FBI ALLOWED HUFF TO TRAVEL TO NON-EVENT AND ARRESTED HIM TEN DAYS LATER
May 22, 2012
Dear Editor:
Emergency responders (Fire Fighters and EMT’s) are required to take terrorism awareness courses. FEMA/National Fire Academy (NFA) course Q-890 titled Introduction to Emergency Response to Terrorism refers to Presidential Decision Directive 39 (PDD-39). On page 70 of the course text it refers to Crisis Management and paraphrases from PDD-39: “Crisis management is the law-enforcement response, and focuses on the criminal aspects of the incident. Specific components of crisis management include activities to anticipate, prevent, and/or resolve a threat or incident; identify, locate, and apprehend the perpetrators; and investigate and gather evidence to support prosecution. Crisis management involves local, State, and Federal law enforcement agencies, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) having the lead role.”
So Darren Huff was visited by the FBI the night before he went to Monroe County to perpetrate what the FBI anticipated would be the great “Madisonville Riot and Courthouse Takeover”. They went to his home to question him because they had a tip that led them to anticipate a threat. But they did not suggest to him that he not bring firearms. Why was that, does anyone suppose? To have done so would have prevented or resolved the threat or incident.
The FBI was the lead LEO at the traffic stop the next morning outside Madisonville. Darren appeared as he said he would; armed. But when the FBI asked that he disarm when he got to the courthouse, he disarmed at the road stop instead, locking his firearm in the truck toolbox. Why would the FBI make such a suggestion knowing the roof tops in town were sprinkled with snipers looking for people with firearms? The FBI certainly anticipated another threat and to tell Darren of the dangers involved in going to town that day armed and to insist that he disarm then and there would have resolved what they knew would be a definite incident.
The FBI made many bad calls in this incident. Innocent lives were put in danger. Should they not be investigating their own investigation? Or did they make those calls deliberately? Were they getting feed back from town that nothing was happening? No riot. No armed militia. No nothing. So did they try to set something up to justify the mass incident that they themselves had created?
And when that failed it took ten days to find a 1960’s era bogus law with which to arrest Darren. And to justify the elaborate trial and cover for the failed attempt to create an incident, it was necessary to sentence Darren to four years in federal prison to: “send a message to others and the public.”
Have we gone past the “tipping point” and become a third world country? Who stands for us now? It would be hard to find any government agency on any level that stands for the folks in east Tennessee. Will that spread to other areas? It has certainly come to north Georgia where the citizens grand juries have been taken over by the state.
For the Republic,
Millard Blanchard