From rich@c2.org Thu Jun 6 07:52:52 PDT 1996 Article: 41336 of alt.revisionism Path: nizkor.almanac.bc.ca!news.island.net!vertex.tor.hookup.net!hookup!news.umbc.edu!cs.umd.edu!zombie.ncsc.mil!nntp.coast.net!chi-news.cic.net!arclight.uoregon.edu!news.uoregon.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.cftnet.com!ns2.mainstreet.net!viper.inow.com!newshub.internex.net!newshub1.internex.net!news.Stanford.EDU!not-for-mail From: rich@c2.org (Rich Graves) Newsgroups: alt.activism,alt.conspiracy,alt.politics.nationalism.white,alt.politics.white-power,alt.radio.talk,alt.revisionism,alt.skinheads Subject: Michigan Militia, Bo Gritz, Charles Duke denouce Freemen as criminals and frauds (was Re: Warning to FBI) Followup-To: misc.activism.militia Date: 5 Jun 1996 14:27:03 -0700 Organization: Uncensored Internet, http://www.c2.org/uncensored/ Lines: 165 Sender: llurch@Networking.Stanford.EDU Message-ID: <4p4u37$cfv@Networking.Stanford.EDU> References:<4p29q7$1v3@jeeves.usfca.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: networking.stanford.edu Xref: nizkor.almanac.bc.ca alt.activism:51585 alt.conspiracy:56011 alt.politics.nationalism.white:21662 alt.politics.white-power:31147 alt.radio.talk:10919 alt.revisionism:41336 alt.skinheads:26657 Followups set to misc.activism.militia, which these trollers are avoiding because everyone with a clue knows that the Freemen are nothing but a bunch of crooks. >From today's Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/, also carried in the San Jose Mercury News, http://www.sjmercury.com/ and "MERCURY" on America Online: FBI Lets 'Freemen' Talk Themselves Out of Allies Standoff: Sympathy sours among right-wing groups after negotiations fail. Federal agents reap the benefits. By KIM MURPHY, Times Staff Writer When Colorado state Sen. Charles Duke first entered the "freemen" compound, it was with the hope of preserving the rights of free Americans to oppose their government, and of ending the FBI standoff without bloodshed. When he left five days later, Duke--a longtime supporter of the patriot movement with sympathies for right-wing groups across the country--had had enough of this particular brand of anti-government militancy. The legislator was so mad that he could be seen waving his arms in fury from a mile away. He was yelling, he said, at Rodney Skurdal, who had--along with the rest of the freemen--reneged on the second of two carefully crafted deals, this one to release two young girls held at the compound. "You aren't enough of a man to come face me, get out of that car!" Duke shouted as Skurdal climbed into an automobile. "I told him, 'I'm going to go out of here and I'm going to tell the American people what you're doing here. You will not get support from the patriot community, you will not get support from the militia community and if you die, nobody's going to avenge you.' " [...] "People in contact with them understand now that what they were doing was fraud," said Randy Trochmann, spokesman for the Militia of Montana. "With the public, a good percentage of them want the FBI just to leave, put a berm around the house and let the state police patrol it. And another percentage just want them [the FBI] to go in and finish them off." [...] It is a position that has not been lost on the right-wing community, some of whose leaders have joined a chorus demanding that the FBI up the ante against the militants. Duke, who said he twice crafted deals with the freemen for release of the girls, ages 8 and 10, said he lost all confidence when the FBI carefully agreed to the conditions, only to see the freemen's demands escalate. "Initially, we believed they were trying to stand for constitutional principles and were simply trying to do some of the same techniques that are practiced on a daily basis by the banks and the Federal Reserve system," said Duke, referring to the freemen's declaration of the U.S. monetary system as invalid and their subsequent issuance of their own money orders, the subject of a federal indictment against about a dozen of the 21 people still at the ranch. "But the overall group there has very little to do with the patriot/constitutionalist movement. They're trying to hide behind that as a way of avoiding arrest, in my opinion," Duke said. "They're just scam artists. And the fact that they're willing to hide behind those two little girls, I realized we're not dealing with honorable people here." [...] One by one, all of those initially most prepared to be sympathetic to the freemen and to help them meet their demands for a public forum against the federal government have thrown up their hands in exasperation and denounced the group as unreasonable. Gritz, in obvious disgust, said he had come close to working out a deal in which half of those at the compound would have left willingly. "But any time that happens, they are immediately put down verbally by these vitamin salesmen who would have to get a job if this whole thing collapses," Gritz said of the two to four most militant freemen leaders. [...] Brent McRae, who is heading the current petition drive, said the new attitude comes in part with a growing respect and sympathy in Jordan for the FBI, which initially was regarded with suspicion. For months, Jordan residents have had the chance to shoot pool and lift a beer with off-duty agents at the Hell Creek Bar; they run into each other at the hardware store and the supermarket. They stop for a chat at the checkpoints on the way out toward the freemen ranch, where bored but cheerful agents are continually begging for homemade cookies and coffee. "It's humanized a government agency. We found out FBI agents aren't like they're portrayed on TV," McRae said. "It's been a shock to everybody, myself included. The people have had the opportunity to meet them, and found them to be very courteous. But they're frustrated. This isn't what they're trained to do, to sit and watch. These people that are here have the ability and the expertise to bring this thing to a conclusion, and feel they could do it without bloodshed if they were given the ability and the go-ahead to do it." [...] "At the beginning, it was all about, 'Here was this poor community in Montana that was being descended on by the federal government.' But it became very apparent very quickly to the general public that this was not a community rising up in opposition to the federal government, that in fact some of them had even asked the federal government for help. To me, that's when the spin started to unravel out of the right," Toole said. On radio talk shows across the country, Toole in recent weeks has said that he had expected hate calls from right-wing sympathizers. But instead, "everywhere what I was getting is: 'The government is mollycoddling those guys.' " Toole said that people like Gritz, Duke and the Militia of Montana's Trochmann brothers found themselves facing a choice of courting either mainstream political support or the freemen. And it was an easy pick. "They could come out and say, 'Those guys are extremists, and we're the reasonable middle.' They could say, 'Those guys don't want to pay their bills, and they're acting like 2-year-olds.' " Duke said his talks broke down because the freemen refused to live up to the bargains they'd made. Today's New York Times: "Long-Running Freemen Standoff No Longer Rattles Locals" By JIM ROBBINS http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/freemen-scene.html ...and so on. -rich http://www.c2.org/~rich/
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