Mad

It can't be said (yet) that Shawna Forde's Minutemen American Defense group, or M.A.D., has been tied to any right wing or official Republican organization. Yet, their very mission statement on their website automatically puts them perfectly in line with the anti-immigration right wing of an increasingly strident conservative movement that's resulting in deaths of innocents virtually every week.

Shawna Forde and two others, Jason "Gunny" Bush and Albert Robert Gaxiola, have been charged with pre-meditated murder in the May 30th shooting deaths of 29 year-old Raul Junior Flores, and his nine year-old daughter, Brisenia Flores. The wife and mother was shot in the home invasion and the motive has already been defined as "purely financial."

It ought to be noted that the intention of the home invasion was to seize drugs and money. Mr. and Mrs. Flores were both known to be involved in the narcotics trade and were not completely innocent, random victims. The same cannot be said for their nine year-old daughter who was obviously murdered to keep her from testifying as a material witness, which makes her murder even more cold-blooded.

On M.A.D.'s website, Bush had this to say:

Keep it simple, keep it as safe as possible, stop the infiltration and everyone comes home. I take a very hard line with drugs and illegal immigration. Make no bones about it, I have a zero tolerance for terrorists, and that is what they are.

Only a hard line right winger would or could even try to establish a connection between Mexican immigrants largely infiltrating the border to make a better life and actual terrorists who fly planes into skyscrapers and are actively seeking nuclear weapons. And only a right wing organization would bother to generously quote another arch right winger like Sean Hannity in a fear-mongering report about the "(b)loodshed south of the border" that's now allegedly being perpetrated by this offshoot of the Minuteman Project.

Right above Bush's own personal mission statement was one from Shawna Forde herself, their Operations Director. Considering that they never bothered taking their words off their index page, their sanctimonious apology and denunciation of the Flores murders rings a little hollow. Plus, even if the Flores' were actually involved in the narcotics trade, if their motive wasn't solely financial they should have contacted the DEA and other pertinent authorities.

It was said that Forde, the home invasion's alleged mastermind, was until Friday feverishly trying to raise more cash to make her organization "more sophisticated." If this is how Forde was planning to raise cash, then it would recall, as C&L's John Amato says, the criminal activities of a group that was around 25 years ago called, "The Order."

Yet this tragic double murder by an organization ostensibly around solely to protect our borders isn't merely about tying in this crime to right wing extremists. My main point in writing this is to get us to reconsider the alleged wisdom of partially putting our nation's security in the hands of ex convicts, thieves and murderers. We've seen the folly of outsourcing to companies such as Blackwater and countless others the responsibility of guarding state department officials.

And even though MAD isn't getting any federal subsidization anymore than Infragard, one has to ask themselves if the absence of any no bid contract makes them any less dangerous when they're allowed to kill with impunity, as Infragard is, when they're allowed to work shoulder to shoulder with legitimate federal agencies.

Forde's own group of criminals, while not the original Minutemen Project, nonetheless for a while has enjoyed the open support and endorsement of the MP's founder and head Jim Gilchrist. Gilchrist has just as openly and publicly begun crawling away from Forde and her actions. Yet even if he wasn't aware of what she would do in the future, the woman had a spotty enough criminal past so that he could've vetted her easily enough before giving her his support.

But none of that mattered. The Cause is everything and we must keep migrant workers out of our country at all costs so they stop stealing jobs that we're too proud to do.

Perhaps it's a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils, since the FBI, CIA and other government agencies can hardly be counted on their powers of forbearance to keep from killing or harming American citizens. Yet I'd rather matters such as border and national security be handled by trained professionals instead of it being outsourced to convicted criminals and outfits such as MAD, Blackwater and Infrgard, the last two of which enjoying financial and/or legal support from our own government.