Homeland Defense and the Prosecution of Jim Bell

[John Young]

(Resent, LNE is down)


http://cartome.org/homeland.htm  (72KB)

"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 Tacoma’s 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 government’s stated case against him only a fragment of 
  a more complex campaign linked to the evolving landscape of
  national and homeland defense.

  In the government’s 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 government’s 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.

Sections:

Homeland
WarCoast
Cypherpunks
PosterBoy
Joshua
Tacoma
Doppleganger
BattlespaceSuburbia
Holdout