Revolution and Reality

Time is Running Out, video made April 1994, length approximately 86 minutes. Speaker: Mark Koernke.

Transcript

Commentary

Setting: Camera tightly focused on Koernke’s head: he is sitting in front of a shelf of videotapes, presumably in a living room, den or garage somewhere. Koernke is dressed all in black and holds a microphone up to his head. This is not a public speaking engagement, but rather a small gathering of some of his close associates. The voices other than Mark's in the videotape indicate both males and females present.

Koernke: …two weeks since last we were all together. First of all, we went through the Dakotas, South Dakota. Excellent flight out, not that you need to know about flights, but to give you an idea, it was actually pretty decent flying. We linked up with a series of patriots who organized an impromptu meeting over the last couple of weeks. In the short period of time they had they announced the gun shows, the gun shops, a variety of other patriot mechanisms, brought a lot of people together at the Holiday Inn. We started at about 7:30 in the evening and didn’t stop until midnight.

And we had three media people there and I just got information about the second program and it was very good. We got a front page, two column article and it's, the parallel article that ran with it was on the Waco tape. And this was a Grand Rapids, er, not Grand Rapids, Rapid City newspaper, one of the two big ones they have there. This gentleman stayed for the whole show, unlike a lot of other media people, he was attentive, he took notes. It was really funny because he started getting into things. In the middle we were talking about how you parade the American flag and burn the rag we were told about, the three red stripes and the three stars. He was the only one who clapped. Arrrh, he got really excited. So not all the media’s against us, in fact, a lot of them get really motivated, wrapped up in this, they start to get into it. We had one tv crew there, but the guy didn’t stay very long, so I guess he didn’t get the kind of response he expected or wanted. We probably got a little blurb on the news, but maybe then again we didn’t because I talked the way I usually do and I try to put everything in one sentence and he couldn’t cut it out very easily and I’m sure he couldn’t chop it, so he probably threw it away, because we stressed that it was a constitutional issue. "It’s a constitutional issue, dummy, don’t you understand, listen to what I said, it’s the third question like this, what’s wrong with you, aren’t you thinking, don’t you understand?" We weren’t quite that abusive, but it was a lot of fun, because the guy put the camera down, looked at me, goes, you know, what’s that guy who did JFK?

Unidentified Person: Stone.

Koernke: Stone. He goes, "You know, you’re a lot like interviewing Oliver Stone." He goes, "One more question, then I gotta go." That was about it, so that was a good compliment. In other words, he couldn’t get anything out of it that he wanted, so he had to end the conversation.

Umm, the overall meeting was a good review of what’s happening in their state. You’ve seen the markers, you’ve seen the signs, the black shirts are there. Again, it varies. Federal forces are altering their postures because, for instance, we know the Minuteman system is being shut down. Those would be an awful lot of nice grain silos out there if they would transfer them to the civilian population, and they’re destroying them, shattering these cities' sites now, instead of giving them to the people or selling them to the people on a regular basis, which is creating a lot of harm out there. The Bureau of Land Management is not loved by anybody. The militia is expanding rapidly, uh, a lot of people are saying that, well, a year ago there were some people organized but in the last year it has geometrically expanded , progressively, month after month after month. And now they don’t have any problem talking to people, telling people what’s going on, and people are listening. There’s a reason for that. All you need to do is watch that television for about another two hours and you’ll find out very quickly that we were absolutely right, so there should be no doubt in anybody’s mind.

One of Mark Koernke's primary goals in his videotapes and speaking presentations is to try to reassure his audience that there are a large number of "patriots" across the country, that the members of the audience are by no means alone, but rather part of a vast movement, even if they themselves feel isolated or alone. Thus reassured, the viewer or audience member will then theoretically be less timid and more willing to take action.

Koernke accomplishes this in several ways. One frequent tactic--used in this videotape--is to tell about meetings and groups in other areas of the country. Indeed, to the extent that this rambling videotape has a form or structure, it is loosely based around Koernke's recent visits to South Dakota and to Texas. Anecdotes about these events serve as the springboard for his lengthy commentary on other issues.

A second tactic, not really used in this video, but often used at his speaking engagements, is direct exhortation, in which he explicitly tells the audience that they are part of a vast movement. However, he does make several allusions to the "numbers" that they have, which we will see later.

They’re definitely going to push for the firearms grab, there’s enough information from across the country that’s first hand, not third hand--somebody said that somebody heard that somebody thought they heard--but first hand data where they're training extensively in house to house, they’re training extensively in forced entry and no knock search warrants and we’re seeing this in every corner of the country. The only reason people aren’t finding this is if they’re not making the effort to, basically they don’t want to hear this.

Now I’m going to stress this again with everybody; if you have a person who’s listening, if you have a person who’s attentive, treat that person like a gem; they're an equal and very quickly they might become like a star that’s poom! goes off on their own like anywhere and you don’t know where they’re going to go. On the other hand, if you have a person who’s debating just for the sake of debate, your time is precious and you cannot replace it. Ignore the problem and go on to somebody else. Okay, I’m serious. Now you’ll find sometimes they’ll even follow you down a hallway and through a store or whatever, you don’t need that, you’ve got other things to do. Those people will wake up in the morning with their bodies in the street and they’ll finally figure out that maybe something's wrong. You can't liberate other people, you can’t free other people. If they're going to get out of this rut, if they're going to educate themselves, that’s one thing.

But you only have so much time that you can spend. Now you know who your friends and enemies are, like I said before, trust this, the back of your neck, this thing raises up, the hackles raise up, there’s a reason. The subconscious has already registered what’s going on, it's just the conscious mind hasn’t kicked in yet. So use that. And with regards to dealing with National Guard, reservists, active Army, if you’re afraid to talk to military people, identify, put the packet together that you think are going to be best suited for that person, and drop them off anonymously. If you're really afraid to talk to law enforcement do the same thing, make up a packet, go there at nine at night, zip by the mail box and have the kids do it or walk up to the mailbox and shove it in and walk away . What we like to do is leave it on the windshield, under the windshield wiper…find a VCR tape and it makes everybody wonder, if it’s something this size.

Person: I did that this morning and the car alarm went off.

Laughter.

Koernke: ….barring the car alarms going off, well, it's not really a nice car, it probably doesn’t have a car alarm, but if it is a nice car, you might want to think about that. Watch for stickers first, remember, says ‘this car protected by’… Well, we’ve had good success with all the anonymous systems we used, and we had a lot of fun with it, too, uh, the other thing you might do, and there’s some people here that are with reserve, guard, or even some active sometimes, they’re off duty that come in. If you can identify on the window that they have a regular training date, what I recommend you do if you want to inundate a whole unit all at once is, if you can identify a guard unit, you know what their training weekend is; prepare a series of tapes, maybe 10, 50 or 20 copies, mix em up, not just one tape, but several different tapes. Get a bunch of literature prepared, get five or six people together, scurry through the lot as you see somebody standing there and give it to them, put some of the stuff on the cars, walk in to the building if you’re bold enough to. Walk right up to some people and say "here."

Or, my favorite is to go into the bathroom, you know, the library, and leave things wherever they can be found easily and also leave a tape or two where it can be found laying around. We do that at the bank sometimes. I have the most fun with doing literature at the banks; what you do is you walk into the bank and almost always they have the drop box out by the vestibule. You're sitting there, what you do is you look around, you write out a piece of paper, you leave a whole bunch of the stuff laying there, then you get in line, which is what you really planned on doing. If you keep looking back, eventually you'll find that the next person walks up to the box, and goes, he looks at it for a minute, then he'll look around, then he'll read it some more, then he'll look around one more time, then he'll go <grabbing gesture> into the shirt or into the papers or into the purse, but what’ll happen is their curiosity is piqued and they’ll carry it away. Somebody will carry it away. And it's fun to watch anyway because people are always worried, "I wonder if the owner is still there, I don’t want to leave it and I don’t really want to steal it," but it's not really stealing because he didn’t worry about leaving it behind, did he? So away they go. That’s the type of anonymous bond, you’ll never know where it went, you’ll never know how it goes, perhaps, you might see them at a meeting like this, or down the road, you might see them at the next ambush, on the other side of the road, firing on the same vehicle you are , which is great, "Hey didn’t I see you at K-mart?" "Oh yeah, that's where I got the shotgun." So it works that way and it's really good. The patriots out there are plain old folk, a lot of good guys, husbands and wives, working together, a lot of kids, we have good range of age groups from very old to very young and everything in between. That's important because you want to try to make sure you interlock the generations, get everybody together, so everybody knows what's happening.

One of the major scare tactics used by proselytizers for the militia movement is the notion of "gun confiscation," the notion that the federal government will embark upon a series of confiscations of the guns of "law abiding Americans." This issue is the single most effective way the militia movement was able to make inroads into more mainstream America, by appealing to the fears of gun owners that they will no longer be able to own guns.

Here Koernke uses fear-mongering at its most graphic: the notion that police are being "extensively" trained in forced entry in order to go door to door, confiscating guns. The backdrop to this statement is the impending passage of the 1994 crime bill (which included the Brady bill imposing a waiting period for the purchase of hanguns) and the assault weapons manufacture ban, also passed in 1994.

Needless to say, none of these house to house seizures ever occurred, and the "first hand data" to which Koernke alludes did not even exist.

The other major issue Koernke raises here is militia recruitment, which is one of the major subjects of this video. In 1994, when this video was made, the militia movement was still in its infancy and its organizers, like Koernke, were very concerned with the subject of recruitment. What is of particular note in this section are the groups which Koernke particularly targets for recruitment: active military and National Guard personnel, and police officers. In fact, the militia movement still tries very strongly to recruit from these pools. Several police officers have been arrested within the last year for criminal activities as part of militia groups. This is a major area of concern for many law enforcement agencies.

Note that Koernke here makes a subtle point, suggesting again that members of the militia movement are part of a vast network, and "you'll never know how it goes," but there are all sorts of people who will show up on your side when the shooting starts.

Came back, not an eventful flight at all, in fact, pretty dull, some of the best flights we've had coming back on that one, ever, I’ve flown, nice smooth landing. Just the last one, not the first one. The last part of the flight looked….the stewardess did the final flight into Detroit. For a while there we thought it was pages from Hunter, we were going right over the spot where the plane went the other way on the road, we were coming down towards that, we didn’t quite know where we were going for a bit, the pilot was having a heckuva time trying to find where the runway was…obviously, we got here.

The tape was not particularly clear at this point, so it was difficult to understand this portion. The reference to "Hunter," if this is what Koernke actually said, might be a reference to the novel of the same name by William Pierce, author of "The Turner Diaries." However, the nature of the reference is unclear.

The next step was these last couple of days we were down for the anniversary of Waco in Odessa. Odessa’s on the far western side, out where the desert is, in Texas. It’s a nice area, we met some of the best patriot units we've seen as far as small light units, that’s right, these people were all serious about it, they absorbed everything, they took everything we had to give them, they provided us with a lot of data , they are well organized, can’t emphasize that enough, they're already into their teams, they’ve already got training programs going and they're cycling people in and out constantly.

Person: They’re heavy into their psyops.

Koernke: Yes, yep, psychological warfare, they have an excellent psychological warfare unit also. These people have been doing a lot of work in the area, and also moving into different parts of the states, trying to organize other people. The meeting started again about 6:30, 7:00; we went out again 'til about midnight. We had a good crowd, the usual. The other meeting up in South Dakota, where the feds didn’t have a great interest in it, we had our usual potpourri, of cutthroats, who usually don’t last but three quarters of the meeting, when they realize we start talking about pushing them into the ocean and everybody starts clapping they realize they're very much alone. In fact, they get real nervous. Usually you start losing their face behind someone else's head or they won’t look up anymore, they can't bring their eyes up to look at anybody, they can't clap, and then eventually they disappear. You know, they skulk out the back door or slink to the bathroom and disappear after that. But the meeting as a whole was really good.

We did a radio program before that; we also did a radio program the second day. To give you an idea of the kind of response, after we got off the air, they had a hundred plus calls come into the station in less than an hour. They had never seen anything like that before. So the people are out there waiting, all we gotta do is make sure we make contact with them so they’ve got the ammunition. And once you’ve got it away they go. And it's like down in Florida where we experienced that, or we did this also in Pennsylvania. People will grab the tapes, we don’t care what you do with them, everybody knows that. You take the tapes, they use that as base ammunition, then they build up their own database themselves, local newspaper, television.

I mean right now I think everybody’s got to admit, television is just plain arrogant right now. If there's any doubt in anyone's mind that the New World Order does not have a goal of taking this country, then you’d better, if you’re thinking there’s some other option for them, then you can probably leave right now, because there’s no doubt in my mind, and there’s no way that anyone can argue against it. The date’s probably set, we don’t know what that is, and we won’t until the time comes, but they’re desperate right now, in fact, if anything I will say this, they are shrill. That’s the only term I can use, they are actually panicking to a limited extent. They’re doing everything they can to get as much out and they’re piling up everything, one project on top of another. That’s not like your enemy. Normally your enemy is very consistent and very concise. They’re methodical, they take their time, and what they will do is target, create an objective, create a condition, remember: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. But normally they’ll at least create the semblance of some mock opposition. Almost everything right now is totally plastic. It’s just the illusion of going through the numbers. That tells me they finally figured out what's out here, to a certain extent, and now they perceive that victory is not assured, they know that now.

Person: The crime bill is an example of that.

Koernke: That’s right, it’s rushed. In fact, the same type of rhetoric they used with NAFTA: "Oh, it's so close, oh, it's neck and neck," when….they were forty votes over what was necessary. That should tell you everything right there. In this case, the crime bill is a done thing. Ignore the garbage with the debate. It is now a pending situation. When that happens, this whole environment changes. No longer will we be free to meet in any home, no longer will we be free to meet in public, the videotapes, anything we have on the videotapes, anything you have on written material, will probably be a crime, I think you pretty well understand that. But that’s again because of the situation that’s been developed here, not here with us, but in the country itself. This is a long-term plan but they are now desperate to accelerate it. They hoped to take a few more years, but they can’t.

Person: They’re still gonna come here.

Again, Koernke emphasizes the great size of the movement: "the people are out there waiting."

Koernke's reference in this section to the "New World Order" and its goal "of taking this country" is an excellent example of his worldview, which to say the least borders on the paranoid. Here he engages in a device he frequently uses in his speeches and videos, in which he describes the strategies of the "enemy," which he knows in great detail. Here a "date's probably set" for the takeover of the country.

However, Koernke always leaves himself an out. What if the New World Order does not actually take over the United States in 1994? If it doesn't, then this is not evidence that there is no New World Order conspiracy threatening America, but rather it is evidence that the activities of the "patriot movement" somehow defeated (always only temporarily) the New World Order. Koernke here asserts that they are now panicking, that they "perceive that victory is not assured." These illusionary victories against an illusionary foe are what Koernke uses, again and again and again, to create for his audiences the illusion that they are somehow heroic participants in some great struggle between good and evil, even if the participants themselves have a) never taken any action and b) never actually perceived any foe themselves.

Koernke also again makes some of his dire predictions, in this case regarding the crime bill (passed shortly thereafter). The crime bill would make it illegal for "patriots" to meet, he argues, illegal to distribute videotapes or written materials. Obviously, none of that ever even came close to materializing.

Koernke: That’s right. They’re still gonna come and get it and that’s what they’ve realized. They do not have the resources to accomplish the mission. Their psyop technology is not going to do it. Their capability as far as their military potential is dependent heavily on America betraying itself. If we work hard now, we can hurt them even more, because they are more blatant about what their intentions are. If they're going to get the guns, Clinton’s said uncategorically, he was going to find or create a way or fabricate a way through the Constitution to confiscate arms and go house to house. That’s exactly what he’s talking about. One of our allies out of Louisiana, out in New Orleans, called. They're lawyers, that’ve been directly involved in several of these other Constitutional fights. They got hold of us while we were down in Texas, which kind of surprised us, because they had to hunt us down. What they said, they talked to the judge personally, they called up to thank him for his ruling in favor of the Constitution and against the no knock search warrants—

Person: In Chicago?

Koernke: In Chicago. But what he had to say was this. Yes, we won this time, for the moment, but they already told him, when they confronted him, that one way or another, if they would not get it constitutionally, they would do it without the constitution. Now they told the judge that and brought it out. Needless to say, that ‘s the person that’s sitting on the bench right now. First of all, it took a lot of guts to stand up in the first place, in light of what’s actually happening, in the wave that he’s facing.

Person: He’s a marked man.

Koernke: Agreed. He’s a marked man, but he probably also understands that if they win, he’s a marked man anyway. Doesn’t make any difference. As more and more people realize this is a one-way street, we either win or we are defeated utterly. There’s no compromise on this, the enemy’s already told you, if they win, they get it all. We have to become very resolute, we have to decide right now if I’m going to be free or slave. I’ve already made that decision years ago, I think everybody else here has, too, now you’ve just got to decide what it is you're going to respond, not react, but as far as response goes, it’s going to have to be methodical, it’s going to have to be very specific.

Once more, Koernke raises a shrill voice about gun confiscation. Clinton, he alleges, has "said uncategorically, he was going to...fabricate a way through the Constitution to confiscate arms and go house to house." In reality, Clinton never said any such thing.

This mention of a judge in Chicago is a reference to U.S. District Judge Wayne Andersen, who in February 1994 issued an order to the Chicago Housing Authority to halt a highly controversial practice of searching public housing apartments for weapons and drugs. The Housing Authority had been conducting searches without obtaining search warrants or asking the tenants' permission to enter. Andersen said that this policy violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Needless to say, he was not a "marked man," and nothing ever happened to him for his decision.

What we need to have people do now, this weather is nice. This is our fighting ground, the state of Michigan. Now the Republic of Michigan is what we are planning on hanging on to. We could run to other states and eventually we might have to abandon the situation. If you’re planning on fighting here, there are a couple of things we want you to do, we’ve already got people doing for years, not just for months….

And what we’re planning on doing is, if we can, we’re going to assign all of you, the first mission is to go out and dig in, I don’t mean dig bunker complexes pe se. We want you to go out to the outlying areas, pick some place miles away from your house or a mile away from your house in a secluded area. We want you to dig in and create a fortified position of some type, one or two man each, two or three in a network. We want them completely camouflaged over and leave them. Now there are some rules, and I want to explain them. I saw this and these people were asking about these people that were arrested, they thought it was in Florida, it was in California. People were in the National forest out in the boondocks and what they were doing, they had dug positions and they were apparently stashing arms and equipment, we all know what that was about. They made several major mistakes, which were flaws in the plan, though, and I saw it when I saw those pictures. Now it could have been a propaganda piece; remember, they know what’s going on and they know they can’t stop all this because we will termite their ass. You get a million people out here doing this and you can’t keep track of them. Big Brother does not have an all-seeing eye; that’s an illusion. They’re counting on everybody thinking, as Orwell said, when he talked, Orwell talked about the black helicopters. The black helicopters' mission was to go around and make everybody believe they could see everything. It’s not that they could see everything, it’s that everyone was terrified into dysfunction so that nobody did anything. And that’s what’s happening right now with a lot of people.

What happened out west, if what appears to have happened happened out west, when you’re digging your position, I’ve talked about this before but I want to make sure that everybody gets this again, the most common way from the air they will identify a target is through thermal energy. Well, hot spots like us do stand out to a certain extent, with earthen cover the temperature changes and it's much harder to define its signature. However, most people dig a hole, and throw the dirt up on top. When they’re done they put their overhead cover in place with their structure and their sandbags, then throw the dirt over on top again and spread everything out. What you’ve created is a shoot-me symbol, because all that is inorganic subsoil that does not have the living matter in it, becomes a big shining target as large as you’ve spread out. And that’s what probably happened in California, they’re using the IRT system, the infrared surveillance technology, which is state of the art. They probably scanned an area and what they’re looking for are sites like this where you have nice neat squares where somebody dug a hole and buried something and they just filled the hole back in, they didn’t pay any attention to what they were doing. When you dig a hole, either bring visiclean or ponchos with you, lay the visiclean or ponchos around the site to be dug, take the surface soil and literally sod it out, scab it out and save it. Once you’ve done that, take the subsoil out, either fill the sandbags you;re going to be using if you're fitting a fighting position or take it and save it to be moved , again, you could use sandbags for this, they’re the easiest sized container, or five gallon plastic buckets, whatever you’ve got.

When you’re done, bring your position back up, camouflage accordingly with the topsoil, and using the original topsoil slabs that were on the cut, make sure they're situated the same on the overhead cover, so when they look down or when they’re shooting down in a surveillance mode, they’re going to get something that looks basically like what’s been there forever. Now you can modify this with other organic material such as fallen timber, rotted debris, you could also enhance the area by bringing in seed and actually developing from other materials in the area, overgrowth, and you should think about that now, this is the time to do it. And once it’s done it will have that Star Wars lifted effect, and you leave it. You may not use it this month, you may not use it next month. But I’d rather be a few feet underground than with my ass hanging to the wind aboveground with someone trying to shoot at me. Also, these give you areas or rally points that your individual sections can use if you have to leave the house and go somewhere else. This will be an objective, a first rally point. Then you may have other rally points. For miles, in all directions, there are positions like this right now around where we’re sitting, all the way out to ten miles that have been in place, some of them for years, and they’re already there and they look just like they’ve been there always and in fact cannot be discerned from the air or the ground. They’re grown in, they look natural, you can walk into them and disappear. That’s what you need to do now. You don’t need to do hundreds of them, but you should at least do three or four, depending on the manpower you have available, and what your area is like, too. Flat terrain is not conducive to good health in many cases, but it can be usable. Rolling terrain is best, needless to say, high low ground, strange contours, harder to identify objectives. Now does it mean that you can completely hide from their technology? No not necessarily, though there are protective measures. But what it means is, this needle in the haystack you’ve created is one of thousand of locations they have to observe, hundreds of thousands, millions. It is impossible for them to keep track of that many targets, period.

Person: What if you could pick up some manure and make some nice little four-by-four squares …in the woods?

Koernke: To create hotspots. Yes. That can be done. That’s a good idea. Using manure, which of course as an organic will generate heat as it decomposes, creating methane, and also generating heat during the conversion process. You could use od? to create hotspots or to create helicopter bait. That’s another consideration. If you want to bring a helicopter in to where you can talk to him, then you might want him to think you're dumb enough to be sloppy. Then they might be smart enough to think they can pounce, and like anything else, you’ve got to have something that’s a confidence builder. You want them to think that you’ve made the effort to conceal yourself, but you're still not that good at it. And again, it has to have the resemblance of a fighting position or a series of fighting positions. For instance, tent cities can be set up, fire is not normally used but you can use, for instance, one of the cheaters for making thermal imaging people, a little ? candle inside of plastic bags, they give you a billowing effect but it’s inside a contained vessel, so it will simulate the torso of a human being that’s normally monitored. There’s a lot of neat tricks you can use inside positions so that they want confidence building when they scan an area if they have a target. When they scan that area they get what will make them believe that it's a viable target worth wasting ammunition on. Once they’ve brought equipment in, then you can create your air defense net or protective net, depending on what you have to deal with, air or ground, or both, and assume both, by the way, assume that they’re going to have normally some air support. Priority is to what? Destroy the air support first. Once they’ve lost their mechanized capability, they’ve got to fight on the ground and it’s a totally different environment when the high tech toys aren’t there. So the helicopters are a priority in all cases, I don’t care whose nationality they are or what they are, if they’re on the other side, if they're an aggressor, if they are not American but United Nations, then your first objective is to destroy the mechanized capability. Do not fight armor. If it's a tank, what have you got to stop it? We can disable it, we can do some damage. If …unit you don’t have the anti-tank capability distributed throughout the country, right away, it‘ll take time. You can be selective in the weapons you do have and we do have some trinkets out there that can do a fine job in whacking even the heavy armor, but the important thing is, don’t fight on equal terms, don’t give them the opportunity to generate casualties. Fight another day. It's very important because if you don’t give their high tech equipment, which costs a great deal of money to put in the field, even their aircraft in many cases, if their aircraft don’t have a viable target , if their armor doesn’t have a viable target, but it's out there being used, that's constantly frustrating and that's going to create a big problem for them. It’s coin warfare. Low tech, simple easy to use, it's user friendly, KISS, keep it simple stupid, technology. The simpler it is the more likely it is to use properly and use effectively and that is very, very important and don’t forget it.

This little news clipping was important because it gave us a little insight into how they're going to try to use propaganda to get us to lock up. You just gotta make sure you don’t make the mistakes other people do when they show them on television, when they show these little tidbits. And remember, some of them may be fabricated and in fact probably are fabricated for the benefit of the psychological warfare effort. They may not have even captured anybody, this could have purely been something put together. This is not the first time it has happened in the past and it won't be the last time it happens.

This lengthy section is a typical, if not particularly interesting, example of "militia neep"--that is, language designed to indicate expertise in military-related topics. Although here the subject of the neep is field fortifications, the most common subject of militia neep is, not surprisingly, weapons. Discussion groups on the Internet quite frequently fill themselves with arguments about which gun is best for a militiaman. These arguments go on endlessly, as each participant strives to show that he knows more obscure gun facts than the next person. Interestingly, later on in this video Koernke seems to bypass this subject, suggesting that any long-range weapon will do.

The incident in California to which Koernke briefly refers actually took place. In early 1994 a Tulare County sheriff's deputy discovered a bunker full of weapons in a national park in California. This led to a two-month investigation which discovered several other bunkers and eventually resulted in the arrests of six men and one woman. The bunkers were located in Sequoia National Forest, Los Padres National Forest and Angeles National Forest. Some were as much as eight feet deep and forty feet long.

Occasionally forest rangers and other officials ran into members of the paramilitary group, who passed themselves off as various federal agents, including a fictitious agency called the "U.S. Enforcement Agency." One of the members had a previous criminal record. The individuals were charged with conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States, false impersonation of a U.S. officer, possession of a firearm by a felon (for one individual), and malicious destruction of federal property. The individuals charged were Peter Thomas Clark (the leader, who claimed to have been a colonel in the French Foreign Legion), John Delacruz, Jack Tsung Shieng Wu, Rebecca Lynn Perkins, Daniel Gomez, Robert Ramos, and Darren Delacruz.

The group claimed in partial defense that the "U.S. Enforcement Agency" was a private company which specialized in providing bouncers to nightclubs. One member said that Clark's idea was for the group to become "international bounty hunters." The various members of the group all either pled guilty or were convicted, and received sentences that ranged from probation to several years in jail. One exception was Rebecca Perkins; charges against her were dismissed.

What the group was really doing in the national parks will probably never be determined.

Now the Texas excursion otherwise gave us a good insight into the general posture of the Texans, they're pretty well pissed off. The general attitude which was given to us, which I think everybody else has heard from other friends and relatives, is that they're embarrassed and also they're ashamed because of the fact that they were all talked into and lulled into the same sense that everything was going to be okay that we did. Everybody agrees that it's not going to happen again. Now the most common question that everybody asks us is when is the next Waco. Well, whenever it is, what it looks like it is going to be the next Waco, ain’t gonna happen. OK, that’s the most important thing. Well, one thing that we notice in the last couple weeks, when there’s an article, it's in the other room, Nancy was looking at it, this propaganda blitz on this gentlemen on the western side of the state, that thing is being done, there are about four or five different versions of this being done all over the country at the same time on the same week, which means we have five Wacos instead of one. In every region they kept it compartmentalized. People outside of Michigan area didn’t hear anything about this guy in Michigan, cuz we asked. "Did you hear about the next Waco up here in Michigan?" "Huh?" Well, that’s because it was compartmentalized; it was tailored for the Michigan region. The next step was back in Virgnia, we heard something similar, we’ve also got Claire Prophet out in, out west, which is another target objective, we’ve got a target in Carolina, we’ve also got a couple down south.

What they’re doing is, keeping them compartmentalized, they can use more than one Waco, or we’ll say Waco Two: The Adventure Continues. The Waco Two operations will be tuned now, remember, every time they’re done with something like this, they adjust the machine for the mistakes that were made. They will not let the general media in on the next one. They will have their own camera crews there. If they are not successful, you will not hear about it. Never, ever will the media give you any type of viable information that is friendly. If at all possible, it's always anti propaganda, it’s always stuff designed to downtrod you. It’s a downer, dude. Remember? They’ve got a problem. What they're doing is, they know how to pull the strings. The important thing is that we pull a few of theirs in return. Now with these different Wacos, if they do it, and typically the case, it will probably be points of the compass--north south east west--they will all take place within a 48 hour period. We don't have the specifics on all of them yet, but we will probably--by the time they are done with all the news blitzes they have done in each region--be able to get a good overview of the targets. With that in mind, I’ve already talked to people within the last couple weeks, we were discussing this. This is what needs to be done in Michigan. We've now been given a coordinate. We got pictures of the guy's house here, he’s actually a well to do man, he’s a millionaire. What we need to do is propagandize that area. If you want to give tapes away for the next week or two weeks, what we need to do is we need to sit down, people need to get together tonight and decide who's going to do what. We need to sit down with a county map of that area, locate his house, and in a ring, inundate that area with friendly propaganda as a groundbed so that if we do go to war in a situation like that, we have some friendlies, who have a better understanding of what's happening here. In other words, the one advantage to theirs of our propaganda mechanism, the fact that we're going to generate good information, is that unlike the boob tube here, when you shut if off at night, it's gone. Nobody is recording their propaganda and keeping it day after day. With the tapes and with the audiotapes and with the paper, it's in their living room every night. So when they see something on the news and somebody starts squawking with the propaganda machine, they go, "Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute, I heard this stuff before, these guys, hey, you have to see this tape." You heard it a hundred times over. You gotta see this tape. That's exactly what they were talking about. Click, plug it in. And especially if the locals watch …help considerably, if the locals come to the aid of the neighbor and they try to ostracize the locals, you now have a galvanized ally for life. See how that works? And by permeating the area with our propaganda mechanism, in other words with our tapes, its not propaganda. It's all true, we try to keep it truthful. Of course, we’ll blow up the numbers whenever we can, in regard to our people, they don’t need to know everything. But our mechanism is designed so they get truthful information, how to find it, where to find it, what to do, we have copies of the data that we demonstrating, that information is a priceless cartridge in our rifle. It's the first one we can use and it's the cheapest.

Now the way to do it is to take the county maps and then take a highlighter and mark off the township map. Once you’ve marked off the township, go to the target objective area, start with those townships and circle the largest towns and ignore them temporarily. The enemy first of all makes a greater effort with the propaganda machine here to get hold of the larger communities. They also control the newspapers automatically. Since they’ve already targeted the media, why do you want to fight in their realm? Why do you want to combat and use resources or waste them, butting up against a wall you can’t break through? Your best bet is to go to the outlying small communities, the places that have four corners. They have a gas station, video store, grocery store hardware combination, and a barber shop, we all know what the barber shop is good for, and beyond the barber shop there might be a lawyer's office or there might be two or three realtor's offices or whatever. Go in there with four, five or six different tapes, whatever you can afford as a group. I recommend doing four different objectives a weekend, if you want to, or sometime during the week. Go in with the paperwork, duplicate as much as you can first of all, all the written material, that you make a lot of. Take about ten or fifteen people or five people, go to the barber shop, go to the hardware, go to the grocery store, go to the gas station, give each one a different tape, and then inundate the area with administrative paper work: how to, where to, what to, what is this all about. That’s just like planting a bomb. If each person got a different tape in a little four corner town like that, I guarantee everybody talks to everybody else. The barber shop got one tape, somebody comes in the barber shop and says, " I got this really weird tape, Fred, you know, you oughta hear about this, dadadadada," and the barber goes, "Here I got one, too, with the guys in uniform, talking about this military stuff," "Well, that’s not the tape I got," "Well, you wanna see my tape," "Oh, I wanna see your tape," all of a sudden what's happened is they will intercommunicate and pass the data back and forth on their own. You won’t have to do all the work and you won’t have to spend all the money.

The reference to Waco, of course, is a reference to the Branch Davidians and their deadly standoff with federal authorities in 1993.

The references to other religious groups and figures are considerably more obscure. The "guy in Michigan" to whom Koernke refers is multimillionaire Robert Van Kampen (in 1989 listed as one of America's 400 wealthiest individuals), an investment banker, philanthropist and extreme religious devotee who moved to western Michigan from the Chicago area in 1993.

Van Kampen believed that the end of the world was near, that all of the prophecies in the Bible indicating the end of the world had been fulfilled except for one. His books include "The Sign" (1992), which claims that Adolf Hitler will be resurrected as the Antichrist. When he and his wife Judy moved to Michigan (along with five other families who were associated with Van Kampen's endtimes prophesying), it caused some alarm among local residents, especially when reports surfaced that he was building a huge bunker. The bunker actually turned out to be a 7,200-square-foot underground vault for his huge collection of religious manuscripts.

Koernke also refers to Claire Prophet, who is "out west." This is a reference to cult leader Elizabeth Claire Prophet, also known as "Guru Ma," leader of a cult called the Church Universal and Triumphant.

The Church Universal and Triumphant is a rather wealthy cult started around 1960 and based in California throughout much of the 1980s, but which in 1986 moved to a 24,000 acre ranch near Livingston, Montana. Members built a huge compound, complete with extensive bomb shelters. Prophet--who claimed to be the reincarnation of Queen Guinevere and Marie Antoinette--predicted the end of the world by nuclear holocaust, perhaps as early as 1990. Her followers, stocked with survival goods, would somehow be able to survive. Members sold all personal possessions to move to her compound. They were also well-armed--also a source of controversy, as when Prophet's husband purchased fifteen guns under an assumed name.

Incidentally, the world did not end in 1990. Nor were Van Kampen or Elizabeth Claire Prophet ever attacked in any way by the federal government.

Now the important thing here is KISS, keep it simple stupid, and we also are limited in resources. Your machine and the machine we’ve always built up, has been very, very cost efficient. Its' got to be a grass roots operation, first of all, I’ve said before, you can’t liberate anybody yourself, they’re going to have to liberate themselves. They going to have to do it themselves, they're going to have to educate themselves, make the decision personally in their life whether or not they want to dig in more and find out more about this, but if you find somebody who is like that, that’s a kindred spirit, and now you are doing the best you can, you’ve started him on the right path, and that’s how this will work out, in a few weeks you can come back in the area, and inundate it with another little bit of propaganda again, hit em with another target group. This has to be done very quickly, the very fact that they wasted the paperwork that they did, there were four or five newspaper articles that were in the Michigan area alone, the Free Pres included, the Detroit Free Press, on the other side of the state. What that means is that they were setting up a Rolling Thunder operation, done with carpetbombing with the newspapers, we watched here two Fridays ago, it was on the nightly news, and who shows up that weekend, the Butcher of Waco, Janet Reno, what is she talking about? The ten counties that they want to do the house to house search and seziures in, across the country. It is no accident that they would time this this way. Nothing is by accident here. This is coordinated effort. Sarah Brady was in here the same week, she was in Detroit, so this is all coordinated so that everybody gets that warm fuzzy feeling that we got a threat to the Constitution, that's what they want. If you’ll notice they’ve said this several times through propaganda. They took a poll; 64% of the American people agreed, we need to get rid of the Constitution and surrender it for a while, if you surrender the Constitution you will never get it back. Well, it's moot, let's put it that way, it's irrelevant.

Rolling Thunder is a reference to the bombing campaign conducted by American forces against North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

Koernke's statement that "they took a poll; 64% of the American people agreed, we need to get rid of the Constitution and surrender it for a while," is a typical piece of Koernke misinformation. He is referring here to a poll conducted in late 1993 by the Los Angeles Times which asked Americans about their opinions on gun control. In response to one question--whether Americans thought gun control laws would be strong enough even after the passage of the Brady bill--64% suggested that they would not be strong enough, 24% thought they would be adequate, and 7% throught they would be too strong. The poll said nothing about "getting rid of the Constitution."

So we're in a situation now where it's a great decision process. We’ve done very well in most of our efforts across the country. I will remind you that the whole tape, if you want to understand what really happened and why if you question whether or not this doesn't work, we didn’t advertise America in Peril or A Call to Arms. Everything we did with America in Peril was all word of mouth, hand to hand, person to person, carried all over the nation. America In Peril now is in all 50 states of the Union, it's in Canada, it's probably in Mexico, we know it's in Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Europe. Yeah, definitely in France because it was just translated to French, it'd be fun to watch that tape, and on top of that we know it went to other parts of Europe. But the fact of the matter is the only way it got there is because of people, just like everybody sitting here, who said, "Here you’ve got to see this." That did what we wanted because the enemy was not able to identify an activity until it was very late and into its development, so we're very deep into the aggressor. Instead of him having an understanding, because we didn’t "Oh you gotta see this on Channel 2" we got to buy time on the regular news media; first of all, they wouldn’t let you buy the time, second of all, if the media got a hold of it and perceived a real threat, they would fabricate an action against it. In fact, we got a copy right here on tape, it came out of Canada, where we definitely affected the Canadian situation. It was totally fabricated but it was done in the classic form, if you can't attack anything else, try to attack the messenger and fabricate the data, which is exactly what they did. What that tells me is this, first of all you never acknowledge an enemy if you can help it. That's the first policy of the government. Never give them any media coverage, that’s free, never admit there’s any kind of resistance out there, because what that does for other patriots is this," I thought I was alone, there’s a bunch of guys out there, I just saw this thing on TV, well if they're out there maybe there are a bunch of other people out there…" That’s why they don’t tell you anything. So the very fact that they actually made the effort to do damage control and play little Dutch boy and put their finger in the dike, tells us that we hurt them badly and they're just now acknowledging it. In fact, I doubt they really knew about this whole idea, about the way we did it, until sometime in the middle of December, when they actually perceived what the actual base is across the nation, because, like I said, it's not one part of the country, it's all fifty states. There's no way we can stop it, there’s no way that it will be stopped now. It's going to take time, victory is already assured, there's just too many bodies against them, and now they're going to have to figure out how to bollux the works up and do great damage against us. When I say us I mean the country as a whole, because if they can’t have this whole piece of real estate, they’re gonna try to do so much damage that we will not be able to repair it easily and then they can walk in some other way.

So we have to prepare and several others, too, and I’ve talked about this. Medical support. You’ve got to be on a track to develop at least some form of medical skills. We wanna see also some form of physical skills, carpentry, trades, whatever you can pick up, even if it's just general handyman. How to fix, how to work, how to do. We have to have a very broad-based population again, and that’s going to take a lot of effort. That will be very, very difficult in some ways because the average skilled laborer is much older than the person coming up to replace him. You're only going to have a limited amount of time for all of you who are skilled to pass your working knowledge on to other men and women below you. See, that's a problem with what they did to our system with regard to industry. They’ve created this massive gap in which we have lost an entire bed of technology that's needed to maintain industry here. The hands-on people, especially. That's where the teaching effort is going to have to come in. See, it's not just war effort, it's what are we going to offer when we are done? Because once we're finished with this--I’m looking beyond this now--we’ve got to be able to sit in on government, we’ve got to be able to sit in and demonstrate industry. It's going to have to be small industry, were going to make sure that never again do we centralize to the level that we’ve allowed these monsters to, because that’s been part of our demise. Smallest is bestest. We disperse it, there’s no way you can destroy any single part of the industry, because the industry is distributed throughout the nation. That is the safest way to insure any kind of production, under any conditions, natural disaster, war, anything else you can think of, those two cover most everything--natural and man-made is about all you get here, usually—divine intervention, we’re expecting that down the road.

America in Peril and A Call to Arms were two of Mark Koernke's earliest videotapes. The former, made in late 1993, is probably Koernke's most infamous speech; it is the one in which made references to hanging public officials.

Other activities, the tape we just got back from Gulfport is just an extension of what we’ve already seen, but there are now over 2000 vehicles on the site. How many people watched the videotape? Okay, everybody got a chance to see the bumpers are marked, the windshields are marked, there is no doubt in anybody's mind that this is United Nations equipment. Okay, now if they are continuing this, there is one thing I will make mention,: if they allowed us to see the trucks, this is the old story of watch this hand, watch this hand, whoops, missed these, didn’t you? That’s exactly what they’re doing. They’ve allowed us to see equipment that’s certainly vital to their resource, to their forces, but that’s not the only resource that they have. It's been keeping us busy, some of us busy, not everybody, while other activities are taking place around the nation. There are many other points than just that one.

Person: Do you think that’s why they put it by a major freeway or something, so that people would notice it?

The reference to Gulfport and United Nations equipment is an allusion to one of the hottest conspiracy topics in the militia movement in 1994, popularized by Koernke, Militia of Montana leader John Trochmann, televangelist Jack Van Impe and others. Koernke refers to some 700 old East German and Russian trucks located in Saucier, Mississippi. Airmar Resources, a small company headed by Fred Koval, purchased the trucks in order to refurbish them and sell them to the United Nations for use elsewhere for delivering humanitarian aid (the trucks can't be driven in the U.S. because they use leaded fuel). Koval bought the vehicles at an auction in Germany shortly after the reunion of East and West Germany. "Patriots" discovered the old trucks and decided they were part of the New World Order plot to invade the United States. Shortly thereafter Koval found his property crawling with militiamen trying to take photographs of the "United Nations military vehicles."

Koernke: Well, sometimes the best place to hide a thing is in plain sight, remember. Most people, how many people told you, "Well, I know what there, those are army surplus vehicles and it's just the government getting rid of some of their own trucks." I mean, I had people telling me, first of all, well, look guys that have been in the military, we’ve been in the military, we’ve been in the training phase, we understand the whole process, we even buy tonnage from the government, we buy the vehicles from them, when things are for sale. You’ll notice on that fence there’s a big sign that says "Not for sale." That’s because the patriots, first way they found, the way they found out about these, they drove up acting like a box of rocks, said "Hey, I wanna buy some of those old army trucks," and the guy said, "No, they’re not for sale," "Oh, they gotta be for sale, they look like old army surpluses, that’s stuff they're selling," "No no no," and after about fifteen minutes of carrying on like this they said, "No, these are United Nations vehicles, they’re not for sale, they’re going to be used again da da da da da," well, of course, cha ching, the big light went on up overhead and everybody understood from that point why they weren’t for sale. These are not for American use per se, they are for United Nations use, you are looking at an extension of 7277 State Department document drawn up to abolish arms in the United States and eventually to disarm the American people and transfer the authority over to the United States and surrender our sovereignty. That is the bottom line to all of this and anybody’s who's too stupid enough not to see it needs to get a swift number ten up their butt, and then be sent on down the road.

In fact, those that are promoting it, by the way, that’s another problem that I have, the ones that think it's a good idea, let them practice their little socialist or fascist or communist routine over in Europe or in Africa or Asia but they can leave us alone, 'cause I know misery loves company and that’s a problem with these characters. They can’t suffer to have us all free because once they bollux the system up, we're still standing outside the system, still have the capability to build anything we want. They, on the other hand, will be hard-pressed because they're not the builders, they're sucking off everyone else’s resources. There’s only so much to suck off from, eventually it’s all gone. You know we are the last tit in line, sorry, the hog’s gone dry so far.

Person: Excuse me, Mark, for interrupting. I’ve got the letter from the head of the state police responding to Jack Wellborne’s request about the multijurisdictional task forces. It's in the car; if you want, I’ll get it and you can tell them what it says.

Koernke: Good, by the way, when we came back, thank you, when we came back from our two week tour, one of the things we, that George brought in, were articles from the Bay City and Saginaw area, which admitted, in the newspaper, that 22 MJTF police units are in Michigan right now. It also gave some of the locations, I’ve got it in the back in the briefcase, I hope, we didn’t carry it off last time, if it's here we’ll leave it here, we'll make copies. But if you’ll recall two and three years ago, "Oh, the MJTF didn’t exist…didn’t exist," everybody was pooh-poohing it because they were trying to draw attention from the fact that they were there. Now they can no longer deny that they exist, so the only option they have is, they can’t deny they exist, is to try to divert the intent, try to make people believe that there’s something else happening. Well, they lied the first time, because they are here and they claim that they weren't, so any other excuse that they're giving now is simply more filth piled on top of the rest of the dung pile and it's simply an extension of the lies that they generated from the beginning to try and conceal the effort. We're on a given path starting to be laid down by them.

Person: Uh, also, a week from this weekend they're supposed to have a big Army-Guard bivouac, helicopters, the whole shot, everything from Lansing going up to ….up the U-P there, out in the woods, and I’m wondering if there's any way we can get guys up there that can tell all this stuff and ….all that?

Person: Next weekend?

Koernke: Kitchlowe? may be closed, but as far as that can be, they can still be using the property, you’ll still be jailed. Oh, it will be good practice for their operations if it’s now a prison. The one thing that bothers me about this whole thing, and I've said this before, but I can’t trust it, so I want to make sure I keep repeating it, isn’t it pretty sickening that the only growth industry we have is prisons? There isn’t anything else we’re doing. All these bases were supposed to become "Industrial Opportunity sites" and yet the only ones that have been released have all become jails and prisons, creating more and more space for fewer and fewer prisoners because if you keep spreading them out, all of a sudden you have far more beds than you need. There’s another question that I have, too, I asked someone else, I said, "Okay, with all the things we’re doing right now…"

Stops, starts looking at letter handed to him.

Koernke, reading: "Dear sir, thank you for your letter of March 10, 1994, regarding the multijurisdictional task forces and as to establishing additional task forces, we have no plans to do so. We do have 22 existing multijurisdictional task forces, which predominately investigate, target narcotic trafficking conspiracies, etc. The goal of these task forces is to integrate federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies and prosecutors in order to improve interagency efficiency and effectiveness"—and we all know how that works—"while most drug task forces have regional territories, one team, the Divergent Investigation Unit or DIU, has statewide responsibility dictated to investigating the diversion of prescription drugs by health care personnel and pharmacists. Another team, the Southeastern Michigan Conspiracy Organization or SEMCO, works with task forces in six southeastern counties solely on high level conspiracy cases."

Someone: Like us.

Laughter.

Koernke, continuing: "….We have been able to attach surveillance and auto theft teams in order to maximize the effectiveness and capitalize on existing supervisory structure. All 22 task forces are adminstered by state police personnel--" which of course, case in point, state response team, SRT, we’ve had a great deal of experience with them in training…slaughtered them with reckless abandon, they had three months worth of psychological evaluation and counseling , after a training exercise, because the cadets, they were involved with. Yes, they could bench press 4 and 500 pounds, but they shit their pants, when they realized someone was trying to kill them. "This provides a much needed consistency in terms of police policy and procedure; for example, evidence handling, report writing, forfeiture procedure"—we all know what that means, don’t we—"and sharing of intelligence information is basically the same for all 22 teams. We will also occasionally form a special multijurisdictional task force to meet a specific need. The House Fiscal Agency investigation, for example, was conducted by a task force comprised of state and federal investigators. The state police investigators were assigned from established units and they will return to their primary duties when that investigation has been completed. I hope that I have addressed your questions. Please contact me if additional information is required." No problemo, dude. The nice thing about it is, now what we can do is use this as a target base, if all else fails, follow the money through public data. We follow the money through public data, we can find out the locations of the sites that they’re using that may be clandestine for collection activities, what specific units are involved, within a short period of time, at least, especially with this SEMCO, that helps a great deal, that by itself is what we needed…SEMCO is in existence, I guarantee you that throughout the state budget and the federal budget you will find data for particularly those and it will not take long to identify the units attached, so this letter is priceless. Of course, these don’t exist, by the way. For the last two and a half to three years…

Person: Right, when you were talking about, we’re nuts, two years ago.

<inaudible comments>

Koernke: Excellent, you made copies already?

Person: Well, you’ve got one….on the back of one of those, but I’ll get copies to you.

Koernke: Now if there are 22 in Michigan, how many are nationwide?

Person: That’s right.

Person: Exactly.

Koernke: Oh oh.

In this paragraph, Koernke makes a reference to "7277 State Department document," another popular source of "patriot" conspiracy theories.

State Department Document 7277 is a pamphlet published in 1961 during the Kennedy administration. It was a summary of a proposal made by John F. Kennedy entitled "Freedom from War: the United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World." The document is a broad outline of the basic stance by the United States with regard to a possible halting of the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, including both nuclear and conventional forces. The document set down the broad positions of the United States on how this could be (theoretically) accomplished.

The document was an essentially conservative document, as its title suggests: disarmament could take place only in the context of a "peaceful world," which was unlikely ever to be accomplished. Basically, the document proposed three basic stages of arms reductions, only two of which were discussed in any detail. Gradually arms would be reduced in "balanced, phased and safeguarded measures," and the United Nations correspondingly strengthened so that it could guarantee the external security of member nations.

The first stage would reduce military force levels to 2.1 million soldiers each for the United States and Soviet Union and would begin reducing armaments, including the reduction and eventual elimination of chemical, biological and radiological weapons. The first stage would also halt nuclear testing and impose restrictions on nuclear proliferation. Weapons of mass destruction would also be prohibited in outer space, while communications links would be set up, notifying countries of major military maneuvers, etc., to reduce risks of accidental war. Many of the items in Stage I had already been subjects of negotiation for some time and were largely unremarkable and not too controversial. Many of the above measures became the basis for treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s.

The second stage involved the reduction of national military forces and the creation of a permanent UN peacekeeping force. The third stage would reduce arms still further and strengthen the UN forces. Generally speaking, the United States never made any attempt to negotiate any Stage II or Stage III measures, although with the collapse of the Soviet Union, further reductions in nuclear and conventional weapons did become possible.

This document was first demonized by the John Birch Society in the 1960s and has periodically surfaced as a target ever since. One twist added by "patriots" is the notion that armaments include all personal weapons in civilian hands, and that therefore this document is, rather than a guide for arms reduction talks, a sinister plan for gun confiscation by the United Nations.

Koernke here also makes reference to the "multijurisdictional task forces," another popular bogeyman for Koernke. The MJTF, according to "patriot" conspiracy theorists, is a national police force consisting of FBI, ATF, BLM and other agents, all controlled by FEMA, with headquarters in Ft. Monroe, Virginia. This MJTF conducts MOUT (Military Operations in Urban Terrain) exercises all across the country, and cross-trains with foreign troops at Ft. Polk, Louisiana. The MJTF reportedly owns over 3,000 black helicopters. According to Mark Koernke (in another context), the MJTF was created when "through a series of political actions that started out in approximately March 1989, the federal government extorted resources from all 50 states simultaneously, within a two-week period, passing laws in every state, authorizing the use of federal funding to convert local and state forces into national police forces. The MJTF Police is in virtually every state of the United States now. Its primary mission is house to house search and seizure, the separation and categorization of men, women and children in large numbers, the transfer of those citizens to detention facilities, and the use of those facilities for interrogation purposes. The MJTF are regular National Guard, local law enforcement and street gangs, all converted to national police services. Remember that this was originally organized under President George Herbert Walker Bush."

Discerning readers will note that there is no national police force consisting of "street gangs" and other forces, nor is there any "MJTF Police" with a mission of house to house search and seizure and transporting people to concentration camps.

Person: I got a question, Mark. I heard somewhere that Linda Thompson was calling for an armed march on Washington by the militia.

Koernke: September. Anybody have a copy of that? I’ve got it, we’ve got it….a copy in the briefcase.

Person: Armed march?

Person: Anybody remember the last time MacArthur did…what about that?

Koernke: One of the problem, okay, the problem, number one, is this, first of all, well, it was against the veterans, when they marched for their benefits.

Person: During the Depression.

Koernke: During the Depression, the veterans at the very beginning of it marched on Washington to try and receive their veteran benefits from World War I, mind you, a decade earlier, they waited, and a majority of the people showed up, they negotiated in a roundabout way….people to walk away, that they would get what they wanted. A number of people were dissatisfied, a percentage stayed there. When they were still in place, they were ordered to fire upon them and they did. And they killed a number of people, wounded a large number, et cetera.

…Anyway, an interesting point, what she generated was a Declaration of Independence.

<unclear conversation as someone leaves>

Koernke: Anyway, case in point, the Declaration of Independence was issued, was generated after the hostilities began. It was not in advance of Lexington and Concord. So there’s a problem that it's premature, certainly we’ve had fighting, but we’ve not had the constant, and we do not have the specific engagement that is protracted and taking place now, and there’s a mistake in issuing at this time. Also she’s given a specific date when everybody should show up. If I were the other side I’d be going, "Hmmm, I guess we know when the train pulls in the station, don’t we?" So, and number one, September is a long way away; if anybody thinks we’ll be around in September sitting here, please raise your hand, we’ll schedule it for you. We look out to the future that far but right now we look two weeks at a time. Every time we’ve gone out somewhere in the last month we’ve first of all had to ask the question should we leave and be that far from home at this time and that’s first and foremost on our minds and our thoughts right now if we go any place. Now I balance it out this way, number one, the aggressor would hope that we will compartmentalize and contain ourselves, that we would become fearful of any activity. We have no choice but to do the reverse. I know for a fact whenever my mailing gets out somewhere, we’ve been able to do damage, we’ve got more people motivated, people go out on their own and do things, we don’t have any idea what they are. That’s priceless because it creates that many more fires and that many more patriots that are organized. That is what we must do now, there is safety in numbers, the old adage, gentlemen, if we do not hang together we will surely hang separately, is true today as it was 200 plus years ago.

So we need the numbers and we need to make sure the people are awake. Now that doesn’t mean a lot of people are going to show up at your camp and eat your lunch. What’s gonna happen is a lot of people are sitting on the fence right now, who certainly know something's wrong, in the back of their little mind here it's actually glowing red, but they won’t make the decision to get off the fence and move. And what's gonna happen is they're gonna show up bare-ass naked to the wind on your front porch, expecting you to arm, equip, they will do something, probably, but they want you to arm equip and feed them. Now, I'm gonna tell you right now and I've said in the past to everybody you should have if possible 10 percent over what you need for that reason, if for no other reason than half the people on this couch may be in your house two weeks from now because they were prepared but their facilities were destroyed. It also works in the reverse order; that is, if you people need a place to go, it’s not that you hadn't commited yourself, you just may lose everything that you have. If that’s the case, if you show up somewhere, you will be fed, you will be fed, you will be equipped. That’s long term planning. But there’s another one, the butter knife brigade as we call them, that are gonna show up, that I got a drawer full of butter knives for. The way it works for a lot of them is like this: when they show up we pull out a butter knife and give it to them and say "Go get a rifle." If they come back, they got an AK or an M-16; if they don’t come back, all I've lost is a butter knife. Okay? That’s the best I can do in some cases. And we’re gonna have to judge accordingly, on how we’re gonna work this. And that’s historically has happened in the past, by the way. That is an actual incident. So don’t think it can’t happen again.

One of the things I think everybody’s seen, we’ve been all over the country, and trust me, when you go west of the Mississippi, the first thing everybody asks if you know if there's any primers, you know if there's any ammo? There isn’t any ammo at the gun shows. They described the gun shows in Texas to me, this is what happens, this is what happens at every gun show they’re going to now. The two biggest ones are right off the interstates, when you pull off the interstates it takes an hour and a half to two hours to get off the expressway, to get into the parking lot to get to the gun show. Once you get in the parking lot it takes an hour and a half to get through the line to get to the door and they put six ticket lines in a row and there's a solid wall of people. Once you get into the gun show, what they're saying, it's just assholes to elbows, to use the term, but it's just solid bodies left to right front to back and he didn't even get through two rows before you're either exhausted or there’s nothing to buy. Most ammunition is gone before eleven o'clock in the morning on the first day of the gun shows. That should tell you something. Whatever’s there, gone.

Person: Gun show in Midland last weekend, no ammunition.

Person: No primers, either.

Person: I wasn’t there; he just said no ammunition.

Koernke: The good part is, the ammo’s all gone somewhere. What that means is that it's not in a central location where it can be confiscated immediately the way it was before. Now what’s happening is the ammunition is tactically dispersed and it's in the hands of the patriots. You're going to have to find several billion rounds of ammunition. In fact I got into this conversation with somebody who was basically reporting to somebody else. He started making all these comments last night on the phone, we were at the office, he said, "well, what about machine guns?" You don’t need machine guns, how much ammo can you carry? What you need is something you can hit somebody with at long range if possible, but how much ammunition can you carry and who's going to re-supply you? That doesn’t mean if you don’t capture something you don’t carry it away, but right now concentrate on hitting them with the biggest nastiest thing you can find at the greatest distance so they bleed out before they ever get close. That’s my concern. I don’t want them coming to visit me and bother me. Then he said, "Well, how many rounds do you carry?" Well, whatever you’re willing to carry. Now, some people have problems, but we look at it as evacuation mode. My personal attitude is lots of ammo, lots of ammo, a little bit of everything else, okay? And if I can get grenades, I am, number one, the spirit of the bayonet, and I thoroughly believe in the poor man’s nuclear device, hand grenades. Because you can saturate your way across the battlefield if at all possible, trust me, it works. Down…they had everybody scared …anyway, they’re pretty indiscriminate, they take everything with them when possible, homemade Simtex, okay. Okay, now, the consideration here, too, is then they were talking about a variety of heavy weapons. Well, there are a variety of things that are out there, people already got them, some people are making them. I don’t wanna know about it. If it’s out there, it will show up on the battlefield, we know the potential, we know a lot of great people out there, they’ve been doing things to take down things, they have…done them for a long time. Some of you are supplying them, so they know exactly what it takes to knock them down. Trust those people, okay.

Now with regards to standardization on weapons, if it will put a bullet down range, it's a good rifle, okay. If it will put a bullet in something it's a good weapon. If it's what you can afford, that’s fine. Diversity is going to save us here, because were we all standardized specifically on just one caliber throughout the country, what would you do if you were on the other side? That’s right, knock it right down and make sure it was never made again. Instead, because of the wide range of arms that are available and because of the different types that we have on hand, we can draw from different ammunitions at different times if we're short on the battlefield. We’ll be able to draw certain weapons into the conflict and withdraw others until the munitions are produced or until such time as we may have replacement weapons for them. But that will all depend entirely on the condition. And that’s something not a lot of people have thought about, it’s nice to have a diverse number of cartridges. It may be a nightmare of supply to a regular military, but we’re not a regular military. Anybody here got a couple of million dollars in your back pocket, …factories to let us know about, raise your hand right now. Oh well, I guess well stick with our plan. Okay, that’s how it works. Again, as much as you can afford, ammunition is a perishable item, there’s a finite amount of it out there, we told people back when it was 60, 70, 80 dollars a case, to buy it, everybody said "I’ll get some down the road." Yes, you will, now, at 150, 200, 220 dollars a case, so now, what I said before is happening, what this is, a war for free resource. You have a finite amount of material, which is a cap line. The aggressor has understood for years how to manipulate your lives by creating shortages, as in fuel, shortages as in food, shortages in virtually every area. Well, in this case they also understand limited resources, the value goes up. If you have to spend more for less, you don’t have as much out there that they have to worry about. The problem is, they reacted late. They figured they were going to give us just enough to get us killed; now we have certainly enough to win.

In fact, more, and what’s really happening now, they finally figured out, probably they saw a couple of our tapes because we blabbed all over the country, that’s why primers are becoming scarce. Because we told everybody get all the primers, get to the reloading, because reloading wasn’t hit yet. But once you have reloading capabilities, you have your own factory. We get everybody in this room, everybody’s reloading capability to bear in one place, we could do virtually hundreds of thousands of rounds a day, because we would simply work out the production processes, we'd have quality control supervisors, and we could crank out the ammo we needed. It would just be a matter of raw material, that's all there is to it. So we have the capability and it's dispersed. Again, reloading is just like every other category we're working on. As long as it's spread out, we're safe. Centralized, it can easily be decapitated and destroyed. So we’ve got to maintain dispersion, especially with our armaments, especially with our soldiers. Lexington and Concord, this is the key, they went after Lexington and Concord because they were the only two viable targets that they could find, where they had specific treasonous information from Tories that were inside the system. The ATF went after them—I mean the redcoats went out after them, and when they went out to confiscate the weapons, and they showed up, the first time around the patriots were on the green, they got fired on, some of them were killed. They got to the second location, though, the town was empty. Everybody had fled with what they could grab and the patriots were converging from miles around and there was no way they could stop them because nobody knew where they all came from. From every tree, from every hillock, from every place where there was a pile of stones the bullets sailed. And that’s a really bad experience for somebody on the other side, when you have this nice, neat impressive uniformed force, with these neat red or black uniforms and all kinds of high tech garb and you're driving along and all of a sudden you go uhhh, (falls over) and you never even hear the (makes sound). And while everybody’s looking up front, and slumped over the steering wheel, here comes the ditch. Okay, now everybody’s piling out of the truck and that’s when everybody else cuts loose and all of a sudden, your whole day is ruined. The patriots get another deuce and a half , or another HUM-V or another russian GAV 131, get a bunch of M-16s, Glocks, get a bunch of Kevlar helmets, and go on down the road and find another one. And that’s how it will happen, all the way back, wherever they came from, when they start going back. The helicopter will be the same way. We just hope that when they crash they don’t burn so we can get everything out in time. That’s our biggest concern, it’s like, you know, "Helmet, yuck, here you take that one. Sock, take the sock. He’s got some good underpants, too, look at those underpants, I haven’t seen 'em that good for a long time." And not only that, but you know, the dogs have to eat.

People: Oooh.

Person: He’s….the Ukraine.

Linda Thompson was a major figure in the "patriot" movement in 1993-94. An attorney then based in Indianapolis, she emerged during the standoff at Waco, Texas, when she decided she would represent the Branch Davidians. Largely ignored, she then declared a mass mobilization of the "unorganized militia" of the United States at Waco to save the Davidians. Hardly anybody showed up. After the horrifying end to the Waco standoff, Thompson produced two videos alleging that the government had set fire to the Davidian's building with flame-throwing tanks. These videos were extremely popular among members of the "patriot" movement, and people like Timothy McVeigh watched them over and over again. Thompson declared herself "Adjutant General of the Unorganized Militia of the United States" and became a proponent of forming militia groups. In the spring of 1994 she overshot herself, however, when she called for an armed march by militia members on Washington, D.C., and the hanging of treasonous Congressmen. This proved too audacious for the young movement and she became the target of severe criticism (although not, it is interesting to note, in this video, where Koernke is relatively gentle in dismissing the notion). In September 1994, almost half a year after this video was made, Thompson issued an angry letter cancelling the march. In the letter, she claimed that the only reason that she had called the march was to convince people to start militia units, and that since that was accomplished, there was no need for the armed march. In reality, the march was cancelled because it was patently obvious that no one would show up for it. The cancellation of the march on Washington marked Thompson's decline as a leader in the militia movement, though she still remains active on its periphery.

Koernke also makes an allusion to the "Bonus March." In 1932, when the nation was in the throes of the Great Depression, a movement formed among veterans of World War I to demand early payment of veterans benefits. After the war ended, Congress voted to pay its veterans a (modest) bonus starting in 1945. With the Depression as severe as it was, many veterans wanted that money earlier. In 1932, calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, they began arriving in Washington, D.C., to call for the bonus. Several tens of thousands arrived in the capital by the summer of 1932, where they slept in vacant government buildings and camped on the Anacostia flats about two miles southeast of the Capital. A bonus bill failed in the Senate in June and at the end of July, marchers were told to evacuate government property. After fighting broke out when D.C. police tried to evict some veterans from a construction site, President Herbert Hoover ordered Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur to evict the BEF from U.S. property. The Army moved in, using tear gas and bayonets, routing the Marchers and burning their camp. The leaders were arrested, while the veterans and their families were driven out of the city. It was one of the cruelest moments of the Depression.

Koernke: That’s right, so everything can be used, and nothing will go to waste. Always remember that. After all, the dogs are your friends. Well, beyond that, as I said, the response is, kids, right now, it's important that we not react but we respond. I’ve been hearing a lot of debate, one of the things I try to put a cap on right away, there was a lot of questions about other patriots, people in the patriot movement. Certain personalities are out there. I didn’t waste any more time than I absolutely had to, I'm gonna say it again right now, the important thing is to stress attack the enemy. Attack the enemy, attack the enemy. Ignore any contention amongst the patriot element. Ignore it completely, we cannot afford it. Because with that, the enemy smiles. And that will stop…in its tracks right now, we’ve got to stop that before it gets started. Okay? In fact, if somebody else wants to discuss, in our personal circles, in meetings like this, or anything else, no no no no. The only thing we’ve got to worry about is we’ve got a foreign invader. Who's trying to usurp the Constitution. Their objectives are obvious, their actions are obvious, it will be genocide against the American people, beyond the shadow of a doubt. In fact if you look at the UN Charter, they still have a eugenics operation, they still have a eugenics division. And their objective is the planned extermination, the planned re-fabrication of the social structure of different parts of the planet and they plan on having heavily engineering us, okay? So our first objective is down the road with the enemy. Later on, once we’ve got the house under control, we can start beating the snot out of each other with two by fours in the back room, where nobody can see, okay ? But in the meantime, attack attack attack, that’s the best thing we can do. Tell you what, we're gonna take a break, anybody, wait a minute, before we go to take a break, anybody got any questions, 'cuz there was some stuff, go ahead, in the back, first.

Person: I’m looking for my Indianapolis photographs, of the concentration camps, we’re going to Wisconsin and I’d like to have them.

Koernke: Okay, Indy photos, wherever they are, we’ve got to have them. Okay they’re right there. Okay.

Person: The stock markets, I’ve heard rumors, there’s a blurb in the Toledo paper about thirteen days ago…

Koernke: Oh, thank you. Bentsen, tomorrow night, is supposed to be saying something about the money by the way. Nationally. We haven’t heard any more than that.

Person: Rumors something supposed to be said today.

Koernke: Well, there were two different pieces we had, we did call the one number from the office, it was supposed to be the information line, and it was basically telling people to have their reinvestments shipped over from one group to another by today. So what specifically that’s involved with with regards to different portfolios or packages, we’re not sure. It sounded to me to be legitimate.

Person: They want two currencies, one to operate outside the United States, one to operate in the, I wish I had brought this…Toledo Blade.

Koernke: There’s a piece, well, interestingly enough, to follow that up about internal and external currency, there was a piece in the Readers Digest that somebody had pointed out to us, I’ve got a copy of that in my briefcase right now, in which they made a little comment that three hundred billion in cash is circulating, only nine percent of that is in the United States right now, the rest of that is outside the country.

Person: Incidentally, Mark, we heard that they’re going to pull a hundred….out of circulation.

For the record, the UN is not involved in eugenics, planned extermination or planned re-fabrication.

Koernke: Okay, that’s, I’m gonna get this in as many places as I can to make sure everybody understands this. Nancy remembers this because I was involved directly when the embassy fell in Iran. You’ll notice that they’re talking about this money being produced by the Syrians and the Iranians that is counterfeit but is really good money. That’s a crock, it’s not really good money, it's our money, it was printed by us on our own machinery. What is was, before the embassy fell, the Central Intelligence Agency--I know a lot of the guys working there--the Central Intelligence Agency had a US Treasury machine, one of the old printers, in the basement, along with all the paper currency, all the paper they needed, currency paper, and spare plates. When they took the embassy, we were talking about this for years after it happened, what they would do is when the CIA wanted to bribe the informant or pay off a government official or the military, they’d crank out the currency right there, and the only reason they had that little flaw on it, and the flaw is not major, in fact, it would be considered acceptable by press standard when in the Treasury, is so they could identify the flow of the currency when it was used. And it was respected, and it was accepted by any bank anywhere in the world and it was known it was being done 'cuz we knew about it in intelligence circles. Now you can ask Nancy, go back and ask her, about that. What they’re doing, is it was the excuse; remember: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. This is going to be one of the several excuses they try to get the currency out. And they are going to do the hundreds anyway, we know that, but this machine was provided by us when they took the embassy over. What happened is, I’ll relate the whole story, refresh everybody’s memory, when they took the embassy, they captured everybody they thought, but there were three people they didn’t find right away. Two of 'em were women and one of them was a black gentleman who was back inside a chamber inside a chamber inside another room. What happened is when they took the embassy they thought that they had a closet they were looking at, and what they had to do is cut through every door, what you do is when you're embassy’s being taken, you fortify, you roll the blast doors shut and every room becomes a bunker. Well, what happened is they thought they were looking at a closet so they brought out the cutting torches on a daily basis and they opened this up and they found out it was a hallway. They cut another part and they found it was another room. They found another door and they realized maybe they had better check it out, well, they found this guy back there with a shredding machine and all this other equipment and for three days straight he’d been shredding papers, just loading, hour after hour after hour, because he thought he was doing his job. He’s the only black man--remember the Ayatollah had tried to create a racial split?

Person: He’s the one they let out.

Koernke: No, he’s the one they wouldn’t let out.

Person: Wouldn’t let out.

Koernke: Right, of all the blacks, remember, they let all the blacks go, but there was one black guy, everybody said, "Well, why didn’t they let him out of there," this is why they didn’t let him out of there, he pissed them off because he was doing his job, and he’d been doing it for three days straight, you can imagine the pile of paper, he was shredding and burning everything. So the money came from that site, the presses came from that, if they broke a press plate, they had spare plates on site, so they even had what they needed to repair the machine.

Person: Another thing that’s been going around, Mark, is that they were going to be doing maneuvers down on the Gulf Coast, and in the Virginia, it was supposed to happen today, …this was maybe false information.

In one of the most memorable segments of the videotape, Mark Koernke relates a fascinating anecdote about the Iranian hostage crisis and at the same time buttresses his "credentials" as someone who knows the dirty secrets of the American government. Or does he?

Although Koernke suggests that he was "involved directly when the embassy fell in Iran," and implies that the story he relates comes from the Central Intelligence Agency--"I know a lot of guys working there"--in actuality all Koernke does is repeat (and conflate) two completely separate incidents, both well-reported in the press at the time. To his audience, Koernke seems to be in possession of all sorts of contraband information. In reality, he simply has good recall of what he read in the newspaper.

Koernke's first anecdote involves the taking of the American embassy in Iran on November 4, 1979. As the mob broke open the outer doors, embassy guards slowly held them off with shotguns as they retreated from the first floor. Eventually, negotiations began which ended in the surrender of embassy personnel. This did not include three men who were shredding confidential documents in a vault on the second floor. However, embassy personnel opened the vault when the Iranians threatened to kill one of the hostages. One of the three men was Charles Jones, an African-American and State Department employee. Soon after the seizure of the embassy, the Iranians releaed thirteen women and blacks, but not Jones. Jones afterwards stated that he felt he was not released because the Iranians were angry at him for his role in the shredding.

Koernke's second anecdote involved more recent events. It was revealed in the spring of 1994 that counterfeit U.S. one hundred dollar bills were coming out of Iran and Lebanon. It is these counterfeits to which Koernke refers. It is true that the Iranians were making the bills on a printing press made in the United States for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. However, this had nothing to do with the taking of the American embassy or Charles Jones. Rather, back in the 1970s the U.S. government gave the Shah of Iran's government such a printing press to print the Iranian rial. It also sent over experts to teach the Iranians how to use the equipment. Iranian chemists were also invited to the U.S. to learn ink production. It was this press which fell into the hands of the Iranian revolutionaries when they seized power from the Shah. The Iranians apparently began producing the high-quality counterfeits around 1990. Most of the bills were sent to Middle Eastern countries as well as the former Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union, which were in dire need of hard currency.

Koernke: No, we’ve got it from a DOD printout, although if they decided to alter it, that’s at their discretion. It’s called Agile Provider 94. Okay, here’s the original, okay, we'll put it on the, do we want to neutralize some of the numbers on here? Okay, this was generated 13 April 1994, ACC 94-59, AC units participate in joint training exercise. This particular documented is generated from Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. Langley?

Person: CIA.

Koernke, reading: "Members from 11 Air combat command wings will join about 40,000 soldiers, sailors and marines for a 20 day joint forces exercise dubbed Agile Provider 94. The exercise, sponsored by US Atlantic Command runs from April 22 to May 11. In addition to US forces, units from France and the Netherlands will participate." Exercise sites include locations in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, that’s off the wall objectives, and Virginia. Why Arkansas? Think about that. "Agile Provider improves joint operations in command and control, forcible entry and air ground and maritime special operations. Now specifically identified was forcible entry operations. The exercise scenario is airborne and amphibious forces evacuate us and United Nations humanitarian aid workers from a hostile foreign nation while helping a friendly country in the same region restore stability" in the United States, oops, I’m sorry, I’ll correct that, stability of its borders. That’s page one. Was there more? I think there was. Okay, the second page…according to USACOM officials, ACC units participating include (very long list of units follows, deleted here).

Person: According to Cooper, this is disinformation, whether it means anything or not…

Koernke: I heard that, we were suspecting somebody would broadcast something like that to counter it. The important thing is this, any time we have a message that can be sent out, we can verify it ourselves and we don’t have to rely on a central source. Once we have a warning to this, we can identify the specific units and identify whether or not they’re active. With regards to the units, I’ve got a piece in my briefcase, the Dutch have already been operating in Florida for quite some time, and we’ve got an article that was put in one of the local papers about Dutch practicing house to house search and seizure and it was photographed, so there are a number of activities there. Umm, we’ve got to have everybody, this is another thing, just to see what kind of PR pieces they generate, everybody needs to watch their local papers. Strangely enough, while the big papers are just basically the same old song and dance, dog and pony show, the little papers have been picking up a lot of the AP articles that are special, that have been generated, that are fillers that have more data in them than most regular news articles would have. I pulled a piece out of the Dutch, that we picked up a month and a half ago, I’ll have the briefcase here in a second, okay, anybody else, questions?

Person: Along with that, Russia, Canada, and the United States are doing joint air/rescue…they’re doing them in Alaska.

Person: I heard over the radio that there's Americans in Russia right now, training exercise over there.

Person: They're doing joint air rescue missions in Alaska, and they were bragging in the article that it was the first time the Russian flag was flown on US soil. And other one that I pulled off there was a Kurd elder from a village who was an eyewitness to the attack on the helicopters, they also had video film of it, of course they turned it over to the authorities, okay, video film of it, he said the F-15s circled the helicopters three times before they fired, then circled them once after they fired. Now I’m no dummy, if they circled those helicopters three times before they fired—

Koernke: There’s no doubt what they were.

Person: They knew what the hell they were, you’re darn right.

Koernke: That’s right.

<unclear conversation>

Person: Mark has the list of casualties I gave him.

What Koernke is slyly discussing "neutralizing" is a standard press release. Exercise Agile Provider 94 was a joint military exercise held by the United States and several other countries from April 22 1994 to May 11 1994 in six southeastern states. U.S. Marines and Special Forces, along with air support, amphibious vessels and even a submarine, conducted major amphibious exercises in the Caribbean. The combined forces numbered some 44,000 personnel. At the time there was some discussion that Agile Provider was a "test run" for a possible military intervention in Haiti, as the United States was at that time putting heavy pressure on Haiti's military leaders to step down and allow the return of the democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The reference to "Cooper" may be a reference to William Cooper, a militia figure, shortwave broadcaster and UFO afficionado from Arizona.

The Alaska exercises referred to were joint "aerospace rescue" exercises held by Russia, the United States and Canada from March 20-25 1994 at a U.S. military base in Alaska. About 55 Russian paratroopers, pilots and doctors took part, along with numerous American and Canadian personnel. The exercises were designed to help form the basis of an international rescue service for the Arctic.

Koernke: We got the printout of that, an interesting thing, when I said before they were shot down and we were all sitting here, number one, there’d be Kurds on board, and some other foreign nationals, what it looks like to me, any time you hear of an operation like this, somebody had knowledge that they weren’t supposed to have. In that group, it was all compartmentalized. There were six Kurds on board. I want to correct everybody, when you think the Kurds are a bunch of Bedouins with rags on their heads. The Kurds are some of the best technical advisors that Iraq has; many of them have been college trained. They have two full Kurdish divisions in the North that are not against Sadddam but are in favor of Saddam. They are the equivalent of the Republican Guard with regard to armaments. Almost everything they have is state of the art. When the war was over in Iraq, they completely retrofitted these two units and they’ve got now state of the art that Russia’s been sending in since. Now they’ve got the T-80 and the T-72. They’ve received a massive amount of air defense equipment, in fact, some of it was already videotaped, and C-Span did a little blurb on it, talking about the Kurds that nobody knew about. The Kurds are also directly involved in a lot of the technical operations such as their nuclear field. Now think about it. One of the reasons they had to stop American forces from going into Iraq is because you had 400,000 plus Americans who could read English well. American soldiers, like World War II, walk in and eat your lunch. They carry away the kitchen sink; they carried away Hitler’s silverware at the end of the war. If it wasn’t nailed down, it was walked away with. Imagine 400,000 reading, intelligent Americans walking in and finding all the documentation that showed where the technology came from before the war started. It was all in English. That’s why the United Nations sent most of those quote unquote advisors in to find out all about Saddam’s nuclear capability. They weren’t looking to find anything they didn’t know. They were sent in to get all the data out so nobody else could find it. They were what we call spooks and kooks. Their job was to go in, acquire and destroy. Notice you see very little printed from their nuclear field batteries. There’s very little printed from any of their research sites and there’s nothing in any technical journals about what Saddam Hussein actually has. Why not? After all, the technology he was using is not state of the art. It was older generation technology that was offered at a bargain basement price. Uh oh. Well, what probably happened is you had six Kurds who may have had a very good idea of exactly what was happening inside Iraq. They probably even thought they were doing somebody a favor and walked out with something that nobody else had. And I can just hear the conversation, they’re like, "Ok, Colonel, you got those guys?" "Oh yeah, oh yeah, sir, we got all of them, we got everybody." I mean, they’d be more confident than that, but, "Yeah, okay, colonel, do they have all the papers?" "Oh yes, sir, they’ve got all the papers." "Okay, you just load them up and we’ll take care of everything. We’ll see you in about an hour and a half, Colonel."

Person: Mark, they hadn’t, the helicopters hadn’t been on the ground thirty minutes, and the rescue teams or whatever the hell you want to call them, were already—

Koernke: Already on the site. The other thing, here, too, that there’s been argument that they may, the videotape would have told us, there’s a question as to whether or not they were flying Blackhawks or they were flying Hinds. It makes no difference. That debate is irrelevant. The reason I say that, you have an AWACs command and control facility nearby. With AWACs in the air, it’s not like an old headset where you monitor one frequency, you monitor thousands of frequencies at one time. So what was happening here, even if it was a Hind-D, that was, say, a covert warfare weapon, anything that was being done in the northern Iraqi theater was automatically monitored by the AWACs and the AWACs could transfer any data to any other aircraft in the air. There was no way they could conceivably have any type of error or accident with regard to this. Because if the pilots in the two aircraft that were shot down were talking to anybody, even if they were talking to each other, they weren’t talking in Sephardim, they weren’t talking in Zen-sunni or something, they were speaking in English. And even if they were one or the other, you’ve got linguists on board whose job it is, they get paid very good money, they earn their highest ratings, and their job is to monitor all of the different languages that are there at the…So they wouldn’t be stupid, they’re not idiots.

Person: There isn’t one person down at the shop, even the non-patriots, that are buying this.

Koernke: The problem is, it’s not even, of course we don’t really want to see us kill friendlies from the other side, but the problem is not the six Kurds that they killed and I could give a shit less about the six United Nations personnel, but the fact of the matter is, the puppies are finding out that nobody’s special. If those were special warfare people, they all found out, that even when they were all safe on the helicopter, it was time to have little black dog for lunch.

Person: Well, one of them, one of them that went down, was one of the most decorated Green Berets in the army, spoke eleven languages, and had been a Green Beret since Vietnam.

Person: An ambush.

Koernke: He knew too much. Well, rule number one, there’s a first rule everybody should understand. It's not an act of war; in wartime, all people are expendable in theory with regard to command and control or command concern, but in this case, most everybody who's into the inner circle of special warfare right now knows what the New World Order is all about. But everyone of them has been talked into the thought that they’re the special people, that nobody will touch, once they win, these will be the golden puppies. In reality, if the other side wins, these people can’t be kept around because historically, any time that an action like this has taken place, when they’ve betrayed a nation, the next people into the hole past the patriots are all the secret police and military who assisted in whatever treason that’s taken place. They have to get rid of them next because they know where the bodies are buried. Case in point is Russia, or example, my favorite one is when they got rid of the Tsar. When they executed the Tsar, the first group came in and shot the Tsar. Well, then they sent a bunch of good communists in to kill all the bad communists. They didn’t tell them why they were shooting them. When they got done with that group, they sent a third group in from the Georgian SSR and they told them that the ones they were going to shoot were bad communists also. So three different firing squads shot three different groups of people and nobody by the time they were done had any good understanding of who they were shooting and why they were killing them. But they were told that they were bad communists. And they ate their young. That’s the first rule in this whole operation. They eat their young. There’s not a single person on their side that they consider valuable because we're only five percent of the world’s population. I can hire five Bolivians for the cost of any one American right now. And if you have a global mentality, Americans to the internationalists are no more valuable than a cat, a dog, a rat, or a little boy. Remember that same phrase we heard just a little while back? We’re all the same. In fact, we’re actually more expendable, therefore we're not cost efficient, therefore we're not the ones they really want to keep around. You’ve got compartmentalized individuals that are specialists in virtually all parts of the planet, there’s no reason to keep us around any more. We’re a failed experiment because we’re too efficient. We actually are generalists, because most of us can hold any job and do what needs to be done. That’s very dangerous if you’re trying to control the population.

Person: And if they don’t have enough exercises going on, now, I just this morning read they’ve got another joint exercise going on, predominately NATO countries, in the Med, in the area of Italy. It’s, you know, they’ve got all that stuff going on in Bosnia and they’re having exercises? It doesn’t even make sense?

Koernke: Yeah.

<commotion>

Koernke: Hold on, Anybody who is here, remember, we put money together for the vests. We’ll get hold of Charlie either this weekend on Sunday or we’ll find out next weekend, because he said it was the end of the month, the person will have the rest of the Kevlar. Next meeting, by the way, wait a minute, I need my calendar. Okay, one of the things, for anybody who wants to go, 'cause we're gonna have a break and we’re also gonna split up here, tomorrow, map reading course, 2:00, okay, 2:00 pm, location?

Person: Adrian’s.

The discussion here centers around the then-recent tragedy in which American F-15Cs shot down two U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopters flying over northern Iraq in April 1994. The helicopters contained 26 U.S. and allied military personnel, including 15 American soldiers. The men had been in Turkey and were flying to the town of Salahaddin in Iraq to meet with Kurdish leaders. Air Force pilots mistook their helicopters for Iraqi Soviet-built Hind helicopters and shot them down in the no-fly zone in northern Iraq. This mission was part of Operation Provide Comfort, which was a mission to provide food, clothing and shelter to Kurdish refugees returning to northern Iraq after the failed uprising there.

The colonel referred to by Koernke is probably Colonel Jerald L. Thompson, who had been Commander of the Security Assistance Training Management Organization at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Koernke: In Adrian… generated an excellent document, that if you don’t have it you had better have it, what they did is, they went back to the original session, we knew there was some funky things about the GCA 68, the Gun Control Act of 1968, is word for a word a duplicate of Nazi Germany’s 1931, 1933 and 1938 gun laws. Now it's important because the only thing that they did, they didn’t even change the italics, in fact, what they did was a survey, they went to the senators involved, they tracked down who it was that got a copy of it in German, and in fact, I think it's right there.

Person: The Library of Congress, right there.

Koernke: Okay, the Library of Congress records, Thomas Dodd, the individual who was involved, Library of Congress, Washington DC, July 12, 1968, federal firearms legislation. Now this is the letter that went back from Lewis C. Coffin. I’m going to read this anyway:

"Dear Senator Dodd, your request on July 2, 1968, addressed to the Legislative Reference Service for the translation of several German laws has been referred to the Law Library for attention. In compliance with your request and with reference to several telephone conversations between Miss Frank of your office and Mr. Fred Karpf, European Law Division, we are enclosing herewith a translation of the Law on Weapons of March 18, 1938, prepared by Dr. William Solyom-Fekete of that Division as well as the Xerox copy of the original German text which you supplied. The translation of the decree implementing the Law on Weapons of March 19, 1938 and the pertinent provisions of the Federal Hunting Law of March 30, 1961, is in preparation and will be sent to you as soon as completed. Sincerely yours, Lewis C. Coffin, Law Librarian."

Again, this is for the Library of Congress, Washington DC, July 12, 1968. The law they’re referring to of 1938 is Nazi Germany’s final gun confiscation law in which they went house to house for search and seizures and in fact was used effectively and is now actually American law, virtually word for word. This is very important to remember. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty, certainly not the innocent.

Yeah, we’ve gotta get out of here, okay, ladies and gentlemen..

Person: Thursday night you’re going to be in LaPierre (?).

Koernke: Thursday night we're in LaPierre at…American Legion.

Person: When is the next meeting.

Koernke: Next meeting. Friday or Saturday?

Person: Got to be Friday.

Koernke: Got to be the Friday, okay, one more Friday, we’re going to change over again. Okay, last but not least because we’re going to close it out:

All: God bless the republic, death to the New World Order, we shall prevail.

Tape ends.

This is not the first time that Koernke has made the allegation that the Gun Control Act of 1968 came from Nazi Germany. In his 1993 video America in Peril he made the assertion that it "was taken from Nazi Germany's control laws of 1938, word for word."

The "source" for this outrageous statement is a small extremist group called the Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO). This radical pro-gun group, which ironically consists mostly of non-Jews, shrilly makes the (unsupportable) claim that the Holocaust was caused by gun control.

The JPFO's case was printed in a 135-page booklet published in 1992 titled "Gun Control: Gateway to Tyranny." This booklet consists largely of copies of regulations regarding firearms from the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Two chapters compare Germany's March 1938 weapons laws to the Gun Control Act of 1968.

The "word for word" parity seems to have been aided by generous translation. In reality, both sections simply had some provisions on similar topics, such as firearms registration. Virtually any piece of firearms legislation would be looking at the same general subjects, and so could have equal claim to have been "based on" the "Nazi" law.

Here are some of the provisions which were allegedly "based on" the Nazi law: felons could not own firearms; firearms dealers had to record purchases and sales; firearms for sporting purposes were defined, etc. In other words, the JPFO is trying retroactively to "Nazify" some of the most basic and reasonable aspects of firearms regulations.

Koernke also again raises fears of gun confiscation, calling the 1938 law "Nazi Germany's final gun confiscation law in which they went house to house for search and seizures." Actually, this appears never to have happened. And there are no provisions in the 1968 law for gun confiscation and house to house search and seizures.

Ironically, the JPFO booklet irritated some of their fellow travellers on the extreme right: the Neo-Nazis. Neo-Nazi groups did not want Adolph Hitler to be tarnished with the stain of gun control. National Alliance leader William Pierce thus published a detailed rebuttal to the JPFO argument, comparing the Nazi weapons law of 1938 with its Weimar predecessors and concluding that in fact the Nazis loosened previous restrictions on gun ownership.

Revolution and Reality: A Transcript and Analysis of Mark Koernke's "Time is Running Out."

Introduction