Lovely!  The paranoia continues to spread faster than the Swine Flu.  They should set up public trials like they did in Salem with the witches and have the populace try, convinct, sentence and execute the accused.  It will probably cost less money that way and "justice" will be served just the same way as it would thru the conventional methods.

 In my experience, federal prosecutors in high-profile domestic arrests of "terrorists" who are also U.S. citizens will always lay out the most damning evidence and accusations they have (even if knowingly untrue) at the very beginning when they hold their press conferences. They do this because they are under pressure (either from supervisors, political aspirations for the future, or both) to make the public believe they are being benevolently looked after by their masters and to justify the BS they are required to live with. This is actually THE MOST IMPORTANT task of a federal prosecutor;...keeping the King's subjects orderly and remaining within the delusion the gov't gives a damn about them.

Therefor, we can be reasonably certain, even now at this early stage, that the entirety of the case has been lain out before us,...and it is alarming not only in how weak it is,...but in how readily applicable it is to nearly any other domestic politically non-desirable group.

Consider the elements laid before us;

1.) For a religious zealot, the "ring-leader" sure was a non-conformist. He had broken away from the mainstream of his particular wing of Abrahamic theology, opting to become an independent teacher of religion who operated out of his home. (Yes, he is Muslim,...but ask the Baptists of the slavic states that made up the former USSR what they think of this. They were sent to the siberian slave labor camps along with the Jews and other "mental defectives" who didn't bow down before the almighty state. How many of you reading this attend an unaffiliated/non-aligned/break-away/independent/non-denominational "church"?)

.2) He had a lot of guns. Even some Evil Black Rifles (EBRs). (Well now, I know for a FACT that many of you here have that, too.)

.3) He was armed when he left his house every day. (Again, that's half the people reading this. Big deal.)

.4) He and like-minded others raised funds and sent fellow "extremists" overseas to troubled areas, supposedly to engage in combat and/or train for it. (While that may end up in fact being true, it is also true that many Christian and Jewish "extremists" raise funds and send "fellow extremists" to troubled parts of the world to help their brothers. If an ultra-orthodox Jew travels to an illegal settlement on Palestinian territory and renders medical aid to a wounded squatter, is he engaging in terrorism. There are those who argue yes. Thousands of Bosnian-American Croats (Christians) travelled to the war-torn Yugoslavia as it was breaking up to (in their minds) prevent the Muslim desecration of their ancestral lands. I am not aware of a single one who was ever prosectued. But since this will all be presented in secret proceedings in a secret court, we'll never know whether or not perhaps the prosecutor,...as prosecutors are famous for,...might simply be exagerating or outright lying. The Viper Militia case right here in Phoenix back in 1996 is proof that such abuse of the press for political sensationalism occurs.)

So,...consider the following future scenario;...A group of "radical" Mormons who believe the small population of Chinese converts to Mormanism is China are being unfairly and brutally oppressed by the gov't there, organize and fund a group of "fellow extremists" to travel there and conduct illegal activities live smuggling in banned religious texts and helping their brothers evade the men with guns who hunt them. Because Mormons are NOT pacifists, perhaps they even engage in a little bit of instruction to their foreign flock on principles of defense against gov't goons. And again, because they are not pacifists, and in part out of devout religious observance, these stateside organizers have their mandated emergency preparedness supplies for Armagedon,...including many Evil Black Rifles. Let us imagine in this hypothetical future that once again in American culture, Mormons are "undesirable" and viewed with fear, distrust and bias by the American mainstream society. How difficult would it be for an unscrupulous politically motivated prosecutor (who lusts to one day attain elective office) to make assumptions, exagerations and outright lies and succeed in portraying these "zealots" as a terrorist conspiracy? While not easily imaginable TODAY,...far stranger things have happened.

The point is that I almost never believe the first announcements put out by prosecutors to the press. They rarely end up being 100% true, and often are less than 50% truthfull. On occasion, they are complete bullshit. Prosecutors have so much power to lie and so little exposure to consequences for doing so (just ask Harold Fish), that it ought to scare the pants off you that no one will ever be able to prove whether these allegations actually have merit to them or not. We will never be allowed to verify or debunk them. Therefore we will never know if it was real or imagined. In short, the gov't is telling us a scary bedtime story.

But is it true?