for the best. and that s the way we re proceeding with this investigation. investigators are don t believe this is a runaway situation but they ve also found no signs of foul play. a federal judge in michigan has ordered eight members of an extremist militia group to remain in custody until their trial. suspects are accused of plotting to kill police officers and wage war with the u.s. government. the judge felt the suspects posed an unacceptable risk to the community if released. so here with us now on the phone is state editor of the michigan messenger ed broton. good morning. the decision the judge made to keep them in jail because he felt they were a flight risk and could be harmful to the public. what do we know about the allegations here? we don t know much beyond the allegations, of course. we certainly know the group was strongly anti-government, had obviously paranoid sort of delusions about what the government was going to do to them and everybody else. you know,
we ve seen the quotes. we ve seen their website. what are the quotes? let s get specific, ed, help me out here. just how dangerous are these allegations? well, certainly what they are accused of doing in the indictment are very dangerous. they were accused of according to the indictment, planning to sort of spark an incident that they thought would provoke a wider war with the government and bring all of the or militias into that war, sort of start a second civil war. and they had thrown many ideas around according to the indictment. many ideas for how to do this. the primary one, which was to kill a police officer and then at that police officer s funeral used explosive devices and weapons to attack the funeral and kill a bunch more police officers. also, allegations that the leader of this group said that women and children are fair game as well. all of these, though, allegations and one of the