Chapter 3
OF U.S. MILITIA, LAWYERS,
VOTE FRAUD AND FREEMEN
The Constitution is a written instrument. As such its meaning does not alter.
South Carolina v. United States
265 Ct. 110, 111 (1905)
"The U.S. Militia was a very grass-rootsish organization," said Tom, "that believed in covertness, which all our members in New York did. It was late '93. We were all required to take an oath to do whatever was necessary to preserve the Constitution, without limitations and qualifications. It was a serious organization. We understood well that to do whatever may be required, you have to have all the tools necessary to do the job. We need to be undercover because our members believe that it is their right, if not their duty, to have all the military accoutrements and supplies that the military have, and of course, our government at this time will not trust our citizenry with those kinds of things.
"Of course, the people in our organization are no more a threat to the American public than an infant child would be. No one will ever be harmed by one of our unregistered handguns, unless they happen to be wearing black hoods, ski masks, with 'ATF' displayed on their back. Those fellows, they have a problem, because they're there to violate what we know to be our rights. Irrespective of what the Supreme Court says, irrespective of what the police think, we can read those documents. And we know what the word 'infringe' means.
"So, when we became U.S. Militia, we were then in a pipeline of information that comes via a grapevine. We became part of this chain of command. One passes to another, to another, and what I mean is, another and another units. These are small cells. So, wherever Unit A is, or 'One,' somewheres down the line there is Unit 492. 492 Unit probably, not necessarily, but may not know Unit 489. I could put information out and track it. It would be back in two hours, to the West Coast and back. In the event that we were to have the lights turned out by the government—I mean communication lines—Paul Revere still needs to ride. So this person here might have to ride a bicycle two miles to get the message to the next one, who jumps in his airplane that he has on his private strip, flies to pre-designated places, honks an air horn and drops off a bottle with orders. This is the resistance of today. This is within our U.S. Militia New York Regiment. We'll get the word through. Paul Revere will ride again."
The start of the Revolutionary War, as every American school used to learn in the "good old days," had been heralded by Paul Revere's ride from Boston on the night of April 18, 1775, to alert the Militiamen in Lexington and Concord that the British were coming to confiscate weapons and ammunition. There had been growing unrest in the Colonies starting in the 1760s, especially in the Boston area, over the increasing taxes, arbitrary court rulings and curtailment of jury trials by the British. Actions in 1775 to confiscate the Militias' weapons were the last straw (the importation of firearms to the Colonies had been halted by royal decree a few months earlier). Because they were warned ahead of time by Revere and the night riders, the Militias were able to repulse the Redcoats. The Militia at Lexington lost eight men in the firefight, which led to the grinding battle of Bunker Hill a few days later in Boston Harbor, and the eight-year Revolutionary War. The result was American independence.
I was trying to get a sense of the extent of Militia networking with groups that had existed prior to the current Militia movement, and I asked Tom whether they had any relationship with the Minutemen, an underground group that I knew had formed in the 1950s in the South, that espoused some of the same ideas about Revolutionary War principles, and was known to be heavily armed. (This group, I learned later, was believed by some to have been taken over at the top levels by government infiltrators, early on. Also, I learned that there were several underground groups across the nation that called themselves Minutemen.)
"We interface with the Minutemen," he answered. "Membership with them is by inheritance. They are a layer deeper than us. It is a grass-root connection. We coordinate. They don't come to our meetings, are not sure we are covert enough. A lot of them are descendants of the original American Revolution. I am not sure they would let me in. It doesn't mean we don't plan on being one thing at a certain time. We brief each other regularly. I have an idea that they are an insignificant number in this state.
"In general parameters, we are a renaissance of the Militia movement that existed in some states until well into this century. The last one was an armored unit in the unorganized Militia, in Massachussetts or Pennsylvania. They had armored units. In about '56 or thereabouts it was scaled back. I believe the state funding dried up. The cost of keeping tanks, etc., became too high.
"The U.S. Militia does not have headquarters per se. It is a grapevine. We're trained to operate at the grass roots. If any of us is taken to prison tomorrow, it wouldn't affect us operationally. If I was taken out, it wouldn't affect New York at all.
"We all, nationwide, understand the same principles. The Constitution is, or was, the supreme law of the land. We know that the current government has enacted what we call a state of 'mixed war' against the people."
The legal term, "mixed war," was often used by patriots to describe the current situation. The definition in Black's Law Dictionary, widely used by lawyers as well as patriots, of "mixed war" was:
one which is made on one side by public authority, and on the other by mere private persons.
That guiding light of the new Republic of the United States of America and inspiration for the Declaration of Independence, John Locke, had once said about such a "state of War":
The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves... Whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any further Obedience and are left to the common Refuge, which God hast provided for all Men, against Force and Violence. Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society, and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to grasp over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; by this breach of Trust they forfeit the power the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty.
"They're not a legitimate government," said Tom. "The nationwide movement, we share common beliefs. The three branches of government were supposed to be independent of each other. Today that is not the way it is. Over the years, some of the things our Founding Fathers feared most, happened. They feared the federal judiciary. It has been a very big problem.
"What we have is a bridge between the three branches—the American Bar Association. Lawyers control the legislature. Naturally, the judiciary is the sole province of lawyers. We have a monopoly in the form of a lawyers union. The Supreme Court Justices are lawyers. And you have, increasingly, the executive branch occupied by a lawyer. Clinton and his wife are lawyers. To reestablish a government that is legitimate, we have to take the Founding Fathers' documents—the Constitution, Bill of Rights—and we have to reestablish them as Gospel.
"All these other rules and enactments—incidentally, there are two types of law: substantive, Constitutional; and administrative, procedural, which is what we have. Lawyer-instituted law. We need to reestablish the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. The Thirteenth Amendment, as people know it, has to do with emancipation. But at the time of the Civil War there was another Thirteenth Amendment that has been unearthed. It refers to something called 'titles of nobility.' It says that anyone who accepts a title of nobility loses their citizenship, and any acts they create of a governmental nature are null and void. Precious documents were removed from Washington in the Civil War, and the Thirteenth Amendment was lost. A fellow from Maine uncovered it in the archives."
I found to my surprise that indeed there had been another, earlier Thirteenth Amendment. Although the Constitution, in Article I Section 9, said, "No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States, and no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State," the latter affecting only people who worked for the government, the first Thirteenth Amendment had expanded this to include all citizens. It said:
If any Citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive, or retain any title of nobility or honor, or shall, without the consent of congress, accept and retain any present, pension, office or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince, or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a Citizen of the United States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them.
It would seem that, at the time, there had already been problems of abuse of power on these counts. While, in the body of the Constitution, it said that the United States would not grant any "Title of Nobility" and that no U.S. officials (or government employees) might receive anything from a "foreign State" without "the Consent of the Congress," in the lost Thirteenth Amendment it said, from "any foreign power" (which was broader than just, "any foreign state," and could be taken to mean also the early transnationals, like the British East India Company, which had its own army, and some of the international banking institutions). The lost Amendment said that "any Citizen" who accepted any thing, or "any title of nobility or honor" from anywhere "without the consent of congress," would lose his citizenship. This, however, explained patriots, was meant as a reference only to "national" citizenship, which, as I was learning, was distinct from "state" citizenship, the more important of the two until after the Civil War. Patriots believed, among other things, that this Amendment had been a move to keep lawyers, who were already becoming too powerful, out of the federal government.
Although Congress and the history books claimed that this first Thirteenth Amendment had never been fully ratified, others argued that it had, by the required thirteen states: Maryland, Kentucky, Ohio, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Vermont, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Virginia. In The Sovereign American's Handbook, by Johnny Liberty, which was widely read among patriots, it explained that the first twelve states had ratified the amendment between 1810 and 1812, at which time the "War of 1812" had broken out with England, interrupting the process. In 1819, however, the ratification process had recommenced, with Virginia signing on as the thirteenth state; the lost Thirteenth Amendment had gone into effect the following year. Although all traces of it had at one time been mysteriously removed from Washington, probably during the Civil War, it had nevertheless survived in official copies of the Constitution in several states.
"So, when we look at this problem of lawyers," Tom continued, "what they have done is they have made themselves a monopoly, and they have caused a diminution of our rights to contract with each other. Under the Constitution, we have the right to counsel of choice. You and I have a right to contract with each other and should be entitled to do so. The Founding Fathers had no Bar Association. Lawyers were apprenticed. Today you are not entitled to have someone else speak for you, like if you stutter.
"A Common Law court does not allow titled people there. 'Esquire' is a title of nobility. Kings, lords, dukes and duchesses, pages, and esquire are all titles of nobility. In the Senate we have pages. We brought this hideous thing—there is a higher class of controllers, which was hideous to the Founding Fathers—to the country. And it is woven into the fabric of the land in this time."
In an article I came across in the AntiShyster (a monthly, citizens' law magazine, published in Texas), that was widely read by patriots, the authority of the American Bar Association (ABA) to license attorneys was questioned. It was pointed out that in Texas, both state and local authorities had responded to letters of inquiry from the magazine that the ABA, indeed, was a private organization, which, of course, brought into question whether its licensing authority was aboveboard, since lawyers were also considered officers of the court, and therefore, public servants. The same authorities had been unable to explain how this was so.
Liberty explained that under the Bar Association Act of 1913, it was necessary to be licensed by the American Bar Association to practice law. In order to be licensed, it was required that a member be issued a "certificate" by the State Bar, signed by the State Supreme Court clerk. But, argued Liberty, this certificate under our Constitution would merely indicate membership in a fraternal, private organization. And besides, a state clerk had no power anyway to issue a license.
Although most lawyers had probably never thought of it this way, from the viewpoint of ordinary citizens, they had special privileges simply by virtue of being members of the ABA—if nothing else, because it had a monopoly of the legal business. These privileges, signified by the suffix, "Esq.," that only lawyers used after their names in the U.S., included being officers of the court, even though they were private citizens. If a "title of nobility" conferred special status or privilege, then the question arose: Was the designation "Esquire" the American equivalent of a title of nobility?
The first three articles of the Constitution governed the three branches of government, respectively: Article I, the Legislative branch; II, the Executive; and III, the Judiciary. What Tom had said about the two types of law—"substantive, Constitutional," and "administrative, procedural"—was something the public at large mostly never considered, but was common knowledge among patriots. Articles I and III in the Constitution dealt with the courts. Article I governed "all legislative Powers" and had a provision for "Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court" (governed by statutes rather than Common Law); therefore, Article I governed what patriots referred to as the "legislative tribunals," or "legislative courts." It was Article III, however, patriots liked to point out, that governed the true Judiciary; it provided that:
The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish... The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution...
The "Law" referred to in Article III, patriots argued, was meant to be understood as the "Common Law," which was the legal system at the time of the Constitution and well into this century. (In fact, however, the term "law" in the English system, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, included common and statute law; "equity," it said, was a separate system of law based on general principles of "natural" justice, to "correct or supplement the provisions of the law," superseding common and statute law in the event of a conflict between the two.) The Judiciary referred to in the Constitution, and indeed, the American legal system, patriots were quick to point out, had been founded upon the English Common Law, where precedent and interpretation of the law governed.
The current system in the U.S., the argument went, was governed by statutory, administrative law that derived its authority from Article I, governing the Legislative branch, under the provision for "Tribunals" in Section 8, which stated:
The Congress shall have the Power... To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;
Today, much of this law came under the Uniform Commercial Code, or UCC, patriots noted, which also derived its power, not from the Judiciary of Article III but, from the Legislative branch's Article I, Section 8—from the clause granting Congress the power:
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes;
The UCC, patriots believed, was the result, eventually, of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's efforts in the 1930s to greatly enlarge the scope of federal law. Written following World War II, in the UCC, the definition of commercial transactions had been twisted to include almost every activity—even when in the true sense of the word there was no "commerce" involved. Technically, the UCC applied whenever state lines were crossed, including by mail or telephone. In practice, today, this was often pushed to the point where an activity was considered "commerce" when state lines "could" have been crossed. The Framers had never meant for such a broad interpretation of "commerce," argued patriots, or for it to replace the legitimate function of the Judiciary, as provided for in Article III. Today, federal cases, and even most non-federal cases, were normally heard, as the patriot groups and the Militias liked to explain, in the legislative tribunals that derived their authority from statutes, not in true judicial courts, which Americans had a right to under the Constitution. And so, unknown to the general public, the true judicial court system had been largely set aside.
There were a number of Militia newsletters, one of which was the New Jersey Militia Newsletter (started that same spring). In one issue was an article with yet another (shocking to me) explanation for why the Constitution no longer had any authority in the courts, and why there was in fact no more separation of powers between the Executive, Legislative and Judiciary branches. Over the years, explained the New Jersey Militia, lawyers had instituted the little-known (to the public) English "Doctrine of Judicial Supremacy." This doctrine, in the United States, it was explained, had been put forth first in 1905 in the book, The American Judiciary, by Judge Simeon E. Baldwin—a professor of Constitutional law at Yale, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in Connecticut, and one-time governor of that state. In an excerpt of the book the judge argued that there needed to be "some permanent human force, invested with acknowledged and supreme authority," always "in a position to exercise it" in case of the unexpected and emergencies. "The Judiciary," Baldwin had stated, "holds this position in the United States." (The New Jersey Militia's comment was that this was why there was a "growing Patriot and Militia Movement.")
A more comprehensive book on the subject, that had appeared in 1911, said the Newsletter, was The American Doctrine of Judicial Supremacy by law professor Charles G. Haines. In it, the professor had explained that under this doctrine, Congress was subordinate to the judges, not a co-equal branch of the government under the separation of powers as guaranteed by the Constitution. He wrote:
In the United States supreme power is exercised for most purposes through a judicial system in contradistinction to those governments in which the legislature is supreme and the courts subordinate...
With the few exceptions noted, the United States stands alone among the great countries of the world according the judiciary the function of guarding the fundamental law and in establishing thereby judicial supremacy...
This principal of law and political practice which places the guardianship of written constitutions primarily in courts of justice, combined with the Anglo-Saxon idea of the dominance of judge-made law, constitute the basis of what may appropriately be termed the American doctrine of judicial supremacy.
(The Newsletter comment was that Judicial Supremacy was certainly not an American doctrine, nor was it Constitutional, but was, rather, "a judicial doctrine created by judges, intoxicated with power.")
The arguments by patriots that, on the one hand, there were no more true judicial courts but only legislative tribunals, and on the other, that there was judicial supremacy (in the legal system), might have appeared contradictory, but as patriots explained it, it simply meant that, in practice, the laws made by legislators, whatever the original intent might have been, once they arrived in the statutory and administrative courts, meant whatever a judge said they meant, period.
Louis B. Boudin, who had been an opponent of this doctrine, reported the Newsletter, in 1932 had published the definitive work on the Doctrine of Judicial Supremacy, Government by Judiciary, refuting the legitimacy of the system of Judicial Supremacy being practiced by the judges, on the grounds that it did away with a separation of powers:
Not only is the Judicial Power here described an entirely different governmental institution from the Judicial Power envisaged by [Supreme Court Justices] James Wilson and John Marshall, but it rests upon an entirely different governmental theory. The Judicial Power as understood by Wilson and Marshall was based on the theory of the separation of powers—the distribution of the powers of government among three co-equal departments; while the modern Judicial Power as expounded by Baldwin and Haines, and as actually exercised by our Judiciary, is based on the theory of the centralization of the powers of government in the Judiciary, which is thereby made the supreme political power in the nation.
And the theory of the separation of powers is not the only one abandoned by the modern supporters of the Judicial Power. There is a tendency also to abandon the written basis of the power and to substitute for a sort of Judicial Prerogative, claimed to be inherent in the office itself, independent of any written constitution either as a source or measure of the power. According to this theory, the judiciary is the repository of a higher law, of which the conscience of the judge is the only evidence and sole measure, which requires and enables him to declare "unconstitutional," and therefore null and void, any law which conflicts with that higher law as understood by him...
Boudin went on to explain that, "This new development in our constitutional law is based upon two historical theories," one English, the other American. "English judges claimed, and for a long time possessed the power to declare a law null and void for 'unreasonableness,' or because it did not square with the dictates of equity and justice as understood by the judges." This doctrine's chief sponsor (in the early 17th century) had been Lord Edward Coke. It had been incorporated into American Constitutional law (in the early 20th century) and supplemented by what Boudin described as, "a rather novel, not to say startling, theory of the American Revolution." Boudin described this theory, saying, "It is nothing less than the assertion that the American Revolution was but a lawyer's revolution, designed to revive and perpetuate in America Lord Coke's doctrine of Judicial Power." (The editor of the Newsletter quipped, "That's right, fellow patriots, according to the mind-set of our judiciary, the real reason we fought the Revolutionary War was to free ourselves from the monarchy of King George and replace it with a Judicial Monarchy!!!")
In fact, explained Boudin, Judicial Supremacy in the United States "first took definite form in the report of a special committee appointed by the New York Bar Association," meeting between 1915 and 1917. In the final report, they said just that, stating:
In short the American Revolution was a lawyer's revolution to enforce Lord Coke's theory of the invalidity of Acts of Parliament in derogation of common right and the rights of Englishmen.
Boudin argued that, contrary to what the New York Bar Association had declared, Lord Coke's theory was not applicable in the United States because, unlike in England, in the United States there was a written Constitution superior to both Congress and the judges. Boudin wrote:
The thing to be remembered is that in Lord Coke's theory—whatever it was—neither the source of the judicial power nor its measure was based on any written constitution. The power was inherent in the office, and in its nature superior to the legislature. The overriding of the will of the legislature was not done ex necessitate, because of the compelling force of a written constitution superior to both legislature and judge, but by the requirements of right and justice as dictated to the judge by his conscience.
(Interestingly, Britain, still today, did not have a written constitution.)
At the beginning of the NJM article was a quote by Thomas Jefferson, who, although a lawyer himself, or perhaps because of it, had been deeply concerned about judges' and the Supreme Court's power. The author of the Declaration of Independence had written:
I do not charge Judges with willful and ill-intentioned error; but honest error must be arrested, where its toleration leads to public ruin. As, for the safety of society, we commit honest maniacs to Bedlam, so judges should be withdrawn from their bench, whose erroneous biases are leading us to dissolution. It may, indeed, injure them in fame or in fortune; but it saves the Republic, which is the first and supreme law.
At the recommendation of the editor of the New Jersey Militia Newsletter, I contacted the Erwin Rommel School of Law, which specialized in seminars and publications on how to represent yourself in court, and was popular with patriots. As part of an information packet, they sent me a present-day article from a mainstream publication, the American Spectator, titled, "Judges For Sale," which showed that questions about the legal system and judges were not confined to patriots. "Judges are indeed different from other officials," noted the article. "They are indeed exempt from ordinary forms of accountability." This, it said, allowed judges to behave in ways "that would not be tolerated in other officials." Listed were a number of current instances of judges' extravagance with taxpayers' money, as well as blatant conflicts of interest, including the acceptance of lavish gifts from interested parties, and the failure to adhere to ordinary norms of ethics, all the way from local judges to Supreme Court justices.
There was one school of thought among patriots that went so far as to reject the provisions for the Judiciary in the Constitution altogether, on the basis that the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention had been authorized only to revise the Articles of Confederation, not draft a Constitution. This movement within the movement deferred to the Articles of Confederation, which, they pointed out, had never been formally repealed. (Johnny Liberty, for example, considered the Constitution an addendum to the Articles of Confederation, meant only to "make a more perfect Union," not disband the Union of states as it existed already, under the Articles of Confederation.)
Because of the treachery of lawyers and Federalists at that time, went the argument, the Constitution had been deliberately left faulty concerning the Judiciary, having no provision for bringing into being the Supreme Court. (Patriots argued that, in any case, the current manifestation of the Supreme Court was not the Supreme Court the Founding Fathers had had in mind. The Founders had never envisioned that the Supreme Court would have the power to rule on how the Constitution was to be interpreted, thereby making policy; the Supreme Court, until after the Civil War, had been, rather, the highest court of appeals for cases under the Common Law.)
Ralph Boryszewski, a retired police officer and patriot in Rochester, New York, had put out a pamphlet titled, "The Unconstitutional Judiciary Act of 1789," that came into my hands early on (he had also written a book on the subject, which I read later, expanding on the same argument), where he explained that immediately after the Constitution was ratified, some of those same lawyers in the First Congress had formed a Senate committee to organize the United States Judiciary. For eleven months they had worked on a bill that was twice as long as the Constitution itself, explained Boryszewski, which really amounted to a series of Constitutional amendments—without going through the prescribed process. The bill had been passed by both houses, which, he noted, were controlled by lawyers.
This bill had established the Supreme Court and a system of federal courts with powers that far exceeded what had been intended in the Constitution, explained the former police officer, creating the offices of Attorney General and U.S. Attorneys. Also, the bill had established a system of adversarial proceedings such as to ensure that people would have to hire lawyers, and had adopted the English Common Law, under which the Colonists had been repeatedly abused. (Here was a patriot who refuted even the Common Law.)
Worst of all, Boryszewski pointed out, Section 17 of this Judiciary Act had granted judges the authority to override a jury's decision (declaring a mistrial) and hold a new trial. The act had also conceded to judges the power "to punish by fine or imprisonment, at the discretion of said courts, all contempts of authority in any cause of hearing before the same." (Federal judges were thereby allowed to make uncontestable decisions canceling jury verdicts, and about what constituted "contempt of court." The latter, explained patriots, amounted to bills of attainder, or punishment without due process, which were forbidden in the Constitution.)
The people earlier had opposed the establishment of lower (federal) courts, said Boryszewski, because they had regarded them as a "dangerous link to the Supreme Court for maintaining federal supremacy." Ironically, he pointed out, since there was no "Supreme Court" sitting at the time, this bill could not be challenged. The Supreme Court should have been seated prior to the passing of any act by Congress, but the Constitution had not provided for the enabling of the Court, leaving the number of justices open, and no oath of office for them.
Thomas Jefferson had made known his feeling about the judiciary having too much power when he had said:
To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.
Tom continued, "To reestablish the Constitution, we would have to have free and fair elections. We do not have free or fair elections. We have not had for a long time. Vote fraud has been with us as a part of our society for years and years and years. I remember back in the '50s, it was acknowledged in the Congressional record that voting machines could be tampered with, and today it has been tuned by a fine ear. Today, electronic balloting leaves no track record of paper ballots to count."
I would learn from material afforded me by the Militias that the computer software for counting votes was considered proprietary, and therefore not open to public scrutiny. So there was good reason to doubt that elections were always fair. The patriots and Militias pointed out that the mainstream media, when it reported at all on vote fraud, mostly stuck to issues of multiple voting or votes cast by unqualified persons. But reporters almost always stayed away from the far more serious matter of electronic vote fraud. Indeed, after the fall elections that year, startling new evidence that there were two-way modems inside many of the computers, capable of being reprogrammed at a distance (like telephone answering machines) would be brought to light in the patriot community. The information would come into my hands later that year.
Tom continued, "Money should not be used as the criteria to hold a person away from running. New York State requirements to get on the ballot, even for someone like Pat Buchanan, are impossible. Forbes got the access, with his money. Buchanan, even so, did not get on all the ballots in the state, there are so many hoops to jump through to be a candidate. Rulemaking today is so complex that almost no one can say he lives not violating the law. Mowing the grass, you may be killing an endangered species, if someone took the time to prove it.
"Buchanan was ignored by the media. Alan Keyes was also a substantial candidate, and he could hardly get out of shadowy obscurity. The press made sure of this. Who is the press to decide on this? Only certain candidates are allowed to participate in the debates. Perot had enough money to buy his way in last election. But others are not shown at all."
That spring, in the Republican primaries, conservative talk-show host Pat Buchanan was running against Steve Forbes (owner of Forbes Magazine), black candidate Alan Keyes, and Senator Bob Dole. Already, Buchanan had won the critical primary in New Hampshire and done well in Iowa. Ignored at first, Buchanan's minimally-funded campaign had nevertheless taken off, and he was being given prime time in the news every day. It had quickly become obvious that he was playing to the patriot community and their concerns, as well as the Militias. His message was populist, pressing for the de-globalization of the economy. He called for abolishing NAFTA and getting the U.S. out of GATT to protect small American businesses and jobs. He also advocated doing away with affirmative action and gay rights laws as well as banning abortion (the ultimate rankling points for liberals). He stood steadfast in favor of gun rights and the Second Amendment.
"Lock and load," he would say, his eyes twinkling, a tacit reference to rifle target practice—and the American Revolutionary War. He also made frequent reference to "peasants with pitchforks," alluding to the disenfranchised American farmers (recalling the French Revolution, where a king and his courtiers, who lived off the impoverished peasants tilling the land, had been toppled). Reform the IRS, get rid of socialism, stop the invasion by illegal immigrants undercutting Americans in the job market, defeat the New World Order and Globalism! America first! Buchanan supported the badly-neglected Tenth Amendment and states' rights, and called for doing away with foreign aid. Israel was the largest recipient of U.S. aid, and already in the past, Buchanan had been taken to task and labeled "anti-Semitic" for suggesting that the Israeli lobby exercised too much power in Washington. The "Amen corner," he had called it.
During these spring primaries, at around the same time, a major scandal erupted when CNN reported that one of Buchanan's top advisers, Larry Pratt—executive director of Gun Owners of America, a Washington, D.C., gun rights group—had ties to the Militias, with the media portraying them as white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and again, as being somehow tied to the Oklahoma bombing. Pratt was forced to step down as the campaign's co-chairman, and Buchanan's campaign took a serious dive, from which it never recovered.
I asked Tom who the overall commander of the U.S. Militia was. He replied that he didn't know, explaining, "We operate on the basis of a need to know." So I asked if it hadn't occurred to him that maybe it was being run by the government, or even someone like George Bush, in order to know what the Militias were planning, to gain control of them, as part and parcel of the plan for the New World Order.
His reply was, "I'm not afraid the enemy is controlling us. We have the commonality of the Constitution. We see things from the Constitutional perspective. There is the same perspective all over the country. We may not agree on the UN, or abortion, or whatever; there are gradations in terms of what it is the Militia is about. You see, what's happening in Montana is a good example. We knew about the Freemen. We have the tapes and all—Leroy Schweitzer is the godfather of this information—and we're doing some of the same things they are doing, but they started it. But why should we go from New York unless they need us? They have a Militia in Montana, grass roots."
Tom was referring to the very tense standoff in Montana that had started on February 25, between a group being called the "Montana Freemen" and the government. Of the group of thirty-some Freemen and their friends who had taken refuge at a ranch outside Jordan, Montana, twelve of them had been charged with filing "phony liens," writing "bad checks" and "threatening judges," as the media reported it. Like most people in that part of the country, the group had weapons, and the Freemen were being described by the media as "heavily armed," and an "anti-government Militia."
The story, however, was far more complex. It was true that most of the Militias had openly taken the side of the Freemen. The Freemen, however, were not a Militia, and the Militias said they had taken the Freemen's side because they feared another Waco. The Freemen, like the people at Ruby Ridge and Waco, held religious beliefs that were outside the mainstream, and they vocally subscribed to the Second Amendment right to self-defense, in the political sense (as a check against tyranny). They were holding out against arrest on the Clark ranch—which had been in the family of owner Ralph Clark for several generations—where they had begun to sequester themselves in the fall the year before, after a fellow Freemen was arrested.
Earlier, the Freemen had established a "township" on the Clark ranch, that they named Justus—the old-English spelling for "justice," and a pun on "just us." Invoking the Constitution, they had set up their own Common Law court and appointed a Justice of the Peace. They had proceeded also to invoke the power to carry out the death penalty under the Common Law, as it had once stood, for such things as murder and treason. This went to the very heart of the matter concerning the all-out government siege. The Freemen, in their newly-formed court, had tried several judges, in absentia, for breaking their oaths of office to uphold the Constitution, which in the Freemen's view constituted treason. These Freemen had then raised their voices, threatening to carry out the executions, while at the same time acknowledging that their jurisdiction was limited to Justus Township. The judges, however, feared something the government itself on occasion resorted to—being kidnapped and taken to Justus for trial.
The Freemen had tried a number of other public officials also for breaking their oaths of office, and they had all been found guilty by default when none of them had showed up for trial. With these judgments, the Freemen had obtained liens against their property in the regular county clerk's office, and had begun issuing credit drafts, of the sort normally used by farmers (where liens could be used as the credit), to pay off debts and make purchases. At the same time, the Freemen were conducting seminars for people around the country—given by two of their members, Leroy Schweitzer and Dan Peterson—to teach other patriots how to do the same. The ideas of this particular Freemen movement (there had been others earlier, linked to Posse Comitatus), which had started in the beginning 1990s, at the same time the patriot groups and the Militia movement were heating up, had spread widely throughout all these groups.
Ralph Clark, the owner of the ranch, went the story, at one point in the late 1980s had failed to pay his mortgage, crying foul, and the bank had recently auctioned the ranch off. A relative had bought it, but Clark refused to move. When the local authorities had failed to remove him, the relative had moved to get the FBI involved: he wanted to sell the stores of wheat and begin spring planting. The Militias were appalled when the first thing the FBI had done was kidnap Schweitzer and Peterson on March 25 (just like the officials judged guilty of treason feared would be done to them), with undercover officers posing as satellite dish installers. At a far place on the ranch, Peterson had been subdued with a stun gun and Schweitzer had been hit over the head. The following day, the FBI announced that they had arrested the two Freemen at the Post Office. The arrest warrant, however, appeared only several weeks later in the court docket.
Schweitzer's daughter had been to the prison to see her father a few days after the arrest, and had published an affidavit on the Internet, dated April 11 (which circulated widely among the Militias), describing his circumstances. She wrote:
He described in detail how the federal marshals put shackles around his ankles and wrists so tightly that he bled. He said they strapped him in a chair and kicked him in the legs, hit him in the face, grabbed him by his hair and yanked his head around, pushed in on his ears with their fingers until he almost passed out, and pressed on the backs of his fingernails. They turned down the heat in his cell, took his blanket and his mattress and left him in only his t-shirt and pants.
The following day, said daughter Brandie Schweitzer, they had moved her father to a medical center without notifying the family, and it was only after repeated calls during the next four days that she had been able to locate him. At the medical center, she and her brother had gone to see him again, and had found him with a tube in his nose for force-feeding, which he said was very painful; he had vowed not to eat until he was given a "grand jury trial." Every time they inserted a tube, he said, he was x-rayed against his will, and they had told him that if he pulled the tube out they would put a bigger one in, that would hurt more. He said they had also threatened to start breaking his bones, and a doctor had told him that if he managed to get released, they would "shoot him up with cancer first." There were bruises on the insides of his elbows, and on his hand where they had inserted an I.V., and he said he could smell drugs put in him through the nose tube. Considering that the crimes he was charged with were white-collar—no different from, say, Michael Milken, who had run a junk bond scam on Wall Street—patriots liked to point out that this treatment was highly unusual.
At present, the Clark ranch was surrounded by a collection of law-enforcement agencies, including some 600 FBI agents, with the people inside with their families and friends, charging that the FBI and the federal government had no jurisdiction over them, and vowing to fight to the death rather than surrender. The FBI, the Freemen did not recognize because the United States government system, the argument went, was one of "delegated powers," and in the Constitution the People had granted no "police powers" to the federal government. Therefore, the FBI was unconstitutional.
I was sent a copy of a letter dated June 17, 1986, from a Marlene C. McGuire at the Library of Congress, which indeed said:
Our research shows that while most entitites within the federal government are officially established and defined by charter, the FBI is not. The Attorney General created the FBI in 1908 (The United States Government Manual 347-8 (1904)). The bureau's activities have since been outlined by various statutory authority.
She went on to say that a "formal charter" had been proposed at one time, but was not approved by Congress.
The Freemen were agreeing to be tried in court, but only in a Common Law court under Article III of the Constitution, not an Article I court. They also, however, demanded to be tried under an 1802 law that stipulated that a jury for a Freeman (defined at that time in some places as a white, male landowner), needed to be made up of other Freemen. (As was pointed out, however, by other patriots, this law had long been defunct. The Freemen's reply to this was that all the laws that came after the Civil War were null and void, on the grounds that there was no longer a legitimate, Constitutional government.)
The national media were camped out a mile from the ranch, playing up the standoff every day on the news. They regularly described the Freemen as "white supremacists" and "anti-Semites," and there was beginning to be talk (as there had been at Ruby Ridge and at Waco to justify a government assault) of this being a "fortified compound" and that the family members and friends inside were "hostages" and the children were being mistreated and needed to be "rescued." Patriots and Militia members were increasingly worried that there could be a replay of Waco.
Tom continued, "Aside from the Freemen situation in Montana, it could be any one of many ongoing situations around the country, even one in New York, to set things off. For example, in the summer of 1995 we had an action in New York, and forty states checked on us. It was over a zoning dispute in the town of Perry. It was in the Rochester press. Jim Dacey of the Chemung Militia received a court order that said he had to move his mobile home off his property. We went to the sheriff and told him that this man was attempting to avail himself of the court processes. We told him we would not allow Gestapo-like action, and to leave him alone until he exhausted the court processes, however long that took. We got the sheriff to understand this. We would have put thousands of people there."
Jim Dacey's plight, I would learn later, had been described in a series of press releases during the summer of 1995, by fax and over the Internet, put out by Norman Olson, Commander of the Northern Michigan Regional Militia (he was the Baptist preacher and gun store owner who had founded the Michigan Militia, whom Tom had mentioned). Dacey's case, it seemed, was typical of certain injustices over property rights, that were happening with increasing frequency all around the country, fueling the Militia movement.
Olson's first release was titled: "New York Patriot Stands Alone Against the State: New York Militiaman Vows to Defend Property With His Life, if Necessary." Datelined, "Perry, NY, July 27," it began, "A 4-year legal battle between local officials and a militia member may be nearing a fatal conclusion in this small town between Buffalo and Rochester. In a 'David v. Goliath'-like struggle, James P. Dacey, 41, father of six, of Perry, stands alone against a zoning board intent on removing his manufactured house from property the board claims is unsuitable for 'trailers.'" The press release explained that Dacey's home was not a trailer, but rather, "a manufactured home sitting on a block foundations and cannot be moved," complying fully with the federal guidelines in the "National Mobile Home Construction an Safety Standards Act of 1974." Notwithstanding compliance with the law, however, the Zoning Board order had been upheld by the New York Supreme Court.
In the several releases, it was explained that in 1992 Dacey had requested a variance for his manufactured home and had been turned down, and although the town judge subsequently had ruled in his favor, saying that the zoning laws were outdated and not in compliance with the federal standards for manufactured housing, and even though Dacey's five-and-a-half-acre lot was back in the woods, off a dirt road, and there were half a dozen mobile homes in the same zone, nevertheless, the (state) Supreme Court had upheld the order to remove the home. The Zoning Board's attorney had demanded that Dacey be handcuffed and physically dragged off his property along with his trailer, but the Supreme Court, instead, had imposed a $50-a-day fine for every day that Dacey stayed on.
"I have not had my day in court," was Dacey's response. "They have violated my rights. I am not asking for preferential treatment, only justice. I want to plead my case in a court of law. Until then I will stand," it said in the release. The Supreme Court, it was explained, in fact, had never overturned the lower court's decision that had been favorable to Dacey, but merely ignored it. The local judge who had ruled in Dacey's favor, said the Zoning Board's actions reminded him of the corruption of a "Good Old Boys' Club," with variances and favors granted to residents who were in favor with the town government. Among several other irregularities that were noted in the various releases, the zoning inspector, in violation of New York laws, it said, owned a contracting firm. In Dacey's behalf, Militia Commander Norman Olson declared:
The Dacey matter is prime evidence of government corruption and the resulting abuse of citizens. This harassment must not be tolerated. Jim's father left school after the 8th grade to work the local coal mines and later worked in the steel mills. Jim is a father of six children who are learning very vividly what the tyrants are doing to their father. Jim Dacey needs the people of New York to support him before he is shot down like a dog. I am calling on people everywhere to support James Dacey to help him get his day in court and to plead his case before a jury. I pray that it does not happen, but if it comes to Jim defending his property against armed jackbooted Gestapo thugs, the citizen militia will most likely be there. We don't want war, but if corrupt government gangsters want the war to start in Perry, NY, we may not be able to avoid it. Its their choice now.
If, at first, Olson's reference to Dacey being "shot down like a dog" had sounded to me like a gross overreaction to what was merely a zoning dispute, my thoughts on this would change over the coming months. Over and over, I heard about instances around the country where people had been subjected to injustices by government authorities, that had ended in police brutality—often, over land disputes in rural areas. Indeed, I was told on a number of occasions about such cases, where people ended up being shot dead by law enforcement. The police invariably claimed that they had simply been defending themselves, or that the person had committed suicide, and there was rarely an investigation. All too often, however, those close to the situation said the person in question had been shot in the back. These cases were never reported in the national media.
Indeed, in one such incident later that year, a fellow member of Jim Dacey's Chemung Citizens Militia, who was also involved in a property dispute, was shot by the police in his home, not far from where I interviewed Tom Church. (Although neither Dacey nor the other man lived in Chemung County, they belonged to the Chemung Citizens Militia, perhaps because it was the most visible Militia in the area.) Unlike Dacey, however, this other Militiaman did not request the presence of the Militia, and he was at home alone when the police came to remove him from the property.
©2000 Nita Renfrew
