None Dare Call It Terrorism
Oregon federal building occupied by militia protesting prison sentence of ranchers
A family previously involved in a showdown with the federal government is part of a group that has occupied a building at a national wildlife refuge in Oregon, and is asking militia members to join them.
Ammon Bundy — the son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a standoff with the government over grazing rights — told The Oregonian on Saturday that he and two of his brothers were among a group of dozens of people occupying the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
The protest began as a rally in support of Oregon ranchers facing jail time for arson.
These are armed individuals violating Federal and state laws, but the police apparently don’t see a need to arrest or shoot. They are protesting people going to jail for starting fires during a drought. Oregon has had a very serious wildfire problem, just like most of the Western states.
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The situation with the fires is a bit more complex than all that, one of the fires the Hammonds set was actually a backfire to try to keep an existing fire from burning onto their land. The Feds came in all butt-hurt because they set it without coordinating with the Feds and possibly endangered some of their firefighters, and charged them with terroristic acts for endangering Federal employees. The jury rejected that and found the Hammonds guilty of two acts of arson on Federal land because their fires crossed over onto Federal land, and the judge sentenced them to 3 months and 1 year respectively in Club Fed. They served their sentences and were released. At which point the Federal prosecutor got all butt-hurt at the notion that these people were walking the same streets at him, realized that the mandatory minimum for arson on Federal lands was 5 years, and appealed the sentences — *after* the Hammonds had already served their sentences and been released.
The appeals court noted that yes, that was the law, so the Hammonds are having to report back to Club Fed for a 5 year sentence. The reality is that they’ll be out of prison in much less time than that. Which is why they’re *also* upset that the Bundy clan is out there making asses of themselves. With time already served and early release etc they could be out within a year on probation, but not if the Bundies are out there getting everything all riled up. Especially when there is an asshole Federal prosecutor who’s already abused his prosecutorial discretion once who might decide to find something *else* to charge them with if things get unsettled…
Free lance burning in a drought zone is a terrible idea. We have wildfires down here all the time because people still use fire to clear land or get rid of trash. It was a really scary thing in SoCal, because fools would do it there.
There are controlled burns to clear fuel on the Eglin reservation, but they require calm winds, recent rain, and high humidity with fire lines cleared before the fires are lit and crews standing by.
Given the drought conditions, there was no way anyone would have issued a permit for a controlled burn, and resources had to be diverted to deal with the fires the ranchers set. There was a minimum sentence, and while I don’t happen to agree with the concept of minimum sentences, they are part of the legal system, and judges have to comply with them. A local Federal judge didn’t and was overturned on appeal.
The Forest Service and Interior Department were probably pushing on the US Attorney because fire fighting is soaking all of the available money in their budgets. If Jack [The Grumpy Forester] was still blogging he would have explained the problem.
In any case, this has nothing to do with the arson convictions, it has to do with Vanilla ISIS/Y’All Qaeda attempting to intimidate Federal officials. It’s about time these clowns were arrested and given sentences at least as severe as are handed out to people growing marijuana in national forests, at least as severe as people arresting for smoking marijuana.
Uhm, the controlled burn in question was in 2001, which definitely was *not* a drought year. The backfire was in 2006, which *was* a drought year, and was successful but did burn onto Federal land and was done without a permit or coordination with the Federal firefighters. The reality is that the Feds have been trying to get the Hammonds out of there for a long time, their ranch is surrounded by the wildlife refuge, and viewed this as a way to do so. This is a situation that has been festering in that area for a long time, the local BLM is good people but the guys back in Washington are controlled by the radical environmentalists who want to push all ranchers off the land. (Yes, I do know people who work for the BLM who tell me these things, off the record of course because they could be fired for making such statements — remember, I’m out here in the middle of BLM country and half the people I go Jeeping with are either BLM, USFS, NPS, or retired thereof).
Note that *neither* of the fires set by the Hammonds required *any* federal fire fighting. The Hammonds put out the first one (the controlled burn of the juniper to improve the range), the second one self-extinguished after it ran into the fire that it was set as a backfire against. That said, they did violate the law, and the Hammonds should have received jail time for what they did. Which they did.
Do note that the minimum sentences are *recommended* minimum sentences after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 US v. Booker decision and judges are allowed by Booker to override the sentencing recommendations if the recommendations aren’t reasonable for the crime committed. And appeals courts are allowed to review those sentences if a judge does override the recommendations and return the case to a district court for re-sentencing if they rule that the recommendations are, in fact, reasonable for the facts of the case. On the other hand, someone serving their prison term, getting out, and *then* the prosecutor appeals the sentence? That is decidedly an abuse of prosecutorial discretion, and just plain assholery.
But as you say, none of this has anything to do with Y’all Qaeda and what they’re up to. Y’all Qaeda is just there to aggrandize themselves, and the locals are more pissed with Y’all Qaeda than they are with the BLM at this point. Even the Hammonds want them gone, pointing out that if they had really wanted to help, they’d volunteer to help out with running the Hammond ranch, they wouldn’t be hanging out with rifles at a bird refuge. So it goes.
I’m not sure if occupying a remote building in a snowed-in park is exactly “terrorism”.
Sedition, maybe, given the Spawn of Bundy’s and others’ statements. “Tresspass”, yep. Committing a crime whilst armed, yep.
Add conspiracy to the list, Comrade. They’re going to shut off power and phone & block access. I hope they roll up a water cannon and blast out the windows. I’m not sure if they’re at a Felony yet (Should be) but it would be great fun to arrest them and take away their guns.
Actions have consequences
Badtux, Federal court appeals take years and have to be filed within a month or so of the district court decision, so the timing is up to the Court of Appeals, not the US Attorney. Land and water issues in the West are contentious, but the reality is that only the 13 original states, Texas, and Hawaii have any claim to existing sovereignty prior to becoming states. The rest of the states initially belonged to the Federal government and private lands were granted by the Federal government.
Comrade Misfit, if you can call vandalizing SUVs terrorism, these acts certainly qualify. In New York I would have charged them with burglary and grand theft, both charges being upgraded because the individuals were in possession of firearms. Burglary is actually the more serious form of trespass under New York Penal Law. The theft charge is knowingly taking the property. You could also play with extortion charges which is really the equivalent of ‘terrorism’ without the political baggage, but it is precisely the political component that makes the terrorism charge more appropriate in this instance than San Bernardino. Sedition could certainly be charged, but the US has a history of misusing sedition charges.
Shirt, while there might be a visceral pleasure in your water cannon approach, I would just lay siege and wait them out. I doesn’t sound like they brought supplies with them, and some strategic plowing could seal them in there. Most of the birds have already moved on to their winter areas, so let them sit in the snow.
Yeah, it was when they started messing with the Hammonds’ water rights for the cattle that things got testy out there. In the West, Mark Twain once (maybe) noted that whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting. Seems like that’s still the thought in some quarters.
Note that the Federal Government’s GIS database of land and water rights is completely FUBAR. I once was hiking in a national park and ran into a gate that said I was entering a military reservation. The problem: According to my map and GPS, which I later validated against the actual congressional document, I was miles from the military reservation boundary. I contacted someone within the NPS and he stated that the Federal GIS system said that gate was correctly placed and that he was required by policy to abide by the Federal GIS system, not by the actual maps and congressional documents. Another NPS employee told me that one of their workers regularly closed areas that Congress intended to be opened just by tweaking the GIS system to show them closed, and nobody did anything about it or even had any way of tracking it.
This is the same BLM that attempted to burn down one of my friends’ house for illegal trespass. The problem: The land in question had been patented over 100 years prior. But the land title wasn’t shown in the Federal GIS system because someone (nobody knows who because their information controls are laughably non-existent, see Snowden) had decided that his inholding was part of a wilderness area rather than private property. It took tens of thousands of dollars and a Federal court ruling on the validity of his title to get the BLM to back off and quit trying to demolish his house.
In short, the situation of property rights in the West is more complex than just, “Feds good, everybody else bad.” It just takes one abusive land manager to wipe out property rights with the click of a mouse. And nobody can even track it, because their change controls are non-existent, and all you can do when they do this is sue them in Federal court, which is an expensive thing and not always successful.
None of which has anything to do with the Bundy idiots and their takeover of a bird sanctuary. Nobody wants them there, not even the Hammonds, who did their stupid crime rather than using the courts like my friend did, and ended up being convicted of it. So it goes.
It is a given that the land/water/mineral use laws in the West and Alaska are even more obtuse and filled with ‘private exceptions’ than the tax code.
Having actually prepared data for inclusion into the GIS system for the Eglin Reservation that includes a 500,000 acre National Forest in addition to the multiple military bases, I was not impressed. I had data that was derived from GPS data, and I had to reformat the data before it could be accepted by that GIS system. What is the point of a GIS system that can’t accept standard GPS formats or data from the existing GIS systems of other agencies?
It isn’t the people or agencies, it is the bad laws and regulations that reflect the middle of the 19th century. I was thinking of homesteading in Alaska, and the rules haven’t changed in any significant degree from the opening of the Cherokee Strip in 1893. Nothing ever gets updated, because the nation only has farmers, ranchers, and miners 😈
I’m not sure what you’re talking about, the homesteading laws were repealed in 1976, and the mining laws were also changed at that time such that you could no longer patent mining claims. This was in order to prevent hippies from setting up communes, of course, rather than because the laws were outdated. You can still file mining claims on BLM land, but the new regulations require that the claims must be scientifically supportable with yearly assessments of the values of the minerals under the claims, and if the assessment finds nothing of value, the claim is revoked. Millsite claims must be related to a mining claim and you can’t live there if there’s no mining being done on the mining claim, you must remove all structures after you’re finished. Things changed drastically in 1976, and the days of filing a millsite claim and, ten years later, patenting it as your homestead, are long gone.
Back East-ers are always whining about the low rates paid by miners and ranchers on the lands, but the reality is that the best way to make a small fortune in mining is by starting with a large fortune. Ranching isn’t doing any better, they’re competing with the giant industrial outfits in the Midwest but they have expenses the big industrial outfits don’t have, like using hundreds of gallons of gas to round up their cattle while the big industrial outfits breed and raise their cattle in tiny pens standing in filth and their only expense is nose filters because those places smell like death (no, I’m not joking, they do, they really do, it’s the decomposition of all the cow feces that they’re standing in, which makes many of the same gases as the decomposition of a dead body). The industrial outfits have driven down the price of cattle so far that even with the subsidy of cheap land, the ranchers can’t make money.
The ranchers are seeing conspiracy in all this, and behaving irrationally as a result. I don’t know that they’re even wrong, the radical greenies seem to have no trouble taking money from the industrial outfits to put the little guys out of business as long as they view it as furthering their agenda of cleansing the land of any trace of human activity. So anyhow, that’s the milieu into which the Bundy clan have inserted themselves… except they’ve gone completely bonkers. Either that, or they view this as a way to get free snacks by duping people into sending them money…
“…but not if the Bundies are out there …” – Badtux
“…given the Spawn of Bundy’s and others’ statements.” – Comrade Misfit
The ghost of my English-teacher mother interrupts to remind everyone that the conventional rule regarding plurals of nouns ending in “y” does not apply to proper names. Hence it’s
glory -> glories
but
Bundy -> Bundys
Here ends the lesson on stuff you really didn’t need to know. :-)>