Tag: Malheur occupation

More Bundy trial.

Federal prosecutors took two weeks to present their case, finishing with a display of more than 30 guns seized after the standoff. An FBI agent testified that 16,636 live rounds and nearly 1,700 spent casings were found.

During trial, Bundy testified that the plan was to take ownership of the refuge by occupying it for a period of time and then turn it over to local officials to use as they saw fit.

Bundy also testified that the occupiers carried guns because they would have been arrested immediately otherwise and to protect themselves against possible government attack.

Quite. Just what I said. They would have been arrested immediately otherwise because they had broken into a closed (for the weekend) federal facility, so the guns were to enable them to commit the crime, and then to continue committing it for weeks.

The Washington Post has more on the Bundy gang verdict.

While a jury acquitted the Bundy brothers, most of the people charged with the Oregon takeover already pleaded guilty or still have to stand trial on federal charges — a group that includes both Bundys, who are still in custody because they are facing another federal trial in Nevada stemming from a different standoff between the family and the government.

…

During the trial, prosecutors described the takeover as a long-plotted occupation, while attorneys for the occupiers — who did not deny they were there — insisted they were not trying to prevent people from doing their jobs, but were instead protesting government actions.

More than two dozen people involved in the Malheur takeover were charged with conspiring to use “force, intimidation, and threats” to keep federal employees from working at the refuge during the takeover. So far, 11 people have already pleaded guilty to this charge, a series of pleas entered during the months before the Bundy trial got underway.

I daresay they’re all wishing they’d gone to trial.

The most high-profile people charged for the takeover were the two Bundy brothers, who were among the group of seven found not guilty of the conspiracy charge as well as a count of possessing firearms in a federal facility. (That one seems odd to many people, given the voluminous evidence of the occupiers wandering around the refuge with guns, but the charge was specifically for having a gun in a federal facility with the intent that it “be used in the commission of a crime.”)

So…they had the guns just for the fun of it, and not as a way to prevent anyone from strolling in and arresting them?

Come on. If they hadn’t been heavily armed, they would have been promptly evicted. Law enforcement held off because they didn’t want a shoot-0ut.

But then they would say they weren’t committing a crime, they were protesting.

Jim Urquhart/Reuters

The guns are just paperweights.

Nicholas Kristof:

I’m staggered that a bunch of armed men can take over federal property, maintain their siege–and then get off scott free. Does anybody think the outcome would be the same if armed Muslims, black men, or Native Americans tried this? And I fear it may encourage others to try similar stunts. Thoughts?

My thoughts: yes, no, yes. I too am staggered and horrified that they got off. I don’t for a second think the outcome would be the same if armed Muslims, African Americans, or Native Americans tried this. I fear that it’s overwhelmingly likely that this idiotic verdict will encourage others to try similar and worse violent crimes against our national parks and refuges. The assault on Malheur was no stunt, it was a long string of crimes committed by heavily armed gang members.

Peter Walker posted this yesterday evening. He later said in a comment that he’d love the photo to be on the front page of every newspaper in the country, so share it widely if you’re so inclined.

To all my Harney County friends, and friends of Harney County: I feel gut-punched, like you probably do. Here’s a photo I took at the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on January 12. A USFWS vehicle is blocking the entrance and a man with an assault rifle is on guard. I had to ask for permission to enter. How can this not have impeded FWS employees from doing their job???? Here’s my promise to Harney County: regardless of the Bundys there will be a book that tells what happened. The agony these people inflicted on a wonderful community will NOT be lost to history. Love you guys.

Look at that guy with the gun. He looks like an official, like a cop or a military guard. He’s not: he’s a civilian with an assault rifle blocking entry to a federal, publicly owned wildlife refuge. But hey, no conspiracy to impede anyone here – it was all totally spontaneous moment to moment. And I’m Marie of Romania.

This day really has been a package of horrors.

The Bundys and their friends have all been acquitted.

Ammon and Ryan Bundy and five of their followers, charged in the armed takeover of a federally owned Oregon wildlife sanctuary in January, were acquitted Thursday of federal conspiracy and weapons charges.

The verdict brings to a close a case that gripped the nation earlier this year with its public debate about government powers, public lands and constitutional rights.

And sends a message to all white right-wing fanatics that they can probably grab a national park or wildlife refuge and get away with it, if they go in heavily armed enough. It sends a message to all non-white people that we are one fucked up country.

This makes me sick.

So it really is all about dressing up and let’s pretend and how awesome do I look in these cowboy boots and never mind what I did, how’s my image?

Ammon Bundy’s lawyer asked a judge to rule on a very important request Wednesday: that his client be able to wear cowboy boots to the trial for several Oregon standoff defendants, according to The Oregonian.

Bundy’s lawyer, J. Morgan Philpot, told the judge that because his client is a “cowboy” and has not yet been convicted of any charges, he should be able to dress however he pleases, which includes cowboy boots, neckties and belts.

“These men are cowboys, and given that the jury will be assessing their authenticity and credibility, they should be able to present themselves to the jury in that manner,” Philpot wrote in a motion, according to The Oregonian.

Peter Walker on Facebook:

Editorial opinion: Judge Steve Grasty is a hero. At the peak of the siege of Burns, when the Bundys invaded the town hall meeting (Jan. 19), Judge Grasty looked Ammon Bundy straight in eye and told him he’d personally drive Bundy to safety outside the county. But Grasty insisted that Bundy leave. Bundy’s men were armed and had taken up tactical positions in each corner of the high school gym (Ritzheimer was right behind me). It was one of the most courageous things I’ve ever seen. Even those who don’t agree with Judge Grasty ought to acknowledge he has served his county with exemplary courage, and allow him the rest of his term in peace.

This photo chills my blood. Judge Grasty is in the yellow shirt. Bundy’s men are unmistakable.

Another photo:

Ammon Bundy (you know which one…) looked stone-faced while Judge Grasty told him to go.

This happened:

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) – A recall petition has been filed against a Harney County official who did not support the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Petitioners say they have gathered 566 signatures, more than enough to compel Judge Steve Grasty to resign or face a recall election.

Peter Walker’s commentary on the news item:

For those who haven’t followed it as obsessively as I do: this is a hangover from the Bundy occupation– in short the occupiers demanded that Sheriff Ward and Judge Grasty shield the Hammonds from federal arrest, in effect declaring the supremacy of county rule over federal law. In their view of the constitution, county officials who refuse to do that “duty” have to be removed. Who gave them authority to decide what the constitution means isn’t clear…

The politics of bullies.

The remaining criminals at Malheur are issuing new threats, which will no doubt be added to the charges once they’re arrested.

As law enforcement surrounded the remaining protesters at an Oregon wildlife refuge Wednesday, an armed occupier urged supporters to join them and to kill any law enforcement officer who tried prevent their entry, according to a livestream that has been broadcasting from the site.

“There are no laws in this United States now! This is a free-for-all Armageddon!” a heavyset man holding a rifle yelled into a camera that was broadcasting a livestream from the refuge Wednesday morning, adding that if “they stop you from getting here, kill them!”

A second man cooed to the camera in a sing-song voice, “What you gonna do, what you gonna do when the militia comes after you, FBI?”

Arrest them. The FBI is gonna arrest them.

The sudden move to arrest ranking protest leaders on a rural stretch of highway Tuesday afternoon was “a very deliberate and measured response” to the armed occupation that had lasted since Jan. 2 with no end in sight, Gregory T. Bretzing, special agent in charge of Portland’s FBI division, said at a Wednesday morning news conference.

“We’ve worked diligently to bring the situation” at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore., to “a peaceful end,” Bretzing said.

He added that the FBI and Oregon State Police’s surprise arrests of protesters confronted outside the refuge Tuesday was deliberately carried far from county residents and that agents were cognizant of “removing the threat of danger from anybody who might be present.”

Behold the martyrs:

Booking photos of eight people involved in the occupation of the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Top row from left are Ammon Bundy, Ryan Bundy, Brian Cavalier and Shawna Cox. Bottom row from left are Joseph Donald O’Shaughnessy, Ryan Payne, Jon Eric Ritzheimer and Peter Santilli.

(Multnomah County [Ore.] Sheriff’s Office; Maricopa County [Ariz.] Sheriff’s Office)

The Washington Post on the news from Harney County, Oregon:

Federal agents moved early Wednesday morning to seal off a remote wildlife refuge in Oregon, hours after authorities arrested several leaders of the armed activists who had seized the land in a shootout that killed one of the group’s most prominent members.

In the weeks since the group began its occupation, local and federal law enforcement officials had called for the occupation to end peacefully. On Tuesday, after these calls and attempts at negotiations went nowhere, authorities moved to arrest several group members while they were away from the compound. A total of eight people were arrested, at the shootout and other locations.

Finally.

After the exchange of gunfire on a highway, Ammon Bundy, the group’s leader, and others were arrested on federal charges. Other members of the group remained at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, but before the sun rose over a remote swath of eastern Oregon previously best known for its bird-watching, authorities said they were blocking access to the federal land.

In a statement, the FBI and Oregon State Police said that they had established checkpoints along key routes to the refuge and that anyone who tries to travel inside would be arrested. Officials said people leaving the refuge would have their names confirmed and vehicles searched, but they did not say whether those people would be arrested.

Finally. I still don’t understand why they didn’t seal off the road at the beginning.

The FBI had refrained from making arrests on the refuge because it did not want to be seen as storming the compound, and officials had publicly said they sought a peaceful resolution. Up to this point, law enforcement has not impeded the travel of occupiers, a law enforcement official said Wednesday.

“But as we call for a peaceful resolution, we’re hoping that people on the refuge will now depart,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing situation.

So instead the FBI is seen as sitting on its ass while hundreds of people illegally occupy a publicly owned wildlife refuge.

The FBI and Oregon State Police have also not said yet how many shots were fired, who fired them or identified the person who was killed. The person killed was later identified as LaVoy Finicum, who was a spokesman for the group, according to occupiers as well as Nevada assembly woman familiar with the occupiers and a Facebook page for Bundy’s father’s ranch. Finicum’s daughter also told the Oregonian that he was killed.

The people at the refuge are still being defiant.

Some worried that the prolonged success of armed standoffs like those at Malheur and Cliven Bundy’s ranch in 2014 would only encourage further showdowns. Brown and local officials in Burns demanded to know why U.S. officials hadn’t taken action.

Well quite. How could that prolonged success not encourage more such armed occupations?

But an image posted on the Bundy Ranch Facebook page condemned the violent outcome.

“Tonight peaceful patriots were attacked on a remote road for supporting the constitution. One was killed,” it read. “Who are the terrorists?”

Of course. They’ll be back.

The Bundyite fascists have big plans, The Oregonian reports.

Leaders of the armed protesters holding the national bird sanctuary on Tuesday plan to push their anti-government agenda in Grant County, whose sheriff recommends the government give in to two of their key demands.

Sheriff Glenn Palmer said in a statement to The Oregonian/OregonLive that “the government is going to have to concede something” to end the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

That’s a horrifying thing for a law enforcement official to say. The “occupation” of Malheur is illegal. The government doesn’t “have to” concede anything to the Bundyite fascists.

He said freeing a father-son ranching team from prison “would be a start. Sending the FBI home would be a start.” He referred to the FBI’s lead role in ending the refuge occupation.

“I just pray to God that cooler heads prevail and that no one gets killed,” Palmer said.

The sheriff’s endorsement of the militants’ demands stunned law enforcement officials, most of whom would not publicly discuss the matter.

Malheur County Sheriff Brian Wolfe, who has been helping in Burns, said Palmer’s position “doesn’t help the cause. If anything, it hampers the effort to end this.”

Palmer should be impeached.

Ryan Payne and Jon Ritzheimer, two leaders of the occupation, attended a lunch in John Day with about 10 local residents. Palmer was called to the lunch, but said he didn’t know ahead of time who was there.

He stayed for the lunch and then joined the group when it adjourned to meet in private at a nearby business.

Ritzheimer said that as the meeting ended, Palmer pulled out his pocket version of the U.S. Constitution.

He had the two militants autograph it, Ritzheimer said.

“We shared similar ideas about where we’re at” in the country, Payne said.

“The sheriff has a practical plan for helping unravel the federal government,” Payne said.

Yeeah we don’t need fascists and their plans to unravel the federal government, thanks.

Jim Sproul, a Grant County businessman who attended the meeting, said the protesters were “clean, nice, very informative.”

“What I took away from it is they’re no militants,” Sproul said. “They’re not terrorists. I think they are very patriotic.”

That’s not a very subtle code for “WHITE” – the lawbreaking fascists were clean, nice, WHITE.

This situation gets more foul every day.

Oregon Live reports:

Occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for three weeks have made sweeping demands that local and federal authorities say are both brazen and unrealistic.

They want immediate freedom for imprisoned local ranchers. They want federal deeds voided and private owners to take over the property. They want the county to control the refuge. They want federal grazing permits vacated, leaving ranchers free to graze as they choose. And they say they won’t go until they get their way.

They mean they won’t go voluntarily. They can be made to go, and they should be. They’ve seized a wildlife refuge that belongs to all of us, and it’s not theirs to seize. They need to be thrown out and arrested and charged. They should not get bail.

Interviews with lawyers, ranchers, federal authorities and others make clear: Little of what they want is likely to happen for reasons that include legal principle, basic property rights, economic forces and cost. Federal authorities also say the occupiers are making demands that fly in the face of the U.S. Constitution.

Also? What they’re doing is extortion. Extortion is a crime.

In a 1976 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court confronted the point Bundy is trying to assert. New Mexico state officials tried to keep wild burros that they had seized from federal land. The officials claimed what the Oregon occupiers claim – that the Constitution strictly limits what property the federal government can own or control.

State officials argued in Kleppe vs. New Mexico that Congress had no power over public lands without state consent. “This argument is without merit,” the Supreme Court ruled.

State officials confused a constitutional provision focused more narrowly on how the federal government oversees land it acquires from a state with the unlimited powers granted to the federal government under the Constitution’s Property Clause, the court said.

They don’t get to overturn a Supreme Court ruling by force.

The occupiers advocate voiding grazing permits issued by the U.S. government as well.

Bundy is the son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who has renounced his federal grazing rights but continued running cattle on public land in a still-unsettled dispute with the federal land bureau. The dispute led to an armed standoff with federal authorities in 2014 – a precursor to the occupation underway in southeastern Oregon.

Voiding grazing rights, though, would be a vexing development in a region where many ranchers count on using public lands to feed livestock.

Occupiers say ranchers would revert to “historic” use of that land to continue grazing. What they seemed to have overlooked is that their plan calls for private ownership of the same high desert expanses that the federal government now rents at subsidized cost to the ranchers. They haven’t answered how ranchers would graze on what becomes private land.

By paying a much higher price! Freedom!!

Oregon Public Broadcasting reports there are children at Malheur.

The two young girls now staying at the occupied refuge are sisters, ages 8 and 9.

OPB is not naming the kids, nor their parents, to protect the identity of the children, but the mother and father are active and vocal militants in the armed occupation. Both parents have been involved in the incident since its start Jan. 2.

Well, that’s good responsible loving parenthood – taking young children to an active crime scene and keeping them there.

The children were visible inside one of the buildings Thursday evening. One of the little girls asked to come outside by a campfire but was not allowed. The kids were also seen playing and wrestling together in a hallway in their pajamas.

Human shields! If there are children there, law enforcement will just throw up its hands and give the criminals Malheur for their very own, right?

Or if not maybe the children will be martyrs.

Either way it’s just hella good child-raising.

Amanda Peacher at Oregon Public Broadcasting on some of what the Bundy gang accomplished this week:

The armed occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge continue to use government equipment inside the complex.

One militant, who refused to give his name, again plowed dirt with a refuge bulldozer Wednesday. He wouldn’t say why he was operating the machinery, but in several places, sagebrush and vegetation had been newly removed, leaving wide patches of bare mud within the complex.

He said the road was already there, and the Bundy gang had just been removing snow from it. That was a big fat lie.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service confirmed Thursday that not only is the road built last week by the occupiers new, but it is also within an archaeological site important to the Burns Paiute Tribe.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service assistant director of external affairs, Jason Holm, condemned the militants last week for what he called “disgusting, ghoulish behavior.”

They removed part of a fence to create the short access road.

That fence was in place “as a deterrent to keep fire crews from driving across the archaeological site,” said Holm.

So that it wouldn’t be damaged, you see.

It appears militants moved rocks from an existing gravel pile in the compound to surface the road.

“It was just a goat trail before,” one militant told OPB, who also declined to provide his name. “People were slipping and falling.”

People who aren’t supposed to be there, people who have invaded the wildlife refuge in order to steal it and destroy it for anything other than grazing their cattle for their profit. If I break into your house and find the kitchen floor slippery, I don’t get to install a new road through it.

Kevin Foerster, the agency’s Pacific region chief, also denounced the construction.

“There’s a reason why there’s not a road there,” said Foerster. “If there was a need for a road in that particular location, we would have over the past 108 years put a road in that location.”

The agency said the action is likely a violation of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, also known as the ARPA.

“Even disturbing 3 to 4 inches on the surface is an ARPA violation,” said Holm. “Investigators will have to excavate to determine depth of disturbance in several areas to understand the extent of the damage.”

You know who else does this? Destroys archaeological sites? Islamic State. The Taliban. That’s who.

There was a community meeting in the Burns High School gym on Tuesday.

In sometimes highly personal remarks, speaker after speaker vented anger – at public officials, at the federal government and at the man in the brown cowboy hat sitting high in the bleachers to take it all in – Ammon Bundy.

So Ammon Bundy left Malheur and went to Bundy and sat in on a meeting, and wasn’t arrested. Why is that exactly? He’s committed multiple crimes and is continuing to commit them on an ongoing basis – why is he allowed to keep doing that, using guns, with impunity?

He sat on the second row from the top as County Judge Steve Grasty, microphone in hand, strode to the foot of that bleacher section.

“It is time for you to go home,” Grasty said to Bundy, vowing to meet with Bundy anytime,  anyplace – outside of Harney County.

A chant then grew in the gymnasium: “Go, go, go, go, go.”

That was a message Bundy heard repeatedly through the evening, one he once vowed to heed. He sat expressionless, making no move to respond or to comment.

But no one arrests him. He should be going to jail, not home.

Another woman, shaking in anger, called out Bundy for the fear he’s caused in local schools, which closed for a week after the occupation began. She yelled across the gym at him, telling him to leave and “go to jail where you deserve to be!”

Apparently fear in the local schools just doesn’t count.

Police presence was heavy, with uniformed officers inside the gymnasium, lining the entry hall, and posted outside.

Ammon Bundy wasn’t the only one catching brickbats. Public officials, particularly Grasty and Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward, took a verbal pummeling.

One man, who said he was from Eugene, pressed Ward about what he was doing to end the occupation and what was the role of the FBI.

“Just tell the truth,” he barked.

One speaker pressed Grasty and others to not ignore questions posed by the audience.

“We deserve a response when we ask a question of our local officials,” said the woman, shaking and in tears as she spoke.

But apparently they didn’t get any.

This story just gets weirder and weirder. The place was full of cops, the sheriff and a judge were there, yet Bundy and his pals weren’t arrested. Why not?

Rancher Tom Sharp noted that Bundy and others had “lectured” local ranchers the night before on the need for them to repudiate their federal grazing permits.

Such a move would be “terribly destructive,” Sharp said.

He noted that Bundy’s impact on the community hasn’t been good.

“Our personal relationships have been damaged,” Sharp said.

He said it was time for patient law enforcement agents to act against “an active crime scene” at the refuge. He urged the refuge be isolated, services be cut off, and supplies no longer allowed in. His proposal drew applause and cheers from some in the crowd.

The community meeting was the second in a row sponsored by county officials, who vow to keep them up weekly as long as residents attend.

Well that’s kind of them, but what about arresting the perps?

When it ended, the Bundy brothers left as quietly as they had entered, striding silently to an SUV with Nevada plates, and driving off without a word to the throngs of reporters and onlookers who trailed behind.

Driving off to return to the national wildlife refuge they have stolen. Driving off without interference from the many police officers present.

So this Oregon group Getting Occupiers of the Historic Oregon Malheur Evicted (see what they did there? Initials=G.O.H.O.M.E.) have a good wheeze.

Brothers Zach and Jake Klonoski launched the group’s fundraising efforts on Sunday morning.

By 5:45 p.m. Monday, the group received $30,000 in pledges.

“We thought, let’s create this vehicle so Oregonians can step up with one collective voice and say that we don’t support this, we want them to leave,” Zach Klonoski told KOIN 6 News.

The Klonoski brothers say they’re frustrated by what’s going on at the refuge, and figure there are thousands of Oregonians who would also like to express their opposition in a “peaceful, meaningful way”.

G.O.H.O.M.E. will continue to raise money in protest of the protesters every day the armed group remains at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

The longer the thieves stay, the more money is raised for groups the thieves won’t like.

The funds will go to 4 different organizations: Burns’ Paiute Tribe, Gabby Giffords’ Americans for Responsible Solutions, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Malheur National Wildlife refuge itself.

“These people came in heavily armed… we feel that they are likely not in support of gun reform. So we thought [Gabby Giffords’ Americans for Responsible Solutions] would be a good organization to choose,” Klonoski explained.

The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks and researches extremist groups all around the U.S., which the occupiers qualify as.

“Every day that they stay, they’re funding the very groups that fight against their actions,” Klonoski explained. “The longer they stay there, the more funds are contributed to groups that are really antithetical to the occupiers’ goals.”

Good plan; I like it.

Updating to add: Rrr points out that the donation website is unsecured, and the thieves hack websites, so it’s probably risky to use that site to donate.

What about what local people think about the criminals who have stolen Malheur National Wildlife Refuge? What about what birders think? What about the local economy?

The Portland Tribune reports on that:

According to a 2008 Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife report, wildlife-viewing tourism accounts for about $8 million of travel spending per year in Harney County.

Ah. That sounds small, but reporting has been saying that Harney County is not rich. The people who depend on that $8 million probably don’t consider it too small to notice.

The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt to protect the vast populations of waterbirds that were being decimated.

“The occupation of Malheur by armed, out-of-state militia groups puts one of America’s most important wildlife refuges at risk,” wrote local Audubon Society Conservation Director Bob Sallinger, who recommended that local birders avoid the area while under occupation. “We hope for a safe, expeditious end to this armed occupation so that the myriad of local and non-local stakeholders can continue to work together to restore Malheur in ways that are supportive of both the local ecology and the local economy — the occupiers are serving nobody’s interests except their own,” Sallinger added.

It’s a wildlife refuge. It’s not a prison or an extrajudicial detention center or a nuclear waste dump. It’s a wildlife refuge. It’s not an insult to cattle ranchers, and it doesn’t steal anything that belongs to cattle ranchers. They don’t own federal lands, because we all do and therefore no one has the right to damage and exploit them for their personal profit. The feds let them graze their cattle on federal land for a fraction of what private landowners charge, so they should get the fuck out of our wildlife refuge.

Three local residents, who are birders and active in conservation and restoration work in the county, commented on what is happening at the refuge:

Dick and Sally Shook

“We are sorry that the refuge has been chosen as a protest site by the ‘outsiders.’ It is our opinion that the land is rightfully under the control of the federal government as ruled on at least two occasions by the Supreme Court,” noted Milwaukie resident Dick Shook.

“If these people leave before the migration season, and don’t damage any of the facilities, probably they won’t have much of an impact. However, if they don’t leave by March or spring migration time, the county and Burns will suffer economically,” he said.

“The headquarters, where the encampment is taking place, is the small area that attracts the migrating birds because it is the best, maybe only, place where there is a concentration of water and large, varied, green trees where the birds find a place to rest and feed before resuming their flights to their breeding grounds,” Shook said.

He added that this same spot is where birders from all over the country come, as well, and Burns and the surrounding area is where they stay and spend their money.

The Shooks have volunteered at the Malheur Field Station which is three or four miles from the refuge headquarters, where the occupiers have taken their stand. They also did a week of volunteer work at the refuge more than 10 years ago, Shook said.

“One of the many enchanting, memorable incidents was watching at dusk several pairs of short-eared owls in a courtship dance, that included clapping their wings together while flying in and out and around low-growing trees and shrubs. It was always a thrill to sight a new species of bird, for us, such as a Virginia rail or the secretive sora,” Shook said.

The violent bullying criminal thieves who have stolen Malheur are messing all that up. A pox on them.

Weirdly sympathetic reporting in the Chicago Tribune on the armed criminals at Malheur.

Several dozen armed men and women now control this federal facility in remote southeastern Oregon, a growing siege staged to protest the imprisonment of two local ranchers and a federal government that they say is out of control. They spend their days concocting strategies, meeting with reporters and well-wishers, and organizing mundane chore charts, all while remaining on hair-trigger alert to any effort to infiltrate their ranks or forcibly end the occupation.

On stolen property, using stolen equipment, with the use of lethal weapons. The Trib almost sounds as if the government has no right to evict the armed criminals who are trying to steal the Refuge.

There is no visible law enforcement presence for miles; the occupiers are free to come and go as they please. Still, the group’s members are certain that their movements and communications are being monitored by police and the FBI. They listen for drones, stare down passing vehicles and keep a 360-degree watch from a 150-foot observation tower adjacent to the compound. They are on guard.

They’re also violent criminals. They’re not the victims here.

On this day, the threat quickly dissipates. “All stations be advised the provocateur is driven off,” a voice crackles over a hand-held radio a few minutes after the commotion in the kitchen.

But it’s a brittle peace. LaVoy Finicum, a 54-year-old Arizona rancher and one of the group’s leaders, says the siege will continue until the federal government cedes control of the 187,000-acre refuge to Harney County.

“It needs to be very clear that these buildings will never, ever return to the federal government,” says Finicum, who wears a cowboy hat and a Colt 45 pistol holstered on his hip.

As he continues to live in and use a federal facility that belongs to all of us, not to him and his armed buddies.

Ammon Bundy sits at a desk in a refuge administrative office. A documentary crew working on a film about Western land use is peppering him with questions. He is soft-spoken, articulate, impassioned and certain of his positions.

After the crew leaves, he admits that he is tired. Asked if he wishes things had unfolded differently, he sits up and leans forward.

“Everything is happening just like it’s supposed to,” he says. “That’s what you have when you have divine guidance that is assisting. The right people come. The right words are said.”

Now the Trib tells us something I didn’t realize, which is that the feds are not only not evicting the thieves, they’re not stopping new ones joining the theft.

With each passing day, more gun-toting people arrive, from Alabama, Utah, North Carolina, Georgia. The vast majority are white men, but others are coming, too.

A woman from California, who would identify herself only as a mom, said she came to be on the right side of history.

And Brendan Dowd, who is black, drove from Colorado Springs to “fight against all the negative things the federal government is doing.” Dowd, 31, said it was “time for the people to stand up and take control.”

I won’t even try to deal with all the ironies of that.

But anyway – what in hell is everyone doing, letting more armed people join in? I get that they don’t want a bloodbath and martyrs and another Timothy McVeigh, but they could surely close the fucking road.

For now, the protesters remain firmly in place. The FBI has established a command center in Burns at the small city-owned airport outside of the town center, but law enforcement continues to maintain a low profile. And a resolution feels very far away.

On Thursday, a supporter drove to the refuge from neighboring Nevada to drop off 180 pounds of frozen meat. The occupiers are hunkering down, ready for whatever.

Near the refuge entrance, Corey Lequieu sits on an ATV with an AR-15 rifle slung across his lap.

The 45-year-old Army veteran from Nevada has just finished a four-hour shift in the observation tower. If the feds come, he says, he’ll be ready.

“What’s the worst they can do – kill me?”

Back in Burns, a clerk at one of the town’s few motels said the FBI has booked rooms through March.

Are we a failed state?