The greatest award the U.S. government can bestow on an American is not the Congressional Medal of Honor. The greatest honor an American can receive is to be charged with sedition by the United States government.

Louis fell in love with Sheila immediately. He'd been visiting her father, talking politics, and couldn't believe his friend could have such a beautiful, sweet and unaffected daughter as Sheila, who lived at home with her parents and brothers in Santa Fe, Texas.

Sheila taught Sunday school. She'd had to wear a back brace from a recent car accident and was in constant pain, although she would never burden anyone by mentioning it. In the following weeks Sheila noticed that Louis was coming over for dinner quite frequently and that he was talking with her more than with her father. He actually likes me, she realized. Within a few months Louis asked Sheila to marry him. They were married in April, 1987

Sheila knew from her father that Louis Beam was a well-known Texas patriot who'd fought Communists and other enemies since his return from Vietnam in 1968. Louis had volunteered for two tours in that slaughterhouse, serving as a door gunner on a Huey helicopter. A typical young American, he'd just thought it the right thing to do. Louis had earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal for Valor, awards which would be eclipsed by the honors he would receive twenty years later.

The next day Louis, Sheila and Sarah attended a meeting of Chapala Americans where the crime situation was discussed. On the way home they went shopping for dinner. They returned after dark and Louis, as usual, went inside the apartment first to check it out. Then he came back to the car to help little Sarah out and grab the groceries while Sheila went inside and upstairs. She glanced out the kitchen window down at the car and was appalled to see Louis bent over the hood with a gun to his head. She immediately went to the dresser and got Louis' pistol...

As Louis had backed away from the car he'd been jumped by an FBI agent and three Mexican federales. "Move or say a word and I'll blow your f------- brains out!" said Steve Walker, the FBI agent, as he slammed Louis' face down on the car's hood. He could not see what happened next.

In December, 1986 Pastor Richard G. Butler, head of the Aryan Nations in Idaho, circulated a Sedition Alert which advised patriots: ...Even as early as April of 1986, top leaders of the right wing in America have been sent alarming communiqués from secret sources in top governmental positions outlining a concerted, orchestrated program of intentional criminal harassment of the White, racialist movements. This plot, sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League and carried out by their ZOG stooges in the U.S. State and Justice Departments... in what has come to be known as Operation Clean Sweep, is well under way...

"So, Louis," said Stevenson, "Things are pretty bad for you..." Louis looked out the window. "You can make it easier on yourself if you cooperate." They flew on across Texas. Stevenson waited a while and then said, "Your pretty little wife's in bad shape back there. Maybe there's a way we can make it easier on her..." Louis looked at him. "I'm interested." Stevenson produced two files and referred to them. "Tell us about Bob Miles and Richard Butler." Louis looked at the files and then at the FBI agent. "You've got the wrong man, I would never betray a friend." Stevenson called ahead notifying the press that they were bringing in one of the ten most wanted to the Fort Smith airport. Upon landing a gaggle of newsmen and television reporters surrounded Louis and begin firing questions as he was led in leg irons and cuffs to the waiting federal convoy. "Did you really conspire to overthrow the government of the United States?" Louis looked directly into the cameras, and in his best down home Texas accent said with a smile on his face "What else is a country boy going to do on a Saturday night when the only drug store in town is closed?" Probably the federals began to have a foreboding that this would not be the show trial they had planned.

Louis was held for trial at the county jail at Ft. Smith. He had not eaten since the arrest several days earlier. His fast continued through eleven days and he was taken before a federal magistrate who asked him if he intended to eat? "I'll eat when I am recognized as a political prisoner." The judge ordered him transferred to the notorious federal prison "hospital" at Springfield, Missouri. Four U.S. marshals drove him there. He was taken to an isolated room and immediately informed that there would be no more hunger strike. "You ain't gonna die on us, boy. You see this here steel platform? We're gonna strap you face down on this platform and we're gonna run this hose up your nose and we're gonna feed you anything we damn please and you ain't gonna die on us."

His attorney, Kirk Lyons, who had never handled a criminal case before, appealed to Amnesty International for relief for Louis and Sheila. Louis, after all, was a political prisoner who was being held for racial and political reasons. (When AI finally responded they refused to intervene on the grounds that Louis' indictment alleged violence! Sheila's case was rejected because she had actually shot a policeman.)

On her fifth day in hell Sheila was transferred to a women's prison in Puerta Agrande. Here the FBI handcuffs were finally removed. As the circulation returned to her nerve-damaged hands the pain was unbearable. Her wristwatch band was embedded in her engorged flesh. She was held here for an additional five days. On each of the first three days she was again forced to swallow a handful of pills. A half hour later the police would question her about guns and drugs. Despite her drugged condition Sheila maintained Louis' and her innocence of these wicked charges.

Then the miracle happened. Officials suddenly appeared and informed Sheila that the charges of intentionally wounding a federal police officer and possession of a weapon of a caliber reserved for the army had been dropped. She would be deported!

What exactly had happened? No one has ever shot a federale, let alone an American, and been set free. If any civilian shoots anyone down there he goes to hell for a long time. The FBI speculated that a large quantity of money accumulated by The Order made its way to the judge in her case. Louis, whom the FBI likes to call the only member of The Order who isn't in prison, scoffs at this. "Who has this money?" he asks. "All of the members of The Order are in prison! How would anyone get it to the judge? It was a miracle–nothing less."

What happened was that the Mexicans finally realized they'd been deceived by the FBI. The finally read about Louis' coming trial for sedition–not drugs. When they read this they demonstrated their contempt for the liars by turning Sheila loose. In fact, right after this, the FBI asked for the extradition of a Puerto Rican terrorist who had escaped from federal prison and fled to Mexico. Further to show their contempt for the gringo liars, they put him on a plane for Cuba.

There was a great deal of drama and suspense surrounding her release, since most of the Mexicans could not fathom how a gringa could be turned loose after trying to kill a cop, and, figuring the order to release her must be a giant foul-up, they stalled every step of the way. They also probably figured someone had been paid off and they wanted to get paid, too. Sheila's father and brother and Dave Hollaway, an associate of Kirk Lyons, had flown down to expedite the release. After some seventeen hours of red tape and delays, poor Sheila was finally put on a plane for Los Angeles. Then, despite her severe internal injuries and equally severe psychological damage, Sheila postponed her required emergency surgery and flew to Ft. Smith to reassure her husband. This, then, is the introduction to the Great Ft. Smith Sedition Trial of 1988.

The judge was another matter. They say that every rule has its exception and, in our rotten federal court system, Morris Arnold was definitely that exception. He was totally opposed to the whole business of trying these men for sedition. He saw through the government's smelly ploy of placing convicted men on trial with Louis, Pastors Butler and Miles. He was doubtless aware that the government had lost the two previous sedition cases in 1798 and 1944 and that the former had destroyed the Federalist Party. He behaved very courteously toward the defendants at all times and this probably helped the jurors see them as normal human beings.

When the transcript of this trial is one day made public it will reveal it as one of the most bizarre in our history. One of the 14 defendants, Robert Neil Smalley, complained that he was completely ignorant of the matter at hand and that he was an employee of the CIA who had to be pulled out of Pakistan by that agency where he had been assisting the Afghan rebels! He was immediately released by Judge Arnold but stayed on as a spectator so as to see what it was all about.

Bill and Ivan Wade, father and son, complained that they couldn't be part of any White supremacy case since they were full-blooded Choctaw Indians. Judge Arnold kept them around as a formality since the senior Wade had owned the property on which Gordon Kahl was murdered and had led a campaign legally to punish those who had done the killing. This campaign was transformed by the government into a conspiracy to kill the killers.

Louis' opening remarks to the jury, it is generally agreed, laid away the government's case before it could get going. "You will be told," he said, "that I and Pastor Butler and Pastor Miles are enemies of this government. This is the truth: The federal government is my enemy and by the time this trial is over you will understand that the government is your enemy, too..."

"The government will produce witnesses who will say terrible and fantastic lies about me and the others. Watch these witnesses very closely. Watch their eyes and their body English as they lie. Watch them squirm and shift around and tap their feet..." Of course, when Ellison and the others took the stand the jurors couldn't but wait expectantly for the nervous gyrations to start. Ellison took the stand and recounted the episode in which Louis had agreed to overthrow the government in the group which sat around Richard Butler's kitchen table. He told how Bob Miles had obtained a barrel of cyanide which Louis and the rest would pour into the water supply of Washington, DC. With his itching and scratching and bouncing knee he didn't disappoint the jurors but they were absolutely delighted when Ellison's associate, Kerry Noble, took the stand and the subject of the cyanide barrel came up. "That? Aw, Ellision had me buy that sometime ago..."