U.S. Democratic President-elect Senator Barack Obama waves during his election night rally in Chicago November 4, 2008. REUTERS/Jason ReedAuthorities say skinhead plot wasn't fully formedThis is James Ridgeway's report in The Guardian.
By Woody Baird And Andrew Demillo, Associated Press Writers – Tue Oct 28
BELLS, Tenn. – Two white supremacists charged with plotting to behead blacks across the country and assassinate Barack Obama while wearing white top hats and tuxes were likely too disorganized to carry out the plot, authorities said, and their planning was riddled with blunders.
Paul Schlesselman, 18, of Helena-West Helena, Ark., and Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells are accused of dreaming up the plan. While authorities say they had guns capable of creating carnage, documents show they never got close to getting off the ground.
Among the blunders: They drew attention to themselves by etching swastikas on a car with sidewalk chalk, only knew each other for a month, couldn't even pull off a house robbery, and a friend ratted them out to authorities.
"Certainly these men have some frightening weapons and some very frightening plans," said Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who studies the white supremacy movement. "But with the part about wearing top hats ... it gets a bit hard to take them seriously."
Despite making sure the plot was stopped, authorities did not believe Cowart and Schlesselman had the means to carry out their threat to assassinate Obama, said a federal law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly.
Asked whether the two suspects had Obama's schedule or plans to kill him at a specific time or place, a second law enforcement official who also was not authorized to speak publicly said, "I don't think they had that level of detail."
The two met online about a month ago, introduced by a friend and bound by a mutual belief in white supremacy, according to an affidavit written by a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent who interviewed them. Together, they chatted about how they could carry out such a terroristic spree, officials said. Schlesselman volunteered a sawed-off shotgun that would be "easier to manuever," and also took a gun from his father, according to an affidavit.
The plot referenced two numbers important to skinhead culture by aiming to take the lives of 88 people, and 14 of them would be beheaded. The number 14 refers to a 14-word phrase attributed to an imprisoned white supremacist: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children" and to the eighth letter of the alphabet, H. Two "8"s or "H"s stand for "Heil Hitler."
But that may have been as detailed as it got. Last week, Cowart drove to pick up Schlesselman from his Arkansas home so the plot could begin, according to the affidavit. They decided to start with a house robbery, and asked a friend to drive them. But when they got to the driveway, they saw a dog and two vehicles, and got spooked.
Armed with ski masks and nylon rope they purchased at a Wal-Mart, they tried again the next day to get started. Authorities say they decided to fire on the windows of a church, then bragged about it to a friend. She told her mother, who alerted the local sheriff. Investigators were able to trace the shell casings to the pair, and took them into custody after spotting their car, decorated with chalk-drawn swastikas and racially motivated words, along with the numbers "88" and "14."
Schlesselman's family said Tuesday that it was unlikely he was seriously planning an attack, even though he expressed hatred for blacks. A high school dropout who was unsuccessful finding work, he often spent time on the computer, his 16-year-old sister, Kayla said. She said she often argued with him about his racial beliefs, and he would say things like "Obama would make the world suffer."
He hated his tiny Delta hometown of Helena-West Helena because it was predominantly black, she said.
"He just believes that he's the master race," she said. "He would just say things like 'white power' and 'Sieg Heil' and 'Heil Hitler.'"
His father, Mike, also doubted the plot was serious. "I think it's just a lot of talk. He would never do something like this," he said.
Cowart worked at a grocery store in Bells for about a year, according to Scotty Runions, 54, who supervised him. Runions said Cowart was preoccupied with computers and bagged groceries at the store until about May 2007, before moving to Texas.
"The guy I saw on TV last night was not the same person that I knew, and I saw him about a month ago," Runions said. "This is something he's created in the past month — that's not the young man that we know."
The Southern Poverty Law Center traced Cowart to the Supreme White Alliance, a skinhead hate group organized this spring that describes itself on its Web site as a "Club based on Racial beliefs. and for those of you who don't know what that means, we are in fact Racist's."
But the link doesn't appear strong, and the group apparently kicked him out earlier this year. A post on the alliance's Web site accused the law center of lying about the extent of its connection with Cowart, but acknowledged that "one of the two young men was in fact a probate earlier this year but was ousted."
The group's leader on Tuesday condemned the plot and denied that Cowart had been a part of his "club," but nevertheless said he was resigning as its president over negative publicity the case generated.
"We don't go out and start trouble. We are more like a social club. We just hang out," Steve Edwards of Central City, Ky., told The Associated Press.
Potok, the law center's intelligence director, said Cowart is shown in a photograph of an April alliance gathering to commemorate Hitler's birthday.
"The chances are excellent he was booted out when he was in the news in a way that didn't reflect wonderfully on them," Potok said.
Attorneys for Cowart and Schesselman haven't commented, but Schlesselman's sister said Tuesday she spoke with him after the charges were made public. "He said he's sorry about everything he's done," she said.
The plot was the third high-profile incident involving death threats against Obama in the last three months.
Raymond Hunter Geisel, 22, has pleaded not guilty to charges he threatened to assassinate Obama and President Bush. Authorities said Geisel kept an arsenal of weaponry and military gear and made the threats while attending a training class to become a bail bondsman.
A group of men who sparked fears of an assassination plot against Obama during the Democratic Party's presidential convention in Denver in August. Authorities said the men had guns and bulletproof vests and made racist threats against Obama, but were high on methamphetamine and posed no true danger.
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Associated Press Writer Andrew DeMillo reported from Helena-West Helena, Ark. Also contributing were Erik Schelzig in Nashville, Bill Poovey in Chattanooga, Tenn. and Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington.
Fourteen Words that spell racismI was working on this post about racism in general when i came across Yawning Bread's latest article in which he highlights an incident in Singapore. Its true, and sad at the same time, when he writes Racism lurks just under the surface. All sorts of grievances, genuine though they may be, are often turned into colour-based accusations and Relative silence does not mean it does not exist.
The prospect of an African-American president is bringing white supremacist subculture in the US out of the shadows
Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman, the two Tennessee neo-Nazis arrested for plotting to kill 102 African-American schoolchildren and then assassinate Barack Obama, clearly drew inspiration from a violent white nationalist group called the Order. In the 1980s, members of the Order carried out a crime spree that included several high-profile murders.
The connection to the Order is evident in the numbers the two men scrawled on their car on Saturday shortly before they were arrested: 14 and 88. The so-called Fourteen Words is a slogan - "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children" - coined by Order member David Lane, who also wrote an essay called 88 Precepts. In white supremacist circles, 14-88 is a shorthand expression of allegiance to the beliefs put forth by Lane and the Order, who wanted to found a white homeland where they could preserve the "Aryan race" from being polluted by non-whites and enslaved by the "Zionist-occupied government" of the US. Lane also advocated polygamy and a kind of European paganism he called Wotanism.
The plot by the two Tennessee men, grotesque as it may be, seems not to have got beyond the half-baked stage. But in the early 1980s, the Order - also known as the Brüder Schweigen or Silent Brotherhood - was active, violent, and deadly.
In order to finance their mission, the gang robbed a series of banks and armoured cars and ran a counterfeiting operation. Cowart and Schlesselman are also said to have planned a series of robberies to support their plot - another indication that they modelled themselves on the Order.
Order members were best known for the 1984 murder of Denver talkshow host Alan Berg. The group's leader, Robert Jay Matthews, was killed soon afterwards in a shootout with federal agents. David Lane was arrested in 1985 and died in prison last year while serving a 190-year sentence. Both men have become heroes and martyrs to the white supremacist movement.
During the heyday of the racist far right in the 1980s, the Order was only one of the groups active across the US. I wrote about that subculture for years, and made a film about it.
During that time, I visited one of the meetings that brought the various groups together, hosted on the Michigan farm of Bob Miles, the Grand Dragon of the local Ku Klux Klan (and also a former finance chairman of the Michigan Republican party).
Miles sought to unite the divergent factions - the various Klans, the Aryan Nations, the National Alliance, the Posse Comitatus, the Order and others -into a serious revolutionary movement with an armed underground. This would be built around leaderless cells and have an overground political presence. In some cases, efforts were made to influence the most rightwing reaches of the Republican party.
Bob Miles's dream of a united front never materialised. And those who track the white power movement generally view it as having been in decline after the 1980s, floundering around without purpose or leadership. Yet remnants of it have clearly survived. They surfaced with horrific results in Oklahoma City in 1995, and they can be found among today's skinheads and their fellow travellers.
Some of these are part of biker gangs, including the Sons of Silence, who were implicated in a threat against Obama at the Democratic convention in Denver. Some have joined the anti-immigrant vigilante movement, committing drive-by shootings of Mexican labourers. Others are scattered around doing their own thing: picking fights in bars, beating up gay men. Some are clearly being brought out of the dark corners by the prospect of an African-American man as president. That's the case with the subject of our video, the National Socialist Movement's Steven Boswell, who talked to us in Columbia, Missouri.
• James Ridgeway is the author of Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads and the Rise of a New White Culture
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