Month: October 2018

Although it has not yet been determined whether the suspect in custody in the mailing of explosive devices to critics of President Donald Trump will be charged with terrorism, at least one analyst asserts that this week’s spate of mail bombs can be labeled as such for several reasons. 

Randall Rogan, an expert on terrorism and hostage negotiation and a professor of communications at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., laid out his logic: “I would define these acts as domestic terrorism — terrorism being defined as acts of violence or threat of violence against non-combatants for political reasons, with ‘political’ being used very broadly to be inclusive of religious, social and other ideological purposes, and this is domestic in nature.” 

Rogan admitted, though, “The definition of terrorism is vague, with no truly universally accepted definition.”  

The Patriot Act, passed in 2001 after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, defines domestic terrorism as activities on U.S. soil that “involve acts dangerous to human life” and “appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.” 

Previous mail attacks 

Attacks through the U.S. mail are anything but new. The U.S. Postal Service has long been used to send suspicious packages to high-ranking U.S. officials. 

William Clyde Allen, a U.S. Navy veteran, was charged this week on seven counts for sending letters containing ricin, a highly toxic substance, to Trump and other high-ranking U.S. officials. Officials confirmed the letters were mailed earlier in October. 

In March 2018, two people were killed when explosive packages arrived at their residences in Austin, Texas. Mark Anthony Conditt, 23, who blew himself up when police closed in on him, was identified as the Texas bomber. 

In 2013, Shannon Guess Richardson, a Texas actress, sent ricin-laced letters to then-President Barack Obama and then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. She was sentenced to 18 years in prison. The sentence was on charges of attempting to use biological weapons. 

That same year, James Everett Dutschke mailed similar letters to Obama and other U.S. officials. He was later sentenced to 25 years in prison. 

(Ricin is a naturally occurring toxin found in castor beans. If inhaled, ingested or injected in a refined form, ricin can kill a person within 48 hours of exposure. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is no antidote for ricin.) 

One of the the most prominent mail attacks occurred in 2001, days after the 9/11 terror attacks. Several letters containing anthrax bacterial spores were mailed to offices of news organizations and U.S. lawmakers. The attacks killed five people and injured 17 others. 

Bruce Edwards Ivins, a former government scientist, committed suicide in 2008 while the FBI was investigating his involvement in the case. Following his death, the FBI announced that Ivins was the only suspect in the anthrax attacks, also known as Amerithrax from its FBI investigation case name. 

And the infamous Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, prompted the longest FBI investigation ever before his capture in 1996, but only after killing three people and injuring another 23. The anarchist went after those involved with technology and was regarded as a domestic terrorist, but he was found guilty of other charges. 

Domestic terrorism 

None of the individuals involved in those cases was convicted of terrorism, while terror charges have been brought against people affiliated with known international terrorist organizations. 

The Patriot Act primarily grants the Justice Department the authority to investigate an individual or a group affiliated with a group that the State Department has listed as a foreign terrorist organization. According to federal law, in order to be charged with terrorism, a person must be suspected of acting on behalf of one of those listed groups. 

Some analysts, like David Sterman of the Washington-based think tank New America, believe the issue of domestic terrorism is debatable, and it is viewed as a sensitive matter.  

“There are laws that deal with domestic terrorism-related acts, but the reason we don’t have a specific law on domestic terrorism is mainly political sensitivity in this country,” Sterman said. “The difference between hate crimes and terrorist acts has always been a controversy in the U.S.” 

Other experts say current federal laws pertaining to acts of political violence are adequate. 

“Our current laws dealing with political violence are sufficient in terms of giving long sentences to the perpetrators,” said Karen Greenberg, director of Center on National Security at Fordham Law, a nonpartisan research group. 

“I don’t think we need a new law that could add more to the sensitivity. The Obama administration had some interest in creating a federal charge for domestic terrorism, but again it didn’t get anywhere because of the political climate,” Greenberg said. 

In September 2017, Trump signed into law a congressional joint resolution that condemned the violence in Charlottesville, Va., where a speeding car slammed into counterprotesters, killing one person and injuring 19 others. The resolution called the incident a domestic terrorist attack.  
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A synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh on Saturday, which left 11 people dead, is “likely the deadliest” such attack in US history, an American civil rights group said.

Here is a list of major attacks on synagogues around the world over recent years, and of attacks on other places of Jewish community life.

Tunisia

On April 11, 2002, 21 people died in a suicide attack on the Ghriba synagogue, on the island of Djerba, in the south of the country. Among the dead were 14 Germans, five Tunisians and two French citizens. A tank truck driven by a Tunisian and filled with inflammable gas blew up outside the synagogue, which is the oldest place of Jewish worship in Africa. The attack was claimed by al-Qaida.

Turkey

On Nov. 15, 2003, vehicles filled with explosives were used against two synagogues in Istanbul, Neve Shalom and Beth Israel, killing 30 and injuring 300. Five days later, the British consulate and an HSBC building came under attack. A Turkish cell of al-Qaida claimed responsibility for the four attacks, which claimed a total of 63 lives.

Israel

On Nov. 18, 2014, an attack by two Palestinians against a synagogue in western Jerusalem claimed five: three Israeli-Americans, one Israeli-Briton and a Druze policeman. The Har Nof neighborhood, where the attack took place, is considered to be a bastion of the ultra-orthodox Shas party. The attack was the first against a Jewish place of worship in Jerusalem. Both attackers were shot dead by police.

Denmark

On Feb. 14, 2015, a Danish citizen of Palestinian origin, having pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, opened fire on a cultural center in Copenhagen, which was hosting a freedom of speech conference, and killed a filmmaker.

Later that night, he also killed a 37-year-old Jewish man who was standing guard outside a synagogue where a bar mitzvah was being held.

The attacker was then killed in a shootout with police.

Not just synagogues

In addition to synagogues, many other places of Jewish community life have been attacked over the years.

In France, on March 19, 2012, a 23-year-old French-Algerian Islamist killed three children and a teacher in a Jewish school in the southwest of the country.

In the U.S., on April 13, 2014, a white supremacist known for his anti-Semitic views attacked a Jewish community center and retirement home in Kansas, killing three people, none of whom were actually Jewish.

In Belgium, on May 24, 2014, a man opened fire in the lobby of the Jewish Museum in Brussels, killing four. The alleged killer, French-Algerian Mehdi Nemmouche, was arrested in France in June of this year and extradited to Belgium for trial.

In France, on Jan. 9, 2015, four Jews were killed during a hostage-taking in a Jewish supermarket in Paris by a Jihadist.
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A battle is brewing between the Trump administration and some of the president’s biggest supporters in Congress who are concerned that sanctions to be reimposed on Iran early next month won’t be tough enough. 

As President Donald Trump prepares to reimpose a second batch of Iran sanctions that had been eased under the 2015 nuclear deal, conservative lawmakers and outside advisers have become worried that the administration may break a promise to exert “maximum pressure” on Iran. They are angered by suggestions that measures to be announced Nov. 5 won’t include a provision cutting Iran off from a key component of the global financial system. 

The self-described Iran hawks are concerned enough that they have drafted legislation that would require the administration to demand that Iran be suspended from the international bank transfer system known as SWIFT. 

“The president asked for maximum pressure, not semi-maximum pressure,” said Richard Goldberg, a former aide to a Republican senator and senior adviser to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a group that supports punishing Iran with sanctions. “Maximum pressure includes disconnecting Iranian banks from SWIFT.” 

Trump pledged Thursday to do whatever it takes to pressure Iran to halt what he refers to as its “malign conduct,” such as nuclear and missile development and support for terrorism and groups that destabilize the Middle East. 

“On Nov. 5th, all U.S. sanctions against Iran lifted by the nuclear deal will be back in full force,” he told a gathering at the White House to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the 1983 attack on the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, which is blamed on Iranian-backed extremists. “And they will be followed up with even more sanctions to address the full range of Iran’s malign conduct. We will not allow the world’s leading sponsor of terror to develop the world’s deadliest weapons. Will not happen.” 

Energy, banking sectors

The Nov. 5 sanctions cover Iran’s banking and energy sectors and will reinstate penalties for countries and companies in Europe, Asia and elsewhere that do not halt Iranian oil imports. They could also include measures to force Iran out of SWIFT. 

Despite Trump’s tough stance, the hawks are worried about recent comments from Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin and his staff that suggest Iran will be able to stay connected to SWIFT. They are also concerned the administration will back down on its stated zero-tolerance policy for Iranian oil purchases by granting waivers to certain countries and companies that do not fully stop buying it. 

Iran deal supporters, like the other parties to the agreement, argue that pushing Iran out of SWIFT, the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, will lead to the creation of alternate mechanisms that could supplant it as the leading global institution for financial institutions to send and receive information about banking transactions. They also say expulsion will make it harder for Iran to conduct transactions, such as humanitarian purchases, that will still be allowed after Nov. 5. 

Allowing Iran to remain in SWIFT would make it easier for Tehran to import humanitarian goods like medicine permitted under U.S. sanctions and “would help the United States make clear that its critique of Iran is directed at the regime, not the people of Iran,” said Elizabeth Rosenberg, a former Treasury official now with the Center for a New American Security. She added, though, that disconnection would be a “fast track” to isolation. 

The debate underscores the challenges the administration faces as it tries to isolate Iran without the full backing of other world powers who remain supportive of the nuclear deal. 

Although the hawks had been pleased by Trump’s decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal in May and cheered the August reimposition of an initial set of sanctions, they are now seething that Treasury may opt to use existing safeguards to isolate Iran instead of hitting SWIFT members with sanctions if they don’t disconnect Tehran. 

Treasury coy

Treasury has been coy about its intentions, saying only that Mnuchin and the agency have led “an intense economic pressure campaign against Iran as part of this administration’s comprehensive strategy to address the totality of Iran’s malign and destabilizing activity, with much more to come.” 

“Treasury has made it very clear that we will continue to cut off bad Iranian actors, including designated banks, from accessing the international financial system in a number of different ways,” it said. “We will also take action against those attempting to conduct prohibited transactions with sanctioned Iranian entities regardless of the mechanisms used.” 

That less-than-categorical position has rallied the hawks around the legislation prepared by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, that would require the administration to impose sanctions on SWIFT members, including some U.S. banks, should it not suspend Iran on its own. 

Federal law currently gives the administration authority to act against Iran’s central bank and other banks covered by terrorism and money-laundering sanctions. Cruz’s legislation, however, would authorize the administration to hit all of Iran’s banks with sanctions and require it to act against SWIFT if it connects any Iranian bank under sanctions to its system, according to a copy seen by the AP. 

In August, Cruz led a group of 16 GOP senators, including Trump allies Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Marco Rubio of Florida, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Barrasso of Wyoming, in demanding action against SWIFT if Iran is not suspended. Congressional aides say they believe support for his proposed legislation will be strong. “The administration’s maximum pressure campaign will not succeed if the Islamic Republic remains connected to SWIFT,” the senators told Mnuchin.  
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A Florida man with a decades-long criminal record was arrested and charged Friday with mailing at least 13 packages containing explosive devices to critics of President Donald Trump, authorities said.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions told reporters Cesar Sayoc, 56, of Aventura, Fla., was being charged with five federal crimes, including illegally mailing explosive devices and threatening government officials. He added that Sayoc faced up to 48 years in prison if found guilty.

​The crude pipe bombs were addressed in recent days to former President Barack Obama as well as other high-profile Democrats, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a former U.S. attorney general, two Democratic members of Congress and former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan. 

FBI Director Christopher Wray, speaking at the same news conference, said 13 IEDs were sent in the packages, and each mailing included 6 inches of PVC pipe, a small clock and potentially explosive material.  

“These are not hoax devices,” Wray said, noting that none of the bombs exploded. Authorities told The Associated Press the devices were not rigged to explode when the packages were opened, but they said they were not sure whether that was because the devices were poorly made or were not intended to harm.

Wray added that authorities believed other bombs might still be found.

Wray said a fingerprint found on one of the packages led investigators to Sayoc. He said possible DNA evidence was found on another package.

Sayoc was previously known to law enforcement officials and has been arrested nearly a dozen times in Florida, including a 2002 arrest for making a bomb threat. His first arrest in the state was at age 29 for larceny. Other charges against him have included grand theft, fraud and illegal possession of steroids.

Sayoc’s arrest Friday in Plantation, Fla., about 30 miles north of Miami, ended a nearly weeklong stretch of terror in which at least one bomb was found each day.

Officers also hauled away Sayoc’s white van — its windows plastered with pro-Trump stickers, American flags, and images of Democratic figures with red cross hairs over their faces.

His arrest came just hours after the Federal Bureau of Investigation intercepted two more suspicious packages, one addressed to Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, the other to former National Intelligence Director James Clapper. And even as Sayoc was being detained, officials with Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California said investigators were looking at a package sent to her office.

Clapper said Friday on CNN that he was not surprised he had been targeted and that the incidents were “serious.” 

President Donald Trump spoke at an event at the White House on Friday and vowed that those responsible for mailing suspicious packages would be prosecuted to the “fullest extent of the law.”

“These terrorizing acts are despicable and have no place in our country,” Trump told the Young Black Leadership Summit at the White House. “We must never allow political violence to take root in America.” 

In a tweet earlier Friday, however, he referred to the investigation as “this ‘bomb’ stuff,” which he blamed for taking focus away from the upcoming midterm elections. He also complained that his critics were blaming him for heated political rhetoric.

The weeklong bomb scare began Monday, when the first bomb was found at the suburban New York compound of billionaire George Soros, a major contributor to Democratic candidates and causes. He has often criticized Trump.

In the following days, packages containing pipe bombs were intercepted for Clinton, Obama, and later were found addressed to former Vice President Joe Biden, former Attorney General Eric Holder and U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters.

Federal investigators searched a massive mail sorting facility in Florida late Thursday, after determining that at least one of the pipe bombs had been processed there.

All of the “suspected explosive devices” were taken to the FBI’s laboratory at the U.S. Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va., said New York City Police Commissioner James O’Neill. 
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A Turkish court on Oct. 12 freed American Pastor Andrew Brunson, who had been convicted on terror charges — charges he denies — and imprisoned for two years. Brunson, who is now back in the U.S. with his family, and his wife, Norine Brunson, spoke with Mehmet Toroglu about his time in prison and how it felt to be released.
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Federal agents have arrested an Ohio man on suspicion of plotting to join Islamic State and carry out “terrorist projects” in the United States. 

Agents arrested Naser Almadaoji, 19, an Iraqi-born naturalized U.S. citizen, on Wednesday at the international airport in Columbus, Ohio. They alleged Almadaoji intended to fly to Kazakhstan and sneak into Afghanistan for IS military training.

U.S. attorneys said Almadaoji appeared in an online video dressed in an Islamic headscarf, pledging allegiance to the leader of IS and saying he wanted to spark fighting in the U.S. between the government and anti-government militias.

According to the complaint against him, Almadaoji told someone he believed had ties to IS that he wanted expert training in weapons use, instruction on planning and executing attacks, and guidance on how to capture high-value targets, break into homes and avoid security guards. 

Prosecutors also alleged Almadaoji traveled to Egypt and Jordan in February with the apparent intention to join terrorist groups. 

Almadaoji faces up to 20 years in federal prison if he is convicted.
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Residents of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands braced Thursday for months without electricity or running water after the islands were slammed with the strongest storm to hit any part of the U.S. this year.

Even after Super Typhoon Yutu had moved away from the U.S. territory in the Pacific, residents were warned by emergency management officials to stay indoors because downed power lines blocked roadways and winds were still strong enough to make driving dangerous.

Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan, the commonwealth’s delegate to U.S. Congress, said the territory will need significant help to recover from the storm, which he said injured several people.

In a telephone interview with The Associated Press from Saipan, Sablan said he has heard reports of injuries and that people are waiting at the island’s hospital to be treated. He could not provide further details or official estimates of casualties.

“There’s a lot of damage and destruction,” Sablan said. “It’s like a small war just passed through.”

The commonwealth’s emergency management agency was “deploying resources to clear our roadways so first responders can begin assisting residents who have lost their homes and for those who need transport to seek medical attention or transportation to the nearest shelter,” spokeswoman Nadine Deleon Guerrero said in a statement.

Sablan said the entire island sustained damage, but there are areas that are worse than others. He has not been able to reach officials on the territory’s neighbor islands of Tinian and Rota because phones and electricity are out.

“It’s going to take weeks probably to get electricity back to everybody,” he said.

Sablan says colleagues in Congress have reached out to offer help. He expects there will be a presidential disaster declaration put in place.

As the storm continues to move away from the Mariana Islands, Sablan said in a tweet Thursday evening that the typhoon warning for Saipan and Tinian was canceled.

The electricity on Saipan, the largest island in the commonwealth about 3,800 miles (6,115 kilometers) west of Hawaii, went out at 4 p.m. Wednesday, resident Glen Hunter said.

“We probably won’t have power for months,” he said, recalling how it took four months to restore electricity after Typhoon Soudelor in 2015.

Maximum sustained winds of 180 mph (290 kph) were recorded around the eye of the storm, which passed over Tinian and Saipan early Thursday local time, said Brandon Aydlett, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

“At its peak, it felt like many trains running constant,” Hunter, who lives on Saipan, wrote in a Facebook message to The Associated Press.

“At its peak, the wind was constant and the sound horrifying,” he wrote.

Tinian suffered a direct hit. Saipan and Tinian will be unrecognizable, Aydlett said, adding that the weather service received reports that Yutu’s catastrophic winds ripped roofs from homes and blew out windows.

“Any debris becomes shrapnel and deadly,” he said.

Fallen trees could isolate residents, and power and water outages could last weeks, the weather service warned.

It was still dark when Hunter peeked outside and saw his neighbor’s house, made of wood and tin, completely gone. A palm tree was uprooted.

Hunter, 45, has lived on Saipan since childhood and is accustomed to strong storms. “We are in typhoon alley,” he wrote, but added this is the worst he has experienced.

The roof flew off the second floor of Del Benson’s Saipan home.

“We didn’t sleep much,” he wrote to the AP in a Facebook message. “I went upstairs and the skylight blew out. Then the roof started to go. We got the kids downstairs.”

Recovery efforts on Saipan and Tinian will be slow, Aydlett said.

“This is the worst-case scenario. This is why the building codes in the Marianas are so tough,” he said. “This is going to be the storm which sets the scale for which future storms are compared to.”

Dean Sensui, vice chair for Hawaii on the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, was in Saipan for a council meeting. He hunkered down in his hotel room, where guests were told to remain indoors because winds were still strong Thursday morning.

“From around midnight the wind could be heard whipping by,” he said in a Facebook message. “Down at the restaurant it sounded like a Hollywood soundtrack with the intense rain and howling wind.”

Because he was in a solid hotel, it wasn’t as scary as living through Hurricane Iniki in 1992, which left the Hawaiian island of Kauai badly damaged, he said.

“The fact that we still have internet access proves how solid their infrastructure is,” he said. “Hawaii and others should study the Marianas to understand how to design and build communication grids that can withstand a storm.”
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Two visitors died in a fall from a popular overlook at Yosemite National Park that allows people to walk to the cliff’s edge, where there is no railing, an official said Thursday.

Park rangers were trying to recover the bodies of a female visitor and a male visitor spotted by another tourist Wednesday, spokesman Scott Gediman said. Officials are still investigating when the pair fell and from what spot at Taft Point, which is 3,000 feet (900 meters) above the famed Yosemite Valley floor, he said.

Railings only exist at a small portion of the overlook, which is popular for its breathtaking views of the valley, Yosemite Falls and El Capitan and fissures on the granite rock that plunge to the valley floor.

More than 10 people have died at the park this year, some from natural causes and others from falls, Gediman said.

Last month, an Israeli teenager fell hundreds of feet to his death while hiking near the top of 600-foot-tall (180-meter-tall) Nevada Fall. The death of 18-year-old Tomer Frankfurter was considered an accident, the Mariposa County coroner’s office said.

Taft Point is also where world-famous wingsuit flier Dean Potter and his partner, Graham Hunt, died after leaping from the cliff in 2015. The pair — experienced at flying in wingsuits, the most extreme form of BASE jumping — crashed after trying to clear a V-shaped notch in a ridgeline.

BASE jumping — which stands for jumping off buildings, antennas, spans (such as bridges) and Earth — is illegal in the park.

An investigation concluded that the deaths were accidental. Despite video and photos of the jump, officials consider the specific reason why Potter and Hunt died a mystery.
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The head of a U.N. fact-finding mission in Myanmar warned Wednesday that if atrocities committed against minority Muslim Rohingya in that country went unpunished, such crimes would be repeated in other countries on new victims.

“Impunity must not be excused and continue to embolden the Tatmadaw in its promotion of Bamar-Buddhist supremacy,” the head of the U.N. Fact-Finding Mission in Myanmar, Marzuki Darusman, told a meeting of the Security Council. The Myanmar military is known as the Tatmadaw.

“National sovereignty is not a license to commit crimes against humanity or genocide,” he added.

Darusman said for others considering stoking conflict and extremism, the events in Myanmar could serve “as a step-by-step manual.”

​Powerful, emotional presentation 

In a presentation that was at times powerful and emotional, Darusman laid out the Tatmadaw’s strategy in “clearance operations” of northern Rakhine state, home to the minority Rohingya population.

“Dehumanize a population, call them all terrorists, deprive them of all rights, segregate and attack them, rape and kill them, crowd them in IDP camps or drive them out, and protect the killers from justice,” Darusman said. “The international community must be gravely concerned.”

The fact-finding mission published a 444-page report on its findings in August. Over the course of a year, it interviewed survivors and witnesses to the scorched-earth campaign unleashed by the Myanmar military in response to August 2017 attacks by Rohingya militants that killed a dozen police officers.

Darusman condemned the militants’ attacks, saying they contributed to the escalation, but that the military response was “brutal and utterly disproportionate” and conducted “in total disregard for human life.”

​Flight to Bangladesh

More than 700,000 Rohingya rapidly fled to neighboring Bangladesh, where they gave accounts of massacres, rape, murder and villages burned to the ground. The U.N. has called the atrocities “a textbook case” of ethnic cleansing.

“Estimates of 10,000 Rohingya deaths are conservative,” Darusman said.

He said the mission found similar patterns of abuses against other ethnic groups by the military in Myanmar’s Kachin and Shan states.

He called for “decisive action” to stop the “destructive dynamics” and to prevent further problems.

“The Security Council holds the power to break this cycle,” he said. “The key is a strong focus on accountability.”

​Divided Security Council

But the 15-member council is divided on the Rohingya issue. China, Russia, Equatorial Guinea and Bolivia sought to block Darusman’s briefing, but failed to garner enough support in a procedural vote. They would also be highly unlikely to support a council referral of the situation to the International Criminal Court.

China’s ambassador said the fact-finding mission’s report was based on “lopsided and incomplete information” because it was denied entry into Myanmar. “Its conclusions are neither objective nor impartial, therefore, their conclusions are not credible,” Ambassador Ma Zhaoxu told the council.

“We will never accept any calls for a referral of Myanmar to the ICC,” Hau Do Suan, Myanmar’s envoy, said. “Putting accountability above all else without regard to other positive developments will only result in untoward consequences.”

He warned that any unilateral or external pressure would be “detrimental” to the existing goodwill and cooperation of his government with the international community.
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The leader of a Southern California white supremacist group and two other members were arrested on charges of inciting a deadly riot in Charlottesville, Va., last year, prosecutors said Wednesday. 

Other group members were indicted in Virginia on similar charges weeks ago. 

Rise Above Movement leader Robert Rundo was arrested Sunday at Los Angeles International Airport and was denied bail in Los Angeles federal court on Wednesday, U.S. attorney’s office spokesman Thom Mrozek said. 

Two others, Robert Boman and Tyler Laube, were arrested Wednesday morning and Aaron Eason remains at large, Mrozek said. All four were charged with traveling to incite or participate in riots. Attorney information for the defendants could not immediately be found.  

The men allegedly took actions with the “intent to incite, organize, promote, encourage, participate in or carry on riots” last year in Charlottesville and in the California cities of Huntington Beach, Berkeley and San Bernardino, according to a complaint from the U.S. attorney’s office.  

“RAM members violently attacked and assaulted counterprotesters at each of these events,” the complaint said.  

Prosecutors have described the Rise Above Movement as a militant white supremacist group that espouses anti-Semitic and other racist views and meets regularly to train in boxing and other fighting techniques.  

The latest arrests came weeks after the indictments of four other California members of RAM for allegedly inciting the Virginia riot.  

Torch-bearing protesters

In August 2017, they made their way to the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville with their hands taped, “ready to do street battle,” U.S. Attorney Thomas Cullen said at a press conference announcing the charges earlier this month. 

Hundreds of white nationalists descended on Charlottesville in part to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.  

Clashes erupted Aug. 11 as a crowd of white nationalists marching through the University of Virginia campus carrying torches and chanting racist slogans encountered a small group of counterprotesters.  

The next day, more violence broke out between counterprotesters and attendees of the “Unite the Right” rally, which was believed to be the largest gathering of U.S. white nationalists in at least a decade. Street fighting exploded before the scheduled event could begin and went on for nearly an hour in view of police until authorities forced the crowd to disperse.  

After authorities forced the rally to disband Aug. 12, Heather Heyer, 32, was killed when a car plowed into a crowd of counterprotesters.  

The death toll rose to three when a state police helicopter that had been monitoring the event crashed, killing two troopers. 
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