By now, I think everyone has fully catalogued the multitude of ways in which Katrina will change everything.
Ornery contrarian that I am, I’ve become pretty convinced that Katrina will change nothing
(except, well, New Orleans, Gulfport, etc.) in the long term.
That said, the strongest candidate for Katrina Makeover so far has been: The media.
The rise of a “new,” “adversarial” media is the most viral meta-meme making the rounds.
I predict it’ll be dead before New Orleans is dry. I’ll explain why, but first, a quick survey:

New York magazine: “In many ways, [Anderson] Cooper and [Brian] Williams defined a fork in the road for the future of broadcast journalism.”

The New York Times (9/5/05): “CNN…and National Public Radio…both found their voices amidst the chaos.”

The New York Times (“Reporters Turn From Deference To Outrage” 9/5/05): ”…it is clear that television is having a major mood swing.”

USA Today “Katrina Rekindles Adversarial Media” (9/5/05): “Reporters covering Hurricane Katrina on the scene showed their human — and often angry and frustrated — face as they questioned the slow response over the weekend…
“Says Fordham University communications professor Paul Levinson, ‘The media rose to the occasion, shone their light on the desolation and the needy, and kept it focused there until the cavalry finally began to arrive.’

”…some observers say that Katrina’s media legacy may be a return to a post-Watergate-like era of tougher scrutiny of the federal government and public policy issues.

”’If any good comes from the catastrophe, it will be that it signaled the beginning of the media’s reassertion of aggressive, in-your-face reporting, in which it confronts government wrongdoing, rather than just swallowing the government’s public-relations handouts,’ Levinson says.”

USA Today (also Peter Johnson, but later in the day): ”…experts and journalists predict that mounting questions about U.S. government preparation, policies and response to Hurricane Katrina will result in intense news coverage for months.
“Katrina ‘doesn’t just have legs, it has tentacles,’ says Bob Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. ‘Its implications reach into hot-button controversies involving race, poverty, economics and partisan politics. The reach of this story will make the O.J. Simpson case look like a news brief.’”

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (9/6/05): ”…reporters and anchors have been asking tough questions in combative and even angry tones.”

SF Indymedia (9/6/05): “Not for decades has there been such merciless questioning of the president and his administration by the U.S. media.”

Reuters (9/7/05): “American TV reporters and newscasters are covering Hurricane Katrina and problem-plagued relief efforts with a sense of outrage and antagonism many thought had long gone out of fashion in broadcast journalism.”

Chicago Tribune “A Cronkite Moment in the Gulf Story” (9/9/05): ”…we might be witnessing something no one thought was possible in this age. This may be a Cronkite Moment.”

Boston Phoenix (9/9/05): ”…it took a hurricane to wake up the press, raise the issue of race and class, and redefine the political landscape.
“Hurricane Katrina did not simply destroy physical infrastructure, social fabric, and countless lives on America’s Gulf Coast. It blew away the ground rules that had defined post-9/11 American politics and protected the most polarizing administration in recent history…
“All the elements that George W. Bush and Karl Rove had exploited for political gain — a timid and kowtowing mainstream media, a deafening silence about America’s growing underclass, the fear that criticizing the White House in the era of Al Qaeda was tantamount to treason, and Bush’s can-do, cowboy image — were shattered by the same winds and rains that savaged casinos in Biloxi and homes in Jefferson Parish.”

USA Today (9/11/05): “ABC News executive Paul Slavin [says] ‘Katrina has uncovered grave weaknesses in this country’s ability to handle a crisis, and we need to make sure we hold officials accountable and investigate as best we can both what happened and what might happen.’”

Salon even posted a “Reporters Gone Wild” compilation reel.

So, what does the post-Katrina news media look like?
In condensed form, the storyline goes like this: Their “timid and kowtowing” nature “shattered” by Katrina,
the “rekindled” media are “asking tough questions,”
shining “their light on the desolation and the needy”
with “merciless questioning of the president and his administration”
in “a return to a post-Watergate-like era of tougher scrutiny of the federal government and public policy issues”
“with a sense of outrage and antagonism many thought had long gone out of fashion” and “aggressive, in-your-face reporting,
in which it confronts government wrongdoing;” “something no one thought was possible in this age…a Cronkite moment,” complete with “reporters gone wild.”

Wow. That’s amazing.
And indicative of a grave misunderstanding of some elemental forces that shape news media’s editorial judgment.
This mistake about the media will, very quickly, come to be seen just as ironically as we now consider the post-9/11 obituaries for irony itself.
Katrina became a media storm for a very simple reason:
Its sheer magnitude overwhelmed the fundamentally flawed media levee known by the misnomer of “objectivity.”
My personal theory is that Watergate, rather than inspiring investigative journalism, inspired a generation of people who became journalists not to challenge power, but to gain the fame that comes with journalism’s podium.
Look past the headlines of the stories I’ve posted above, and you’ll see in them the seeds for the return of old-time, useless “journalism.”

Here are a couple important points SF Indymedia made, though I think the author missed the meaning of the former:

“Never before, say some observers, have US reporters been so emotionally involved in a story to the point of being enraged.”
“They are not just telling a story, they have become part of it.”

”’Has Katrina saved the US media,?’ asked BBC reporter Matt Wells who sees the shift in tone as a potentially historic development.
“A number of US journalists who cover federal politics, especially television presenters, had become part of the political establishment, says Wells.
”’They live in the same suburbs, go to the same parties. Their television companies are owned by large conglomerates who contribute to election campaigns.’
“It’s a ‘perfect recipe’ for fearful, self-censoring reportage, he says, but thinks ‘since last week, that’s all over’.”

No, it’s not. And the reason is that after Katrina, the same reporters who were emotionally engaged, and outraged, will return to their desks and their bureaus. And their suburbs. And their parties.

The emotional root of The New Adversarialism is just one reason it will be short-lived; such high-pitched feelings can’t and won’t last (and shouldn’t: Journalists who really cared about Katrina’s victims would have wept less afterward and done more boring, public-policy stories beforehand). Nikki Finke in the LA Weekly attributes the death of The New Adversarialism to corporate politics. But even more profoundly at work here is the dynamic of how the media engage not with emotion but with the nature of reality itself.
Yes, this was the first time many of these reporters and journalists saw such conditions on U.S. soil, but the reason that translated into outrage had to do not with emotion, but fact and objectivity.
This was the first story in which a critical mass of high-level, decision-making media were on the ground to witness X and have government officials tell them to their face ”-X.”

On Friday Sept. 23rd, in a massive Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.)
operation in the town of Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, Filiberto Ojeda Rios,
leader of the clandestine revolutionary organization called El Ejercito
Popular Boricua-Macheteros (The Popular Boricua Army-Machete Wielders) was
assassinated by an FBI sniper.

During the ensuing gun battle, Beatriz Rosado Barbosa, Ojeda Rios’ wife, was
critically wounded and then arrested, along with an F.B.I. agent. Both are
presently hospitalized, and a third man has yet to be identified by
authorities.

This assassination is an attack against the Puerto Rican Independence
movement that cannot go unanswered!! We must mobilize and organize a
response to this heinous act of murder. Ojeda Rios represented the
revolutionary spirit and morality of the Puerto Rican independence
movement!!

The FBI chose to assassinate Ojeda Rios on Friday Sept. 23rd (Known as El
Grito de Lares, a celebration of the anti-colonial resistance movement in
Puerto Rico) as a message to the independence movement; the US government is
trying to tell us that if we resist, then we will be murdered like Ojeda
Rios, Don Pedro Albizu Campos, Angel Rodrgiuez Cristobal and the many other
Puerto Rican patriots that have fallen at the hands of the US governement.

We will not be scared or initmidated. The power of the people cannot be
stopped!! We make freedom happen; we make liberation happen!!

WE WILL RISE, RESIST AND REBEL!!
Join us in our outrage, mourning and resistance!!
Wear a black arm band or wear ALL black…

MOBILIZE IN THE SPIRIT OF FILIBERTO!!

¡¡FILIBERTO OJEDA RIOS PRESENTE!!
¡¡FILIBERTO VIVE, LA LUCHA SIGUE!!

***************************
YOU CAN MURDER A LIBERATOR, BUT YOU CAN’T MURDER LIBERATION

Project Censored presents the 10 stories the mainstream media ignored over the past year
Just four days before the 2004 presidential election, a prestigious British medical journal
published the results of a rigorous study by Dr. Les Roberts, a widely respected researcher.
Roberts concluded that close to 100,000 people had died in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
But that news didn’t make the front pages of the major newspapers.
It wasn’t on the network news.
So most voters knew little or nothing
about the brutal civilian impact of President George W. Bush’s war when they went to the polls.
That’s just one of the big stories the mainstream news media ignored,
blacked out or underreported during the past year, according to Project Censored,
a media watchdog group based at California’s Sonoma State University.
Every year, project researchers scour the media looking for news that never really made the news,
publishing the results in a book, this year titled Censored 2006.
Of course, as Project Censored staffers painstakingly explain every year,
their “censored” stories aren’t literally censored, per se. Most can be found on the Internet if you know where to look.
And some have even received some ink in the mainstream press.
“Censorship,”
explains project director Peter Phillips, “is any interference with the free flow of information in society.”
The stories highlighted by Project Censored simply haven’t received the kind of attention they warrant,
and therefore haven’t made it into the greater public consciousness.
“If there were a real democratic press, these are the kind of stories they would do,”
says Sut Jhally, professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts
and executive director of the Media Education Foundation.
The stories the researchers identify involve corporate misdeeds and governmental abuses
that have been underreported if not altogether ignored, says Jhally,
who helped judge Project Censored’s top picks.
For the most part, he adds, “stories that affect the powerful don’t get reported by the corporate media.”
Can a story really be “censored” in the Internet age,
when information from millions of sources whips around the world in a matter of seconds?
When a single obscure journal article can be distributed and discussed on hundreds of blogs and Web sites?
When partisans from all sides dissect the mainstream media on the Web every day? Absolutely, says Jhally.
“The Internet is a great place to go if you already know that the mainstream media is heavily biased”
and you actively search out sites on the outer limits of the Web, he notes.
“Otherwise, it’s just another place where they try to sell you stuff.”
“The challenge for a democratic society is how to get vital information not only at the margins but at the center of our culture.”

This list should not be taken as gospel;
not every article or source Project Censored has cited over the years is completely credible;
But most of the stories that made the project’s Top 10 were published by more reliable sources and included only verifiable information.
And Project Censored’s overall findings provide valuable insights into the kinds of issues the mainstream media should be paying closer attention to.

1. Bush Administration Moves to Eliminate Open Government

While the Bush administration has expanded its ability to keep tabs on civilians, it’s been working to make sure the public – and even Congress – can’t find out what the government is doing.
One year ago, Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., released an 81-page analysis of how the administration has administered the country’s major open government laws. His report found that the feds consistently “narrowed the scope and application” of the Freedom of Information Act, the Presidential Records Act and other key public-information legislation, while expanding laws blocking access to certain records – even creating new categories of “protected” information and exempting entire departments from public scrutiny.
When those methods haven’t been enough, the Bush administration has simply refused to release records – even when the requester was a congressional subcommittee or the Government Accountability Office, the study found. A few of the potentially incriminating documents Bush and co. have refused to hand over to their colleagues on Capitol Hill include records of contacts between large energy companies and Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force; White House memos pertaining to Saddam Hussein’s, shall we say, “elusive” weapons of mass destruction; and reports describing torture at Abu Ghraib.
The report’s findings were so dramatic as to indicate “an unprecedented assault on the laws that make our government open and accountable,” Waxman said at a Sept. 14, 2004, press conference announcing the report’s release.
Given the news media’s intrinsic interest in safeguarding open-government laws, one would think it would be plenty motivated to publicize such findings far and wide. However, most Americans remain oblivious to just how much more secretive – and autocratic – our leaders in the White House have become.

2. Media Coverage Fails on Iraq: Fallujah and the Civilian Death Toll

Decades from now, the civilized world may well look back on the assaults on Fallujah in April and November 2004 and point to them as examples of the United States’ and Britain’s utter disregard for the most basic wartime rules of engagement.
Not long after the “coalition” had embarked on its second offensive, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour called for an investigation into whether the Americans and their allies had engaged in “the deliberate targeting of civilians, indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, the killing of injured persons, and the use of human shields,” among other possible “grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions … considered war crimes” under federal law.
More than 83 percent of Fallujah’s 300,000 residents fled the city, Mary Trotochaud and Rick McDowell, staffers with the American Friends Service Committee, reported in AFSC’s Peacework magazine. Men between the ages of 15 and 45 were refused safe passage, and all who remained – about 50,000 – were treated as enemy combatants, according to the article.
Numerous sources reported that coalition forces cut off water and electricity, seized the main hospital, shot at anyone who ventured out into the open, executed families waving white flags while trying to swim across the Euphrates or otherwise flee the city, shot at ambulances, raided homes and killed people who didn’t understand English, rolled over injured people with tanks, and allowed corpses to rot in the streets and be eaten by dogs.
Medical staff and others reported seeing people, dead and alive, with melted faces and limbs, injuries consistent with the use of phosphorous bombs.
But you wouldn’t know any of this unless you’d come across a rare report by one of an even rarer number of independent journalists – or known which obscure Web site to log onto for real information.
Of course, the media blackout extends far beyond Fallujah.
The U.S. military’s refusal to keep an Iraqi death count has been mirrored by the mainstream media, which systematically dodges the question of how many Iraqi civilians have been killed.
Les Roberts, an investigator with the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, conducted a rigorous inquiry into pre- and post-invasion mortality in Iraq, sneaking into Iraq by lying flat on the bed of an SUV and training observers on the scene. The results were published in the Lancet, a prestigious peer-reviewed British medical journal, on Oct. 29, 2004 – just four days prior to the U.S. presidential elections. Roberts and his team (including researchers from Columbia University and from Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad) concluded that “the death toll associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq is probably about 100,000 people, and may be much higher.”
The vast majority of those deaths resulted from violence – particularly aerial bombardments – and more than half of the fatalities were women or children, they found.
The State Department had relied heavily on studies by Roberts in the past. And when Roberts, using similar techniques, calculated in 2000 that about 1.7 million had died in the Congo as the result of almost two years of armed conflict, the news media picked up the story; the United Nations more than doubled its request for aid for the Congo, and the United States pledged an additional $10 million.
This time, silence – interrupted only by the occasional critique dismissing Roberts’s report. The major television news shows, Project Censored found, never mentioned it.

3. Another Year of Distorted Election Coverage

Last year, Project Censored foretold the potential for electoral wrongdoing in the 2004 presidential campaign: The “sale of electoral politics” made No. 6 in the list of 2003-04’s most underreported stories. The mainstream media had largely ignored the evidence that electronic voting machines were susceptible to tampering, as well as political alliances between the machines’ manufacturers and the Republican Party.
Then came Nov. 2, 2004.
Bush prevailed by 3 million votes – despite exit polls that clearly projected John Kerry winning by a margin of 5 million.
“Exit polls are highly accurate,” Steve Freeman, professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Organizational Dynamics, and Temple University statistician Josh Mitteldorf wrote in In These Times. “They remove most of the sources of potential polling error by identifying actual voters and asking them immediately afterward who they had voted for.”
The 8-million-vote discrepancy was well beyond the poll’s recognized, less-than-1-percent margin of error. And when Freeman and Mitteldorf analyzed the data collected by the two companies that conducted the polls, they found concrete evidence of potential fraud in the official count.
“Only in precincts that used old-fashioned, hand-counted paper ballots did the official count and the exit polls fall within the normal sampling margin of error,” they wrote. And “the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official count was considerably greater in the critical swing states.”
Inconsistencies were so much more marked in African-American communities as to renew calls for racial equity in our voting system. “It is now time to make counting that vote a right, not just casting it, before Jim Crow rides again in the next election,” wrote Rev. Jesse Jackson and Greg Palast in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

4. Surveillance Society Quietly Moves In

It’s a well-known dirty trick in the halls of government: If you want to pass unpopular legislation that you know won’t stand up to scrutiny, just wait until the public isn’t looking. That’s precisely what the Bush administration did Dec. 13, 2003, the day American troops captured Saddam Hussein.
Bush celebrated the occasion by privately signing into law the Intelligence Authorization Act – a controversial expansion of the PATRIOT Act that included items culled from the “Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003,” a draft proposal that had been shelved due to a public outcry after being leaked.
Specifically, the IAA allows the government to obtain an individual’s financial records without a court order. The law also makes it illegal for institutions to inform anyone that the government has requested those records, or that information has been shared with the authorities.
“The law also broadens the definition of ‘financial institution’ to include insurance companies, travel and real estate agencies, stockbrokers, the U.S. Postal Service, jewelry stores, casinos, airlines, car dealerships, and any other business ‘whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax or regulatory matters’” warned Nikki Swartz in the Information Management Journal. According to Swartz, the definition is now so broad that it could plausibly be used to access even school transcripts or medical records.
“In one fell swoop, this act has decimated our rights to privacy, due process, and freedom of speech,” wrote Anna Samson Miranda in an article for LiP magazine titled “Grave New World” that documented the ways in which the government already employs high tech, private industry, and everyday citizens as part of a vast web of surveillance.
Miranda warned, “If we are too busy, distracted, or apathetic to fight government and corporate surveillance and data collection, we will find ourselves unable to go anywhere – whether down the street for a cup of coffee or across the country for a protest – without being watched.”

5. U.S. Uses Tsunami to Military Advantage in Southeast Asia

The American people reacted to the tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean last December with an outpouring of compassion and private donations. Across the nation, neighbors got together to collect food, clothing, medicine and financial contributions. Schoolchildren completed class projects to help the cause.
Unfortunately, the U.S. government didn’t reflect the same level of altruism.
President Bush initially offered an embarrassingly low $15 million in aid. More important, Project Censored found that the U.S. government exploited the catastrophe to its own strategic advantage.
Establishing a stronger military presence in the area could help the United States keep closer tabs on China – which, thanks to its burgeoning economic and military muscle, has emerged as one of this country’s greatest potential rivals.
It could also fortify an important military launching ground and help consolidate control over potentially lucrative trade routes. The United States currently operates a base out of Diego Garcia – a former British mandate in the Chagos Archipelago (about halfway between Africa and Indonesia), but the lease runs out in 2016. The isle is also “remote and Washington is desperate for an alternative,” wrote veteran Indian journalist Rahul Bedi.
“Consequently, in the name of relief, the U.S. revived the Utapao military base in Thailand it had used during the Vietnam War (and) reactivated its military cooperation agreements with Thailand and the Visiting Forces Agreement with the Philippines,” Bedi reported.
Last February, the State Department mended broken ties with the notoriously vicious and corrupt Indonesian military – although human rights observers charged the military with withholding “food and other relief from civilians suspected of supporting the secessionist insurgency, the Free Aceh Movement,” Jim Lobe reported for the Inter Press Service.

6. The Real Oil-for-Food Scam

Last year, right-wingers in Congress began kicking up a fuss about how the United Nations had allegedly allowed Saddam Hussein to rake in $10 billion in illegal cash through the Oil for Food program. Headlines screamed scandal. New York Times’ columnist William Safire referred to the alleged U.N. con game as “the richest rip-off in world history.”
But those who knew how the program had been set up and run – and under whose watch – were not swayed.
The initial accusations were based on a General Accounting Office report released in April 2004 and were later bolstered by a more detailed report commissioned by the CIA.
According to the GAO, Hussein smuggled $6 billion worth of oil out of Iraq – most of it through the Persian Gulf. Yet the U.N. fleet charged with intercepting any such smugglers was under direct command of American officers, and consisted overwhelmingly of U.S. Navy ships. In 2001, for example, 90 of its vessels belonged to the United States, while Britain contributed only four, Joy Gordon wrote in a December article for Harper’s magazine.
Most of the oil that left Iraq by land did so through Jordan and Turkey – with the approval of the United States. The first Bush administration informally exempted Jordan from the ban on purchasing Iraqi oil – an arrangement that provided Hussein with $4.4 billion over 10 years, according to the CIA’s own findings. The United States later allowed Iraq to leak another $710 million worth of oil through Turkey – “all while U.S. planes enforcing no-fly zones flew overhead,” Gordon wrote.
Scott Ritter, a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq during the first six years of economic sanctions against the country, unearthed yet another scam: The United States allegedly allowed an oil company run by Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov’s sister to purchase cheap oil from Iraq and resell it to U.S. companies at market value – purportedly earning Hussein “hundreds of millions” more.
“It has been estimated that 80 percent of the oil illegally smuggled out of Iraq under ‘oil for food’ ended up in the United States,” Ritter wrote in the U.K. Independent.

7. Journalists Face Unprecedented Dangers to Life and Livelihood

Last year was the deadliest year for reporters since the International Federation of Journalists began keeping tabs in 1984. A total of 129 media workers lost their lives, and 49 of them – more than a third – were killed in Iraq.
In short, nonembedded journalists have now become familiar victims of U.S. military actions abroad.
“As far as anyone has yet proved, no commanding officer ever ordered a subordinate to fire on journalists as such,” wrote Steve Weissman in an update for Censored 2006. But what can be shown is a pattern of tacit complicity, side by side with a heavy-handed campaign to curb journalists’ right to roam freely.
The Pentagon has refused to implement basic safeguards to protect journalists who aren’t embedded with coalition forces, despite repeated requests by Reuters and media-advocacy organizations.
The U.S. military exonerated the Army of any wrongdoing in its now-infamous attack on the Palestine Hotel – which, as the Pentagon knew, functioned as headquarters for about 100 media workers – when coalition forces rolled into Baghdad on April 8, 2003.
To date, U.S. authorities have not disciplined a single officer or soldier involved in the killing of a journalist, according to Project Censored.
Meanwhile, the interim government the United States installed in Iraq raided and closed down Al-Jazeera’s Baghdad offices almost as soon as it took power and banned the network from doing any reporting in the country. In November, the interim government ordered news organizations to “stick to the government line on the U.S.-led offensive in Fallujah or face legal action,” in an official command sent out on interim prime minister Eyad Allawi’s letterhead and quoted in a November report by independent reporter Dahr Jamail.
And both American and interim government forces detained numerous journalists in and around Fallujah that month, holding them for days.

8. Iraqi Farmers Threatened by Bremer’s Mandates

Historians believe it was in the “fertile crescent” of Mesopotamia, where Iraq now lies, that humans first learned to farm. “It is here, in around 8500 or 8000 B.C., that mankind first domesticated wheat, here that agriculture was born,” wrote Jeremy Smith in the Ecologist. This entire time, “Iraqi farmers have been naturally selecting wheat varieties that work best with their climate … and cross-pollinated them with others with different strengths.
“The U.S., however, has decided that, despite 10,000 years practice, Iraqis don’t know what wheat works best in their own conditions.”
Smith was referring to Order 81, one of 100 directives penned by L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, and left as a legacy by the American government when it transferred operations to interim Iraqi authorities. The regulation sets criteria for the patenting of seeds that can only be met by multinational companies like Monsanto or Syngenta, and it grants the patent holder exclusive rights over every aspect of all plant products yielded by those seeds. Because of naturally occurring cross-pollination, the new scheme effectively launches a process whereby Iraqi farmers will soon have to purchase their seeds rather than using seeds saved from their own crops or bought at the local market.
Native varieties will be replaced by foreign – and genetically engineered – seeds, and Iraqi agriculture will become more vulnerable to disease as biological diversity is lost.
Texas A&M University, which brags that its agriculture program is a “world leader” in the use of biotechnology, has already embarked on a $107 million project to “re-educate” Iraqi farmers to grow industrial-sized harvests, for export, using American seeds. And anyone who’s ever paid attention to how this has worked elsewhere in the global South knows what comes next: Farmers will lose their lands, and the country will lose its ability to feed itself, engendering poverty and dependency.
On TomPaine.com, Greg Palast identified Order 81 as one of several authored by Bremer that fit nicely into the outlines of a U.S. “Economy Plan,” a 101-page blueprint for the economic makeover of Iraq, formulated with ample help from corporate lobbyists. Palast reported that someone inside the State Department leaked the plan to him a month prior to the invasion.
Smith put it simply: “The people whose forefathers first mastered the domestication of wheat will now have to pay for the privilege of growing it for someone else. And with that, the world’s oldest farming heritage will become just another subsidiary link in the vast American supply chain.”

9. Iran’s New Oil Trade System Challenges U.S. Currency

The Bush administration has been paying a lot more attention to Iran recently. Part of that interest is clearly in Iran’s nuclear program – but there may be more to the story. One bit of news that hasn’t received the public vetting it merits is Iran’s declared intent to open an international oil exchange market, or “bourse.”
Not only would the new entity compete against the New York Mercantile Exchange and London’s International Petroleum Exchange (both owned by American corporations), but it would also ignite international oil trading in euros.
“A shift away from U.S. dollars to euros in the oil market would cause the demand for petrodollars to drop, perhaps causing the value of the dollar to plummet,” Brian Miller and Celeste Vogler of Project Censored wrote in Censored 2006.
“Russia, Venezuela and some members of OPEC have expressed interest in moving towards a petroeuro system,” he said. And it isn’t entirely implausible that China, which is “the world’s second largest holder of U.S. currency reserves,” might eventually follow suit.
Although China, as a major exporter of goods to the United States, has a vested interest in helping shore up the American economy and has even linked its own currency, the yuan, to the dollar, it has also become increasingly dependent on Iranian oil and gas.
“Barring a U.S. attack, it appears imminent that Iran’s euro-dominated oil bourse will open in March 2006,” Miller and Vogler continued. “Logically, the most appropriate U.S. strategy is compromise with the EU and OPEC towards a dual-currency system for international oil trades.”
But you won’t hear any discussion of that alternative on the 6 o’clock news.

10. Mountaintop Removal Threatens Ecosystem and Economy

On Aug. 15, environmental activists created a human blockade by locking themselves to drilling equipment, obstructing the National Coal Corp.’s access to a strip mine in the Appalachian Mountains 40 miles north of Knoxville, Tenn. It was just the latest in a protracted campaign that environmentalists say has national implications, but that’s been ignored by the media outside the immediate area.
Under contention is a technique wherein entire mountaintops are removed using explosives to access the coal underneath – a practice that is nothing short of devastating for the local ecosystem, but which could become much more widespread.
As it stands, 93 new coal plants are in the works nationwide, according to Project Censored’s findings. “Areas incredibly rich in biodiversity are being turned into the biological equivalent of parking lots,” wrote John Conner of the Katúah branch of Earth First! – which has been throwing all its energies into direct action campaigns to block the project – in Censored 2006. “It is the final solution for 200-million-year-old mountains.”

GOT POWER?

FEMA won’t accept Amtrak’s help in evacuations

FEMA turns away experienced firefighters

FEMA turns back Wal-Mart supply trucks

FEMA prevents Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel

FEMA won’t let Red Cross deliver food

FEMA bars morticians from entering New Orleans

FEMA blocks 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid

FEMA fails to utilize Navy ship with 600-bed hospital on board

FEMA to Chicago: Send just one truck

FEMA turns away generators

FEMA: ‘’First Responders Urged Not To Respond‘’

“GOD BLESS THE CHILD THATS GOT HIS OWN!!”

YEAH!…what Chris said

Ten years after the Oklahoma City bombing left 168 people dead, the guardians of American national security seem to have decided that the domestic radical right does not pose a substantial threat to U.S. citizens.
A draft internal document from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that was obtained this spring by The Congressional Quarterly lists the only serious domestic terrorist threats as radical animal rights and environmental groups like the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front. But for all the property damage they have wreaked, eco-radicals have killed no one — something that most definitely cannot be said of the white supremacists and others who people the American radical right.
In the 10 years since the April 19, 1995, bombing in Oklahoma City, in fact, the radical right has produced some 60 terrorist plots. These have included plans to bomb or burn government buildings, banks, refineries, utilities, clinics, synagogues, mosques, memorials and bridges; to assassinate police officers, judges, politicians, civil rights figures and others; to rob banks, armored cars and other criminals; and to amass illegal machine guns, missiles, explosives, and biological and chemical weapons. What follows is a list of key right-wing plots of the last 10 years.

Almost 60 terrorist plots uncovered in the U.S.

1995

July 28, 1995
Antigovernment extremist Charles Ray Polk is arrested after trying to purchase a machine gun from an undercover police officer, and is later indicted by a federal grand jury for plotting to blow up the Internal Revenue Service building in Austin, Texas. At the time of his arrest, Polk is trying to purchase plastic explosives to add to the already huge arsenal he’s amassed. Polk is sentenced to almost 21 years in federal prison, with a projected release date in 2009.

October 9, 1995
Saboteurs derail an Amtrak passenger train near Hyder, Ariz., killing one person and injuring scores of others. An antigovernment message, signed by the “Sons of Gestapo,” is left behind. The perpetrators remain at large.

November 9, 1995
Oklahoma Constitutional Militia leader Willie Ray Lampley, his wife Cecilia and another man, John Dare Baird, are arrested as they prepare explosives to bomb numerous targets, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, gay bars and abortion clinics. The three, along with another suspect arrested later, are sentenced to terms of up to 11 years in 1996. An appeals court upholds Lampley’s sentence the following year. Baird is released in August 2004, while Ray Lampley — who wrote letters from prison urging others to violence — is slated to be freed in January 2006.

December 18, 1995
An Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employee discovers a plastic drum packed with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil in a parking lot behind the IRS building in Reno, Nev. The device failed to explode a day earlier when a three-foot fuse went out prematurely. Ten days later, tax protester Joseph Martin Bailie is arrested. Bailie is eventually sentenced to 36 years in federal prison.
1996

January 18, 1996
Peter Kevin Langan, the pseudonymous “Commander Pedro” who leads the underground Aryan Republican Army, is arrested after a shootout with the FBI in Ohio. Along with six other suspects arrested around the same time, Langan is charged in connection with a string of 22 bank robberies in seven Midwestern states between 1994 and 1996. After pleading guilty and agreeing to testify, conspirator Richard Guthrie commits suicide in his cell. Two others, Kevin McCarthy and Scott Stedeford, enter plea bargains and do testify against their co-conspirators. Eventually, Mark Thomas, a leading neo-Nazi in Pennsylvania, pleads guilty for his role in helping organize the robberies and agrees to testify against Langan and other gang members. Shawn Kenny, another suspect, becomes a federal informant. Langan is sentenced to a life term in one case, plus 55 years in another. Thomas is sentenced to eight years in prison, and is released in early 2004.

April 11, 1996
Antigovernment activist Ray Hamblin is charged with illegal possession of explosives after authorities find 460 pounds of the high explosive Tovex, 746 pounds of ANFO blasting agent and 15 homemade hand grenades on his property in Hood River, Ore. Hamblin is sentenced to almost four years in federal prison, and is released in March 2000.

April 12, 1996
Apparently inspired by his reading of a neo-Nazi tract, Larry Wayne Shoemake kills one black man and wounds seven other people, including a reporter, during a racist shooting spree in a black neighborhood in Jackson, Miss. As police close in on the abandoned restaurant he is shooting from, Shoemake, who is white, sets the restaurant on fire and kills himself. A search of his home finds references to “Separation or Annihilation,” an essay on race relations by National Alliance leader William Pierce, along with an arsenal of weapons that includes 17 long guns, 20,000 rounds of ammunition, several knives and countless military manuals.

April 26, 1996
Two leaders of the Militia-at-Large of the Republic of Georgia, Robert Edward Starr iii and William James McCranie Jr., are charged with manufacturing shrapnel bombs for distribution to militia members. Later in the year, they are sentenced on explosives charges to terms of up to eight years. Another Militia-at-Large member, accused of training a team to assassinate politicians, is later convicted of conspiracy. Starr is released from prison in 2003, while McCranie gets out in 2001. The last member, Troy Allen Kayser (alias Troy Spain), draws six years in prison and is released in early 2002.

July 1, 1996
Twelve members of an Arizona militia group called the Viper Team are arrested on federal conspiracy, weapons and explosive charges after allegedly surveilling and videotaping government buildings as potential targets. All 12 plead guilty or are convicted of various charges, drawing sentences of up to nine years in prison. The plot participants are all released in coming years, with Gary Curds Baer, who drew the heaviest sentence, freed in May 2004.

July 27, 1996
A nail-packed bomb goes off at the Atlanta Olympics, which is seen by many extremists as part of a Satanic “New World Order,” killing one person and injuring more than 100 others. Investigators will later conclude the attack is linked to 1997-1998 bombings of an Atlanta-area abortion clinic, an Atlanta gay bar and a Birmingham, Ala., abortion facility. Suspect Eric Robert Rudolph — a reclusive North Carolina man tied to the anti-Semitic Christian Identity theology — flees into the woods of his native state after he is identified in early 1998 as a suspect in the Birmingham attack, and is only captured five years later. Eventually, he pleads guilty to all of the attacks attributed to him in exchange for life without parole.

July 29, 1996
Washington State Militia leader John Pitner and seven others are arrested on weapons and explosives charges in connection with a plot to build pipe bombs for a confrontation with the federal government. Pitner and four others are convicted on weapons charges, while conspiracy charges against all eight end in a mistrial. Pitner is later retried on that charge, convicted and sentenced to four years in prison. He is freed from prison in 2001.

October 8, 1996
Three “Phineas Priests” — racist and anti-Semitic Christian Identity terrorists who feel they’ve been called by God to undertake violent attacks — are charged in connection with two bank robberies and bombings at the two banks, a Spokane newspaper and a Planned Parenthood office. Charles Barbee, Robert Berry and Jay Merrell are eventually convicted and sentenced to life terms. Brian Ratigan, a fourth member of the group arrested separately, draws a 55-year term.

October 11, 1996
Seven members of the Mountaineer Militia are arrested in a plot to blow up the FBI’s national fingerprint records center, where 1,000 people work, in West Virginia. In 1998, leader Floyd “Ray” Looker is sentenced to 18 years in prison. Two other defendants are sentenced on explosives charges and a third draws a year in prison for providing blueprints of the FBI facility to Looker, who then sold them to a government informant who was posing as a terrorist.
1997

January 16, 1997
Two anti-personnel bombs — the second clearly designed to kill arriving law enforcement and rescue workers — explode outside an abortion clinic in Sandy Springs, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta. Seven people are injured. Letters signed by the “Army of God” claim responsibility for this attack and another, a month later, at an Atlanta gay bar. Authorities later learn that these attacks, the 1998 bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., abortion clinic and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing, were all carried out by Eric Robert Rudolph, who is captured in 2003 after five years on the run. Rudolph avoids the death penalty by pleading guilty in exchange for a life sentence, but simultaneously releases a defiant statement defending his attacks.

January 22, 1997
Authorities raid the Martinton, Ill., home of former Marine Ricky Salyers, an alleged Ku Klux Klan member, discovering 35,000 rounds of heavy ammunition, armor piercing shells, smoke and tear gas grenades, live shells for grenade launchers, artillery shells and other military gear. Salyers was discharged earlier from the Marines, where he taught demolitions and sniping, after tossing a live grenade (with the pin still in) at state police officers serving him with a search warrant in 1995. Following the 1997 raid, Salyers, an alleged member of the underground Black Dawn group of extremists in the military, is sentenced to serve three years for weapons violations. He is released from prison in 2000.

March 26, 1997
Militia activist Brendon Blasz is arrested in Kalamazoo, Mich., and charged with making pipe bombs and other illegal explosives. Prosecutors say Blasz plotted to bomb the federal building in Battle Creek, the IRS building in Portage, a Kalamazoo television station and federal armories. But they recommend leniency on his explosives conviction after Blasz renounces his antigovernment beliefs and cooperates with them. In August, he is sentenced to more than three years in federal prison. Blasz is released in early 2000.

April 22, 1997
Three Ku Klux Klan members are arrested in a plot to blow up a natural gas refinery outside Fort Worth, Texas, after local Klan leader Robert Spence gets cold feet and goes to the FBI. The three, along with a fourth arrested later, expected to kill a huge number of people with the blast — authorities later say as many as 30,000 might have died — which was to serve, incredibly, as a diversion for a simultaneous armored car robbery. Among the victims would have been children at a nearby school. All four plead guilty to conspiracy charges and are sentenced to terms of up to 20 years. Spence enters the Witness Protection Program. Carl Jay Waskom Jr. is released in June 2004. Shawn and Catherine Adams, a couple, are expected to be freed in 2006, and Edward Taylor Jr. in early 2007.

April 23, 1997
Florida police arrest Todd Vanbiber, a member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance’s Tampa unit and the shadowy League of the Silent Soldier, after he accidentally sets off pipe bombs he was building, blasting shrapnel into his own face. He is accused of plotting to use the bombs on the approach to Disney World to divert attention from a planned string of bank robberies. Vanbiber pleads guilty to weapons and explosives charges and is sentenced to more than six years in federal prison. He is released in 2002. Within two years, Vanbiber is posting messages on neo-Nazi Internet sites boasting that he has built over 300 bombs successfully and only made one error, and describing mass murderer Timothy McVeigh as a hero.

April 27, 1997
After a cache of explosives stored in a tree blows up near Yuba City, Calif., police arrest Montana Freemen supporter William Robert Goehler. Investigators looking into the blast arrest two Goehler associates, one of them a militia leader, after finding 500 pounds of petrogel explosives — enough to level three city blocks — in a motor home parked outside their residence. Six others are arrested on related charges. Goehler, with previous convictions for rape, burglary and assault, is sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

May 3, 1997
Antigovernment extremists set fire to the IRS office in Colorado Springs, Colo., causing $2.5 million in damage and injuring a firefighter. Federal agents later arrest five men in connection with the arson, which is conceived as a protest against the tax system. Ringleader James Cleaver, former national director of the antigovernment Sons of Liberty group, is eventually sentenced to 33 years in prison, while accomplice Jack Dowell is sentenced in a separate trial to serve 30 years. Both are ordered to pay $2.2 million in restitution. Dowell’s cousin is acquitted of all charges, while two other suspects, Ronald Sherman and Thomas Shafer, plead guilty to perjury charges in connection with the case.

July 4, 1997
Militiaman Bradley Playford Glover and another heavily armed antigovernment activist are arrested before dawn near Fort Hood, in central Texas, just hours before they planned to invade the Army base and slaughter foreign troops they mistakenly believed were housed there. In the next few days, five other people are arrested in several states for their alleged roles in the plot to invade a series of military bases where the group believes United Nations forces are massing for an assault on Americans. All seven are part of a splinter group of the Third Continental Congress, a kind of militia government-in-waiting. In the end, Glover is sentenced to two years on Kansas weapons charges, to be followed by a five-year federal term in connection with the Fort Hood plot. The others draw lesser terms. Glover is released in 2003, the last of the seven to get out.

December 12, 1997
A federal grand jury in Arkansas indicts three men on racketeering charges for plotting to overthrow the government and create a whites-only Aryan People’s Republic, which they intend to grow through polygamy. Chevie Kehoe, Daniel Lee and Faron Lovelace are accused of crimes in six states, including murder, kidnapping, robbery and conspiracy. Kehoe and Lee will also face state charges of murdering an Arkansas family, including an 8-year-old girl, in 1996. Kehoe ultimately receives a life sentence on that charge, while Lee is sentenced to death. Lovelace is sentenced to death for the murder of a suspected informant, although in early 2005 he will be up for resentencing because of court rulings. Kehoe’s brother, Cheyne, is convicted of attempted murder during a February 1997 Ohio shootout with police and sentenced to 24 years in prison, despite his key role in helping authorities find his fugitive brother in Utah in June 1997 after the shootout. Cheyne went to the authorities after Chevie began talking about murdering their parents and showing sexual interest in Cheyne’s wife.

1998

January 29, 1998
An off-duty police officer is killed and a nurse terribly maimed when a nail-packed, remote-control bomb explodes outside a Birmingham, Ala., abortion facility, the New Woman All Women clinic. Letters to media outlets and officials claim responsibility in the name of the “Army of God,” the same entity that took credit for the bombings of a clinic and a gay bar in the Atlanta area. The attack also will be linked to the fatal 1996 bombing of the Atlanta Olympics. Eric Robert Rudolph, a loner from North Carolina, is first identified as a suspect when witnesses spot his pickup truck fleeing the Birmingham bombing. But he is not caught until 2003. He ultimately pleads guilty to all four attacks in exchange for a life sentence.

February 23, 1998
Three men with links to a Ku Klux Klan group are arrested near East St. Louis, Ill., on weapons charges. The three, along with three other men arrested later, had formed a group called The New Order, patterned on a 1980s terror group called The Order (a.k.a. the Silent Brotherhood) that carried out assassinations and armored car heists. New Order members plotted to assassinate a federal judge and civil rights lawyer Morris Dees, blow up the Southern Poverty Law Center that Dees co-founded and other buildings, poison water supplies and rob banks. In the end, all six plead guilty or are convicted of weapons charges, drawing terms of up to seven years in federal prison. Wallace Weicherding, who came to a 1997 Dees speech with a concealed gun but turned back rather than pass through a metal detector, is freed in 2003. New Order leader Dennis McGiffen is released in July 2004, the last of the six to regain his freedom.

March 18, 1998
Three members of the North American Militia of Southwestern Michigan are arrested on firearms and other charges. Prosecutors say the men conspired to bomb federal buildings, a Kalamazoo television station and an interstate highway interchange, kill federal agents, assassinate politicians and attack aircraft at a National Guard base — attacks that were all to be funded by marijuana sales. The group’s leader, Ken Carter, is a self-described member of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations. Carter pleads guilty, testifies against his former comrades, and is sentenced to five years in prison. The others, Randy Graham and Bradford Metcalf, go to trial and are ultimately handed sentences of 40 and 55 years, respectively. Carter is released from prison in 2002.

May 29, 1998
A day after stealing a water truck, three men shoot and kill a Cortez, Colo., police officer and wound two other officers as they try to stop the suspects during a road chase. After the gun battle, the three — Alan Monty Pilon, Robert Mason and Jason McVean — disappear into the canyons of the high desert. Mason will be found a week later, dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot. The skeletal remains of Pilon are found in October 1999 and show that he, too, died of a gunshot to the head, another apparent suicide. McVean is not found, but most authorities assume he died in the desert. Many officials believe the three men intended to use the water truck in some kind of terrorist attack, but the nature of their suspected plans is never learned.

July 1, 1998
Three men are charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction after threatening President Clinton and other federal officials with biological weapons. Officials say the men planned to use a cactus thorn coated with a toxin like anthrax and fired by a modified butane lighter to carry out the murders. One man is acquitted of the charges, but Jack Abbot Grebe, Jr., and Johnnie Wise — a 72-year-old man who attended meetings of the separatist Republic of Texas group — eventually are sentenced to more than 24 years in prison.

July 30, 1998
South Carolina militia member Paul T. Chastain is charged with weapons, explosives and drug violations after allegedly trying to trade drugs for a machine gun and enough C-4 plastic explosive to demolish a five-room house. The next year, Chastain pleads guilty to an array of charges, including threatening to kill Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh. He is sentenced to 15 years in federal prison.

October 23, 1998
Dr. Barnett Slepian is assassinated by a sniper as he converses with his wife and children in the kitchen of their Amherst, N.Y., home. Identified as a suspect shortly after the murder, James Charles Kopp flees to Mexico, driven and disguised by friend Jennifer Rock, and goes on to hide out in Ireland and France. Two fellow anti-abortion extremists, Loretta Marra and Dennis Malvasi, make plans to help Kopp secretly return. Kopp, also suspected in the earlier sniper woundings of four other physicians in Canada and upstate New York, is arrested in France as he picks up money wired by Marra and Malvasi. He eventually admits the shooting to a newspaper reporter — claiming that he only intended to wound Slepian — and is sentenced to 25 years in prison. Marra and Malvasi go to prison for almost three years after pleading guilty to federal charges related to harboring a fugitive.

1999

June 10, 1999
Officials arrest Alabama plumber Chris Scott Gilliam, a member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, after he attempts to purchase 10 hand grenades from an undercover federal agent. Gilliam, who months earlier paraded in an extremist T-shirt in front of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s offices in Montgomery, tells agents he planned to send mail bombs to targets in Washington, d.c. Agents searching his home find bomb-making manuals, white supremacist literature and an assault rifle. Gilliam pleads guilty to federal firearms charges and is sentenced to 10 years in prison. He is expected to be released in 2008.

July 1, 1999
A gay couple, Gary Matson and Winfield Mowder, are shot to death in bed at their home near Redding, Calif. Days later, after tracking purchases made on Mowder’s stolen credit card, police arrest brothers Benjamin Matthew Williams and James Tyler Williams. At least one of the pair, Matthew Williams (both use their middle names), is an adherent of the anti-Semitic Christian Identity theology. Police soon learn that the brothers two weeks earlier carried out three synagogue arsons in Sacramento, along with the arson of an abortion clinic there. Both brothers, whose mother at one point refers in a conversation to her sons’ victims as “two homos,” eventually admit their guilt — in Matthew’s case, in a newspaper interview. But Matthew, who at one point badly injures a guard in a surprise attack, commits suicide in jail in late 2002. Tyler, who pleads guilty to an array of charges in the case, is not expected to be eligible for parole for some 50 years.

July 2, 1999
Infuriated that neo-Nazi leader Matt Hale has just been denied his law license by Illinois officials, follower Benjamin Nathaniel Smith begins a three-day murder spree across Illinois and Indiana, shooting to death a black former college basketball coach and a Korean doctoral student and wounding nine other minorities. Smith kills himself as police close in during a car chase. Hale, leader of the World Church of the Creator, at first claims to barely know Smith. But it quickly emerges that Hale has recently given Smith his group’s top award and, in fact, has spent some 16 hours on the phone with him in the two weeks before Smith’s rampage. Conveniently, Hale receives a registered letter from Smith just days after his suicide, informing Hale that Smith is quitting the group because he now sees violence as the only answer.

August 10, 1999
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 kills 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.” Furrow, who has a history of mental illness, eventually pleads guilty and is sentenced to two life terms without parole, plus 110 years in prison.

November 5, 1999
FBI agents arrest James Kenneth Gluck in Tampa, Fla., after he wrote a 10-page letter to judges in Jefferson County, Colo., threatening to “wage biological warfare” on a county justice center. While searching his home, police find the materials needed to make ricin, one of the deadliest poisons known. Gluck later threatens a judge, claiming that he could kill 10,000 people with the chemical. After serving time in federal prison, Gluck is released in early 2001.

December 5, 1999
Two California men, both members of the San Joaquin Militia, are charged with conspiracy in connection with a plot to blow up two 12-million-gallon propane tanks, a television tower and an electrical substation in hopes of provoking an insurrection. In 2001, the former militia leader, Donald Rudolph, pleads guilty to plotting to kill a federal judge and blow up the propane tanks, and testifies against his former comrades. Kevin Ray Patterson and Charles Dennis Kiles are ultimately convicted of several charges in connection with the conspiracy. They are expected to be released from federal prison in 2021 and 2018, respectively.

December 8, 1999
Donald Beauregard, head of a militia coalition known as the Southeastern States Alliance, is charged with conspiracy, providing materials for a terrorist act and gun violations in connection with a plot to bomb energy facilities and cause power outages in Florida and Georgia. After pleading guilty to several charges, Beauregard, who once claimed to have discovered a secret map detailing a planned un takeover mistakenly printed on a box of Trix cereal, is sentenced to five years in federal prison. He is released in 2004, a year after accomplice James Troy Diver is freed following a similar conviction.

2000

March 9, 2000
Federal agents arrest Mark Wayne McCool, the one-time leader of the Texas Militia and Combined Action Program, as he allegedly makes plans to attack the Houston federal building. McCool, who was arrested after buying powerful C-4 plastic explosives and an automatic weapon from an undercover FBI agent, earlier plotted to attack the federal building with a member of his own group and a member of the antigovernment Republic of Texas, but those two men eventually abandoned the plot. McCool, however, remained convinced the un had stored a cache of military materiel in the building. In the end, he pleads guilty to federal charges that bring him just six months in jail.

April 28, 2000
Immigration attorney Richard Baumhammers, himself the son of Latvian immigrants, goes on a rampage in the Pittsburgh area against non-whites, killing five people and critically wounding a sixth. Baumhammers had recently started a tiny white supremacist group, the Free Market Party, that demanded an end to non-white immigration into the United States. In the end, the unemployed attorney, who was living with parents at the time of his murder spree, is sentenced to death for targeting his victims because of their race.

2001

March 1, 2001
As part of an ongoing probe into a white supremacist group, federal and local law enforcement agents raid the Corbett, Ore., home of Fritz Springmeier, seizing equipment to grow marijuana and weapons and racist literature. They also find a binder notebook entitled “Army of God, Yahweh’s Warriors” that contains what officials call a list of targets, including a local federal building and the FBI’s Oregon offices. Springmeier, an associate of the anti-Semitic Christian Patriots Association, is eventually charged with setting off a diversionary bomb at an adult video store in Damascus, Ore., in 1997 as part of a bank robbery carried out by accomplice Forrest Bateman Jr. Another 2001 raid finds small amounts of bomb materials and marijuana in Bateman’s home. Eventually, Bateman pleads guilty to bank robbery and Springmeier is convicted of the same charges, and both are sentenced to nine years.

April 19, 2001
White supremacists Leo Felton and girlfriend Erica Chase are arrested following a foot chase that began when a police officer spotted them trying to pass counterfeit bills at a Boston donut shop. Investigators quickly learn Felton heads up a tiny group called Aryan Unit One, and that Chase and Felton, who had already obtained a timing device, planned to blow up black and Jewish landmarks and possibly assassinate black and Jewish leaders. They also learn another amazing fact: Felton, a self-described Aryan, is secretly biracial. Felton and Chase are eventually convicted of conspiracy, weapons violations and obstruction, and Felton is also convicted of bank robbery and other charges. Felton, who previously served 11 years for assaulting a black taxi driver, is sentenced to serve more than 21 years in federal prison, while his one-time sweetheart draws a lesser term.

Oct. 14, 2001
A North Carolina sheriff’s deputy pulls over Steve Anderson, a former “colonel” in the Kentucky Militia, on a routine traffic stop as he heads home to Kentucky from a white supremacist gathering in North Carolina. Anderson, who has issued violent threats against officials for months via an illegal pirate radio station and is an adherent of racist Christian Identity theology, pulls out a semi-automatic weapon and peppers the deputy’s car with bullets before driving his truck into the woods and disappearing for 13 months. Officials later find six pipe bombs in Anderson’s abandoned truck and 27 bombs and destructive devices in his home. In the end, Anderson apologizes for his actions and pleads guilty. He is sentenced on a variety of firearms charges to 15 years in federal prison.

Dec. 5, 2001
Anti-abortion extremist Clayton Lee Wagner, who nine months earlier escaped from an Illinois jail while awaiting sentencing on weapons and carjacking charges, is arrested in Cincinnati, Ohio. Wagner’s odyssey began in September 1999, when he was stopped driving a stolen camper in Illinois and told police he was headed to Seattle to murder an abortion provider. He escaped in February 2001 and, while on the lam, mailed more than 550 hoax anthrax letters to abortion clinics and posted an Internet threat warning abortion clinic workers that “if you work for the murderous abortionist, I’m going to kill you.” Wagner is eventually sentenced to 30 years on the Illinois charges, including his escape. In Ohio, he is sentenced to almost 20 years more, to be served consecutively, on various weapons and car theft charges related to his time on the run. In late 2003, he also is found guilty of 51 federal terror charges, but his sentencing is deferred.

Dec. 11, 2001
Jewish Defense League chairman Irving David Rubin and a follower, Earl Leslie Krugel, are arrested in California and charged with conspiring to bomb the offices of U.S. Rep. Darrel Issa (R-Calif.) and the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City. Authorities say a confidential informant taped meetings with the two in which the bombings were discussed and Krugel said the jdl needed “to do something to one of their filthy mosques.” Rubin later commits suicide in prison, officials say, just before he is to go on trial in late 2002. Krugel pleads guilty to conspiracy in both plots, and testifies that Rubin conspired with him. Krugel faces a mandatory 10-year sentence, and could receive up to life in federal prison.

2002

Jan. 4, 2002
Neo-Nazi National Alliance member Michael Edward Smith is arrested after a car chase in Nashville, Tenn., that began when he was spotted sitting in a car with a semi-automatic rifle pointed at Sherith Israel Pre-School, run by a local synagogue. In Smith’s car, home and storage unit, officials find an arsenal that includes a .50-caliber rifle, 10 hand grenades, 13 pipe bombs, binary explosives, semi-automatic pistols, ammunition and an array of military manuals. They also find teenage porn on Smith’s computer and evidence that he carried out computer searches for Jewish schools and synagogues. In one of his e-mails, Smith wrote that Jews “perhaps” should be “stuffed head fIRSt into an oven.” In the end, Smith is sentenced on weapons and explosives charges to more than 10 years in prison.

Feb. 8, 2002
The leader of a militia-like group known as Project 7 and his girlfriend are arrested after an informant tells police the group is plotting to kill judges and law enforcement officers in order to kick off a revolution. David Burgert, who has a record for burglary and is already wanted for assaulting police officers, is found in the house of girlfriend Tracy Brockway along with an arsenal that includes pipe bombs and 25,000 rounds of ammunition. Also found are “intel sheets” with personal information about law enforcement officers, their spouses and children. Although officials are convinced the Project 7 plot was real, Burgert ultimately is convicted only of weapons charges and draws a seven-year sentence; six others are also convicted of or plead guilty to weapons charges. Brockway gets a suspended sentence for harboring a fugitive.

July 19, 2002
Acting on a tip, federal and local law enforcement agents arrest North Carolina Klan leader Charles Robert Barefoot Jr. for his role in an alleged plot to blow up the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office, the sheriff himself and the county jail. Officers find more than two dozen weapons in Barefoot’s home. They also find bombs and bomb components in the home of Barefoot’s son, Daniel Barefoot, who is charged that same day with the arson of a school bus and an empty barn. The elder Barefoot — who broke away from the National Knights of the KKK several months earlier to form his own harder-line group, the Nation’s Knights of the KKK — is charged with weapons violations and later sentenced to more than two years. In 2003, Barefoot’s wife and three men are charged with the murder of a former associate. Police say the murder may have been related to the alleged bombing plot.

Aug. 22, 2002
Tampa area podiatrist Robert J. Goldstein is arrested after police, called by Goldstein’s wife after he allegedly threatened to kill her, find more than 15 explosive devices in their home, along with materials to make at least 30 more. Also found are homemade C-4 plastic explosives, grenades and mines, a .50-caliber rifle, semi-automatic weapons, and a list of 50 Islamic worship centers in the area. The most significant discovery is a three-page plan detailing plans to “kill all ‘rags’” at the Islamic Society of Pinellas County. Eventually, two other local men are also charged in connection with the plot, and Goldstein’s wife is arrested for possessing illegal destructive devices. In the end, Goldstein pleads guilty to plotting to blow up the Islamic Society and is sentenced to more than 12 years in federal prison.

Oct. 3, 2002
Officials close in on long-time antigovernment extremist Larry Raugust at a rest stop in Idaho, arrest him and charge him with 16 counts of making and possessing destructive devices, including pipe bombs and pressure-detonated booby traps. He is accused of giving one explosive device to an undercover agent, and is also named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot with colleagues in the Idaho Mountain Boys militia to murder a federal judge and a police officer, and to break a friend out of jail. A deadbeat dad, Raugust is also accused of helping plant land mines on property belonging to a friend whose land was seized by authorities over unpaid taxes. He eventually pleads guilty to 15 counts of making bombs and is sentenced to federal prison. Raugust is expected to be released in 2008.

2003

Jan. 8, 2003
Federal agents arrest Matt Hale, the national leader of the neo-Nazi World Church of the Creator (WCOTC), as he reports to a Chicago courthouse in an ongoing copyright case over the name of his group. Hale is charged with soliciting the murder of the federal judge in the case, Joan Humphrey Lefkow, who he has publicly vilified as someone bent on the destruction of his group. (Although Lefkow originally ruled in wcotc’s favor, an appeals court found that the complaint brought by an identically named church in Oregon was legally justified, and Lefkow reversed herself accordingly.) In guarded language captured on tape recordings, Hale is heard agreeing that his security chief, an FBI informant, should kill Lefkow. Hale is eventually found guilty and sentenced to serve 40 years in federal prison.

Jan. 18, 2003
James D. Brailey, a convicted felon who once was selected as “governor” of the state of Washington by the antigovernment Washington Jural Society, is arrested after a raid on his home turns up a machine gun, an assault rifle and several handguns. One informant tells the FBI that Brailey was plotting to assassinate Gov. Gary Locke, both because Locke was the state’s real governor and because he was Chinese-American. A second informant says that Brailey actually went on a “dry run” to Olympia, carrying several guns into the state Capitol building to test security. Eventually, Brailey pleads guilty to weapons charges and is sentenced to serve 15 months in prison. He is released in February 2004.

Feb. 13, 2003
Federal agents in Pennsylvania arrest David Wayne Hull, imperial wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and an adherent of the anti-Semitic Christian Identity theology, alleging that Hull has arranged to buy hand grenades to blow up abortion clinics. The FBI says Hull also illegally instructed followers on how to build pipe bombs. In addition, Hull published a newsletter in which he urged readers to write Oklahoma bomber Tim McVeigh “to tell this great man goodbye.” Hull eventually is found guilty of weapons violations and sentenced to 12 years in federal prison.

April 3, 2003
Federal agents arrest antigovernment extremist David Roland Hinkson in Idaho and charge him with trying to hire an assassin on two occasions in 2002 and 2003 to murder a federal judge, a prosecutor and an IRS agent involved in a tax case against him. Hinkson, a businessman who earned millions of dollars from his Water Oz dietary supplement company but refused to pay almost $1 million in federal taxes, is convicted in 2004 of 26 counts related to the tax case. In early 2005, a federal jury finds him guilty in the assassination plot as well.

April 10, 2003
The FBI raids the Noonday, Texas, home of William Krar and storage facilities he rented in the area, discovering an arsenal that includes more than 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 65 pipe bombs and remote-control briefcase bombs, and almost two pounds of deadly sodium cyanide. Also found are components to convert the cyanide into a bomb capable of killing thousands, along with white supremacist and antigovernment material. Investigators soon learn Krar was stopped earlier in 2003 by police in Tennessee, who found in his car several weapons and coded documents that seemed to detail a plot. Krar refuses to cooperate, and details of that alleged plan are never learned. Eventually, he pleads guilty to possession of a chemical weapon and is sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.

June 4, 2003
Federal agents in California announce that former accountant John Noster, in prison since November 2002 for car theft, is under investigation for plotting a major terrorist attack. Noster was first arrested as part of a car theft ring investigation, but officials who found incendiary devices in his stolen camper continued to probe his activities. Eventually, they find in various storage facilities three pipe bombs, six barrels of jet fuel, five assault weapons, cannon fuse, a large amount of ammunition and $188,000 in cash. Law enforcement officials, who describe Noster as an “antigovernment extremist,” allege at a press conference that he “was definitely planning” on an attack, but they do not elaborate.

Oct. 10, 2003
Police arrest Norman Somerville after finding a huge weapons cache on his property in northern Michigan that includes six machine guns, a powerful anti-aircraft gun, thousands of rounds of ammunition, hundreds of pounds of gunpowder, and an underground bunker. They also find two vehicles Somerville calls his “war wagons,” and on which prosecutors later say he planned to mount machine guns as part of a plan to stage an auto accident and then massacre arriving police. Officials describe Somerville as an antigovernment extremist enraged over the death of Scott Woodring, a Michigan Militia member killed by police a week after Woodring shot and killed a state trooper during a standoff. Somerville eventually pleads guilty to weapons charges and is sentenced to six years in prison.

2004

April 1, 2004
Neo-Nazi Skinhead Sean Gillespie videotapes himself as he firebombs Temple B’nai Israel, an Oklahoma City synagogue, as part of a film he is preparing to inspire other racists to violent revolution. In it, Gillespie boasts that instead of merely pronouncing the white-supremacist “14 Words” slogan (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children”), he will carry out 14 violent attacks. A former member of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations, Gillespie is found guilty of the attack and faces a minimum 35-year sentence without parole.

Oct. 13, 2004
Ivan Duane Braden, a former National Guardsman discharged from an Iraq-bound unit after superiors noted signs of instability, is arrested after checking into a mental health facility and telling counselors about plans to blow up a synagogue and a National Guard armory in Tennessee. The FBI reports that Braden told them he’d planned to go to a synagogue wearing a trench coat stuffed with explosives and get himself “as close to children and the rabbi as possible,” a plan Braden also outlined in notes found in his home. In addition, he intended to take and kill hostages at the Lenoir City Armory, before blowing the armory up. Eventually, Braden, who also possessed neo-Nazi literature and reportedly hated blacks and Jews from an early age, pleads guilty to conspiring to blow up the armory. He faces a mandatory 10-year minimum prison sentence on two separate charges.

Oct. 25, 2004
FBI agents in Tennessee arrest farmhand Demetrius “Van” Crocker after he allegedly tried to purchase ingredients for deadly sarin nerve gas and C-4 plastic explosives from an undercover agent. The FBI alleges that Crocker, who local officials say was involved in a white supremacist group in the 1980s, tells the agent that he admires Hitler and hates Jews and the government. He allegedly also says “it would be a good thing if somebody could detonate some sort of weapon of mass destruction on Washington, D.C.” Crocker is charged with trying to get explosives to destroy a building and other charges, and faces more than 20 years in prison if convicted.

2005

May 20, 2005
Officials in New Jersey arrest two men they say asked a police informant to build them a bomb. Craig Orler, who has a history of burglary arrests, and Gabriel Garafa, said to be a leader of the neo-Nazi World Church of the Creator and a member of a racist Skinhead group called The Hated, were charged with illegally selling 11 guns to police informants. Carafa allegedly gave one informant 60 pounds of urea to use in building him a bomb, but never said what the bomb was for. Police say they moved in before the alleged bombing plot developed further because they were concerned about the pair’s activities. They taped Orler saying in a phone call that he was seeking people in Europe to help him go underground.

citx say- “i think i saw a kid doing grafitti”