2015 is beginning with a bang, as the indictments roll in and more home-grown terrorist plots are revealed.
Here's one from Rome, Georgia, a picturesque Southern town that might be an idyllic vacation spot. Then again, you just never know what lurks beneath the surface:
Terry Eugene Peace, Brian Edward Cannon and Cory Robert Williamson on Monday waived arraignment and pleaded not guilty to the domestic terrorism charge as well as charges of conspiring to defraud the government.
[...]
Peace, Cannon and Williamson — all members of a militia in Georgia — participated in online chat discussions between Jan. 23 and Feb. 15, 2014, that were monitored by the FBI.
During the conversations online, they discussed using guerilla war tactics and planned to launch attacks against a metro Atlanta police station and several government agencies in February 2014.
The three men attempted to “recruit other individuals to join them and to carry out similar operations in those individuals’ home states.”
Peace allegedly told other militia members to choose targets including “road blocks, TSA checkpoints, sheriffs/police conducting operations outside the Constitution” as well as to participate in the “removal of government people who support extra-Constitutional activities.”
In February 2014, the men traveled from Rome to Tennessee for a meeting with an undercover FBI source about getting several explosive devices, including a thermite-mix charge and a dozen pipe bombs constructed for “maximum fragmentation.”
Now why is it that stories like this stay local even when they're clearly of national concern? Fox News goes on and on about Muslims when the real threats are in places like Rome, Georgia. That rhetoric is straight out of the right-wing playbook, and yet our media refuses to obsess on it the way they do over Muslim international terrorists.
Extremism is extremism, regardless of the religion of the extremists, right?
