Sarah Palin and the Alaska Independent Party

October 3-5, 2008

Alaska Governor and John McCain running mate Sarah Palin confused U.S. Afghanistan commander General David McKiernan with General George McClellan, the general of the Union Army during the Civil War, in her debate with Senator Joe Biden.

Palin can be excused for bringing up the name of a Civil War general in the debate. WMR has reported on Palin's connections with the Alaska Independence Party (AIP) and its links to the Confederacy restoration movement, the League of the South. Palin's slip was understandable considering her long association with the AIP, which has drawn those who want an "Aryan" homeland in Alaska, and the neo-Confederate movement. Palin has referred to Alaska's Native Inuit and Aleut peoples as "mukluks" and "Arctic Arabs."

On September 10, 2008, WMR reported: "The AIP is part of a network of extreme right-wing secessionists around the country, many of whom are linked to white supremacist causes. In 2006, the AIP participated in the first North American Secessionist Convention in Burlington, Vermont. Also attracted to the convention were a number of Southern secessionist movements, including the League of the South; the Southern Caucus; the Southern National Congress; and Christian Exodus, which advocates the secession of South Carolina as an independent republic governed by the Ten Commandments as the foundation of law."

Palin's and her husband's Todd's connections to the AIP are all the more worrisome when it is pointed out that the AIP's founder, Joe Vogler, who ran for governor of Alaska in 1986. Vogler's running mate was Al Rowe, a former Alaska state trooper. Vogler disappeared in 1993 after he attempted to buy plastic explosives. Vogler's remains were discovered in a gravel pit near Fairbanks in 1994. A petty criminal identified himself as Vogler's murderer in a very mysterious case.

When Sarah and Todd Palin's dalliance with the AIP was made public, the McCain campaign denied any links. The files of the Alaska State Police still contain details of the Vogler murder and the abortive plastic explosives deal. The swiftness of Governor Palin's and her husband's desire to purge their ex-brother-in-law Mike Wooten and Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan from the ranks of the Alaska state troopers may have more to do with getting them away from files on the criminal activities of the AIP, something that could embarrass Palin and sink her vice presidential nomination. It would not look good for the anti-terrorism McCain campaign to have on its ticket someone who may have had something to do with an Alaskan independence leader trying to buy plastic explosives.

However, Vogler was the rule rather than the exception with radical right groups. Such groups have used bombs to terrorize abortion clinics, African American communities, Democratic judges in the South, and even the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta.

-- www.waynemadsenreport.com/articles/20081003_1

Published: October 15, 1994, New York Times

Fingerprint tests show that human remains found in a gravel pit east of Fairbanks on Wednesday are those of Joe Vogler, the founder of the Alaskan Independence Party, who vanished in May 1993, Alaska state troopers said today.

The discovery of the remains, following an anonymous tip to the authorities, apparently resolves a year-and-a-half-old mystery concerning Mr. Vogler, a folk hero throughout the state who was 80 when he disappeared from his home here.

The blue tarp and duct tape in which the remains were wrapped, officials said, matched a description given by a convicted thief, Manfred West, who confessed last summer that he had killed Mr. Vogler in a plastic-explosives sale gone bad and had then buried him.

-- query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940CE3DB153CF936A25753C1A962958260