MILITIA OVERRUNS AREA IN OREGON
It was, at the start, a very private fight, about some very particular rules. But over the years, it devolved, as these fights do. And eventually it burst, breaking open into armed occupation on a wide patch of rural American land.
On Saturday afternoon, self- proclaimed militiamen seized an empty f ederal building on an Oregon wildlife reserve.
Joined by two sons of controversial Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, the occupiers captured the stone building, according to local reporters, after finding “a stack of keys.” They have since vowed to continue their protest for “years” if necessary and have asked supporters to bring their guns and join them.
The standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in Oregon’ s H arney County, began Saturday with a peaceful protest in nearby Burns. According to the Portland Oregonian, the state’s largest newspaper, about 300 militiamen from several states marched through town and threw pennies at the local sheriff ’s office before a smaller group, including the Bundy brothers, broke off and drove south to capture the empty building.
The protest and occupation were both sparked by the case of two local ranchers set to soon begin federal prison terms of five years each on charges of arson.
Father and son Dwight and Steven Hammond were convicted in 2012 of causing two fires, in 2001 and 2006, t hat collectively burned more t han 1 00 acres of federally owned land near their own ranch in rural Oregon.
A key state witness at their trial was Steven’ s nephew, a nd Dwight’s grand son, Dusty Hammond, who was 13 at the time of the first fire. He testified in court that his uncle handed out matches that day and told him to “light the whole county on fire” and later told him to keep his “mouth shut” about the blaze.
The Hammonds were initially charged with a host of crimes stretching across decades, most linked to an ongoing battle with federal officials over land management in the area surrounding their ranch. But in the end the jury convicted them of only the two fires in question.
The trial judge sentenced Dwight and Steven Hammond to three months and one year in jail respectively and for a time that seemed like the end of it.
But the Hammonds had been convicted under a 1996 law called the AntiTerrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. And that act, which was once described by a Yale l aw school lecturer as “surely one of the worst statutes ever passed by Congress and signed into law by a President,” has many quirks, among them a fiveyear, mandatory minimum sentence for arson that destroys federal property.
With that in hand, prosecutors appealed the original sentence. An appellate court upheld that appeal and sentenced the Hammonds to the five- year mandatory minimum. And last year, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Since t he appeal, t he Hammonds’ case has become a cause celebre in the growing anti- government militi a movement. The ranchers’ decades- l ong skirmish with the government, over management of and access to federal lands, could not have been better crafted to play at the fears and anxieties of that subset of the American far right.
In the last several months, the Bundys, who were themselves involved in an armed standoff with federal officials on their Nevada ranch in 2014, took up the Hammonds’ cause.
On Jan. 1, Cliven Bundy, the family patriarch, released a statement urging t he Hammonds to s eek protection from their local sheriff, instead of turning themselves over to the federal prison system.
The next day, two of his sons, Ryan and Ammon Bundy, appeared at the rally in Burns.
In an interview posted on his Facebook page, Ammon Bundy told one reporter that the occupation was about people having “their lands and their resources taken from them.” Clad in a cowboy hat and plaid shirt, he said: “We’re out here because the people have been abused long enough, really.”
Ryan Bundy t old Oregonian reporter Ian Kullgren that the ranchers were “willing to kill and be killed if necessary.”
But as of l ate Sunday, the standoff appeared to be mostly one- sided. Pictures from inside the seized buil di ng s howed s o me workout gear and food. But law enforcement was largely absent from the scene.
As for the Hammonds, their lawyer told the local sheriff that the Bundys and t heir organization don’t speak for them. Last week, they told the Associated Press they intend to report to prison as scheduled.
“We gave our word that’s what we would do,” Dwight Hammond said, “and we intend to act on it.”