Domestic Terrorism Threat

I would have expected the Time magazine feature, “The Secret World of Extreme Militias,” to be getting a lot more attention in the blogosphere than it has been getting. Earlier this week some elements of the Right had the vapors over an appearance by Kos on Countdown (which I missed), in which Kos discussed threats of right-wing violence. Anyway, Time‘s Barton Gellman writes,

As militias go, the Ohio Defense Force is on the moderate side. Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement agencies and outside watchdogs. A six-month TIME investigation reveals that recruiting, planning, training and explicit calls for a shooting war are on the rise, as are criminal investigations by the FBI and state authorities. Readier for bloodshed than at any time since at least the confrontations in the 1990s in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, the radical right has raised the threat level against the President and other government targets.

Maybe the righties are keeping quiet about the story because they don’t want to draw attention to it.

One story that I hadn’t heard before is of James Cummings, who had planned to bring a real dirty bomb to the Obama inauguration. And let me emphasize that, unlike the hapless Jose Padilla, Cummings had the goods. With the help of a large inheritance he had accumulated a remarkable amount of thorium, cesium and uranium, the means to disperse them, and enough smarts to pull it off. He intended to load his bomb into a motor home and drive it to Washington for the inauguration.

And he might have achieved his plan had his wife not shot and killed him in December 2008. Cummings had a long history as a domestic abuser, and I don’t believe Mrs. Cummings is being charged with anything. Indeed, she should get a medal.

See also Joe Conason.