Federal agents arrested four suspected members of a Georgia militia on charges of plotting attacks with toxins and explosives against unnamed government officials. The four – all over 65 years old – who authorities arrested on Tuesday, were expected to appear in federal court in Gainesville on Wednesday afternoon.

Court documents state that 73-year-old Frederick Thomas told others he intended to model their actions on the online novel Absolved, which involves small groups of citizens attacking U.S. officials.

Thomas is part of a group that also tried to obtain an unregistered explosive device and sought out the complex formula to produce ricin, a biological toxin that can be lethal in small doses, according to a federal complaint.

The four listed in the indictment are Thomas; Dan Roberts, 67; Ray Adams, 65; and Samuel Crump, 68. The men live in the north Georgia towns of Cleveland and Toccoa. On September 17, prosecutors say Crump was recorded by a confidential informant as saying he would like to make ten pounds of ricin, which would be simultaneously placed in several U.S. cities. The group had been talking about ‘covert’ operations since at least March, according to court records, discussing murder, theft and using toxic agents and assassinations to undermine the state and federal government.

Thomas is accused of driving to Atlanta with a confidential informant on May 24 and scoping out an Internal Revenue Service building there and an ATF building ‘to plan and assess for possible attacks’, the indictment states.

At a meeting in April, Thomas said the ‘civilian government operatives’ the militia members would be targeting included police officers and members of federal law enforcement groups, such as the IRS and FBI, the affidavit said.

‘I could shoot ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] and IRS all day long,’ Thomas said, according to the affidavit. ‘All the judges and the DOJ [Justice Department], and the attorneys and prosecutors.’

Thomas is accused of driving to Atlanta with a confidential informant on May 24 and scoping out an Internal Revenue Service building there and an ATF building ‘to plan and assess for possible attacks’, the indictment states. ‘We’d have to blow the whole building, like Timothy McVeigh,’ Thomas said during the Atlanta trip, referring to the man executed for bombing a federal building in Oklahoma City, the indictment states.

To the Chinese immigrants he recruited, Yupeng Deng was known as Supreme Commander. He offered them United States Army uniforms, conducted training exercises on Sundays, led marches in municipal parades and promised a path toward American citizenship.

The uniforms were real, but Mr. Deng’s U.S. Army/Military Special Forces Reserve unit was a sham, the authorities said.

On Wednesday, Mr. Deng, 51, was arraigned in Los Angeles County Court on 13 felony charges related to the fake military operation, which concentrated on Chinese immigrants, eager to become American citizens, in the San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles.

More than 100 immigrants paid upwards of $300 to join the bogus unit, the authorities said, and $120 to renew their memberships each year. In addition, recruits could increase their rank with additional cash donations to Mr. Deng, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, which is prosecuting the case.

To entice recruits, Mr. Deng also set up an office decorated to look like a real military recruiting office. Once they had paid, he provided gear bought from army surplus stores and identification cards made to look like military ID’s, which Mr. Deng said they could use to get out of traffic tickets, said Laura Eimiller, a public affairs specialist with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Los Angeles.

Despite its lack of affiliation with the Army, the unit became a well-known presence in the San Gabriel Valley. The group has marched in city parades in Monterey Park for the last two years, and also took a tour of the U.S.S. Midway Museum in San Diego, dressed in military uniforms.

At the extreme right wing of Dominion Theology is a relatively obscure theological movement that Mike Bray found particularly appealing: Reconstruction Theology, whose exponents long to create a Christian theocratic state. Bray had studied their writings extensively and possessed a shelf of books written by Reconstruction authors. The convicted anti-abortion killer Paul Hill cited Reconstruction theologians in his own writings and once studied with a founder of the movement, Greg Bahnsen, at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi.

Rev. Paul Hill, Rev. Michael Bray, and other Reconstructionists—along with Dominion theologians such as the American politician and television host Pat Robertson and many other right-wing Christian activists today—are postmillenialists. Hence they believe that a Christian kingdom must be established on Earth before Christ’s return. They take seriously the idea of a Christian society and a form of religious politics that will make biblical code the law of the United States.

These activists are quite serious about bringing Christian politics into power. Bray said that it is possible, under the right conditions, for a Christian revolution to sweep across the United States and bring in its wake Constitutional changes that would allow for biblical law to be the basis of social legislation. Failing that, Bray envisaged a new federalism that would allow individual states to experiment with religious politics on their own. When I asked Bray what state might be ready for such an experiment, he hesitated and then suggested Louisiana and Mississippi, or, he added, “maybe one of the Dakotas.”

Read the full article at Religion Dispatches

Not-guilty pleas were entered Wednesday in federal court in Detroit on behalf of eight militia members accused of plotting to kill police officers as part of a revolt against the federal government.

“This is not about militias or a group of militias, but about a group conspiring against the U.S. who have shared beliefs that the New World Order elitists are in charge and seek to have one world government and is working with the U.S. government,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ronald Waterstreet said in his opening statement. “Any law enforcement officer is a foot soldier for the New World Order.”

None of the eight defendants spoke during the proceeding. The seven men wore orange jumpsuits and the lone woman a green jumpsuit; the legs of each were shackled. Each stood silently next to their court-appointed attorneys as the judge entered pleas of not guilty on their behalf.

A ninth person, Thomas Piatek, 46, of Whiting, Indiana, is being held in Indiana. Most were arrested over the weekend; one was arrested Monday night.

[Read more at CNN]

“Captain Hutaree,” his wife and two sons planned with other militia members to kill a law enforcement official to draw the officer’s colleagues to the funeral, authorities say. Then, according to an indictment unsealed Monday, the militia planned to attack the funeral procession to kick off its war against the U.S. government.

Members of the Hutaree militia — whose Web site says it is preparing for end times to “keep the testimony of Jesus Christ alive” — have been indicted on five counts, including seditious conspiracy and attempting to use weapons of mass destruction.

Federal authorities allege militia members had declared war against law enforcement and “foot soldiers” of the federal government. They had conducted “military-style training” in Lenawee County, Michigan, about 35 miles northwest of Toledo, Ohio, since 2008, the indictment said.

The group’s leader, David Brian Stone — aka “Joe Stonewall” or “Captain Hutaree” — allegedly planned to kill a law enforcement officer to instigate a war against the U.S. government.

“As a consequence of this act, law enforcement officers from throughout the nation would be drawn to and gather in the Eastern District of Michigan for the funeral,” the indictment said. “According to the plan, the Hutaree would then attack law enforcement vehicles during the funeral procession with improvised explosive devices with explosively formed projectiles.”…

[continues at CNN]

Buford Furrow, a former member of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations who has been living with the widow of slain terrorist leader Bob Mathews, strides into a Jewish community center near Los Angeles and fires more than 70 bullets, wounding three boys, a teenage girl and a woman. He then drives into the San Fernando Valley and murders Filipino-American mailman Joseph Ileto. The next day, Furrow turns himself in, saying he intended to send “a wake-up call to America to kill Jews.”

Read More on the The Southern Poverty Law Center website

Norman Olson is the founder of the Michigan Militia, the most famous/notorious/we-think-maybe-oldest? group of the early-90s citizens’ militia movement. If you’re too young to remember, that was this thing where guys in camouflage got together to train with their guns and guys with cameras pretended they were scary and racist.

The movement hit a speed bump when it got blamed for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and Norm Olson didn’t do much good for his own group when he tried to pass the blame to the Japanese—an idea which, if you subscribe to certain theories concerning the earlier sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo subway and the responsible doomsday cult’s alleged connections to the Japanese Imperial Family, makes a limited sort of sense, but otherwise sounds like the craziest of all possible answers. With faith already shaken in his leadership, Norm then hitched the Militia’s wagon to fears over that Y2K thing and by February 2000 the group was essentially defunct.