"Modern Militia Movement" Report Written with ADL Assistance

"The Modern Militia Movement" - the report written by Missouri law enforcement which lists support for Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, or Bob Barr for president as a sign of involvement in the militia movement - is very troubling. While the report has drawn much criticism, little attention has been paid to where Missouri law enforcement got their information from. My immediate suspicion was that the report was written with the help of either the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Anti-Defamation League. Minimal Internet detective work has shown that my suspicion was correct, and that the report was written with the assistance of the latter group.

While the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith purports to be a Jewish civil rights organization, in reality the ADL is a left-wing advocacy group which conducts extensive surveillance on individuals and groups across the political spectrum. The San Francisco district attorney accused the ADL of conducting a national "spy network" after a 1993 raid on the organization's San Francisco offices uncovered computer files [including stolen confidential police documents containing personal information] on 9,876 individuals and more than 950 groups. Noam Chomsky decried the ADL's "Stalinist-style mentality and behavior" after a detailed 150-page report on his activities was leaked to him by someone within the group. While the ADL denies engaging in illegal activities, they boast of their "nationwide fact-finding infrastructure." According to their web site, they specialize in gathering, analyzing and disseminating intelligence on extremism to law enforcement agencies in order for them to combat "serious threats".

The ADL regularly conducts "extremism training" classes for law enforcement, where they instruct officers on "extremist ideologies" and share effective investigation and prosecuting techniques to combat these ideologies. According to the ADL's web site, an extremism training class for Missouri law enforcement was held in Arnold, Mo. in March 2008, in which officers from 25 different agencies heard lectures from "ADL experts on right-wing extremism." It's likely that documentation provided to law enforcement officers at this meeting was the basis for the "Modern Militia Movement" report written by Missouri law enforcement.

Almost the entire Missouri report is composed of cursorily re-worded documents publicly available on the ADL's web site. The first similarity I noticed was this one below. See if you can spot the similarities between the two selections (compare the italicized text).

Selection on "Underground Groups" in the Missouri report
These groups primarily adhere to the principles of Louis Beam’s philosophy of leaderless resistance. This philosophy advocates small autonomous cells driven by ideology rather than by the direction of leaders. These groups are difficult to gather intelligence on as no one outside of the cell would be aware of the organization or its plans. Individuals or “lone wolves” have also been known to adhere to the principles of leaderless resistance in order to perform or plot acts of violence.

Selection on "Leaderless Resistance" (a.k.a. "lone wolf" theory) from the ADL
Beam called for an overhaul of the movement's tactics; he advocated the formation of small, autonomous underground groups driven by ideology rather than by the directions of leaders and membership organizations. Because those outside the cell would not be aware of planned attacks, Beam explained, leaks or infiltration became far less likely.

I thought I was pretty clever for figuring this out, but in fact nearly the entire Missouri edocument is a re-wording of documents available on the ADL's web site. Simon Jester, a poster at the ConnectMidMissouri forum, discovered that the entire section on the Christian Identity movement in the Missouri report was copied nearly verbatim from an ADL source.

The one exception seems to be the section of the Missouri report on "Political Paraphernalia" that mentions Paul, Barr, and Baldwin. The ADL has previously branded Ron Paul a "far-right conservative" with extremist views on taxes, but there's nothing on their web site associating him with the militia movement. Also, a search of the ADL's website returns no matches for either "Chuck Baldwin" or "Campaign for Liberty".

If the rest of the Missouri document was based on information provided by the ADL, you can be sure the section on Paul, Barr, and Baldwin was as well. We can safely assume the ADL has been closely monitoring the activities of Ron Paul and the Campaign for Liberty. Noam Chomsky's secret ADL file was 150 pages. Any guesses as to how long Ron Paul's file is?

It's worth noting that the ADL has been in the forefront of national and state efforts to pass hate crimes legislation. To date 45 states and the District of Columbia have statutes for bias crimes, many of which have been based on the ADL's model hate crimes legislation originally drafted in 1981. The David Ray Ritcheson Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 (HR 262), which could pass in Congress this session, will construct a federal hate crimes command center in Washington, D.C. with an annual cost of $10 million to taxpayers. This command center will not be run by the federal government but by the ADL. Ron Paul and the Campaign for Liberty should aggressively combat the ADL and this latest hate crimes bill.