Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 10 Num. 25

("Quid coniuratio est?")

FOCUS ON FORTIER

With media attention beginning to turn again to the Oklahoma City bomb, and particularly the confessions of McVeigh friend Michael Fortier, Steamshovel Press would like to present again John Judge's comments about Fortier from SP14, which developed into a broader discussion about manipulation of the militia movement. As the author of Judge For Yourself and a research associate of the late Mae Brussell, Judge is well-known among conspiracy researchers. He works as one of the central organizers of the Committee on Political Assassinations, a non-profit group working for the release of government files on political assassinations (POB 772, Ben Franklin Station, Washington, DC 20044-0772.) This excerpt comes from Steamshovel Press #14, now available as a back issue for $6 postpaid. The current issue of Steamshovel (#15), is also now available for $6. Steamshovel Press, POB 23715, St. Louis, MO 63121.

Q: You mentioned that you talked to Michael Fortier before his "confession."

1. Myself and researchers I know talked to Fortier. He was an army buddy of McVeigh's and he also helped McVeigh get the job out in Arizona at the TruValue hardware store. When he spoke with us, and he didn't have to speak with us, we're not press, and if he was part of this elaborate it would not be likely that he would talk to anybody. He was saying to us that he knew McVeigh and he didn't think McVeigh would do anything like this. He had never seen indication that McVeigh would bomb a building or do this kind of violence. He basically expressed frustration with the way things were going. He said, "what happened to innocent until proven guilty?" Now he seems to be the main prosecution witness. They have him visiting the building, checking it out with McVeigh. There's a whole story that's implicated McVeigh.
2. He seems to be plea bargaining with that.
3. I guess. It seems like they put him over a barrel and they said it's either going to be you or McVeigh, so take your pick. That's the implication always when you have somebody that's cooperating and all of sudden they become a suspect, or vice versa, you have to wonder about what the prosecution is up to. And there have been a string of these: the brother out on the farm in Michigan, Terry Nichols, was first said to be a very cooperative person and eventually became suspect. These people become suspects, but then we're told they are not suspects in the bombing. They are just suspects of other, sort of related, crimes. Blowing up cans in the back yard, I guess.

   There are a lot of disinformation rumors flying around. Michael McLure said years ago that even paranoids have enemies. That's true, but that doesn't mean that the paranoids know who their enemies are.

4. That's my feeling about people I have met in the militia movement. Some of them are real, sincere populist types, but they should have real suspicions about their leadership.
5. It's quite likely that these groups are either created whole cloth or heavily infiltrated. These kinds of groups would be of use to the government, both in terms of as they used the Klan and the Hell's Angels in the past, as an arm of the government to be paid to do murders, assassinations, hits or attacks on people that the government wanted to go after and thereby camouflage, this one done through COINTELPRO and other programs--Hell's Angels were paid off by the US government to kill Cesar Chavez, there were different plots of this sort in the past. So they're a good scapegoat if they need one. There's also quite a bit of history of missing weapons being stolen from military bases and in a few cases where there are suspects, these suspects tie back in to either the Aryan Brotherhood, neo-Nazi, right-wing or these militia movements. It was very clear that there were active police department and active military and reserve military veterans in the militia, even three congressmen were named in the congressional roll call as members of the militia. So the militia have clearly a whole range of people.

   The militia want to see themselves as victims. They would say that the government did the Oklahoma bombing and are scapegoating them because they want to destroy the militia and take their guns away. I think all anybody has to do to put that claim in perspective is look at how the Panthers were treated in the 1960s, when black people picked up guns and how different their experience was. There weren't Panthers getting on Nightline. There weren't people being allowed to just espouse their philosophy without any political comeback. The militia people are basically being given a forum. "Are you a racist organization?" "Oh, no." But these are predominantly white organizations and their response to the situation that they believe is going on, which is partially racism and xenophobia coming out, that United Nations is bringing foreign troops and foreign weapons--this isn't going to be done with a good old American tank, they're going to have go import a Russian tank to do this to us. We're more than willing to be a conduit for foreign weapons and to ship them out as long as they are inferior to any other country on the dole. We certainly do bring foreign troops into this country and train them, as assassins and death squads, we train other foreign troops to be surrogate forces for us around the world, and it's us that's taking over the UN, not the other way around. The UN has clearly been used as an extension of US foreign policy for many years.

   It's not that to that there haven't been victims of these federal police attacks, but you're comparing a few, the one Randy Weaver, even the hundred people at Waco, the underlying theme is that the people that the government is really after are these good white Christians.

6. This is exactly the kind of thing that's behind, say, Qubilah Shabazz and Louis Farrakhan. The FBI is going in and trying to manipulate Shabazz into taking a contract out on Farrakhan. The militias don't seem to care about that. They don't care about the Black Panthers. But when it happens to Randy Weaver or the strange Christians at Mt. Carmel, the whole movement is enflamed.
7. Or the children in Waco or the children in Oklahoma City. But foreign children, when they die, aren't somehow as innocent or deserving of our pity. There's stories about seeing foreign troops being trained to go house to house and disarm the people in the houses. That's classic counter-insurgency warfare strategy that they would use in a place like Somalia. Does it mean that they wouldn't use it here? No, but the communities where it's going to be used first are the communities where they are afraid of people having guns. They have been providing guns to people in this country, much more so than taking them away. Any kid in Los Angeles, on the streets in a black or Hispanic neighborhood, in the gangs, they know where to go to get the guns. They come in by the trainload literally. On certain notes and certain locations you go down and you can buy the guns. It's like the drugs. They don't come from the moon, they don't come from a sixteen year old kid with a plane that goes to Bogota every week. They come through channels that involve government complicity or looking the other way.

   Guns generally don't protect homes. It's more likely that it's going to end up with a gun fatality in the home. On the other hand, I'm not saying that therefore no one should own a gun. But what I am saying is that guns cannot be said to protect civil liberties. The fact that somebody armed themselves--as G. Gordon Liddy says, when BATF comes to break into the house, shoot for the head because of the vests they've got on--is not protecting the civil liberties of themselves and the broader rights of people. Most of the people that focus on the second amendment rights are not people that I have ever seen focussed on anybody else's rights in the United States. They aren't concerned about the violation of civil and human rights here and abroad by this government for many, many years. They are people who have a kind of reactionary response, a selfish response of "I'm going to protect what I have."

   Going out and practicing with a 350 Magnum in the woods is the response of the last guy in a prison riot. In the last cell, back in there saying, "Come on in, you dirty screws! You'll never take me alive and I'm going to take a couple of you with me. Pry the gun out of my cold, dead hand." Well, so what? This isn't about changing the United States. It really isn't about realizing constitutional rights. It's about individual protection. It's the response of the guy who goes down to his fallout shelter as a response to the bomb and not only that, won't let you in. He takes the shotgun down there to make sure you try and come in.

   There is another view. Yes, the government has conspired to take away your rights. But the thing to do about it is to expose it and to work for a democratic and public solution to it, not a private or little militia vigilante solution to it, because it doesn't rest there. You are not going to win a pop-gun war against the current US military. If the only game you understand how to play is the gun game, you've lost at this point in human history.

Also now available from Steamshovel Press:

     Popular Alienation, a back issue anthology
     NASA, Nazis and JFK: The Torbitt Document
     The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny
          Casolaro

See also http://www.umsl.edu/~skthoma
Link to that site available at
http://www.shout.net/~bigred/cn.html

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