Mark Koernke thought Hutaree arrests were start of militia-government war

Mark Koernke, a longtime local militia leader who lives outside Dexter, predicted the war he had long been waiting for was about to occur when nine members of the Hutaree militia were arrested in late March, ArborWeb, the website of the Ann Arbor Observer reports.

The website has a lengthy profile of Koernke, chronicling his past misadventures with law enforcement, his accidental capture in 1998 by cops in a helicopter looking for marijuana and his conviction several years later for assault and resisting and obstructing officers.

Koernke, back home after serving his time, thought the raid on Hutaree was the start of something much bigger than it turned out to be. The article says Koernke wrote the following on an Internet message board:

"just got off one of our back up phones with another militia unit commander...He told me that he was packing up his LBE [load-bearing equipment, a military pack] and weapons into the armored truck he has...he asked his wife to bring the congregation together to say a prayer for the militia that may be going to war this Sunday."

Neither Koernke nor anyone from his family talked to the Observer for the article, but it pulls together information from Koerne's past, his Internet broadcasts and interviews with others to sketch its picture of the man at one time known simply as Mark from Michigan.

From the article:

"In the Koernkes' universe, everything is sinister. The website of the We the People Radio Network, which carries Mark Koernke's broadcasts, promises to "expose the New World Order's plans for global domination. Mark's research has managed to come across actual photographs of one of the FEMA concentration camps located in the United States! Koernke has also figured out and exposed their plans to plant microchips into the bodies of children, to insert barcodes into dollar bills so we can use scanners to find out how much money people have, and to use FEMA to take over the country for the U.N."

Read the Observer article.