US 'Christian militants' charged after FBI raids

Nine alleged members of a radical US Christian militia group have been charged with conspiring to kill police officers and wage war against the US. The suspects were detained in a series of FBI raids across the Mid-West, while one remains at large.

Prosecutors say the eight men and one woman belonged to the Hutaree group. It is alleged they planned to kill a police officer in Michigan and then stage a second attack on the funeral, using landmines and roadside bombs.

The FBI raided properties in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana over the weekend in the belief that the group was planning a reconnaissance exercise.

"The indictment... outlines an insidious plan by anti-government extremists to murder a law enforcement officer in order to lure police from across the nation to the funeral where they would be attacked with explosive devices," said Attorney General Eric Holder. "Thankfully, this alleged plot has been thwarted and a severe blow has been dealt to a dangerous organisation that today stands accused of conspiring to levy war against the United States."

A website in the name of the group shows video footage of military-style training exercises and describes Hutaree as "Christian warriors". It is edited to a backing track of rock music. A statement on the website says the group are preparing to defend themselves upon the arrival of the Antichrist. The website says Hutaree is "preparing for the end time battles to keep the testimony of Jesus Christ alive".

In the indictment, Hutaree is described as an "anti-government extremist organisation" advocating violence against the police.

BBC

FBI shuts down Czech neo-Nazi group web site

Blood and Honour operated on American server

The FBI has shut down a Web site operated by a Czech neo-Nazi group for having terrorist content, Hospodářské noviny wrote on Wednesday.

Czech police had been trying for years to convince the U.S. authorities to shut down the Web site. Until now, they had had no success, due to America's liberal communications laws.

"Due to the freedom of speech laws, these Web sites are not considered to be illegal in the United States," said František Valeš who monitors the sites for the Czech Helsinki Committee.

European neo-Nazi groups often post their Web sites on servers in the United States and other countries where media laws are more liberal. In Europe, Nazi propaganda is against the law. Now, however, the Czech branch of the neo-Nazi group Blood and Honour has made it onto the FBI's list of terrorist organizations, and the FBI has shut down the site.

Blood and Honour is an international neo-Nazi organization founded in the 1980s in London by Ian Stuart Donaldson, the lead singer of the skinhead band Screwdriver. Its aim, in addition to disseminating Nazi propaganda, is to make money to fund the movement through concerts and CDs.

"There were instructions on the manufacture of weapons and links to Combat 18," said the Karel Kuchařík, the head of the Czech police section on criminal communications. Combat 18 is the militant wing of the movement; the numbers refer to the initials of Adolf Hitler.

"We repeatedly asked the American police to give us information about the Web site administrators," Kuchačík said, adding that the Czechs found out the site had been blocked during routine monitoring – Americans had not bothered to inform them of the measure.

Czech police arrested the leaders of the Blood and Honour movement in 1999, and Jaroslav Brož, the head of the Plzeň branch was sentenced to four years in jail for distributing hate propaganda.

The FBI shut down the Polish Blood and Honour Web site two years ago.

The Prague Post

Hatewatch for the week of January 30th 2008

Man Indicted On Federal Conspiracy Charges For Displaying Noose
Jeremiah Munsen, 18, and a juvenile member of the Ku Klux Klan allegedly conspired in criminal threats and harassment by attaching nooses to pick-up trucks and then repeatedly driving past civil rights marchers gathered at a bus depot last September...

Bombmaker Suspected Of Targeting Synagogues
A man with an arsenal of weapons in his apartment who was arrested for making pipe bombs confessed to scrawling swastikas on synagogues in his neighborhood, police said...

FBI Investigates Mormon Seminary Vandalism
The FBI considers anti-Mormon graffiti spray-painted outside a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seminary building to be a hate crime...

Accused Cross Burners Charged With Hate Crimes
Two white men who allegedly burned a cross on a black family's lawn last November were charged with criminal mischief as a hate crime in addition to aggravated harassment and arson...

Hatewatch

Neo-nazi threatmaker Hal Turner accused of working for FBI

New Jersey radio host Hal Turner is well known as one of the most vicious neo-Nazis in America, a man who routinely suggests killing his enemies.

Railing against President Bush, he told his audience last June that “a well-placed bullet can solve a lot of problems.” He has written that “we need to start SHOOTING AND KILLING Mexicans as they cross the border” and argued that killing certain federal judges “may be illegal, but it wouldn’t be wrong.” In 2006, after he published an attack on New Jersey Supreme Court justices that also included several of their home addresses, state police massively beefed up security for the members of the court, checking on one justice’s house more than 200 times.

Hal Turner is a serious extremist. He may also be on the FBI payroll.

On Jan. 1, unidentified hackers electronically confronted Turner in the forum of his website for “The Hal Turner Show.” After a heated exchange, they told Turner that they had successfully hacked into his server and found correspondence with an FBI agent who is apparently Turner’s handler. Then they posted an alleged July 7 E-mail to the agent in which Turner hands over a message from someone who sent in a death threat against Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.). “Once again,” Turner writes to his handler, “my fierce rhetoric has served to flush out a possible crazy.” In what is allegedly a portion of another E-mail, Turner discusses the money he is paid.

On Thursday, as the E-mail exchange was heatedly discussed on a major neo-Nazi website, Turner suddenly announced he was quitting political work. “I hereby separate from the ‘pro-White’ movement,” he said, adding that he was ending his radio show immediately. “I will no longer involve myself in any aspect of it.”

The FBI declined comment. “Longstanding FBI policy prohibits disclosing who may or may not provide information,” Agent Richard Kolko of the agency’s press unit said. Reached in New Jersey, Turner also declined all comment.

The apparent revelation set off a torrent of criticism from experts in criminology and the use of informants. “This is clearly over the line,” said James Nolan, an associate sociology professor at West Virginia University who is an expert in police procedure and a former unit chief in the FBI’s Crime Analysis, Research and Development Unit. “Informants may be involved in drugs, and you overlook that because of the greater good. However, these are viable threats — they could be carried out — that the FBI clearly knows about. I want to see the FBI stop it.”

Informants, of course, are commonly used by law enforcement agencies that have no other way of proving suspected criminal activity. “These are frightening groups whose members deserve to be investigated and infiltrated,” said Jack Levin, a criminology professor and expert on the radical right at Northeastern University. “My concern is that Turner’s methods actually are more dangerous and destructive than the evil they are seeking to cure. His threatening messages may actually inspire neo-Nazis to up the ante, to engage in even more destructive behavior.”

Turner, 45, has developed a reputation as one of the hardest-line racists on the radical right since starting up his radio show seven years ago. He has routinely ranted about such things as a “Portable Nigger Lyncher” machine and slimed those he hates as “savage Negro beasts,” “bull-dyke lesbians,” “faggots” and worse.

But it is his threats that are legendary.

In 2006, Turner told his audience to “clean your guns, have plenty of ammunition … [and] then do what has to be done” to undocumented workers. Around the same time, he suggested that half the U.S. Congress “may have to be assassinated.” A year earlier, he suggested “drawing up lists of yeshivas,” or Jewish religious schools. He once started a website called www.killtheenemy.com for the purpose of posting photos and names of those who marched in favor of immigrant rights. Hearing that anti-racist activist Floyd Cochran was visiting Newark, N.J., last June, Turner said he had “arranged for a group of guys to physically intercept” Cochran and added that Cochran would likely “get such a beating that his next stop is going to be University Hospital.” In a July letter, Turner wrote to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which publishes the Intelligence Report: “If you do not change your stance soon, you will face a wrath of fury that you will never be able to defend yourself against. We have the ability to reach out and touch someone.”

Last July, Turner posted photographs of a pro-immigrant activist being taken away by an ambulance outside Turner’s North Bergen home. “Click the images below to see how I kicked the shit out of one such douchebag,” he wrote.

Reaction on the radical right to the apparent revelation was mixed, as activists tried to figure out if Turner really was an informant. But to many, there was little question it was Turner, based on the style of writing in the E-mails. “It does sound like Hal,” wrote “Varg” on the Vanguard News Network, a neo-Nazi website. “I agree,” responded “Yankee Jim.” “The Email definitely sounds like Hal.”

Turner’s alleged E-mail to his FBI handler is also addressed to a detective sergeant with the New Jersey State Police who trained with the FBI Police Executive Fellowship Program in 2004. Interestingly, as long ago as May 2006, Turner wrote of a visit paid to him by the two men, saying they had come to his house to warn him that “Washington has instructed us to close you down.” In that same posting on his website, Turner described himself as the type to inspire “a whole slew of potential Timothy McVeighs. I don’t make bombs,” he added, “I make bombers.”

“It’s become so routine,” Turner said of FBI visits in a 2005 interview with The (Hackensack, N.J.) Record, “they are like my private FBI agents.”

Hatewatch

FBI used mafia capo to find bodies of Ku Klux Klan victims

The FBI recruited a mafia enforcer to help solve the slaying of three civil rights workers by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in the 1960s, according to evidence provided in Brooklyn state court by a mobster's moll. In the 1988 film Mississippi Burning that recreated the events, the case was broken when the FBI brought in a black agent to put the frighteners on a Ku Klux Klan member.

But Linda Schiro told the court it was her boyfriend, Gregory Scarpa, who had kidnapped a klansman, put a gun in his mouth and forced him to reveal the spot where the three had been buried. The FBI until that point had been engaged in a fruitless search for the civil rights workers, facing silence from the klansmen and the white community in general.

James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were beaten and shot by a gang of white supremacist klansmen and buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia. Rumours about the involvement of Scarpa have circulated for years and a report appeared in the New York Daily News a decade ago based on federal sources but this is the first time the claim has surfaced in open court.

Scarpa, who Ms Schiro said had boasted of involvement in 20 killings and was nicknamed the Grim Reaper, had been a capo in the Colombo crime family. He died in jail in 1994. The Mississippi case attracted a lot of political and media attention. Scarpa, according to Schiro, "said that [the FBI director J Edgar] Hoover at the time was getting a lot of pressure about the bodies, where they were."

Schiro, who met Scarpa in a bar in 1962 when she was 17, said she had flown with him to Mississippi in 1964. They walked into a hotel in Neshoba county where the FBI based itself during the investigation and he had winked at the agents. Minutes later, an agent had turned up in their room and handed Scarpa a gun.

"Greg changed his clothes - he left some money on the dresser - and he told me if he didn't come back, to take a cab to the airport and just go home."

He later told her he had kidnapped a salesman, a local klansman, catching him off guard by helping him carry a television to a car. "He put a gun in the guy's mouth. You know, he threatened the guy," she said. "He told him where the bodies were."

After Scarpa returned to the hotel, she said an agent gave him a wad of cash and took back the gun. She was surprised when she first learned he was working for the FBI. "I said, 'What do you mean, you're a rat?' And he said, 'No, I just work for them'."

Schiro is the star witness in the trial of a former FBI agent, Lindley DeVecchio, who is accused of providing confidential information that led to four murders. The prosecution claims that Scarpa gave DeVecchio money, jewellery, alcohol, prostitutes and a Cabbage Patch doll in return for inside information about informants and rivals.

Guardian

Back from the dead and facing life - trial recalls horrors of the Klan

Ex-policeman, 71, accused of 1964 race killings
Victim's brother traced suspect said to be dead

Thomas Moore is looking forward to finally coming face-to-face with James Ford Seale, a Ku Klux Klansman who came back from the dead. "I want to look at him," he said. "I want to tell him about the pain he caused me and my family."

Mr Moore, 63, a retired sergeant-major, recalled the day he found out that Mr Seale was still alive. "I was so happy. We thought he was dead - and so did everyone else."

The trial opens here today of Mr Seale, 71, a former worker in a paper plant, crop-duster and policeman, accused of kidnapping and conspiracy in relation to the murder of two black teenagers in 1964, one of them Mr Moore's brother. According to the indictment, the two 19-year-olds, Charles Moore and Henry Dee, were kidnapped by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, tortured and dumped in the Mississippi, Moore tied to a jeep engine block, and, according to an FBI informant at the time, still breathing.

The killings marked the beginning of a summer of madness, as the KKK responded to the civil rights movement with the fiery crosses, church bombings and murders depicted in Alan Parker's 1989 film Mississippi Burning.

The Seale prosecution could be among the last of the KKK trials. Although the justice department has promised to re-open cases, witnesses are dying off and files have been lost.

Now living in Colorado, Mr Moore had been brought up in Franklin County, one of the strongholds of the White Knights. He returned in 2005 with a Canadian film-maker, David Ridgen, to investigate the murders. Pulling up at a petrol station for an egg and sausage sandwich, he met by chance a distant cousin, Kenny Byrd.

Mr Moore explained why they were there and said it was a pity that Mr Seale, who had been one of the main suspects, was dead. His family had been saying so since 2000. The local Clarion-Ledger had reported it as fact: so too had the Los Angeles Times. Mr Byrd replied: "Hell no, he lives over there."

Mr Moore traced lost files, spoke to potential witnesses, harassed former Klansmen, mobilised the African-American community and successfully campaigned to have the FBI re-open the case.

Mr Seale is expected to plead not guilty in a trial expected to last about a fortnight. If found guilty, he faces life sentences.

Mississippi is different these days, at least on the surface. It is evident to anyone arriving at the airport at Jackson, now called Jackson-Evers International in recognition of the civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in 1963. It is evident, too, in the fact that the judge who will try the case is African-American, Henry Wingate.

But Heidi Beirich, deputy director of intelligence at a Jackson-based civil rights group, the Southern Poverty Law Centre, which investigates hate crimes, cautioned that although the KKK and institutionalised racism is mainly a thing of the past, Mississippi still has problems. She noted that when the state voted in 2002 to retain the Confederate flag, a symbol of hate for African-Americans, the divide was on racial grounds. African-Americans in the state continue to live in the poorest areas, with the worst schools.

"As far as the Klan is concerned, its heyday is definitely in the past. It hit its peak in the 1920s at 4 million. The number of Klansmen is way down: we estimate 5,000-6,000. It is not a cohesive organisation any longer: it is fragmented. They are no longer capable of the kind of terror they rained down on the South in the 1950s and 1960s," Ms Beirich said.

But the sense of dread inspired by the KKK has not gone completely. Ridgen, who put together a documentary Mississippi Cold Case, said: "The psychological threat was always there. There was fear every time in Franklin County. We never took the same route. We never told anyone in advance about coming."

At the trial, the key witness is likely to be a former Klansman, Charles Edwards, a suspect at the time, who is expected to give evidence against Mr Seale in return for immunity. Former FBI agents who carried out a fairly thorough investigation at the time are also scheduled to testify. After their investigation in 1964, they handed the case over to the local justice department who, as was not unusual at the time, quickly dropped it.

No real explanation has been given for the killings. Klansmen at the time told the FBI that Mr Dee had been peeping at one of their wives while others alleged gun smuggling into a black church. The indictment suggests otherwise: "The White Knights ... targeted for violence African-Americans they believed were involved in civil rights activity in order to intimidate and retaliate against such individuals."

Mr Dee's sister, Thelma Collins, who now lives in Louisiana, said yesterday she could not remember him being involved in any civil rights activity. "He was quiet, never said much," she recalled. She is saddened that the case has taken 43 years to come to court: "It is pitiful that those boys were killed and no one did anything about it."

Like Mrs Collins, Mr Moore will be given his chance to make a victim's statement in court. He said: "I want to tell how it is to go without a brother, my son without an uncle, how Charles never had the opportunity to make mistakes, to live his life."

Backstory

The reopening of racist murder cases from the 1960s in the South began in 1990 when a white supremacist, Byron La Beckwith, was indicted and eventually jailed for the assassination in 1963 of Medgar Evers, then chairman in Mississippi of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This encouraged the FBI and local justice departments to look again at unsolved cases. Since then, there have been six prosecutions in Mississippi, including Mr Seale's today. Authorities in seven states have re-examined a total of 29 killings and made 29 arrests, leading to 22 convictions.

One of the most prominent was the trial and jailing in 2001 of Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry for the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls. The revulsion created by the bombing helped turn public opinion behind the civil rights movement. In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, 80, was jailed for the murder of the three civil rights activists depicted in Mississippi Burning. But the reality is that there may not be many more cases brought to court: elderly witnesses are dying off and records of crimes have been lost.

Guardian