The trial has begun in the bombing of a Woodburn, OR bank in December, 2008.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys present opening statements Wednesday in Marion County Circuit Court in the trials of father Bruce Turnidge and son Joshua Turnidge, accused in the Dec. 12, 2008, bombing at West Coast Bank in Woodburn.
The Turnidges face 18 counts each of aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, assault and other charges stemming from the bombing. Two police officers were killed, another lost his leg and a bank employee was injured when police tried to dismantle the bomb, mistakenly believing it to be a hoax device.
And yes this was a case of domestic terrorism although no one will call it that.
Bruce and Joshua Turnidge had long harbored anti-government feelings, but the November 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama served as a “catalyst” for the father and son to plant a bomb at the West Coast Bank and plan a bank robbery, prosecutors said today.
The two men feared that the Obama administration would impose a slate of new restrictions on gun ownership, Marion County deputy district attorney Katie Suver said in opening statements in the aggravated murder trials for the two men. Bruce Turnidge, years ago during the Clinton administration, had similarly anticipated a crackdown on Second Amendment rights and sought funding to start his own militia, she said.
Suver laid out the men’s anti-government leanings, grisly details of the bomb blast and the trail of evidence that investigators followed in presenting the state’s assertions that the two men were responsible for the Dec. 12, 2008 bomb blast at a West Coast Bank branch in Woodburn that killed two police officers, critically injured the Woodburn police chief, and injured a bank employee. The two men could face the death penalty if convicted.
Of course this is just a small local example of a growing threat as Barton Gellman explains in The Secret World of Extreme Militias.
Within a complex web of ideologies, most of today’s armed radicals are linked by self-described Patriot beliefs, which emphasize resistance to tyranny by force of arms and reject the idea that elections can fix what ails the country. Among the most common convictions is that the Second Amendment — the right to keep and bear arms — is the Constitution’s cornerstone, because only a well-armed populace can enforce its rights. Any form of gun regulation, therefore, is a sure sign of intent to crush other freedoms. The federal government is often said in militia circles to have made wholesale seizures of power, at times by subterfuge. A leading grievance holds that the 16th Amendment, which authorizes the federal income tax, was ratified through fraud. (Read “America’s New Patriotism.”)
In a reversal of casting, the armed antigovernment movement describes itself as heir to the founders. As they see it, the union that the founders created is now a foreign tyrant. “It’s like waking up behind enemy lines,” says Terrell. He says he smelled a setup when the FBI arrested nine members of Michigan’s Hutaree militia in March and charged them with plotting to kill police. (Their trial is set to begin in February.) Terrell and other leaders put their forces on alert, anticipating a roundup. “There was a lot of citizens out there in the bushes, locked and loaded,” he says. “It’s only due to miracles I do not understand that civil war did not break out right there.”
Some groups, though not many overtly, embrace the white-supremacist legacy of the Posse Comitatus, which invented the modern militia movement in the 1970s. Some are fueled by a violent stream of millennial Christianity. Some believe Washington is a secondary foe, the agent of a dystopian new world order.
Originally published at Newshoggers