www.latimes.com
Four days into the armed occupation of a wildlife reserve in Oregon’s rugged backcountry, and something’s still missing.
The police.
While local authorities and federal agents have kept an extraordinarily low profile as the dissatisfied ranchers and activists remain holed up in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters, one recently retired FBI commander said he’d be shocked if law enforcement hasn’t monitored the every move of the occupiers.
Greg Vecchi, former chief of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, said the agency is almost certainly preparing a worst-case scenario to take the occupied wildlife refuge headquarters by force, and that – following the procedures he was familiar with – had likely constructed a set of buildings that resemble the ones in Oregon and have practiced for a coordinated tactical assault.
“They have found a building or quickly put together a mock-up of the building and they’re practicing, putting role players in there to represent the people inside,” said Vecchi, who retired in 2014 and wrote his doctoral dissertation on hostage situations.
“They’re dropping helicopters, working flashbangs, coming in with [armored personnel carriers], so that if it happens, it’s kind of like the Navy SEALs did with Osama bin Laden,” he said. “Practice, practice, practice.”
But a tactical assault is an option of last resort and federal agents in recent years have taken a seemingly placid, wait ‘em out approach to potential showdowns like the one in Oregon. The more measured tactical plan was shaped by the pushback to the deadly sieges at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and near Waco, Texas.
The downside is that authorities sometimes come away appearing to be weak -- activists get away with breaking the law, escape fines and other potential punishments
But authorities said avoiding the loss of life is the aim of a more reserved approach.
“We have enough firepower, we have enough guns, we have enough equipment and tech to take back what they’ve got,” said retired FBI agent James Wedick. “It’s better not to show up with an overwhelming appearance of force and cause something to happen.
“The approach,” he said, “is to de-escalate.”
In cases similar to what’s unfolded in Oregon’s rugged backcountry, Vecchi said the FBI sets up what agents call physical and verbal perimeters – out of sight, but observing the moves of the subjects of a siege.
The wildlife refuge of 19 buildings about 30 miles outside Burns, Ore., was occupied Saturday by a group of activists who arrived to protest the incarceration of father-and-son ranchers who’d already spent time behind bars before a judge determined their sentences were too short.
To determine the number of people inside the compound, Vecchi said the FBI is likely using thermal imaging cameras to detect heat signatures, and will have its role-players mimicking the locations and movements of the people inside.
Crisis on a national scale draws the attention of the FBI’s Critical Incidents Response Group, which is itself a response to the deadly militia sieges of the 1990s.
In the early 1990s, the FBI had two primary teams to deal with a crisis: hostage negotiators and tactical assault teams. A natural tension existed between the groups, based on their preferred approach to ending a crisis.
When the Branch Davidians shot and killed ATF agents inside the Mount Carmel Center ranch near Waco in February 1993, the FBI arrived as if an occupying force. That, said Vecchi, was a mistake when confronting a group of extremists already deeply suspicious of the federal government.
The Waco siege ended when the FBI pumped tear gas into the building, the Branch Davidians fired on them and a massive blaze consumed the ranch, killing most of the people inside, children included.
In the aftermath of the disastrous siege, the tension between the negotiation and tactical groups’ commanders became the dominant story. Then-FBI Director Louis Freeh reorganized the bureau’s approach to crises and combined the two groups, demanding a more coordinated approach.
The first victory for Freeh’s vision was in Montana in 1996, when a group known as the Freemen held off authorities for 81 days. The siege ended peacefully.
One of the keys to that surrender, Vecchi said, was a third-party intermediary. The Freemen refused to deal with the FBI, so the agency turned to a local sheriff to help bring things to an end.
“They coached that sheriff on how to negotiate, and the [Freemen] viewed the negotiator as credible,” Vecchi said. “There was no reason to do anything else.”
In Oregon, Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward has already established himself as an opponent of the occupation, asking the people inside the refuge to pack up and go home to their families.
Retired FBI agent Dennis Franks, now living in Houston, said as he watched the situation in Oregon unfold on television that he silently thanked the bureau’s new approach. Franks was a member of the tactical assault team during the Waco siege – albeit not on the day of the deadly final assault.
He was there when the FBI established a massive perimeter, with agents from Dallas, El Paso and San Antonio responding. The overwhelming show of force was comforting after the killing of ATF agents, but the situation didn’t sit right with him.
“I had this feeling it wouldn’t go well,” he said.
The FBI cut off supplies to the group – something no agency has proposed yet in Oregon – and played loud music to try and urge them out, a 1990s tactic that also has fallen out of favor.
“Mistakes were made that were learned from,” Franks said. “And particularly in this type of situation, with anti-government protesters, showing up in massive force would only further their cause and the hysteria of people who have adopted that belief.”
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www.miamiherald.com
The standoff at an Oregon wildlife refuge is the latest, edgiest skirmish in a decades-old conflict over federal control of Western lands. It’s been a war, not always bloodless, that’s been fought in courts, on Capitol Hill and far out on the range.
Decades ago, the conflict was dubbed the “Sagebrush Rebellion.” In the 1990s, conservatives provocatively cited a “War on the West.” And with the federal government owning more than one-third of the land in states such as California, Idaho and Washington, future clashes are all but certain.
“There are problems with the federal bureaucracies, and people are going to chafe at changes in management practices,” Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said in an interview Wednesday. “That’s been going on forever.”
But DeFazio, a liberal who has nonetheless repeatedly sought compromise on vexing Western land disputes, also noted a flip side of federal ownership not always acknowledged by some vocal conservative activists: However frustrating, federal ownership brings benefits, too.
“We are subsidizing grazing,” DeFazio noted as an example. “People are paying only a tiny fraction of what they would pay to use private land.”
There’s ongoing frictions. In Oregon, we’ve been having timber wars my entire time in Congress. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore.
Nationwide, the federal government owns 640 million acres, or about 28 percent of the country’s land mass. It is not, however, evenly distributed, and consequently, neither is the political heat.
North Carolina and Florida, for instance, have only 12 percent and 8 percent of their land held by the federal government.
By contrast, 45 percent of California is federally owned, while half of Idaho and 53 percent of Oregon belong to such federal agencies as the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. In other words, the sagebrush that fuels rebellion is a distinctly Western crop.
“I have seen what happens when overzealous bureaucrats and agencies go beyond the law to clamp down on people,” Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., said on the House floor Tuesday. “I have seen what courts have done, and I have seen the time for Congress to act, and it has not.”
Walden represents Harney County, the high desert region in eastern Oregon thrust into the national spotlight on Sunday when armed anti-government protesters occupied an empty building at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
The armed protesters, calling themselves the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, still occupy the building in an emergency now being responded to by the FBI. The protesters spun off from peaceful demonstrators who had rallied to support two Harney County ranchers, Dwight Hammond Jr. and Steven Hammond.
The Hammonds, who are father and son, have been ordered back to prison to serve longer terms following their conviction on arson charges.
“I know the Hammonds. I’ve known them, probably, for close to 20 years,” Walden said. “They are longtime, responsible ranchers.”
The Hammonds’ beef with the federal government is a complicated one, with conflicting accounts related by both sides, but in brief it encapsulates the benefits and the burdens of Western reliance on federal land.
Since the time when the phrase “Sagebrush Rebellion” was first coined, Westerners have complained that onerous federal rules and regulations have needlessly fenced them in.
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Politically, the Western discontent empowered lawmakers such as Republican Richard Pombo, a young rancher from California’s San Joaquin Valley first elected in 1992, who rode the wave all the way to eventual chairmanship of the House Resources Committee.
Tellingly, Pombo titled a book he co-authored “This Land Is Our Land: How to End the War on Private Property.”
Equally telling, perhaps, was his eventual political fate. In 2006, with the deep financial support of environmental groups who opposed Pombo’s positions, Democrat Jerry McNerney toppled Pombo and has held the Stockton-based seat ever since.
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Westwide grazing rights, timber harvesting, hard-rock mining, and water storage and deliveries all have been underwritten by the federal government’s low fees, cheap roads, absence of mining royalties and subsidized irrigation contract rates.
Through early 2013, for instance, the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management charged some 21,000 livestock operators nationwide only $1.35 per animal unit month for using the public land. This was less than had been charged in 1993, and was considerably less than was charged on state or private lands.
“Generally, livestock producers who use federal lands want to keep fees low, while conservation groups and others believe fees should be increased,” the Congressional Research Service noted in a 2012 report.
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But when the Clinton administration tried, with its first budget proposal in 1993, to raise grazing fees and boost payments from hard-rock mining, among other Western revisions, it got clobbered.
