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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, fringe militia organizations are recasting themselves as neighborhood watch groups. But old ways die hard.
Jul 4, 2002 | It was a small, obscure militia called Project 7, and according to local investigators, its members were stockpiling weapons and plotting mass murder as part of a plan to make Flathead County, Mont., the flash point for world revolution.
First, they would murder local police, judges and prosecutors. When the National Guard came in, they would kill as many troops as they could. When the U.S. government turned to NATO for help, they would take up arms against the forces of the New World Order.
When the alleged plot was discovered and David Burgert, a 38-year-old ex-Marine who owns a sports rental business, was arrested as the mastermind in February, many Montanans were exasperated that their state was in the news yet again as a haven of violent extremists and far-right paranoia. But what set the Project 7 case apart was the angry response from others in the self-styled patriot movement.
"This guy Burgert in Kalispell, this guy is just a miscreant, a little weenie evildoer," says militia icon James "Bo" Gritz, a former Green Beret. "People who know him say that he's just a talker, but Tim McVeigh might have been a talker ... If they're gonna talk like they're gonna break the law, it's like the Montana Freemen were putting up reward posters for public officials, 'Wanted Dead or Alive.' By gosh, you can't do that."
Though in decline since the deadly Oklahoma City terrorist bombing in April 1995, militias have been enjoying a quiet upsurge since Sept. 11. While they have tried in recent years to reposition themselves as a force on local political and environmental issues, militia leaders say the attacks and the Bush administration's war on terrorism have created a new audience for their worldview and new customers for their security training and survival gear.
"Our role, I think, has been more clearly defined now with the threat of foreign terrorism," says Norm Olson, who founded the Michigan Militia, one of the nation's largest, in 1994.
Militia watchdog groups agree that Sept. 11 led to an increase in such activity. "I do believe there's an upswing in interest in militia and anti-government groups," says Brian Goldberg, Pacific Northwest regional director for the Anti-Defamation League. "Whether that translates into an upswing in action we're still ascertaining." With citizens wondering after Sept. 11 if the government is capable of protecting them, Goldberg says, the militias may be emerging from their post-Oklahoma City exile to assume a revised role.
Exactly what that role will be is, as yet, uncertain. Some of the bigger, old-line militias have shifted their focus since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They're focused more on battling terrorism, and less on warring with their own government. But they still harbor deep suspicion for the United Nations, the U.S. government and various suspected agents of the New World Order -- suspicions compounded by the new intelligence-gathering powers given to the FBI and CIA.
Other groups, however, are marketing themselves almost as neighborhood-watch organizations -- opposed to violence, open to all, even willing in some cases to work with the federal government. But coming at such a sensitive time, leaders fear that the Project 7 bust was a setback in the effort to mainstream the militias.
Some who track the groups say the shift may be genuine, or at least partly so. "The central theme of the militia movement had been that the government had been stolen by secret elites and needed to be cleaned up," says Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, a nonprofit organization in Boston that studies right-wing groups. "But a lot of these folks come out of a military background, and I think there was a conflicting set of loyalties after 9/11. For some militia leaders, this attack on U.S. soil so horrified them that they shifted."
That analysis leaves Montana state Sen. Ken Toole, program director of the Montana Human Rights Network, skeptical. In his view, Project 7's alleged assassination plot shows how conspiracy theories still permeate the militia movement -- and how their paranoid threats can turn real. Like others here, he is skeptical about the militia leaders who disavow Burgert and wonders whether the Project 7 leader was in fact conspiring with similar groups in other Montana counties.
"In terms of their worldview -- the U.N., the international conspiracies -- they're very closely aligned," Toole says. Burgert's "idea that they were going to kill a few cops, then kill a few national guardsmen, then have the Chinese army come over from Canada -- all of that is stuff you read pretty regularly in the militia propaganda mill."
Indeed, the movement's own statements reveal their internal contradictions. The Michigan Militia has tried to reject the violent, racist, homophobic image that used to distinguish the movement. Visitors to its Web site are greeted by a message proclaiming that the militia doesn't care "what race you are, what ethnic group you belong to, what your sex or gender is, what your sexual preference is, what your political beliefs are, or what your religious beliefs (or non-beliefs) are."
Olson echoes the sentiment. But when asked how the homeland-defense program is different from the old training, he replies: "We used to shoot at U.N. flags, but now we shoot at Middle Eastern rag-head terrorists."
The comment suggests that, even as they try to reinvent themselves, some of the militia groups maintain the character that makes outsiders uneasy.
