Domestic terrorismMichigan-based militia violent plot investigation included undercover FBI agent

An undercover agent was part of the federal investigation of a Michigan-based Christian militia group that allegedly planned to spark an uprising against the U.S. government by killing police officers and then exploding IEDs during the officers’ funerals, court documents show. Evidence presented to the grand jury in federal court in Detroit included photographs of Thomas William Piatek, one of nine people indicted Monday in connection with alleged criminal activities by the militia group, known as Hutaree, in southeastern Michigan.

The grand-jury exhibit included sworn testimony of a law-enforcement officer that Mr. Piatek “is the person known by a Cooperating Witness and an undercover FBI agent to be the person who participated in the criminal violations” detailed in the indictment.

The court had to briefly unseal the indictment, issued Tuesday, 23 March, in order to correct Piatek’s middle name, which had been incorrectly written in the arrest warrant and indictment as “Edward.” The indictment was publicly unsealed in federal court Monday.

A spokesperson at the FBI’s Detroit office declined to comment on the undercover agent and any role such an agent may have had in the investigation. A spokesman at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. also declined to discuss specifics of the investigation.

The Wall Street Journal’s Keith Johnson, Alex P. Kellogg, Lauren Etter, and Timothy W. Martin write that infiltration is a common tactic for law-enforcement officials targeting militia groups. It has been widely used to get inside domestic extremist groups, which have in the past proven easier to infiltrate than Islamic terror groups.

In recent months, the FBI also has used one or more undercover agents or employees to carry out sting operations against suspected Islamic terrorists.

Hutaree planned to kill an unidentified local law-enforcement officer in April and then attack local, state and federal officers who came to Michigan to attend the funeral, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan said in a 12-page indictment.

The Journal reports that the indictment said Hutaree had practiced attacks and other military maneuvers for more than a year, and had planned to use homemade bombs like those used against U.S. forces by insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bombs were the key part of the alleged plot to attack the funeral of a law-enforcement officer, the indictment said.

After that attack, the group planned to retreat to a remote “rally point” from which members would resist an expected response by the government, sparking what Hutaree’s alleged leader, David Brian Stone, hoped would be a wider uprising against the government, the indictment said. FBI agent Andrew Arena called Hutaree “an example of radical and extremist fringe groups which can be found throughout our society.”

The Journal notes that security officials in Washington have been watching the rejuvenation of the militia movement with unease for the past year. “Some of the same conditions that last led to a surge of militias in the early 1990s — a tough economic environment and a Democratic administration in the White House — prevail today,” the Journal quotes investigators to say.

The election of Barack Obama as the U.S. first African-American president has galvanized some white supremacist in parts of the militia universe.

Domestic terrorism from armed groups not connected to Islamic ideology is possible, said Lydia Khalil, a counter-terrorism researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Heidi Beirich, director of research for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), in Montgomery, Alabama, said Hutaree has a MySpace page listing more than 300 “friends,” some of which are members of other militia groups.