The alleged crime ? - voting against a Senate bill that would have established English as the official language of the United States. Newsweek did not reveal the names of the four senators. But a May 20, 2009 Huffington Post story by Military Religious Freedom Foundation Senior Researcher Chris Rodda does: Democratic Party senators Dodd, Biden, Clinton, and Obama.

It was not the first time that Jim Ammerman has suggested or called for the execution of top US government leaders from the Democratic Party. Unlike common stereotypes of those who promote such incendiary views, Jim Ammerman is neither a right wing talk show host or on the militia movement fringe.

[below: in widely broadcast 1997 video, E.H. "Jim" Ammerman claims Jewish bankers control the US economy and calls for execution of then-president Bill Clinton]

Through his Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches, retired Colonel "Jim"Ammerman presides over more than 270 active duty military chaplains, perhaps 7-8 percent of the active duty chaplain force.

Ammerman says he was a friend to the late General William Westmoreland, claims both Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee and Word of Faith televangelist Kenneth Copeland as current friends and states that his agency works with three and four star generals and has allies at the highest levels of the Pentagon as well as in the US Congress and Senate.

The June 20, 2009 Newsweek story by journalist Kathryn Joyce, "Christian Soldiers: The growing controversy over military chaplains using the armed forces to spread the Word", explored Jim Ammerman's involvement in a recently exposed scheme to distribute native-language Bibles in Iraq as well as the controversy surrounding reports from a nonprofit watchdog group, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, of an extensive pattern of illegal and sometimes abusive Christian fundamentalist religious proselytizing in the United States Military. Founded by Air Force academy graduate and Reagan Administration lawyer "Mikey" Weinstein, MRFF was at the center of a May 2009 story, about the spread of fundamentalism in the US military, published in Harpers Magazine.

Ammerman's activities in the civilian sphere are equally notable:

From the late 1990's and up into the 2008 presidential election, Retired Colonel Jim Ammerman has engaged in a pattern of anti-government agitation and, along with one of his top chaplains noted in the Newsweek story, James F. Linzey, has gone on national speaking tours to promote a class of  New World Order and Federal Reserve conspiracy theory which has been widely credited with helping inspire acts of right wing violence and also the rise of the militia movement in the 1990's. But these conspiracy narratives are not secular; they are interwoven with apocalyptic Biblical narratives and presented as "Bible prophecy."

[below: VHS cassette box packaging from Jim Ammerman/Prophecy Club video  "Immanent Military Takeover of the United States II"]]

James F. Linzey's conspiracy theories, which Major Linzey promoted in 2005 during a Prophecy Club speaking tour and through appearances on Christian media venues in 2005 and 2006, had an overtly racialist, anti-immigrant slant and both Ammerman and Linzey have each publicized a conspiracy theory,