Shouldn't Obama Bomb a Domestic Terrorist Outfit Allegedly More Dangerous than Islamist Jihadis?
The West Virginia state police recently arrested a 21-year-old with explosives in his SUV, reports the Charleston Gazette. And why is this the least bit interesting besides the fact that he apparently had live chicken right next to AK 47-style guns in his trunk?
Because he belongs to the sovereign citizen movement (not to be confused with Sovereign Society, a publishing company that offers investment advise) that state and local enforcement officials around the country polled by University of Maryland's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism rate as the Number One terrorist threat in the United States today, ranking above Islamic terrorists and
jihadis. (A 2007 version of the same study, cite the group as the seventh greatest potential threat.)
So what makes this group so dangerous?
One reason is that it lacks organization, one official told the Gazette. "There's not one ultimate organization that represents all of these groups. In the United States, most of them are small groups, so they're not really organized," he said. "Most groups have a leader you can go to and sit down and talk things out."
If this doesn't make it Al Qaeda's American doppelganger then I don't know what does!
Another reason is that it has 100,000 hardcore and 300,000 total members, which, not only makes it the largest "domestic terrorist movement," as per the FBI, but also many times bigger than the 20- to 30,000-strong ISIS.
But what makes the group really dangerous is not that it is based on the Al Qaeda cell model and is bigger than ISIS, but that it is an "anti-government" extremist outfit that considers all forms of government taxation and regulation illegitimate. Its members don't pay taxes, carry a driver's license or hold a Social Security card.
A few of them have gone "postal" in encounters with authorities. But by and large the group's main form of resistance, according to the FBI, is that it impersonates judges "police officers and diplomats" and tries to extort money from the U.S. Treasury Department. How? Sayeth FBI:
"It files legitimate IRS and Uniform Commercial Code forms for illegitimate purposes, believing that doing so correctly will compel the U.S. Treasury to fulfill its debts, such as credit card debts, taxes, and mortgages…These activities create a voluminous influx of documents that clog the courts and other government agencies."
Expect Obama to launch an aerial bombing campaign any moment now. If ever a group was asking for one, this is it!
H/T Bruce Majors
Correction and Caveat: It would be more appropriate to call sovereign citizens a movement rather than a group, as previously written. Also, this piece is supposed to mock the law enforcement tendency — with the assistance of a credulous media — to inflate security threats and then over-react to these inflated threats!