BLM Director Neil Kornze
The Obama-BLM war against Nevadan rancher Cliven Bundy isn’t over.
Last Saturday, April 12, 2014, citing “safety concerns,” the BLM announced a premature halt to confiscating Bundy’s cattle and released about 400 head of cattle it had seized. BLM’s “operation” war, originally expected to take up to a month, ended after only a week.
Martin Griffith reports for The Associated Press that Bundy’s cattle were freed after hundreds of states’ rights protesters, some of them armed militia members, showed up at corrals outside Mesquite to demand the animals’ release. (An eyewitness says it was not hundreds, but THOUSANDS of protesters.)
But Bureau of Land Management spokesman Craig Leff denies there was a deal. He said, “The BLM and National Park Service did not cut any deal and negotiate anything. There was no deal we made. The door isn’t closed. We’ll figure out how to move forward with this.” Leff said the BLM will continue to try to resolve the matter with Bundy “administratively and judicially,” but declined to comment on BLM’s possible options.
The several hundred cows gathered during the roundup were short of the BLM’s goal of 900 cows that it says have been trespassing on U.S. land without required grazing permits for over 20 years. The BLM insists Bundy owes more than $1 million in grazing fees. But Bundy, the last rancher in Nevadas Clark County, has been fighting a “one-man range war” since 1993, when he decided to take a stand against the BLM by refusing to pay fees for the right to graze on a ranch run by his family for centuries.
The fight between Bundy and the BLM widened into a debate about states’ rights and federal land-use policy. Bundy does not recognize federal authority on land he insists belongs to Nevada
After years of court battles, in the name of protecting endangered desert tortoise in the region, the BLM secured a federal court order to have Bundy’s “trespass cattle” forcibly removed and, last week, dispatched some 200 agents armed with automatic weapons and sniper rifles to Bundy’s ranch about 75 miles outside of Las Vegas.
Meanwhile, environmental nazis are now irked with the BLM, accusing the bureau of capitulating to threats of violence from the “armed thugs” who have converged to support Bundy.
Mrowka fumed, “The BLM has a sacred duty to manage our public lands in the public interest, to treat all users equally and fairly. Instead it is allowing a freeloading rancher and armed thugs to seize hundreds of thousands of acres of the people’s land as their own fiefdom. The BLM is setting a dangerous precedent in announcing that it will pick and choose who has to follow federal laws and who it will reward for violating them.”
The green nazis should know that the BLM’s war on Bundy has NOTHING to do with desert turtles.
It’s all about democrat Nevada senator Harry Reid and his deal with the Chinese to build massive solar facilities on Bundy’s land. See “Dirty Harry Reid Has His Hands All Over Bundy/BLM Dispute.“
~Eowyn