Homeland Defense and the Prosecution of Jim Bell
John Young
jya at pipeline.com
Sat Jun 9 09:27:25 PDT 2001
(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 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.
Sections:
Homeland
WarCoast
Cypherpunks
PosterBoy
Joshua
Tacoma
Doppleganger
BattlespaceSuburbia
Holdout
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