Times Square car-bomb scare.)
Cummings made his best progress on high explosives. He bought large quantities of 3% hydrogen peroxide, which is commonly sold in pharmacies, then concentrated it on his kitchen stove to 35%. With acids on hand, Cummings had a recipe and all the required ingredients for TATP, a hellishly energetic explosive favored by Middle Eastern suicide bombers.
In 2001, when shoe bomber Richard Reid came close to downing American Airlines Flight 63, he had several ounces of TATP in his hiking boots. Cummings had the ingredients to make many times that much, as well as aluminum powder, thermite, thermite igniter and other materials used to detonate the explosive and amplify its effects. Crude designs Cummings sketched on lined paper suggest that he had a lot to learn about efficient dispersal of radioactive particles. Even so, he was aware of the gaps in his knowledge. "His intentions were to construct a dirty bomb and take it to Washington to kill President Obama," Amber Cummings says. "He was planning to hide it in the undercarriage of our motor home." She says her husband had practiced crossing checkpoints with dangerous materials aboard, taking her and their daughter along for an image of innocence.
Maine state police detective Michael McFadden, who participated in the investigation throughout, says he came to believe that James Cummings posed "a legitimate threat" of a major terrorist attack. "When you're cooking thorium and uranium under your kitchen sink, when you have a couple million dollars sitting in the bank and you're hell-bent on doing something, I think at that point you become someone we want to sit up and pay attention to," he says. "If she didn't do what she did, maybe we would know Mr. Cummings a lot better than we do right now."
See pictures of crime in Middle America.
Read "How Should America Try Terror Suspects?"
Who Would They Fight?
The abandoned state prison in Roseville, with its broken cinder-block walls and crumbling stairwells, made a suitably apocalyptic set for the Ohio militia's August exercise. In the officers' ready room, where back issues of Shotgun News and Soldier of Fortune lay on folding tables, an ancient graffito reading "KKK" had been painted over by one of Kenneth Goldsmith's men. "The Klan in this area, they don't like me at all," Goldsmith says. "They came to me a few years ago to join forces ... I told the guy, 'You think you are from a superior race, is that it?' He said yes. I said, 'You don't look so superior to me.' "
Members of militias around the country say, like Goldsmith, that they resent comparison with white supremacists like Cummings and Von Brunn. They complain of being tarred as members of hate groups by watchdogs at the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. "I can't tell you how much I enjoy being lumped in with sociopathic organizations like neo-Nazis, antiabortion extremists and Holocaust-denial groups," says Darren Wilburn, a private detective in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., who trains with a hard-core militia he preferred not to name. He cites his motto, "Life, liberty and the pursuit of anyone who threatens it," as evidence that he is not looking for trouble as long as trouble keeps clear of him.
The same two points — a defensive posture and ill will toward no one — were repeated with sincerity by many of Goldsmith's men. There were layers of meaning beneath those words, which peeled back as the weekend progressed. The Ohio Defense Force charter declares two missions, which may sound the same to outside ears but mean very different things. One is to help state and local law enforcement upon request. The other is to "assist in the protection of local citizens in emergencies."
An example of the first mission, the most recent one Goldsmith could think of, came after flooding struck Columbiana County six years ago. Chief Deputy Sheriff Allen Haueter says the militia helped direct traffic, leaving sheriff's officers free to respond to emergencies. But Haueter did not authorize them — "Oh, no, no," he says — to carry guns. They could as easily have done the job garbed as candy stripers. (See pictures of America's gun culture.)
Why, then, the paramilitary training that takes up nearly all the militia's time? That question bothers Sheriff Matt Lutz of Muskingum County, where the militia is headquartered. "There is no correlation with them saying they're there to help us in any way and them running around with assault rifles in the woods," he says. "That's what scares people. That just tells me they're preparing for the worst."
As indeed they are. The militia's second mission, protecting local citizens, requires no invitation from the likes of the sheriff. An officer named Ken, who asked that his last name and hometown go unmentioned, says, "You can be a civilized human being and defend yourself without being a bad guy." Against what? "Most likely it will start when the government tries to take our guns," he says.
Craig Wright, 50, a consulting engineer from Mansfield, was one of the face-painted raiders who ambushed the Blue Team's rear-perimeter guards. He learned something important, he says, when he went drinking with fellow members of force Red. "Some of these people are, quite honestly, quite scary," he said. "They might not be well educated, they might not listen to Beethoven, but they can take care of themselves."
And that is what Wright is looking for.
"We're not planning to overthrow the government," he said. "We're planning for what could happen." He proceeded to list, among other scenarios, a pandemic; economic collapse; hunger-driven big-city refugees; a biological, chemical or nuclear terrorist attack; an electromagnetic pulse from the sun that wrecks earthly machinery; invasion by Mexican drug cartels; and an eruption of ash from Yellowstone that "wipes out the breadbasket of the United States." Any one of those would likely give Washington the excuse to declare martial law. If so, Wright and his brothers in arms would fight back. "Hopefully," he said, "if they rule the cities, we'll rule the countryside." (Read "A Brief History of Civil War Reenactment.")
This is a frame of mind that law-enforcement and counterterrorism officials have seen before, and it worries them. "There are a number of militias out there that we call almost defensive in nature, right?" a senior national-security official says. "So they train. They're pulling in arms or pulling in weapons. They're pulling in food. They're preparing bunkers ... They're preparing for confrontation, but they will call it defensive." The official paused as if to play out a scene in his mind's eye. A well-equipped paramilitary force with "a perception of being confronted would strike out and strike out pretty hard," he says. "For a small or even a medium-size law-enforcement agency — anybody, really — there would be some serious, serious issues."
War on the Feds
On the sidelines of the disparate antigovernment movement, its philosophers are edging their followers closer to violence.
Bob Schulz, a leading exponent of the view that the IRS and much of the government it funds are operating illegally, has reached the brink of calling for war. The moment is significant because he is an influential voice among militia groups.
After more than a decade of conventional legal battles, Schulz and a network of allies organized by the We the People Foundation began filing hundreds of petitions for redress of grievances. Schulz had come to believe that the First Amendment's petition clause required governors, legislatures and federal agencies to provide specific and satisfactory answers to accusations of wrongdoing. He filled government dockets with thousands of questions — one petition, for instance, asked the IRS to "admit or deny" 116 allegations of fraud in the 1913 debate that ratified the 16th Amendment. When his petitions went ignored and the Supreme Court declined to hear his case in 2007, he wrote a formal brief accusing the court of "committing treason to the Constitution." The IRS, meanwhile, revoked his foundation's tax-exempt status, alleging that he used it to promote an illegal "tax termination plan" and bringing tax-evasion charges against some of the people who followed Schulz's advice.
See the top 10 tax dodgers.
Read "American Discontent: Why Washington Is Tied Up in Knots."
Last year Schulz convened hundreds of delegates to a second Continental Congress in St. Charles, Ill., drafting Articles of Freedom with "instructions" that state and federal governments halt unlawful operations. Refusal to comply would be "an act of WAR," the delegates wrote, and "the People and their Militias have the Right and Duty to repel it." Several militia leaders are among the authors.
Then, in November and March, Schulz staged vigils at the White House in which he and some of his followers dressed in the mask of the menacing "V" from the film V for Vendetta. (In the movie's final scene, the oppressive seat of government erupts in spectacular flames to the swelling strains of the 1812 Overture.) "If the First Amendment doesn't work," Schulz says, "the Second Amendment would." He asks, "What does a free man do" when all other avenues are closed? "I am struggling with my conscience."
Regardless of what conscience tells them, what chance do would-be armed rebels possibly have of prevailing against the armed might of the U.S.?
One answer comes from former Alabama militia leader Mike Vanderboegh, who wrote an essay that is among the most widely republished on antigovernment extremist sites today. In "What Good Is a Handgun Against an Army?" Vanderboegh says the tactical question is easy: Kill the enemy one soldier at a time. A patriot needs only a "cheap little pistol and the guts to use it," he writes, to shoot a soldier in the head and take his rifle; with a friend, such a man will soon have "a truck full of arms and ammunition." Vanderboegh is hardly a man of action himself, living these days on government disability checks. Even so, when he wrote a blog post in March urging followers to protest the health care bill by breaking windows at Democratic Party offices, they did so across the country. (Read "The War Over Patriotism.")
Another answer comes from Richard Mack, who is holding constitutional seminars for county sheriffs from coast to coast, urging them to resist what he describes as federal tyranny by force. In his presentations, he shows movie clips to illustrate his point, like a scene from The Patriot in which Mel Gibson says, with fire in his eyes, "You will obey my command, or I will have you shot."
Citing a long list of antecedents, beginning in 11th century England, Mack asserts that each of the nation's county sheriffs is the supreme constitutional authority in his or her jurisdiction. A sheriff has the power to arrest and, if necessary, use lethal force against federal officers who come uninvited, and he may "call out the militia to support his efforts to keep the peace in the county."
In his term as sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, Mack became famous for fighting and winning a legal battle against a provision of the Brady Bill that required him to enforce federal gun-control laws. He now says he wishes he had stayed out of court and simply drawn a line in the sand with the ATF. "I pray for the day when the first county sheriff has the guts to arrest the real enemy," he says. Among the enemy, he numbers "America's gestapo," the IRS. Steve Kendley, a Lake County, Montana, deputy sheriff who is running for the top office there on Mack's platform, says he expects federal agents to back off when threatened with arrest, but he is prepared for "a violent conflict" if "they are doing something I believe is unconstitutional." (See TIME's photo-essay "Profiles of 'Open Carry' Gun-Law Advocates.")
The nearest antecedent to Mack's argument, and the only one known to scholars interviewed for this story, is the Blue Book of the Posse Comitatus, by white-supremacist militia leader Henry Lamont Beach, whose organization disintegrated after leading members were convicted of felonies or killed in 1983 during shoot-outs in Arkansas and North Dakota with federal marshals and uncooperative sheriffs. Beach used nearly identical language, saying the county is "the highest authority of government in our Republic" and the sheriff "the only legal law-enforcement office." After TIME emailed Mack extracts of Beach's book, he replied that it "sounds exactly like Jefferson."
Beware the Lone Wolf
Federal law-enforcement agencies want no part of a conversation about angry antigovernment extremists and refused in virtually every case to speak on the record. A few injudicious passages from career analysts at the DHS in an April 2009 report titled "Rightwing Extremism" — which could be misread to suggest danger from ordinary antigovernment opinions or military veterans in general — brought a ferocious backlash. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano distanced herself from the report and forbade further public discussion of the subject. Shortly afterward, the National Security Council staff canceled plans for a working-group meeting on the surge of violent threats against members of Congress.
Yet the months that followed brought fresh support for the study's central finding, that rising "rightwing radicalization and recruitment" raised the risk that lone wolves would emerge from within the groups to commit "violent acts targeting government facilities, law-enforcement officers, banks and infrastructure sectors."
Within 90 days came the Von Brunn shooting; a triple murder of police officers in Pittsburgh by white supremacist Richard Andrew Poplawski; and a double murder of sheriff's deputies in Florida by a National Guardsman, Joshua Cartwright, who attributed his rage to Obama's election.
The specter of the lone-wolf terrorist is what most worries law-enforcement officials, who return again and again to the searing example of Timothy McVeigh. Before destroying the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, McVeigh cycled through several white-supremacist groups and militias. In the end he decided to act alone, abetted by his friend Terry Nichols.
A top FBI counterterrorism official says the bureau's "biggest concern" is "the individual who has done the training, has the capability but is disenchanted with the group's action — or in many cases, inaction — and decides he's going to act alone." A high-ranking DHS official added that "it's almost impossible to find that needle in a haystack," even if the FBI has an informant in the group. James Cavanaugh, who recently retired from a senior post at the ATF and took part in some of the bloodiest confrontations with the radical right in the 1990s, says the creation of monsters in their midst is the greatest danger posed by organized groups.
The ceaseless talk of federal aggression — and regular training to repel it — "becomes a hysteria where you constantly, constantly practice and nothing happens," he says. "Now most of them wouldn't go out offensively, O.K.? But generally why they're dangerous is that some people can't stand that rhetoric and just wait for it to happen. And they go off the rails, à la McVeigh."
TIME By Barton Gellman
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)