The War Against Terror comes home and goes after the Cowboys!

Repost from Gregory Krasovsky (https://www.facebook.com/gkrasovsky):

The other day, a FB friend made the following comments on the current Ammon Bundy armed stand-off in Oregon:

"Call me crazy, but perhaps the use of drone strikes against armed terrorists should begin at home."

This struck my "card-carrying member of the ACLU" nerve and I responded as follows:

[Friend] I've known you a long time. To be honest, I'm disappointed and a little frightened with your comments -- "perhaps the use of drone strikes against armed terrorists should begin at home" -- for several reasons:

1. Drone strikes have killed thousands of innocent women and children around the world.

2. Drone strikes are state-ordered executions of merely suspects (people who are innocent until proven guilty) without constitutional due process, including a trial by a jury of their peers.

3. Bundy and his followers may be naive and foolish, but they haven't killed, hurt or taken hostage any people. Moreover, they haven't struck any vital civilian infrastructure (e.g. power stations, transportation hubs) that could cause damage to people, the economy or real national security.

4. Labeling domestic protesters -- when they're armed to protect themselves against federal law enforcement (last year over 1100 people were killed by police in the U.S.) -- as terrorists supports the philosophy and propaganda of many totalitarian regimes around the world who conveniently label armed opposition as terrorists to kill or incarcerate them without due process.

5. The following confrontations between activists who challenged state and/or federal laws and law enforcement have shown that your approach of "let's bomb these nuts" leads to deaths not only of the participants on both sides but also of innocent people, including women and children

The Pine Ridge Shootout 1975
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Ridge_Indian_Reservation

MOVE Sieges of 1978 and 1985
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE

Ruby Ridge siege 1992
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge

Waco siege 1993
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege

6. When anti-terrorist legislation was enacted after the 9/11/2001 attacks, a number of law enforcement professionals, political scientists, attorneys, politicians and human rights activists expressed concern that the ulterior motive behind such laws was not to prevent future attacks by Al Qaeda but to grant our government additional (and unconstitutional) powers to combat future domestic dissenters, protesters and activists, who would be conveniently labeled as terrorists and treated as their Al Qaeda or ISIS counterparts, regardless of their American citizenship and actions on domestic soil.

Experts were also concerned with main-stream corporate media and government propaganda that was being used to prepare the U.S. population to accept such treatment of domestic "terrorists"

Now, I'm seeing a fellow Columbia University graduate (both College and Law School!) repeat this stuff!

7. As a former police officer and an attorney, I don't condone attacks on law enforcement and don't feel sorry for people who do so without the only mitigating factor possible -- self-defense against police brutality and unjustified use of deadly force by law enforcement.

But I cannot justify either as an attorney or a law enforcement supporter the unjustified and often disproportionate use of deadly force by any government agency (federal, state or local) against protesters or activists, especially when such abuse of police powers clearly violates our constitutional rights.

8. With all that in mind, please re-consider your statement -- after you read the linked article on the greater issue of federal land use rights that has gotten farmers like Bundy and Hammonds all worked up to the point of armed civil disobedience -- as statements like yours could lead our country down the slippery slope toward a police state or a totalitarian one.

********

The War Against the Cowboys

The Oregon stand off and US imperialism

by Justin Raimondo, January 04, 2016

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2016/01/03/the-war-against-the-cowboys/

"The Hammond case has become a cause celebre West of the Mississippi, where federal control of huge swathes of real estate has become a life and death issue for ranchers and others who make their living off the land. As the feds encroach on their livelihood, they are pushing back, and nothing illustrates this better than the Hammond case.

In 2001, the Hammonds started a controlled burn on their own land to eliminate invasive junipers from ruining grazing for cattle: the fire spread to neighboring federal lands. As the Tri-State Livestock News reports:

“The first fire, in 2001, was a planned burn on Hammonds’ own property to reduce juniper trees that have become invasive in that part of the country. That fire burned outside the Hammonds’ private property line and took in 138 acres of unfenced BLM land before the Hammonds got it put out. No BLM firefighters were needed to help extinguish the fire and no fences were damaged.

“’They called and got permission to light the fire,’ Dwight’s wife, Susan, said, adding that was customary for ranchers conducting range management burns – a common practice in the area.

“’We usually called the interagency fire outfit – a main dispatch – to be sure someone wasn’t in the way or that weather wouldn’t be a problem.’ Susan said her son Steven was told that the BLM was conducting a burn of their own somewhere in the region the same day, and that they believed there would be no problem with the Hammonds going ahead with their planned fire. The court transcript includes a recording from that phone conversation.”

There was a second fire in 2006, started by Steven Hammond to counteract the lightning fires that threatened to envelope their land and their home. The Bureau of Land Management says that a single acre of federal land was affected by the fire –  and they pressed charges, even though lightning fires were raging all over the area and there was no way to determine which fires were burning what land.

The Hammonds were originally charged under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 with nine counts – including starting several other fires — but the jury saw otherwise and acquitted them of all but two counts: starting the fires they admitted to in the first place. The judge sentenced them to less than the federal mandatory, stating that what the government was asking – five years – was “disproportionate” and if imposed would’ve “shocked my conscience.”

The government wasn’t satisfied with that, and they appealed the decision. Judge Ann Aiken – the same judge who ruled that the prison system has a right to keep its safety standards confidential, even though a prisoner had died under dicey circumstances – agreed with the Justice Department, and the Hammonds must now serve full five-year sentences, minus time already served. They have agreed to turn themselves in, in spite of the protests on their behalf."