EPA Announcement

Today's announcement by EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy is an important step forward for our nation and our planet. From now on, future coal- and gas-fired power plants must take responsibility for their global warming pollution by reducing or capturing their overall emissions.

This is a critical achievement for President Barack Obama and his administration. In the face of an intransigent and inactive Congress, the President has made halting the climate crisis a priority. The policies announced today, combined with the rest of the President's Climate Action Plan, will put us on the path toward solving the climate crisis, but Congress must also soon face the reality of the situation.

Three years ago, Congress failed to put a price on carbon and, in doing so, allowed global warming pollution to continue unabated. We have seen the disturbing consequences that the climate crisis has to offer -- from a drought that covered 60% of our nation to Superstorm Sandy which wreaked havoc and cost the taxpayers billions, from wildfires spreading across large areas of the American West to severe flooding in cities all across our country -- we have seen what happens when we fail to act. We need a price on carbon. We need it now.

Thanks for all that you do,

Al Gore
Chairman, The Climate Reality Project

P.S. This is a historic step in the right direction. Head to the EPA's website for more information on the announcement.

The Dark Side Of Homeschooling

On September 9, the parents of Hana Williams, an Ethiopian teenager living in the state of Washington, were convicted of killing her. During the last year of her life, court documents show, she had lost almost 30 pounds as she was beaten, denied food, forced to sleep in a barn, and given cold outdoor showers with a garden hose. Much of the time she was kept barefoot, although she was allowed shoes if there was snow on the ground. Sometimes she was given nothing but a towel to wear. If Williams had been in school, someone might have noticed that she was underdressed and emaciated. But she was homes chooled, and so her parents, fundamentalist Christians in thrall to a harsh disciplinary philosophy, had complete privacy to punish her as they saw fit. She died naked, face down in the mud in their backyard.

Katrina Wittkamp/Getty

Williams is far from the only home schooled kid to be tortured or murdered in recent years. Exactly how many is hard to say—research on home schoolers is incredibly spotty, and what exists is mostly done by homeschooling advocates. But Heather Doney and Rachel Coleman, two women who themselves grew up in homeschooling families, have documented dozens of horrific cases on their website, Homeschooling’s Invisible Children, which launched in May. A database of local news stories and official documents, the site is searchable by category, including Fatality, Food Deprivation, Imprisonment, Physical Abuse and Sexual Abuse. Under Sexual Abuse, to take just one of them, Doney and Coleman found almost 70 victims since 2000—and those are just cases that made the papers.

Coleman, an Indiana University Ph.D. student who studies the role of children in the Christian right, does not believe that homeschooling parents are more abusive than others. Some 1.5 million Americans kids are taught at home, and there’s no reason to think that more than a small fraction of them are subject to severe violence. Indeed, Coleman says she wouldn’t even rule out homeschooling her own children. But she argues that because the practice is almost entirely unregulated in much of the country, it can make abusive situations worse, allowing parents to hide their crimes and denying kids access to outside authority. “Homeschooling enables parents to isolate children,” Coleman says. “That can enable them to abuse them.”

April Duvall, 33, is a member of an online support group for women who grew up in fundamentalist homeschooling families. Before her parents stopped sending her to school, she says, her father, a far-right evangelical pastor, worried that he’d get in trouble if he left marks on her after a beating. “My parents were abusive as long as I can remember, but my dad was afraid they would get caught,” Duvall says. Then, in second grade, her mother started teaching her at home, and “my dad stopped being scared that he would get caught.”

Indeed, when kids are homeschooled, it’s easy for the world to forget that they exist. In August, Erica Lynn Parsons, a 15-year-old girl ostensibly being homeschooled in North Carolina by her adoptive parents, was reported missing by her stepbrother; it soon emerged that she hadn’t been seen since 2011. Her birth mother is now calling for an “Erica’s law” that would provide greater oversight of homeschooling.

Some families are simply trying to hide abuse and keep kids wholly under their control. In others, the abuse and the homeschooling stem from the same rigid religious ideology.

Right now there’s remarkably little. In 10 states, homeschooling is completely unregulated, and in 15 more, parents only have to notify their school district that their kids will be learning at home. There are no minimum educational standards for teachers, no curriculum review, no testing or monitoring to make sure that any education is taking place at all.
 Duvall, for example, says she had to teach herself out of textbooks from Bob Jones University. “If I didn’t do it, nobody made me do it,” she says. “I wanted to go to college.” Her two youngest siblings had it even worse. Their mother, Duvall says, “gave them an impossible list of housework tasks they had do before they were allowed to do schoolwork. I think she just didn’t want them to leave home, ever.”

Even in states with more regulation, like North Carolina, required testing is administered by parents, who are responsible for mailing the results to authorities. “The law gives its officials no right to enter homes or to inspect any records besides test scores,” says a state legal summary put out by the Home School Legal Defense Association, the nation’s premier Christian homeschooling organization.


The Home School Legal Defense Association was founded in 1983, just as homeschooling was catching on among an ascendant Christian right. Many in the movement believed that public schools indoctrinated children in godless secularism and saw homeschooling as a way to give their kids an education steeped in biblical values. At first, homeschoolers faced a great deal of official resistance—some states banned homeschooling outright, while others strictly limited it. During the past 30 years, though, HSLDA has successfully fought to eliminate or drastically loosen those regulations.

Meanwhile, the practice has grown rapidly—according to the National Center on Education Statistics, the number of home schooled kids increased by 74 percent between 1999 and 2007. No one knows how many of these kids come from deeply religious families, but it’s clear that conservative Christians constitute the single largest bloc.

Among the evangelical homeschooling subculture, there’s an assumption that “anyone who is in favor of increased regulation really wants to ban homeschooling,” says Coleman. Any attempt to curtail the authority of parents, no matter how abusive they might be, is treated as a slippery slope. Michael Farris, the founder of HSLDA, even wrote a novel, Anonymous Tip, about an innocent homeschooling family persecuted by corrupt agents of child protective services.

The power of the movement was demonstrated as far back as 1990, when Florida considered a law that would have required the names of homeschooling parents to be run through a child-abuse registry. “Homeschoolers freaked out, opposed the law, and killed it,” Coleman says. Indeed, one Florida homeschooling organization still touts that victory on its website. This sort of lobbying means that in many places, violent parents who keep their kids out of school can rule them unchecked.

In general, such parents fall into two broad categories. Some are simply trying to hide abuse and keep kids wholly under their control, like the Ohio pedophile Kenneth Brandt, who was convicted last year of raping and prostituting his adopted homeschooled sons. In other families, though, the abuse and the homeschooling stem from the same rigid religious ideology.

The parents of Hana Williams, for example, subscribed to the teachings of Michael and Debi Pearl, promoters of an authoritarian, proudly patriarchal variant of Christian fundamentalism that emphasizes a wife’s total submission to her husband and children’s total submission to their parents. The Pearl’s influential book, To Train Up a Child, advocates whipping children with a thin tree branch from the time they’re just a few months old and has sold well over half a million copies. Their followers have been involved in several child killings, including the 2010 murder of 7-year-old Lydia Schatz, whose homeschooling adoptive parents were convicted of beating her to death for mispronouncing a word.

Coleman, 26, who says her own parents were followers of the Pearls, has a few theories as to why many of these cases involve adopted kids. The eldest of 12 children, she and her siblings were accustomed to harsh discipline their entire lives and knew better than to try and rebel. “Because they started with us so young, there weren’t as many long, drawn-out battles of the will,” she says. “We knew that obedience was immediate, complete, and without question.”

Adopted kids, however, don’t have such long training in submission. Further, says Coleman, they don’t have a lifetime of bonding with their parents, which “can tend to be kind of a staying hand.” (The Pearls recognize that love can interfere with their child training, which is why they warn parents not to let crying “cause you to lighten up on the intensity or duration of the spanking.”) Of course, adoptive parents usually love their kids, too, but, especially with older children, the connection isn’t necessarily immediate. Nor is tenderness likely to develop, Coleman says, “if you start out viewing that child as someone that is evil and needs to have their will broken.”

Sometimes in the wake of a homeschooling death, there will be official calls for reform. In 2011 in Florida, the adoptive parents of 10-year-old Nubia Barahona were arrested for her murder, as well as for the horrific abuse of her twin brother, Victor. Afterward, the state convened an expert panel to review how its social-service systems had failed. In their report (PDF), the panelists wrote that school officials had tried to intervene, noting their “diligence as caring professionals.” In 2010, however, the Barahonas began homeschooling, “taking away most of their visibility to outside eyes and increasing the danger that abuse and neglect would go unrecognized. This was further compounded by the lack of formal requirements relating to the monitoring of students being homeschooled.” (The Barhonas are expected to go on trial next year.)

So far, however, regulations haven’t been tightened, and it’s not clear whether the recent killings will change anything. Earlier this year, Pennsylvania state Sen. Andrew Dinniman sponsored new legislation in response to the 2012 deaths of two young homeschooled boys in Philadelphia: 6-year-old Khalil Wime, whose parents were arrested for starving and torturing him to death, and 5-year-old Dashawn Harris, reportedly beaten to death by his mother’s boyfriend for mispronouncing the word “sad” during a homeschooling lesson. He is awaiting trial for first-degree murder.

Under Dinniman’s bill, when families with recent child-abuse complaints start homeschooling, child protective services would have to be notified. The parents wouldn’t necessarily be prohibited from pulling their kids out of school, but there would be an outside risk assessment.

The homeschooling movement reacted with outrage. “Bad Bills Threaten Homeschooling Freedom” said an alert sent out by HSLDA. The organization was indignant that families that had already been investigated for abuse would be investigated a second time “just because they had decided to homeschool their children.” As of now, legislation’s future is unclear. “We have heard some concerns in questions about the bill,” said Dinniman’s legislative director, refusing to speculate on its chances.

Because the Christian homeschooling movement is fairly new, the first generation of homeschooled students is just reaching adulthood and starting to speak out. Eventually, people like Doney, Coleman, and Duvall may organize to counter the lobbying might of the HSLDA. For now, though, homeschooling parents have all the influence. “I wish the homeschooling community admitted that abuse happens a lot,” says Duvall. “People say there are no abused homeschooled kids in their community, but there probably are.” They just don’t have a voice.

In Epic Briefing Rumble, Jay Carney Challenges Fox News’ Ed Henry to a Crossfire

 At Thursday’s daily briefing, a combative Fox News Chief White House Correspondent Ed Henry met an equally combative White House Press Secretary Jay Carney in rhetorical combat over the economy, and the ongoing Republican effort to leverage the debt ceiling.

Things escalated quickly to Carney challenging Henry to an eventual Crossfire debate. This is the second time he has made such a reference to Henry this month, but the first one was a good deal more friendly.

Henry began by asking Carney about the Fed’s decision to continue its efforts to stimulate the economy, and what that says about the economy. “Is that not an indictment of the President’s policies, since he’s had five years now?” Henry asked.

Despite the loaded construction, Carney started off with the calm boilerplate about just how bad things were when the President took office, how things have improved, but not enough, and how critical investments in infrastructure, research and development, and education are needed, investments that Republicans want to cut.

Then, things took a turn when Henry said “2011, the President signs a Budget Control Act of 2011 — the last time we had this big debt ceiling fight — into law. And he says, ‘We have $2 trillion in deficit reduction,’ the President says, ‘yet it also allows us to keep making key investments in things like education and research that lead to new jobs, and assures we’re not cutting too abruptly while the economy is still fragile.’ August 2011. Here we are more than two years later, you’re saying the same thing about we need to invest in education…”

“And how many jobs has the economy created since then?” Carney shot back.

Henry replied “And Bernanke yesterday said it’s not keeping up, that people are leaving the workforce. That’s why the unemployment…”

“You and I, we’re going to do this on Crossfire one day, I promise,” Carney said, adding “And let’s be clear that I’ll be on one side and you’ll be on the other.”

Carney began making the point that those investments are as crucial today as they were then.

“The budget of 2011 did that, according to the President,” Henry said. “Two years later…”

Carney, clearly perturbed, said “We need to help you with your facts about what happened in 2011.”

He took Henry through the evolution of the so-called “sequester,” which was a part of the Budget Control Act that was never supposed to take place because both sides were supposed to recognize how onerous it would be, and reach an agreement on deficit reduction.

“Now, the sequester is indiscriminate, across-the-board cuts, which Republicans bemoaned, until, lacking an alternative, they celebrated, including significant cuts to our military readiness and cuts to Head Start and other programs that are vital to millions of American families across the country,” Carney continued. “So again, if you’re suggesting by this that we ought to be cutting education, you should say so. If you’re suggesting we ought to be — that’s what the Republican budget proposes — that we ought to be cutting — we ought not to be funding infrastructure.”

“The President said we were making those investments,” Henry responded. “Two years later, the Fed says it’s just not growing.”

“Ed, have we been growing?” Carney asked. “Has the economy been growing? Yes, it is.”

“Those are facts,” Henry persisted. “That’s what he said. He said it’s just not growing quick enough for us to take the training wheels off.”

Carney then explained that the “key investments” that have led to growth ought not to be cut, and that “Republicans have put forward ideas that would bring us back to policies that caused the worst job loss of our lifetimes.”

Henry then drew laughs from a few reporters when he cracked “Since you said you wanted to focus on facts, yesterday you and the President talked about how ‘never in the history of America has the debt ceiling been used to extort a President.’ You probably saw The Washington Post looked at that, looked at the facts and gave you four Pinocchios. So are you going to correct that today?”

Carney and Henry went back and forth over Glenn Kessler’s “Fact Check” for awhile, with Carney standing by his interpretation of the President’s use of the term “extort.”

“There is no question that prior to 2011, there has never been a case where one party with one ideological agenda has threatened to default on the United States obligations for the first time in its history,” Carney said. For what it’s worth, Kessler, in an update to his fact check, appeared to concede Carney’s point, but maintained that it differed from the President’s.

“So why did The Washington Post give you four Pinocchios?” Henry asked.

“You can ask The Washington Post,” Carney replied.

After a few more rounds, an exasperated Carney cracked “Does anybody else want to watch Ed and me debate?”

“Yes, I said it is absolutely correct that prior to 2011, no party to the budget agreements of the past had ever threatened default if it did not get its way ideologically,” Carney said. “It did not happen. And in 2011, we saw it happen. And even the flirtation with default, the fact that there were members of Congress on Capitol Hill who said, we should default rather than reach an agreement with President Obama, a compromise with President Obama — that took an enormous toll on our economy.”

“And people who think that this is fun and games ought to tell it to those people who did not get jobs in August of 2011 or September of 2011 because of that behavior,” Carney scolded. “People who struggled to pay their bills for longer than they should have because of that decision. It was a mistake then, and I think the American people saw it as a mistake. And a lot of people, including a lot of Republicans, see it as a mistake today.”

It has been clear, for a long time, that Ed Henry has a keen understanding of his audience, and it appears that Carney is gaining one for his.

Here’s the clip, via The White House:

The Georgia Militia Murders

Michael Roark had been stationed at Georgia’s Fort Stewart Base for four months when he replaced the Army with a new love: his girlfriend Tiffany York. Finished with boot camp, the formerly enthusiastic 19-year-old’s attitude began to change. He complained that his superiors were picking on him. His father, a veteran himself, told his son, “You signed up for a certain period of time, you need to stick it out.” But Michael was determined to move on with his life. He pushed to get discharged so that he and 17-year-old Tiffany could move to the West coast—she wanted to be by family; he wanted to be a motorcycle mechanic. Four days after Michael was released on December 2, 2011, his body and Tiffany’s were discovered by two fishermen in the woods outside Fort Stewart.

U.S. Army Sgt. Anthony Peden, 25, right, and Pvt. Isaac Aguigui, 19 are led away in handcuffs after appearing before a magistrate judge at the Long County Sheriffs Office Monday, Dec. 12, 2011 in Ludowici, Ga. (Lewis Levine/AP)

The story of the murders is tailored for a thriller, complete with drugs, guns, and a maniacal plot to overthrow the U.S. government—based almost entirely on a video game. The young couple, Georgia state prosecutors charged, was killed by Private Isaac Aguigui, Sergeant Anthony Peden, Private Christopher Salmon, and Private First Class Michael Burnett. The four were Michael’s fellow soldiers at Fort Stewart. They were also part of an anti-government militia. In July, Aguigui, the group’s ringleader, pleaded guilty charges including malice murder and criminal gang activity and was sentenced to life in prison. Just a few weeks earlier, the Army, which had been investigating Aguigui since his pregnant wife’s death two years earlier, charged him with her murder as well. (He hasn’t yet entered a plea in that case.)

Knowing that Isaac Aguigui will be in prison for the rest of his life is not enough for his victims’ grieving families. Roark’s father told The Daily Beast that a colonel suggested to him that the Army had deliberately not discharged the FEAR Militia members in order to monitor them. Last month, after Aguigui was sentenced, his victims’ families filed a wrongful death claim against the Army, arguing that in investigating Aguigui’s wife’s death, the Army had become aware that Aguigui was violent, stockpiling weapons with the money he received from his wife’s insurance policy, and actively recruiting soldiers to join his anti-government militia. If Aguigui had been charged with his wife’s death sooner, or even discharged sooner, they claim, Michael and Tiffany might still be alive. 

Aguigui was a charismatic figure at Fort Stewart, though one with a penchant for anti-government rants. Shortly before his wife’s death, according to court documents, he started actively recruiting troubled or disillusioned soldiers for his militia through a process he called “the awakening.” Aguigui would make them read a magazine article about Rainbow Six Patriots, a then-upcoming video game about U.S. soldiers attacking the government in an effort to return the United States to greatness. Those who liked the game’s concept were welcomed into the militia.

The inner circle of the FEAR militia (which stands for Forever Enduring, Always Ready) sports tattoos of the Greek letters alpha and omega, signifying the beginning and the end. The same symbol is engraved on some of their guns. And they had big plans, prosecutors say: They were to move headquarters to a compound in Washington State, where they would set up a security company as a front for their criminal activities. Those planned criminal activities included bombing a major dam, poisoning the state’s apple crop, and infiltrating the drug trade between Canada and Washington. Their ultimate goal, prosecutors say, was to assassinate President Obama and seize control of the U.S. government.

***

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil-rights organization, has been pushing the military to get tough on extremists since 1985, following a number of incidents that included members of the military providing paramilitary training and stolen firearms to neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups and the murders of black civilians. A decade later, the military began to require commanding and recruitment officers to look for Swastika tattoos and other indicators of radical affiliations. But in 2005, at the height of the Iraq and Afghan wars (and with all factions of the military desperate to fill quotas), recruitment officers started turning a blind eye to some of these clues, according to SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok.

The SPLC began collecting incriminating photos and comments posted by soldiers on the website New Saxon, which is kind of like a Facebook for white supremacists, and sending them to the Pentagon. In a 2006 article entitled “A Few Bad Men,” the SPLC alleged that thousands of extremists had managed to make their way into the military. In the fall of 2009, the Pentagon changed its policy from banning only “active participation” in extremists groups to prohibiting any advocacy of supremacy or other efforts to deprive individuals of their civil rights.   

“These are people who followed a charismatic leader who turned out to be slightly insane.”

“These are people who followed a charismatic leader who turned out to be slightly insane and wound up in a situation where two people were murdered,” Potok says of the FEAR Militia.

Before he set his sights on overthrowing the U.S. government, Isaac Aguigui attended the U.S. Military Academy Prep School in West Point, New York, where, according to her obituary, he met his future wife, Deirdre, in 2009,. Their relationship, against the academy’s rules, reportedly got Aguigui kicked out. But a year later they were both stationed at Fort Stewart, the largest military installation east of the Mississippi, spanning five Georgia counties and training up to 50,000 reserve soldiers each year. Isaac served as an intelligence analyst and Deirdre as a linguist.

After returning from a deployment from Iraq at the beginning of 2011, Deirdre became pregnant; five months later, she was found dead at their home with small cuts on her wrists. Aguigui told Army investigators at the time that he and his wife had sex only a few hours before her death, pointing to handcuffs and a variety of sex toys that were strewn across their bed. But Army criminal investigators later discovered that Deirdre had kicked her husband out the house for infidelity and drug use and concluded that the scandalous bed scene was likely staged. A friend told investigators that Aguigui had said he’d be “better off if she was gone.” Fellow soldier and ex-girlfriend Samantha Thacker confirmed that she received a text message from Aguigui about eight hours before Deirdre’s death reading, “We’ll have plenty of money. All I need is your body whenever I want it.”

The initial military autopsy on Deirdre came back inconclusive as to the cause of her death. But a medical examiner who took a second look for the Georgia Bureau of Investigations this past April reportedly concluded that Deirdre had been either choked or smothered to death.

Aguigui received $500,000 in insurance benefits from his wife’s death, which he almost immediately began using to fund his militia, Georgia state prosecutor Isabel Pauley said in court. While on bereavement leave in his hometown of Cashmere, Washington, he purchased $32,000 worth of military grade assault rifles, accessories and other weapons. He continued to buy about $28,000 more similar weaponry over the phone through November, 2011—right before the murders of Tiffany and Michael. In September of 2011, Wenatchee police Sgt. John Kruse in central Washington reportedly received a tip from a Washington relative of Aguigui’s who was concerned about his semiautomatic shopping spree and suspicious about the circumstances of Deirdre’s death. After confirming Aguigui’s purchases, the Wenatchee police notified the FBI and the Army’s criminal investigation division and discovered that there was already an investigation being conducted into Deirdre’s death.

When Aguigui came back to Fort Stewart, Pauley said, he notified his FEAR troops that it was time to change up their process for purchasing weapons. He gave members of the militia his credit and debit card numbers so they could continue stockpiling, this time illegally. One of the people entrusted with access to the money was Michael Roark.

*** 

On August 27, 2012, a soldier named Michael Burnett pleaded guilty to manslaughter and illegal gang activity in connection with the deaths of Roark and York.  At his hearing, he detailed his recollection of the events leading up to December 5, 2011, the night Michael Roark and Tiffany York were murdered. Recently divorced with custody of his young son, Burnett had become friends with the FEAR crew through Chris and Heather Salmon. Heather had been discharged from the Army for drug abuse and other misconduct, including firing a weapon at her husband after an argument. She volunteered to babysit for Burnett, and he started spending time at their house, which was essentially the FEAR Militia headquarters. (Heather, who has pleaded not guilty to charges of all of the charges against her, was reportedly the group’s chief financial officer, called “Mamma Ray” by members of the family.) At first, Burnett testified, his friendship with the men of the group consisted of going shooting together, “just guy stuff.” Then he was introduced to what Aguigui called “the manuscript”: the article about the Patriots video game.

“It just progressed from there to going out and buying more guns,” Burnett said in court. “They talked of doing radical things... things that I didn’t agree upon like hurting innocent people. I did think that the government needed a change and I thought we were the people to be able to change it,” he told the judge. “If I could have stopped this from happening I would have.”

The night of the murders, Burnett recalled in court, he’d just returned home from picking his son up at the Salmons’ when he got a call from Anthony Peden telling him to come back over to the headquarters. This was around 9:06 p.m. “The decision had already been made to murder those two,” Burnett said.

Why did Aguigui and his inner circle kill Michael? There are a few theories. Some reports suggest that Aguigui may have believed Michael was using his money—to which he’d been given access to purchase weapons—for personal items. Burnett said that Michael was a witness to a previous murder that Aguigui had committed, though that claim has not been backed up with any facts. Michael’s father, Brett Roark, and his attorney Brian Brook think the explanation is simple: Michael Roark was leaving the army and taking with him detailed knowledge of the FEAR militia’s criminal activities and destructive plots. Aguigui could no longer control him.

“A loose end is one way that Isaac put it,” said Burnett at his guilty plea hearing.

Burnett said that he tried to plead with his friends to reconsider, but they were resolute. “Isaac ordered me to come along and then he threatened to kill my son,” Burnett said. They’d already called Michael to come over and go night shooting with them. He brought Tiffany, and they drove separately off the base and into Long County, far off the beaten path, according to Burnett.

Once they’d stopped driving, Burnett said, Peden and Chris Salmon approached both sides of Michael’s car. As Tiffany started to get out, Peden shot her, checked her pulse, then shot her again, according to Burnett. Michael was told to get on his knees. He was shot twice in the head. The gun used to kill Michael and Tiffany belonged to Burnett, who kept his weapons at Peden’s house, away from his child. Burnett said Peden took it and chopped it up into a bunch of pieces after the shooting. It was at Peden’s house, Burnett said, that Aguigui instructed everyone who was at the scene of the crime to take off their clothes and burn them.

Five days after the murders, Aguigui, Burnett, Peden, and both Salmons were arrested. (Neither Chris Salmon nor Peden has entered a plea responding to the charges against them. If convicted, they each face the death penalty.) Inrecordings obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Isaac Aguigui goes from indignant to confessional in a matter of 20 minutes while being interrogated by a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent. Aguigui broke down when the agent told him that his FEAR “family” members had made statements, pointing to him as the mastermind behind the anti-government plot and the murders.  

“You ever think how Dr. Frankenstein thought when Frankenstein ripped his first person in half?” Aguigui asks the GBI agent. “‘Dear Jesus, what have I created?’ And all he wants to do is go back to that moment before he brought it to life.”

When the agent asked what the monster was, Aguigui replied, “I think it’s me.”

****

On September 11, 2012, five men were indicted on charges that include violating the Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act. At the guilty plea hearing of one of them, Randall Dearman, Georgia state prosecutor Isabel Pauley described the group’s activity as “far more sinister and troubling” than traditional street gangs like the Bloods or the Crips, because nearly everyone involved was a soldier. 

Dearman’s brother, Adam, was a military officer stationed at Fort Stewart and another member of the FEAR Militia’s “family.” He was also the leader of the group’s criminal arm known as “the black cell,” according to prosecutors. He and Heather Salmon had allegedly been in negotiations to purchase the land in Washington State—with Aguigui’s money—that would become the organization’s compound and terrorism headquarters.

The night of the murders, according to court records, Adam was in North Georgia visiting his younger brother Randall for his birthday. Adam received a phone call instructing him to come back to Fort Stewart and remove the bodies of Michael Roark and Tiffany York, as well as Michael’s car, from the crime scene. Adam and Randall—who was neither a member of the military nor the militia—headed down to Long County in separate cars the day after the murder. On their way, the Dearmans were approached by a man whose car they’d broken into earlier. Adam shot the man. He was arrested and was unable to make it back in time to move the bodies of Michael and Tiffany before they were discovered by two fishermen that morning. A walkie talkie—a device that signaled the militia’s growing paranoia—was found near Michael’s head.

With the rest of the inner circle already indicted for murder, an incarcerated Adam instructed his friend Timothy Joiner, another active-duty soldier, to pick up his brother Randall from North Georgia and begin committing crimes—mostly breaking into cars and stealing things like stereos that they could sell—in order to make money to get him out of jail.

“If Aguigui killed his wife and unborn child, they should have known this guy was capable of anything. This is what kills me.”

Drugs played a major role in the FEAR militia saga. Aguigui wanted to infiltrate and put a stop to the drug trade across the Canadian border. But in the span of just one month, right before Michael and Tiffany’s murders, Aguigui purchased between $10,000 and $15,000 worth of drugs—ecstasy, cocaine, marijuana, etc.—for consumption by the members of his crew. On November 15, 2012, 27-year-old drug dealer and former Navy recruit Jeffrey Roberts admitted to selling drugs in bulk to Aguigui, making him the eleventh person arrested on charges related to FEAR. Randall Dearman and Joiner both admit to drinking and using drugs heavily while carrying out the break-ins and burglaries they thought would help get Adam out of jail. Randall said he was so messed up during that time—mostly on a combination of alcohol and Percocet—that he doesn’t even remember all of the crimes he committed.

***

A few days before Michael and Tiffany were murdered, they went to Florida to visit Michael’s father. The two had only been dating for a month and a half, but the way his son talked about this girl, Brett Roark knew it was serious. The elder Roark says neither of them gave him any indication that they were in trouble. Drawing on his own Navy experience, which includes serving a tour in Beirut during the Cold War, Roark says he doesn’t recognize the institution he once admired.

“I would have thought someone would have put two and two together and said, ‘These are obviously some bad guys here.’ They had a bad thing going on and there was nothing done until after Michael and Tiffany’s murder,” he said. “If Aguigui killed his wife and unborn child, they should have known this guy was capable of anything. This is what kills me.”

Brian Brook, one of the attorneys representing the Roark and York families, finds it “unfathomable” that there were no federal charges brought against the people who killed Michael and Tiffany when it was known that those same people were plotting to kill the president, blow up dams, and poison Washington’s apple supply.  

“I’ve never met a federal prosecutor who wouldn’t jump at the chance to prosecute these kinds of criminals,” Brook told The Daily Beast. “You’ve got a terrorist group within the U.S. Army and you have every reason to believe the Army knew about this.”  

Michael and Tiffany’s families filed a claim of $15 million for each death, giving the army the opportunity to settle out of court before officially filing suit. Brook doesn’t expect the Army to settle, but it has six months to either make an offer or deny the claim. Fort Stewart spokesman Kevin Larson declined The Daily Beast’s request to comment on the wrongful death claims but wrote, in an email, “The military legal charges and July 2013 court case against Pvt. Isaac Aguigui resulted from a thorough investigation by the U.S. Army, and civilian legal assistance from state and federal law enforcement.”

The Federal Torts Claim Act allows an individual to sue the U.S. government for wrongdoing committed by someone acting on the government’s, or in this case the military’s, behalf. Timothy Bakken, a law professor at West Point, explains that the Army generally cannot be held responsible for crimes that are committed by soldiers outside of their jobs, such as killing civilians.

There is one exception to that rule, however, which was established by the 1988 Supreme Court case Sheridan v. United States. That precedent indicates that if the plaintiffs can prove the Army knew the members of the FEAR Militia were violent and may have had a motive to kill civilians like Michael and Tiffany, then the Army had an obligation to stop them. Bakken says proving this will be difficult, but Brook has no doubt that, once they’d begun investigating Aguigui after his wife’s death, the Army had reason to believe that he was a dangerous man.

“There might not be a duty to fix a bridge, but when you start trying to fix a bridge, your job is to do it in a non-negligent fashion,” Brook said. “Here, they’re trying to investigate the death of Deirdre Aguigui and there is that same duty.”

Monday’s news that a former Navy reservist had opened fire on the Washington, D.C. Navy Yard, killing at least 12 people, shook Roark to his core. “Just ripped us all apart again, I’m so tired of it,” he told me.

He believes the Army is making a concerted effort to keep the information gleaned from its investigation into Aguigui’s militia under wraps. “The military doesn’t like to look bad,” he says. “They’re our military; they’re there to protect us. But what is going on under their watch? Are they protecting us or are they protecting themselves?”

Forever Enduring, Always Ready. That was the motto of Aguigui’s militia. It seems the alpha and omega, the representations of beginning and end inked on its members, will endure longer than the band of disillusioned soldiers and their diabolical plans. Unless, of course, there are others still out there wearing that tattoo as a badge of honor, secretly plotting to overthrow the government.

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Caitlin Dickson is a reporter and researcher for The Daily Beast. She has also written for The New Republic and The Atlantic Wire.

Mexico is suffering from floods even worse than those that struck Colorado last week

Mexico is suffering from floods even worse than those that struck Colorado last week. The floods began late last week when tropical storms Manuel and Ingrid hit Mexico at the same time. So far the storms have killed 97 and forced 50,000 to evacuate, while 40,000 tourists are stranded in Acapulco. Even worse, there’s a chance a cyclone could form over the Gulf of Mexico and cause even more flooding. Fortunately, things are looking up in Colorado. The number of people missing after last week’s floods has dropped to 200, and some Coloradans are beginning to return home. It’s going to be a long recovery: The storm destroyed 1,500 homes and damaged 11,750 more.
 
• Read up on the 80-person death toll no one is talking about (PolicyMic).
 
• 34 photos of the aftermath from Colorado’s historic floods (In Focus).