On December 12, 2011, I wrote in the Arizona Daily Independent, “We want our Land Back”. The following was stated: “Even worse, now the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), owner of the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area (NCA) wants to steal our water. In ancient times, to capture a city or empire was to cut off the water supply. Just think of how the BLM wants to grab Sierra Vista’s water shed of 888 square miles encompassing Tombstone, most of Bisbee, all of Sierra Vista, Ft. Huachuca, Whetstone, Huachuca City and the unincorporated areas of Hereford and Palominas. Wow! What a land grab – by stealing our water.” This gross evil extends far beyond the San Pedro! The BLM is also charged via internal government investigation and grand jury indictment with murder, cattle rustling and stealing cattlemen’s grazing rights in Southeastern Oregon.
On January 25, 2018, a Civil Complaint – Demand for Jury Trial (Case # 2:18-cv-00160-SU), was filed and states: Jeanette Finicum and others vs. United States of America, FBI, BLM, and individuals, The Center for Biological Diversity and numerous John Does in the U.S. District Court in Pendleton, Oregon. The civil lawsuit is about the following: On January 26, 2016 at approximately 4:40 pm, decedent Robert LaVoy Finicum was fatally shot three times in the back, assassination style by one or more officers of the Oregon State police and/or FBI. In the statement of the case, this compares to the November 2017 widely published news story that caught the attention of the American public as unthinkable, when a video surfaced of a North Korean soldier attempting to defect for freedom with a dash across the South Korea border and was pursued and shot five times in the back but was able to cross the border to safety. The same thing happened where our own government shot and killed Mr. Finicum in the back via a planned ambush when he attempted to cross the Grant County border to meet with the county sheriff.
What are the roots that causes overreach of Federal authority on the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area and the murder of Mr. Finicum? In both circumstances, it appears that an over-zealous priority for federal control of environmental protection creates a fanatic mindset. In the killing of Mr. Finicum, it started with the discontinuing of time-honored cattle grazing on the Southeastern Oregon and Nevada rangeland for ranchers who had land grants for legal grazing rights. Mr. Finicum was involved in the local peaceful protest against BLM and supporting liberal environmental groups as well as state and federal agencies who had little interest in the cattlemen’s’ constitutional rights. The lawsuit complaint is 48 pages and included 230 claims of illegal and wrongful BLM and other government agency actions. Notable among the 230 issues itemized, the lawsuit lists some gross unlawful acts that establish an unreasonable biased mindset. Perhaps the actions of the BLM resonated with elitist environmentalists who believe that overreach and even murder of their opponents is necessary to protect the environment.
Paragraph 10 of the complaint includes the charge of spreading false and maliciously false information. Paragraph 17 informs that Robert Finicum was shot in the back with his hands in the air in a surrender position. Finally, in three separate paragraphs, 14, 121 and 131 the defendants targeted religious bias of the Mormon Church. When reading the entire complaint, it goes on and on about the wrongful criminal acts of the defendants who sided with the unlawful land grab by the BLM.
The complaint highlights by unstated inference that our agencies in the federal government like the BLM are out of control. To remove this social hazard of big government, the BLM should be abolished. The land should be returned to states and supervised with an oversight committee consisting of citizen ranchers, mining and lumber companies who engage in use of these public lands with input retained by scholar consultants representing environmental technology, cattle ranching and mining, as energy development is an important facet of America’s free enterprise and does not deserve to be targeted by federal government abuse by the BLM or other land-owning governmental agencies.
Our governmental agencies have grown into bureaucratic monsters and the key to eliminating any criminal abuse is the return of the land to people at the state level. The real threat to our democracy is when liberals become consumed with uncontrollable outrage when someone or a group disagrees with them and they attempt to silence them by any means!