Armed anti-government protesters in the USA state of OR, who took over a federal building on Saturday, have vowed to continue their occupation even as local officials told the group to leave.
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Up to a hundred protesters – styling themselves “citizens for constitutional freedom” – are believed to be holed up at the snowy visitor’s centre for the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, which they took over to protest the Hammonds’ imprisonment.
“We have exhausted all prudent measures and have been ignored”, he said.
“These guys are out in the middle of nowhere, and they haven’t threatened anybody that I know of”, said Jim Glennon, a longtime police commander who now owns the Illinois-based law enforcement training organization Calibre Press.
But in Oregon, Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes said, Ammon Bundy had picked the wrong battle.
Ammon Bundy – one of the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights – told reporters on Monday that two local ranchers who face long prison sentences for setting fire to land have been treated unfairly.
But the occupation marked the latest flare-up of anger against the U.S. government over federal management of public land in the West, long seen by political conservatives in the region as an intrusion on individual freedom and property rights. Although the Hammonds have acquiesced, the Bundys and their followers seized the opportunity, and federal property, to make a grand and unacceptable show of force and disregard for the law. The preserve has grown over the years to about 300 square miles and surrounds the ranch Dwight Hammond bought with his father in 1964.
The FBI in Portland referred calls to the Harney County Joint Information Center, which said in a statement it had no information on arrests or arrest warrants and that authorities were “still working on a peaceful resolution”. It is hard to say how many people belong to such groups or at least support them.
Ammon Bundy’s tactics have also been rejected by many locals, by the Oregon Cattleman’s Association and others.
Those concerns were shared by John O’Keeffe, president of the Oregon Cattleman’s Association, who said Monday that his group “does not support illegal activity taken against the government”. But the spokesman for anti-government activists is also the recipient of a federal small-business loan. But not all of it: Paul earlier this year had a private meeting with the elder Bundy that the rancher said lasted 45 minutes.
“This is not a romantic instance of Western self-reliance or an excusable moment of heated rhetoric”, Grijalva said in a statement. Landon was a logger until the federal government declared the spotted owl a protected species in the 1980s, damaging the local logging industry. The Hammonds reported to prison Monday as required.
Basically, the militia used the community protest over the sentencing of father-and-son ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond in Burns, Ore., as cover for a sneak attack.
The case, quite likely, will end up before a federal grand jury, which could bring a variety of charges, the sources said.
Whatever positive message the protesters created turned negative, he said.
The ranching and logging industries were only a start, since then these modern day conqueror’s (federal agencies) have moved onto the housing, banking, auto, manufacturing, financial and the list goes on and on and on.
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“If there was one thing I said that you should have forgotten, it’s that”, Bundy said. I don’t condone them taking over a federal building.
