Earlier this afternoon, Zack Roth reported on the murder charges against two leaders of 'Minuteman American Defense' stemming from an incident over the weekend in which they staged a home invasion in Arizona, killing reputed drug dealer Raul Flores, his nine year old daughter and wounding his wife. Beyond the brutality of the act, it's difficult to get a handle on just what Shana Forde, Jason Bush and Albert Gaxiola were trying to do. They broke into Flores's home in Arivaca, Arizona posing as police officers with what police say was the intention of killing him and his family, taking a large sum of money and stealing his drugs which they would then sell on the street for more money. The proceeds, it seems, would go toward funding their on-going anti-immigrant 'activism' and, more ambitiously, instigating a race war to overthrow the US government.

Now it appears that Forde and her confederate, Jason "Gunny" Bush, had extensive ties to white supremacist groups and planned to recruit members of the Aryan Nations and similar worthies to create some sort of militia to mount an on-going cycle of these raids and murders and start a "revolution against the US government."

Reading back into their story, the first thing that I thought of today was that it felt like dialing into the world McVeigh and Nichols circa late 1994 just a few months in advance of the big day. But as another one of our team said, the tenor is a bit different. The background reads like the script of a Coen Brothers movie. Along with Forde, you have Bush, who may or may not be a decorated US Army veteran as he claims, but does seems to have history killing Hispanic men. Forde recently signed Bush up to be AMD's chief of 'operations'.

Zack has now looked back at Forde's background and, like Jason Bush, even by the rather expansive standards of violent white supremacist freaks, she reads pretty clearly like a psychopath. Here's our follow up report on Forde.