http://cartome.org/homeland.htm "So, say goodnight to Joshua ..." Homeland Defense and the Prosecution of Jim Bell Deborah Natsios Cartome 8 June 2001 A sparsely attended trial which unfolded in Tacomas US district courthouse the first week of April 2001 hardly seemed an event that might open a small but revealing view onto the shifting national security apparatus. But to outside observers following the criminal prosecution of Washington State resident Jim Bell, accused of stalking and intimidating local agents of the IRS, Treasury Department and BATF, the defendant was a symptomatic target, and the governments stated case against him only a fragment of a more complex campaign linked to the evolving landscape of national and homeland defense. In the governments estimation, Bell had placed its Pacific Northwest agents "in reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury"1. But for some trial-watchers, the case against James Dalton Bell, 43, was underpinned by a constellation of factors that made him more than the disaffected neighbor projecting antigovernment bile. Bell had invited the governments fullest prosecutorial zeal because his technical skills placed him in more ambiguous terrain, that of untested gray zones within emerging national defense landscapes, which, by calling into question the impregnability of the national border, have been taking national security tactics incountry in unprecedented ways, deploying new rules of engagement to challenge national security threats within the US domestic interior. Chapters: Homeland WarCoast Cypherpunks PosterBoy Joshua Tacoma Doppleganger BattlespaceSuburbia Holdout
participants (1)
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John Young