Crazy people do the craziest things, but this plot by a Christian Militia called Hutaree in Michigan to murder police officers sounds more like Baghdad than the upper midwest – well maybe Detroit.

It’s interesting that in the US we call these people militia members, but if they were in Iraq they’re called terrorists.

Evidently the group planned to murder one police officer and then launch another full-blown attack during the funeral using IEDs.

According to the indictment, “the Hutaree would attack law enforcement vehicles during the funeral procession with Improvised Explosive Devices with Explosively Formed Projectiles, which, according to the indictment, constitute weapons of mass destruction.”

TPMMuckraker Justin Elliott has the story.

Nine members of the Christian militia group Hutaree have been indicted on multiple charges involving an alleged plot to attack police, including seditious conspiracy and attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. Attorney in Michigan announced this morning.

“Six Michigan residents, along with two residents of Ohio and a resident of Indiana, were indicted by a federal grand jury in Detroit on charges of seditious conspiracy, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, teaching the use of explosive materials, and possessing a firearm during a crime of violence,” according to the government’s press release, which you can read in full below.

Read the complete story on TPMMuckraker

On Sunday, Former Vice President Dick Cheney accused the Obama administration of making the country less safe by mirandizing terror suspects, trying them in civilian court and abandoning torture.

“It’s the mind-set that concerns me,” Cheney said. On “This Week” he explained, “I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Read this article on Examiner.

David Brooks wrote today: We have tried to fight the Afghan war the easy way, and it hasn’t worked. Switching now to the McChrystal strategy is a difficult choice, and President Obama is right to take his time. But Obama was also right a few months ago when he declared, “This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. … This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

David Brooks “The Afghan Imperative”

Dick Cheney is amazing. It’s like he’s really living in another universe. Here’s what he said on Fox this morning about torturing prisoners.

“I’m very proud of what we did in terms of defending the nation for the last eight years successfully,” Cheney said.

Here’s an excerpt from a review by the CIA inspector general of the torture program.

In June 2003, the U.S. military sought an Afghan citizen who had been implicated in rocket attacks on a joint U.S. Army and CIA position in Asadabad located in Northeast Afghanistan. On 18 June 2003, this individual appeared at Asadabad Base at the urging of the local Governor. The individual was held in a detention facility guarded by U.S. soldiers from the Base. During the four days the individual was detained, an Agency independent contractor, who was a paramilitary officer, is alleged to have severely beaten the detainee with a large metal flashlight and kicked him during interrogation sessions. The detainee died in custody on 21 June; his body was turned over to a local cleric and returned to his family on the following date without an autopsy being performed.

Now that’s just one incident in which one man was murdered after he turned himself in. I wonder what his family and neighbors felt when they were returned a corpse?

But back to Cheney’s assertion about keeping us safe for eight years. There was that little event we call 9/11. I know I won’t forget that nearly 3,000 of us were killed on a sunny Fall morning while Cheney and Bush were “protecting” us. Now I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking that they weren’t torturing people before 9/11, and we were attacked, ergo when Cheney started waterboarding people and beating them to death with flashlights, that’s when we were safe. One can find a correlation between torture and a lack of terrorist attacks here in the US, but correlation does not equal causation. In fact, in the documents Cheney cites as evidence that torture saved lives, the author clearly states that there is no evidence that torture provided any actionable intelligence that saved our nation from attack.

And in terms of who’s to blame for 9/11, I know Cheney tried to pin that on President Clinton, but it never stuck. So if 9/11 happened on Cheney’s watch, why does he feel he gets a pass? If 9/11 had happened under Clinton, do you think Cheney would just chalk it up to “stuff happens”?

Also, it’s common knowledge that President Bush and Vice President Cheney did not consider terrorism a serious threat before 9/11. If they did, they certainly didn’t act like it. Just read the 9/11 commission report. The authors of the report tried very hard to give Bush and Cheney a get of jail free card for 9/11, but there’s no doubt that the Bush administration had a laissez-faire attitude to towards terrorism.

What happened after 9/11 could never have happened without it. What we know of so far is that there was torture, eavesdropping, prisons full of suspected “terrorists,” two wars, a bloated privately owned military industrial complex, a shattered economy and a radicalization of a pretty sizable segment of the population here and around the globe.

Dare I say, the reason Cheney doesn’t show remorse for 9/11 is because he knows it was the best thing to have happen during his tenure in the White House – it’s almost like he planned it himself.

Without 9/11, Bush could very well have become a one-term president. There certainly would not have been the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan and the level of fear, paranoia and overt patriotism could never have reached post-9/11 heights.

No, Cheney needed 9/11, and so he sees no reason to show remorse or take responsibility for this failure, because to him it wasn’t a failure.

To learn more about the policy discussion in neo-conservative circles just prior to 9/11, read the Project for a New American Century policy report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century.”

Here’s a story in the Washington Post about Cheney’s latest case for torture.
CIA Special Review of Torture program May 7, 2004