Jeff Rosenbury said:
Calling for 100,000 unarmed men is a crime?
Calling for a peaceful political demonstration on federal land isn't protected political speech?
To be perfectly honest, what this guy is saying is so vague/disjointed that it is tough for me to tell what he is calling for them to do. But it sounds like he's asking them to join the occupation as human shields between the armed occupiers and the police. Yes, I'd consider that a crime - it's a civilian equivalent of the human shield war crime! In either case, that's not the only thing he says and again, using "we" and being with the armed men makes him a co-conspirator at the very least, whether he carries a gun himself or not.
Also, I'm not sure why you are/we should be focusing on one person in a group of a dozen, in a preliminary complaint. Based on what we know of what has happened, there is surely a lot more coming (as you indicate below) and I'm not especially concerned with exactly who is going to be charged with exactly what at this point. It is too far down in the weeds to matter much to the big picture issues we're discussing. That said, recall that the charge in the complaint is "Conspiracy to Impede Officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats". Summoning 100,000 people to surround the site and physically prevent the BLM employees from getting into their offices certainly fits. It's just that that charge is only the entry point. It's the basic crime of the occupation, for which all of the other crimes they will certainly be charged with branch off from.
I don't get the 24 hour news here, so I only have the information from the affidavit to go on. In it the government makes it clear that in general tone these guys were intending peaceful protest.
Huh? You mean you don't consider the parts where they say they are willing to die to defend their position as threats? How about threatening to burn down the house of the BLM employee? Is that a threat? I think you are ignoring what you are seeing.
My argument is not that they didn't break laws... It's that this could have and should have been handled by one BLM guy writing tickets.
Huh? I'm genuinely confused as to what the point of that would be and how it would work. Could you explain, in nuts-and-bolts detail exactly how that would work and the big picture of what it would accomplish? What tickets, for what crimes is the BLM empowered to write? Are you suggesting a BLM employee - after others were explicitly threatened with violence and harassed - should enter the compound? Should this person be armed? Would you expect this "ticket" to compel the group to cease their illegal occupation? If not, what would be the point of doing it?
BTW, equating someone camping in peaceful protest on BLM land (which I thought was legal, though not in a bird sanctuary) to a home invasion seems like a stretch to me. The Occupy Wall Street crowd managed the same thing in Manhattan without a federal troop rollout.
Huh? Are you saying you are unaware that they are not, in fact, "camping" but are actually living in BLM buildings? And do you not understand the difference between threats and not threats? For the most part (and as a matter of general philosophy), the left wing "occupy" crowd were pacifists, unarmed, and explicitly non-violent...like MLK.
As with mhselp, I'm genuinely confused as to how it could be that you would consider an armed occupation of buildings, accompanied with direct and indirect threats to be equivalent to an explicitly peaceful and unarmed camping on public land.
But for your general point - don't the feds have something better to do? Here's a good op-ed describing the problem inherent with the hands-off approach:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opini...finicum-our-view-editorials-debates/79479994/
The hands-off approach doesn't end the problem and in fact encourages it to get worse. This very same group was treated to the hands-off approach previously when they threatened violence and the government backed down. No doubt, this helped convince them that they can, in fact, use threats of violence as a political tool. In the USA, in particular, that is a really, really bad message for the government to be sending.
[separate post, sorry for the continuity loss]
I believe the crime they were cited with was conspiracy to impede or injure an officer (18 USC § 372) which requires force, intimidation, or threats. While I'm sure someone said something intimidating given the amount of time and number of people involved, calling for peaceful protests was not the threat...
Then why did you bring it up? Frankly, this strikes me as disingenuous in the extreme that you are focusing on one specific, vague statement (buried most of the way through the document) and apparently utterly ignoring the rest of the criminal complaint. That takes effort! "I'm sure..."? Are you? Rather than complaining about something that may only be barely/vaguely a crime, why don't you look at and consider the things that certainly are?
Everyone commits felonies just by breathing.
Jeff, c'mon. There's no way to respond to that nicely.
