While the Bush ‘Justice’ Department was infiltrating groups like the Audubon Society and those militant Quaker groups (irony intended), weapons-toting self-styled “Freemen” like Scott Roeder were doing whatever the hell they wanted. After all, just how dangerous could Roeder be?:
Those who know Roeder said he believed that killing abortion doctors was an act of justifiable homicide.
“I know that he believed in justifiable homicide,” said Regina Dinwiddie, a Kansas City anti-abortion activist who made headlines in 1995 when she was ordered by a federal judge to stop using a bullhorn within 500 feet of any abortion clinic. “I know he very strongly believed that abortion was murder and that you ought to defend the little ones, both born and unborn.”
Roeder also was a subscriber to Prayer and Action News, a magazine that advocated the justifiable homicide position, said publisher Dave Leach, an anti-abortion activist from Des Moines, Iowa.
“I met him once, and he wrote to me a few times,” Leach said. “I remember that he was sympathetic to our cause, but I don’t remember any details.”
Leach said he met Roeder in Topeka when he went there to visit Shelley Shannon, who was in prison for the 1993 shooting of Tiller.
“He told me about a lot of conspiracy stuff and showed me how to take the magnetic strip out of a five-dollar bill,” Leach said. “He said it was to keep the government from tracking your money.”
Roeder, who in the 1990s was a manufacturing assemblyman, also was involved in the “Freemen” movement.
“Freemen” was a term adopted by those who claimed sovereignty from government jurisdiction and operated under their own legal system, which they called common-law courts. Adherents declared themselves exempt from laws, regulations and taxes and often filed liens against judges, prosecutors and others, claiming that money was owed to them as compensation.
In April 1996, Roeder was arrested in Topeka after Shawnee County sheriff’s deputies stopped him for not having a proper license plate. In his car, officers said they found ammunition, a blasting cap, a fuse cord, a one-pound can of gunpowder and two 9-volt batteries, with one connected to a switch that could have been used to trigger a bomb.
Read the entire article and ask yourselves, with all the surveillance and wiretapping of American citizens that went on during the Bush years, how is it that true terrorist organizations like the ones Roeder championed, organizations armed to the teeth and full of righteous zealotry, somehow escaped their dragnet? Yes, that is a rhetorical question.