DENVER – They were a ragtag collection of racist rednecks, armed with guns, methamphetamines and hatred of the idea of a black president.
U.S. federal law enforcement firmly insisted Tuesday the three men arrested this week could never have credibly followed through on a plan to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama at his party’s national convention.
But the incident still managed to revive the worst fears of Obama supporters, stoking memories of the political violence that struck down John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King Jr. and providing a stark reminder of the racism still ingrained in America’s lunatic fringe.
Under the biggest security blanket to ever envelop a White House hopeful, Obama will formally become the first black presidential nominee Thursday after his speech before 75,000 people at the open-air Invesco Field.
The airspace will be closed above him, and the interstate that runs past the football field will be shut, part of the unprecedented Secret Service effort to protect the 47-year-old Illinois senator.
“The law recognizes the difference between a true threat, one that can be carried out, and the racist rantings of drug abusers,” said U.S. attorney Troy Eid, calling the arrested men a stoned “group of meth-heads.”
It didn’t appear plausible that the men arrested in Denver would ever possess the tactical means to follow through on their threat.
Eid called their plan “more aspirational than operational.”
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But they did believe that it would be wrong if a black man ascended to the Oval Office.
“He don’t belong in political office. Blacks don’t belong in political office. He ought to be shot,” suspect Nathan Johnson, 32, told local television station CBS4 in a jailhouse interview Tuesday after his arrest.
The chain of events unfolded Sunday when a police officer pulled over 28-year-old Tharin Gartrell, who was driving erratically in a Denver suburb.
A pair of rifles, ammunition and a sniper scope were among the items found in Gartrell’s rented truck.
Police tracked down Johnson and 33-year-old Shawn Robert Adolf to separate Denver hotels, capturing Adolf after he leapt out a window and fell six storeys, breaking an ankle.
Johnson denied on television that he was part of the murder plot, but said Gartrell and Adolf planned to shoot Obama from “a high vantage point.”
A woman arrested with the trio told federal agents that she checked into a hotel with the men to “chill and do drugs,” said an affidavit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Colorado.
“Adolf, Johnson and Gartrell began to speak negatively about Obama, and further stated she believed Adolf, Johnson and Gartrell were all racists and possibly associated with white supremacist groups,” the document said.
The woman told a federal agent that the three called Obama a “nigger” and that they “could not believe how close he (Obama) was to becoming president.”
“We don’t know if this was a serious plot or some methamphetamine-induced racist babbling or what,” said Brian Jenkins, senior adviser on counterterrorism with the Rand Corporation.
“We do know, regrettably, the country is not without a racist streak. We know that some white supremacists are angry about the possibility of a candidate who does not meet their standards of racial purity.”
Jenkins said the event was a “sad reminder” that the era of Harry Truman bantering freely as he walked down Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House are long gone, replaced by the reality of Kennedy’s 1963 assassination in Dallas as well as the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
“What we always worry about in this country is not the vast political conspiracy but the lone gunman, the single damn fool,” said Jenkins.
No intelligence apparatus, no matter how vast, can “X-ray for a man’s soul” and get inside the head of every fanatic in the country, said Jenkins.
“The Dallas fantasies have been in the minds of these people for four decades. These people read novels; they excite themselves on the Internet.”
This raw nerve was exposed during the primaries when Obama’s opponent, Senator Hillary Clinton, was heavily criticized for making reference to the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy in the months leading up to the raucous Chicago Democratic Convention.
“We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California,” Clinton told a South Dakota newspaper in May.
The Secret Service is leading the 5,000 security personnel from other federal, state and local agencies that are trying to keep the four-day convention safe from a terrorist attack or street violence from protesters.
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