Steve Duin: Free to wreak havoc in Harney County

[phantom power]

These stoic Western heroes, we are told, have occupied a federal bird sanctuary to confront the oppressive overlords who threaten our liberties.

But they do so in a demilitarized zone where they are free to entertain New Mexico state legislators and receive X-rated care packages through the U.S. Postal Service.

Free to threaten federal range conservationists and confront visitors to the refuge with assault rifles.

Free to roam Harney County, where they have seized and vandalized public land, via pickup truck or cellular phone.

Free to graze cattle – as family patriarch Cliven Bundy long has on 96,000 acres in Nevada – and never pay the Bureau of Land Management a dime in those heavily subsidized federal grazing fees.

Free to ignore federal court orders and steer bulldozers over Burns Paiute tribe archaeological sites.

Free to disdain the very hand that feeds them federal loan guarantees and foster-child-care payments.

...

Ammon Bundy initially claimed he was protesting the prison sentence of ranchers Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son. Now, he's pledging to confront agents from the U.S. Forest Service or BLM in any grazing-fee dispute.

"In the midst of this armed standoff, he is trying to engineer future armed standoffs," Suckling says. "That's the scariest thing. He's trying to replicate this.

"This is not on a trajectory toward a peaceful resolution."

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/steve_duin/index.ssf/2016/01/steve_duin_free_to_wreak_havoc.html#incart_story_package

[Eleanors38]

1. Longer it goes in, the more legitimacy unlawful actions are given.

[Odin2005]

2. This spinelessness sets a precedent that can only lead to ANARCHY in the Inter-Mountain West.

This is how you get paramilitary groups (both more loonies and citizens getting together to defend themselves against the loonies) and state collapse inevitably follows as society decays into warlordism.

[tblue37]

3. I think news reports should start referring to Bundy as a warlord or wannabe warlord. nt

[matt819]

4. This is why it's terrorism

From OP: "In the midst of this armed standoff, he is trying to engineer future armed standoffs," Suckling says. "That's the scariest thing. He's trying to replicate this."

So, regardless of the status or ultimate resolution of the Malheur standoff, these terrorists are laying the groundwork for similar attacks/occupations elsewhere - literally anywhere they feel like it. And given the fact that they're heavily armed, the threat of death is present. This is the definition of terror.

I can appreciate the strategy of waiting them out, but there has to be some sort of law enforcement action that demonstrates that they are just not free to do what they please. Whether that means arresting them one at a time as they move freely in Burns. Or finally shutting them off from the world with no power, no water, no internet. Or stopping mail deliveries. Something. Anything.

[UTUSN]

5. R#10 & K n/t