Who’s A Terrorist?
It gets so confusing, a group of homeless whackos in Miami, pizza delivery guy from New Jersey, etc. people without the money or equipment to do anything are terrorists, but other people with weapons, ammunition, and bomb making materials aren’t.
Undeniable Liberal at Maru’s place comes across a guy in Colorado who seems to be rather dangerous.
Rachel Carter reports in the local paper, The Daily Times-Call:
LONGMONT — Ronald Swerlein, the man police arrested Sunday morning on suspicion of hoarding explosive chemicals in his north Longmont home, appeared in court for the first time Monday afternoon on two felony counts of possession and use of explosives.
Boulder County District Judge John Stavely set Swerlein’s bond at $50,000. Officers and agents who searched Swerlein’s home at 2404 Sunset Drive from Friday night to Sunday night found about 200 different chemical compounds, blasting agents and explosives in the house.
Explosives sounds pretty dangerous to me, but then the details come out – he’s a white guy who doesn’t seem to be a Muslim or to be involved in the environmental movement. [In comments: he had some literature from the Animal Liberation Front.]
He didn’t have a copy of the Quran, or anything written by Rachel Carson or Al Gore, no he had Don’t Get Mad, Get Even and Your Revenge is in the Mail on his bookshelves. He was just a dissatisfied customer planning to blow something up. It wasn’t political.
I hope that clears up the confusion.
6 comments
The piece Maru quoted is hard to find because there’s no link
but you can read all of it, and much more about this case, here:
http://winterpatriot.blogspot.com/search/label/Ronald%20Swerlein
Maru’s template sucks when it comes to links.
Oh, you wondered about the $5,000 he paid to get out – that’s $5K in cash, 10%, for a bail/bond outfit to put up a $50K bond. The $5K isn’t all refunded in any jurisdiction when you show up for court and there is a lien against something to cover the other $45K.
I used to live in Longmont — from 1987 to 1990 — and my ex and his family still live there. I even know the general neighborhood this guy lives in. It’s a nice little Midwestern-style city with a spectacular view of Longs Peak and the rest of the Front Range of the Rockies. And it harbors its fair share of wingnuts. They probably let him out on bail because he was protecting us from the yellow horde.
The guy was mixing up nitroglycerin and MEKP in his house. It would have been safer if he had been running a meth lab, but then, there is mention of drugs in the Winterpatriot post.
There seem to be pockets of these whackos all over the West.
Having talked to my ex about this, his guess is that it’s a well-armed meth lab. That’s a very popular diversion out there.
MEKP and TATP are a couple of compounds that can occur by accident when people start messing around with organic chemistry, as in making meth.
They should all go back to growing weed – it doesn’t blow up, it doesn’t melt your brain, and and it reduces greenhouse gases.