Hysteria over a Muslim
community’s plans to place a cemetery in a small rural Texas town has
reached such heights that residents are proclaiming that burials would
likely contaminate the town’s drinking water — leading one resident to
recommend that the site be contaminated with the blood and heads of
pigs.
The residents of Farmersville, Texas — located about 40 miles northeast of Dallas — recently descended upon the town council
to demand that city fathers put a stop to a request from the Islamic
Association of Collin County to turn a 35-acre open tract into a Muslim
cemetery. The request was filed because the region’s Muslims face a
shortage of cemetery space for members of their faith.
The meeting was replete with fears that the plan is mere cover for more nefarious purposes.
“It is my duty and my right to warn when there is a danger,” said one
resident. “They’re at war with us,” said another. “It’s gonna kill
Farmersville,” warned yet another.
A local pastor, David J. Meeks, told the Dallas Morning News that
residents fear an expanded Muslim presence in their town. “How can we
stop a mosque or madrassa from going in there?” he asked. “The concern
for us is the radical element of Islam.”
But the wildest charges came from people claiming that they were
concerned the cemetery would contaminate the city’s water supply.
“When somebody dies, they bury them at that time,” Farmersville
resident Troy Gosnell told KTVT-TV. “You don’t know whether they were
shot, diseased or anything else. All they do is wrap them in a sheet,
throw them in the grave and bury them.”
Another resident claimed that this was part of a plot to poison the
town’s water supply. “Their bodies are generally above the water,” she
explained. “We get rain, it’s going to be in our drinking system.”
An elderly resident proposed a plan of attack for locals to dissuade
the Muslims from seeking the land: “Take and dump pigs’ blood and
[plant] pigs’ heads on a post,” he said, “and they won’t buy the land.”
In reality, Muslim Americans use coffins and vaults to bury their
dead. Khalil Abdur-Rashid, a spokesman for the Islamic association, said
misinformation was behind the criticism. He contended that the plans
for the cemetery have more to do with “human dignity” than religion.
“Some thought it was a mosque going to be built, others thought it
was a training ground,” Abdur-Rashid told WFAA-TV. “We want to be very
clear that this is a cemetery.”
“They are fearful of what they don’t understand and hopefully it’s an
opportunity for us to come together and learn a little bit more about
each other and hopefully dispel some of those misconceptions,” said Alia
Salem with the Dallas-Forth Worth chapter of CAIR (Council on
American-Islamic Relations) Texas.
Of course, such irrational behavior related to Islamophobic hysteria
isn’t confined to rural Texas. Recently a Florida gun shop owner
announced via YouTube video that he was declaring his store a
“Muslim-free zone” as a way of preventing terrorism.
CAIR officials in Florida noted that such a declaration violated
state law, and the organization would be requesting an investigation.
“I invite Andy, the gun shop owner, to come and break bread with us,
to get to know us as his fellow Americans. As his neighbors. We might be
his doctor, his police officer, his firefighter. That’s what the
American-Muslim community is. And I think he should get to know us, and
not let fear and hatred divide us as Americans,” said Hassan Shibly of
CAIR Florida.
Back when it was bustling with militiaman volunteers
eager to stop immigrants from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, they
called Cuban “Rusty” Monsees’ rural property outside of Brownsville,
Texas, “Camp LoneStar.”
But as the sheen faded – and the arrests of participants at the camp
mounted – the encampment of “Patriots” began to dwindle to almost
nothing, and it gradually came to just be dubbed “Camp Rusty.”
Monsees recently announced that the property is now up for sale. He reflected on the changes with a reporter for KRGV-TV.
“Some of the stuff that was taking place, it wasn’t that great,” Monsees admitted.
The encampment first made news in Texas
a year ago by attracting number of armed militiamen from around the
rest of the nation to the little spot on the Rio Grande where
participants could go rambling on “missions” running reconnaissance on
border-crossing activities.
At times, the gun-toting militiamen even detained border crossers
they caught – cuffing them with plastic ties and guarding them with
weapons until Border Patrol arrived to take them away – while at other
times they would chase people swimming over the Rio Grande back across
the river.
Then participants began having run-ins with the law. First, a Border Patrol officer took shots at one of the militiamen while pursuing a border-crossing fugitive. Then it emerged
that the man who had been shot at, who was carrying a weapon at the
time of the incident, was a felon prohibited from possessing firearms.
And so, it then emerged,
was Kevin C. “K.C.” Massey III, the ostensible “commander” of Camp
LoneStar, who was with the militiamen at the time and whose background
check revealed a similar felony conviction.
Both men were charged with felony weapons violations and currently await trial in federal court in Texas.
Monsees, a longtime Brownsville-area rancher, explained to reporters
at the time that he invited the militiamen to come to his property and
set up camp there because he was concerned about “security” on his
border ranch. But he told the KRGV reporter that he regretted the whole
business now.
“They jeopardized my safety and some other people’s safety by what they were doing,” Monsees said.
He said he had made mistakes about who could participate. “Number one
because I misread some of the people,” he said. “I found out that there
were people here that I didn’t do far enough of a background check on.
That’s a regret that I have.”
Some neighbors told KRGV that they appreciated having the “Patriots” gathered in their vicinity. But other reporters had earlier found a number of neighbors who found their presence intimidating and fear-inducing.
“We don’t know who these people are. They’re carrying high-powered
weapons. It makes us feel less safe, not more safe to have them here,”
one of them said. “I just hope they leave soon.”
The headlines — widely
circulated on social media and a variety of right-wing websites —
certainly are attention-grabbing: “Fox News Designated Hate Group by
Southern Poverty Law Center” and “Juggalos Classified As Hate Group By
Southern Poverty Law Center.” And many of the posts promoting the pieces
on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere clearly seem to take them at face
value.
There’s a big problem, though: The stories are complete fakes.
The Fox News piece was published earlier this week at a satirical “news” site called the Free Wood Post,
where the motto is: “News That’s Almost Reliable.” The post contained
no links to any such SPLC report because, of course, none existed.
That didn’t stop the Free Wood Post from doing its thing. “Their
hatred was tolerated for a long time as freedom of expression,” the site
said dramatically of the news channel, “which they are still free to
do, however, the time has come to no longer ignore their obvious bigotry
broadcast to millions of like-minded folks, and label them what they
are — a hate group.”
Needless to say, Fox News has never come under consideration for
hate-group status by the SPLC, nor is it ever likely to. A news channel,
by definition, includes many voices with many different opinions — even
if those displayed on Fox are virtually all conservative — and so it is
fundamentally different from a group whose members all sign on to the
same ideology. Nonetheless, by Thursday, the post about Fox News had
garnered over 30,000 shares on Facebook.
You’d think folks might have figured out that the story was a spoof. After all, the site carries a pretty clear disclaimer:
“Free Wood Post is a news and political satire web publication, which
may or may not use real names, often in semi-real or mostly fictitious
ways. All news articles contained within FreeWoodPost.com are fiction,
and presumably fake news.” But enormous numbers didn’t.
Similarly, the Juggalos piece, which ran before the Fox News tale,
first appeared in a post at another satirical “news” site, the National Report. That site uses a url beginning with “nytimes.com.co,” leading many to assume that the story actually originated with The New York Times, whose url is similar but not the same.
Juggalos is the name used by members of the fan club of the hip-hop
duo Insane Clown Posse, who are known for making controversial comments.
The story said, in part: “The Southern Poverty Law Center has
classified Juggalo’s [sic] as a hate group among 17 states including the
entire Midwest (North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas,
Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and
Ohio), in addition to California, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and
Oregon.”
That, too, was laughably false. While the members of Insane Clown
Posse do indeed make incendiary and insensitive remarks, they fall far
short of the behavior — namely, having “beliefs or practices that attack
or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable
characteristics” — that earns a hate-group designation by the SPLC.
Moreover, there were some pretty obvious clues. The story claimed the
SPLC was asking citizens to “keep an eye open” for a list of behaviors
including “Making or responding to a ‘whoop whoop’ call” and “Drinking
or spraying their enemies with Faygo (an inexpensive soda).”
However, at least one right-wing blogger — Jay Syrmopoulos at the Free Thought Project
— initially succumbed to the hoax and published a breathless post that
swallowed the entire tale whole.
Afterward, upon learning that the piece
was satire, he edited the story to indicate that the source of
information was a spoof, but redirecting his ire at the FBI, which had
classified the Juggalos as a gang. “This is the level of absurdity to
which our government has risen,” he raged. “They have criminalized an
entire fan base with a blanket label over anyone displaying typical
rabid fanatic behavior… hence the term fan, short for fanatic!”
Contacted by the SPLC, Syrmopoulos, who is described in his author
summary as an “investigative journalist,” was defiant: “The reality is
that the SPLC isn't an unbiased research organization, but rather a
leftist anti-hate activist group masquerading as a center of legitimate,
academically sound research,” he huffed. “Sadly your group is so
extremist that the story, as farcical as it was, seemed totally
plausible given the SPLC's track record, hence me being duped. On a side
note, upon realizing the story was satire I changed the title to state
that it was satire and added an update apologizing to my readers and
explaining how I was duped. Any other changes made to the piece or title
after that did not involve consultation with me.”
“We have no beef with people writing satirical articles, and in fact
enjoy satire as much as anyone,” said Mark Potok, the SPLC senior fellow
who wrote Syrmopoulos. “But it says something important about today’s
right-wing media that so many are snookered so easily, and by such
transparently false and ridiculous narratives. The ‘investigative
journalist’ and others who credulously repeated these fairy tales as if
they were actually true really ought to take up a different line of
work, one that doesn’t require such mental effort.”
Sites such as National Report and Freewood Post are symptomatic of
what many observers see as a growing problem on the Internet: the
proliferation of fake news sites that, as the Washington Post put it,
“profit — handsomely, in some cases — from duping gullible Internet
users with deceptively newsy headlines. Their business model is both
simple and devastatingly effective: Employ a couple unscrupulous
freelancers to write fake news that’s surprising or enraging or weird
enough to go viral on Facebook; run display ads against the traffic;
gleefully cash in.”
And it helps, of course, to have gullible “journalists” out there to help them along.
A self-described “sovereign citizen” recently posted a video
of his May arrest in Addison, Texas, by a local police officer,
ostensibly to display police misbehavior as the policeman breaks out his
car’s window and handcuffs him.
What the video actually seems to demonstrate instead, however, is how
delusional the sovereign citizen worldview really is, and how police
are ultimately driven to harsh measures in order to simply enforce
traffic laws in ordinary encounters with these “true believers.”
The video shows the May 2 arrest of 49-year-old Scott Richardson
after being pulled over for allegedly driving 50 mph in a 40 mph zone.
Recorded by Richardson on his cell phone, it shows him arguing with the
Addison officer for over four minutes before the policeman gets out his
baton and breaks the driver’s side window and pulls the man from the
car. At that point, the phone appears to fall onto a seat, recording the
sounds of Richardson being put in handcuffs and the officer who made
the arrest discussing the matter with a fellow officer.
During the course of the interchange, the officer requests the man
show him his driver’s license and proof of insurance a total of 15 times
before he gets out his baton, makes the same request a final time, and
begins breaking the window.
Throughout the exchange, Richardson refuses the request, instead attempting to interrogate the officer.
“Mmkay, let me ask you a question,” Richardson says. “As a man, what
right do you have to stop another man?” When the officer explains that
the state of Texas gives him the authority, Richardson goes on to claim
that speeding is not illegal in the state.
“I’m speeding? Did you realize that in the State of Texas, speeding in and of itself is not illegal?” he says.
Richardson also claims in the video that the 1979 U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Texas,
established that law enforcement officers are not allowed to demand a
citizen's identification unless he was seen committing a felony.
Actually, the case established that officers needed probable cause to
detain and ID a citizen, and speeding qualifies as such.
The officer again asks for his ID, and again warns Richardson that he
is facing arrest for failure to identify himself. Instead, Richardson
keeps trying to question the policeman.
“Mmkay, I’m still having to ask you a question here,” Richardson says.
“That’s not how this works,” the officer responds.
“That is how this works,” Richardson insists.
Eventually, the officer shouts at the man to demand he identify
himself or he will break the window open, drawing his baton and raising
it. When Richardson keeps babbling into his phone, the window is broken
open, the officer opens the door, and the phone falls to the floor. You
can then hear the officers telling the man to stay down and then
applying handcuffs and telling him he is being charged with failure to
identify.
After a few more minutes, the officer can be heard conversing with
another policeman, explaining that the matter was just a simple traffic
stop: “All he had to do was give me his driver’s license! He was giving
me that Republic of Texas crap, saying I had stopped him illegally and I
don’t have the right to detain him.”
“This was for speeding?” the other officer asks.
“Yeah, that’s all it was,” the officer says. “All it was.”
A little later, he muses: “I should have known when I saw the back window. All the stickers. All that stuff.”
A judge’s order requiring the Bureau of Land Management to refrain
from enforcing its regulations while the dispute over the Sugar Pine
Mine in southwestern Oregon is being adjudicated appears to be enough
for the assembled antigovernment “Patriots” who have shown up on the
scene to declare victory and head for home.
“Mission Accomplished” now declares the header over the website of the Oath Keepers of Josephine County, the local organization that had made a national callout the month before
for other Oath Keepers and likeminded antigovernment zealots to show up
to defend the mine from the supposed plans of the BLM to destroy the
mine and kick out its owners. The day before, the headline had read:
“STAND DOWN.”
“Our initial mission has been a success... however this is just the
first of many missions we are still working on,” the website proclaims.
The declarations of victory came with a stay issued on Wednesday
by James Roberts, an administrative law judge with the Interior Land
Board of Appeals, which began handling the case of the Sugar Pine mine
last month when the mine’s owners filed their appeal of the letter of non-compliance that the BLM had issued regarding their operations earlier this year.
Rick Barclay, one of the mine’s owners and their chief spokesman,
called off the effort to protect his mine. “If this is indeed everything
the attorney asked for, this will de-escalate the situation for the
time being," Barclay told the Medford Mail Tribune. "It may mean my guests will be going back to their daily lives."
Even as the miners filed their appeal last month, the BLM had been
clear that it never intended to enforce the regulations until the issue
had been entirely adjudicated, which is its standard operating
procedure. So when Barclay and his attorneys filed their appeal last
month – including the request for a stay of enforcement – the BLM did
not oppose it.
In spite of all that, Barclay has insisted that he has been at risk
of having the BLM burn down his cabin at the mine, which is why he asked
for armed militiamen to help protect it.
"Camp Defiance" participant with rifle, Oregon
On their Facebook pages, the “Patriots” took to gloating, with
Barclay, Idaho III Percent leader Brandon Curtiss, and Eric “EJ” Parker –
one of the III Percent movement followers who came to Oregon, and who
was notorious as one of the supposed sniper-rifle owners who drew down
on federal agents at the Bundy Ranch standoff in Nevada – posting a photo of the three men flipping off their critics.
“From us to you BLM... oh lets not forget the Southern Poverty Law
Center and Routers,” the message read. “Looks like the Judge agreed with
us!! Granted stay of appeal states you have no jurisdiction or right to
terrorize that man!! you'll be getting our bill for the cost of WE THE
PEOPLE mounting an EFFECTIVE resistance to your threats. Thats two for
two facists!! See you next time.”
The result of the national callout was an encampment next to
Interstate 5 the organizers took to calling “Camp Defiance.” Its
camo-clad participants and their multitudes of guns, as well as their
intimidating attitudes and behavior, had created growing concern among
some of the longtime residents and business owners in the area. Some of
them held a press conference to express their concerns, at which some of
the “Patriots” showed up and began heckling them.
Those concerns only escalated, though, when a helicopter flying in
the vicinity of the Sugar Pine mine set off a full-scale alarm among the
“Patriots,” who feared the BLM was about to descend upon them with
troops and SWAT teams and wipe them out with black helicopters. That
turned out to just be another landowner flying a helicopter nearby.
Stewart Rhodes, the national leader and founder of the Oath Keepers, took note of the “victory” in Oregon
as a way to explain why the organization’s main website had been hacked
that day by vandals who posted obscene material under the group’s name.
“Clearly, what we are doing is ticking off our enemies,” Rhodes
wrote. “When you get attacked like this – when you get flack – that is
how you know you are over the target. We won’t let it slow us down.
At the moment, I am at the Sugarpine Mine in Josephine County OR, where
the miners have just attained a victory by securing a judge imposed
stay, that forbids the BLM from entering the property for purposes of
destruction of private property. A victory. No wonder we are being
hacked. Clearly the domestic enemies of the Republic are not happy.”
According to the Mail-Tribune, the Oath Keepers intend to keep up a
prominent presence at this weekend’s Boatnik Parade in Grants Pass,
where it will be marching and passing out pocket editions of the U.S.
Constitution. Rhodes is reportedly planning to be in attendance.
English professor Lee Bebout intended to be thought-provoking when he
offered a course at Arizona State University (ASU) titled “Race Theory
and the Problem of Whiteness.” He had no idea that it would also provoke
the wrath of, first, Fox News viewers, and then, white supremacists,
sparking protests on campus, and yet ultimately drawing the explicit
support of ASU administrators.
English professor Lee Bebout
But that’s what happened after Bebout listed the course for ASU’s
spring semester. Now, having survived a barrage of hate mail and
protests, he can only say he’s relieved the ordeal appears to be over.
“I’ve been a lot less stressed lately,” he told Hatewatch. “There
were moments of anxiety in the beginning of all this, but once I got
support from folks, the anxiety subsided tremendously.”
The problem began a little while after the course was listed, when an ASU student named Lauren Clark wrote a blog post for Campus Reform, a right-wing organization founded by David Horowitz
and Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute. The institute is devoted
to policing American campuses for “the conduct and misconduct of
university administrators, faculty, and students.”
The next day, Clark appeared on Fox News with host Elisabeth Hasselbeck to attack Bebout’s course in more explicit terms.
Clark and Hasselbeck listed the texts — which included such titles as The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, Critical Race Theory, Everyday Language of White Racism, Playing in the Dark, and The Alchemy of Race and Rights
— and Clark said they suggested a trend: “All of these books have a
disturbing trend and that’s pointing to white people as a root cause of
social injustices for this country.”
“Clearly we have a lot of work to go, as a society, in terms of
racial tension,” Clark continued. “But having a class that suggests an
entire race is the problem is inappropriate, wrong, and, frankly,
counterproductive. I wonder what students like myself are taking out of
this course when they learn all about all this negative racial tension
out in society. There’s a lot of negative implications here.”
In reality, the course is a fairly standard academic study of race in modern society. As ASU administrators explained at the time
the controversy erupted: "This course uses literature and rhetoric to
look at how stories shape people's understandings and experiences of
race. It encourages students to examine how people talk about – or avoid
talking about – race in the contemporary United States. This is an
interdisciplinary course, so students will draw on history, literature,
speeches and cultural changes – from scholarly texts to humor. The class
is designed to empower students to confront the difficult and often
thorny issues that surround us today and reach thoughtful conclusions
rather than display gut reactions. A university is an academic
environment where we discuss and debate a wide array of viewpoints."
Within hours of the segment having aired, Bebout and ASU were barraged with hate mail from around the country. Some of the messages included threats; one of special note contained a cryptic religious message suggesting the professor deserved to be murdered.
But that was just the beginning. A short time later, members of a neo-Nazi youth organization called the National Youth Front (NYF), a youth-oriented arm of the white nationalist organization American Freedom Party,
began plastering the ASU campus with fliers featuring Bebout’s portrait
and the stark label “Anti-White.” They also went to Bebout’s
neighborhood and distributed them there.
An NYF spokesman, Angelo John Gage, told Talking Points Memo
that their “Operation Bad Teacher” program targeted Bebout because his
course was “racist.” (Gage himself has a long history of racism and
anti-Semitism, including stints on The White Voice, a white nationalist
website, and Stormfront.) He also claimed none of his members had
threatened Bebout.
"No longer will we have our identity destroyed and our people defamed," declared NYF's website.
"This week, several of National Youth Front's members went to ASU to
raise awareness that we will no longer tolerate this antiwhite agenda.
Over four hundred fliers were delivered over several days to both Lee
Bebout's neighborhood and ASU." A local NYF member who called himself “John Hess” admitted to being the person seen in a video promoting the campaign.
Early in March, when ASU students organized a protest in support of
the embattled professor Bebout’s course, as well as the work of an
associate professor at the school named Robert Poe, “Hess” and a cadre
of like-minded right-wing extremists showed up on the ASU campus
to counter-protest. While Bebout maintained a low profile throughout
the ordeal, Poe went out and confronted his antagonists face to face.
University administrators at the time remained mostly mum in the face of
the controversy, leading some academics from other schools where
similar courses are taught to wonder why Bebout had been “left out to
dry.”
“I haven’t seen the administration come to his defense in the way
that I would expect any university to do when an employee and his family
are facing death threats,” Purdue University professor Bill Mullen told TPM.
But recently, the ASU administration has emerged from its shell to
offer a robust defense – and expressions of support – for Bebout and the
course.
ASU President Michael Crow told the student paper, the State Press,
that he and a vice provost both examined the course carefully and found
that it was well within the framework the school hoped to offer
academically.
“[The] course looked like a pretty good critical thinking course to
me,” Crow said. “It looked like it was doing what it was supposed to do,
which is to deal with a complex subject through literature and get
students interested in talking and writing and thinking about that
complex subject.”
ASU administrator James Rund co-authored a letter that appeared in The Arizona Republic
condemning recent manifestations of racist hate groups: “There have
been a series of hate speech incidents over recent weeks in Tempe and
Mesa, orchestrated by Neo-Nazi groups and hate preachers. Some of the
incidents included anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT and anti-Muslim
speech and intimidation. This behavior and these sentiments do not
reflect the values of our community.”
Crow also made note of these outside influences: “They don’t
represent our values; they don’t represent the way we think," he said.
"So we can ask them to stop, but they don’t have to.”
Bebout said the community support he’s received has been tremendous.
“It’s been really amazing,” he said. “Obviously people at ASU have been
solid, but people from all over the country (and other countries) who do
this sort of work or see a value in it have reached out as well.”
Bebout told Hatewatch that he would be offering the course again in
the future, likely in Spring 2016, with some adjustments: “I’ll be
tweaking the syllabus a bit now that I had a chance to give it a run
through with undergraduates.”
He noted that many observers of the interaction between mainstream
conservatism and far-right extremism have focused on how white
supremacists “code and frame their rhetoric in ways that make them
acceptable to mainstream news sources.”
“My situation seems to show that the inverse is also true,” Bebout
noted. “Fox News, Campus Reform, and other organizations give cover and
provide ‘research’ and ‘facts’ for white supremacist groups.”
Bebout explained that he and a graduate student had been carefully
following white supremacist/nationalist sites even before the
controversy erupted, and particularly afterward.
“Since my class came under the attention of white supremacists, I
noticed that NYF and other groups regularly post stories from Fox News
and Campus Reform as ‘proof’ for their ideology,” he said. “While these
outlets like Fox News and Campus Reform certainly use different rhetoric
than National Youth Front, it would be erroneous to say that they are
completely separate discursively or ideologically (one being colorblind
and the other being explicitly racist). Indeed, I am fascinated with how
much they share in common in terms of rhetoric and ideology.”
It wasn’t exactly a black helicopter, but it was close enough to
spook the Oath Keepers keeping watch on the Sugar Pine Mine in southern
Oregon.
Someone flew a private helicopter over a tract of land near the mine north of Grants Pass last week and set off a panic among the assembled “Patriots”
– Oath Keepers, so-called “III Percenters,” and various other
militiamen. And somehow, in militialand, this translated into a
certainty that not one, but three helicopters were circling the mine and
the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was bringing in “troops.”
The militia gathered issued a coded call to arms, bringing the entire
collection of would-be defenders rushing to the armed encampment’s
staging area near the town of Merlin, bristling with guns and ready for
action.
“THIS IS NOT A DRILL. CODE WORDS HAVE JUST BEEN GIVEN THAT OR MINE IS
IN DISTRESS. ANY PATRIOTS IN THE AREA. ROLL OUT. ANYONE WHO CAN GO
BETTER” read the callout on Facebook.
But according to Josephine County Sheriff Dave Daniel, it was all a false alarm.
The helicopter did not belong to the BLM or any government agency, but
instead was privately owned. It was landing on a mountain far from the
Sugar Pine Mine.
Daniel told the Grants Pass Daily Courier that Oath Keepers
leader Joseph Rice personally checked on the reports about the supposed
three helicopters circling the mine and found nothing to them. Rice told
his compatriots on the ground to “stand down.”
The armed encampment is already something of an exercise in
groundless paranoia. The collection of “Patriots” are there because they
believe they need to protect the mine’s owners – Rick Barclay and
George Baskes – from having their property destroyed by the BLM while
the question of the surface rights to the mine are being adjudicated. A
nationwide callout went out among Oath Keepers two weeks ago, on the
anniversary of the Bundy Ranch standoff, bringing a collection of
militiamen from around the country to the little Oregon town of Merlin.
However, while the BLM has in fact burned down old mining cabins in
the region after it has obtained a court order enabling it to do so,
there is no record of it having done so while the issue was still in
court.
Yet despite being in the midst of a lengthy due process over their mining rights, the mine owners insist
they need the Oath Keepers’ presence to keep the BLM from coming in and
destroying their property while they are in court. The Oath Keepers in
turn proclaim that they are there to protect the miners’ “Fifth
Amendment rights to due process” from being violated. The BLM, for its
part, denies it has any intention on attempting to remove the miners
from their claim while the matter is in court.
The paranoia at the camp has been ratcheting up steadily. A series of bulletins issued from the camp and published at a Patriot website have focused on the militiamen’s beliefs that the BLM had sent in a squad of mercenaries who were preparing to wipe them out.
The security operation underway at the Sugar Pine Mine, outside of
Grants Pass, Oregon has gone from a simple site security operation to
possibly a defensive detail. The reason stated for the change to the
operation comes from the confirmation that BLM brought in private, armed
military contractors and set up a 24 hour surveillance team to openly
watch the command center located next to Interstate 5 in Merlin, Oregon.
The important distinction to make is that these people are not law
enforcement officers but private contractors. Hired guns to put it quite
simply. Oath Keepers has not escalated any activity so the question
must be asked, why did BLM bring in these people if they do not intend
to use the resources? Why are they in Grants Pass, Oregon? The situation
has gone from a peaceful resistance to one that potentially becomes
volatile in nature.
Later, the reports calmed down somewhat: “Much speculation has been
undertaken regarding the scope and purpose of these security
contractors. At this time, the Oath Keepers Josephine County wishes to
express no opinion on the matter of the purpose of the armed
contractors. They are under observation and no action is being taken
beyond that.”
The incident with the helicopter followed shortly.
Local residents have already held a press conference asking for the armed encampment to disband and go home because of the fearfulness they bring to their community.
Sheriff Daniel – who is himself a member in good standing of Richard Mack’s Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which is allied with the Oath Keepers – told the Courier that
the episode is “exactly the type of incident he’s been fearing ever
since Oath Keepers issued a national callout earlier this month.”
“I want everybody to understand that things like this are dangerous,”
he said, adding, “You never know what could happen in an accident.”
Perturbed by the influx of armed militiamen bristling with guns and angry rhetoric into their normally quiet little town, residents of rural Josephine County, Oregon, are fighting back,
asking the assorted “Oath Keepers” and other “Patriots” who have
arrived recently to ostensibly defend a local miner to pack their bags
and leave.
As if to prove their point, a number of Oath Keepers showed up on the
scene last week and heckled local residents, intimidating them into
retreating through the courthouse where they had stood to hold a news
conference on Friday.
The community residents – who included a sporting-goods business
owner, a former dean at the local community college, and several local
church leaders, each of whom read a prepared statement – spoke to
reporters outside the Josephine County Courthouse in Grants Pass.
“Certainly the miners are entitled to get their fair day in court and
not have anything done to them until after the legal process, but they
don’t need gun toting people coming around, threatening the whole
community,” said Jerry Reid, a former dean of Rogue Community College.
The news conference, held in response to the rally organized by the mine’s supporters outside Bureau of Land Management offices
in nearby Medford on Thursday, was organized by a local man named Alex
Budd, who told Hatewatch he simply was concerned about what he was
observing in the community and on the conspiracy theory corners of the
Internet, where the hopes of another Bundy Ranch-style armed standoff
run high.
“I want to acknowledge that it takes courage to be here today,” Budd
said in introductory remarks to the press. “I think we all know that
here in Josephine County, we’re very diverse folks, and you can find
people of just about every stripe. One thing I think we all agree on is
that we should not be afraid or intimidated within our own communities
to speak to our neighbors.
“But that’s where we find ourselves today. And that in itself tells you that what’s happening here is wrong.”
“Over the last few years, I’ve gotten more and more questions from my
customers about the safety of coming to Josephine County to recreate,”
sporting goods business owners Dave Strahan said, describing how his
work required him to travel the region widely. What he called the
presence of “nutty, tough-acting, gun-toting thugs” is driving away
visitors by reinforcing the perception that southwestern Oregon is a
dangerous place.
Joseph Rice, coordinator of the county’s Oath Keepers chapter and one
of the leaders of the Patriot encampment outside of Grants Pass, near
the road leading to the disputed mine, began heckling the speakers as
they took questions from reporters.
“Have any of you ever talked to the miners?” he demanded to know.
When Strahan retorted: “I’m not here to answer your questions, Joseph,”
Rice nonetheless persisted. “If I understand correctly, you’ve never
spoken to the miners?”
According to Budd, at that point others in the small crowd joined in. He said that Brandon Curtiss
of the local III Percent chapter “came up to me right afterwards with
Joseph Rice and was filming me on his cell phone, and they were trying
to heckle.” He said another local Patriot started ranting at him, at
which point Budd and the rest of the group retreated back through the
courthouse, because “we didn’t want to let it turn into a shouting
match.” He said another Patriot kept sticking a camera into his face as
he tried to conduct an interview with a local TV reporter.
“It was blatantly clear they were there to try and intimidate
people,” Budd said. “They were shouting that we were wrong and sticking
cameras in the faces of community members to record them. It was
definitely meant to be intimidating; our group went back inside the
courthouse and everyone left out a back door because they didn’t want to
have to walk through them again.”
Afterwards, Rice and his fellow Oath Keepers held court with the press.
“These groups coming in or not pushing any national agenda, the mining
owners came directly to us and asked for assistance. Here’s the fact of
the reality: if the BLM was following constitutional due process this
never would have occurred,” Rice told reporters.
Former Josephine County Sheriff Gil Gilbertson – a longtime leading
member of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association,
the “Patriot” law-officers group led by former Sheriff Richard Mack –
was among the faces in the crowd. He told reporters he had made several
trips to the mine.
“Nobody’s talking about violence. They’re not here for violence.
They’re here to make a point and that point is the federal government
has overstepped some of its bounds,” said Gilbertson.
At the center of the dispute is the Sugar Pine Mine, whose owners – Rick Barclay and George Backes – received in March a “letter of noncompliance”
from the BLM informing them they needed get their operation into
compliance with federal regulations for mining on federal land. The
letter gave the owners three options: to cease operations and clean up
and leave; to bring their operation into compliance; or to file an
appeal of the BLM’s finding with either its regional chief or with a
three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit of Appeals.
The mine’s owners filed the paperwork for the latter option on
Wednesday, and then on Thursday told the assembled supporters and the
press that they were being denied their rights to due process. Barclay
in particular has been adamant in claiming that the BLM would come in
and remove his equipment and destroy his cabin even while the process
was being adjudicated.
“Just because I turned in my paperwork doesn’t mean the BLM won’t come up there tomorrow and set everything on fire,” he told Hatewatch.
Mary Emerick, the Josephine County Oath Keepers’ spokeswoman, issued a statement
decrying the press conference: “We are not seeing armed men with long
guns in our city. We are not bringing demonstrators into the city. In
fact, we carefully screen our volunteers. We have asked that if you come
with a different agenda or to stir up trouble, DO NOT COME, we do not
want you. We are keeping the peace. We are protecting the mine from a
specific threat and we are assuring that due process takes place.”
In the meantime, the “III Percenters” from Idaho responded to the conference by compiling a video of support from locals who say they are happy the Oath Keepers are present.
Indeed, southern Oregon has been a hotbed of “Patriot” organizing for many years, dating back to the Klamath water dispute of 2001, and more recently of Oath Keepers-based organizing.
If the Oath Keepers follow the mine owners’ wishes and keep up their
encampment until the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hears his case – an
event likely to occur more than a year from now – then they will be
there a good long time.
A collection of about 50 antigovernment “Patriots” gathered Thursday in the
parking lot of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) office in Medford,
OR, to protest what they believe was the federal government’s
“tyrannical” treatment of miners in the region.
But the organizers of the affair were adamant they were uninterested
in a standoff with federal authorities similar to the confrontation
between BLM agents and hundreds of heavily armed “Patriots” a year ago
at Cliven Bundy’s ranch in Nevada. All they wanted, organizers claimed,
was to defend ordinary citizens from federal abuses.
Joseph Rice
“You have untrained people, uneducated people, throwing around their
weight, abusing people who are trying to earn a living, and they think
it’s OK,” Joseph Rice, coordinator for the Josephine County chapter of
Oath Keepers, told about 50 people gathered. “I took an oath to uphold
the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic, and a domestic
enemy is anyone who will abuse someone’s rights within that
Constitution.”
Rice added, “Today it is the BLM, because they did not allow the due
process to occur. They need to seriously look at their administrative
process and procedures and address that. It’s a cultural issue. We saw
it a year ago. Here we are again today. It doesn’t seem to be willing to
change or improve that.”
At issue is a dispute between the BLM and the owners of the Sugar
Pine Mine near Merlin, Ore., who were given a “letter of noncompliance”
last spring telling them they either needed to clear out of the mine
within 60 days or file an appeal of the ruling that they were not in
compliance with BLM mining regulations.
What followed was a nationwide callout to defend a couple of miners
in imminent danger of having their constitutional right to due process
destroyed by the BLM, according to the local chapter of the Oath Keepers
that made the plea. And they called it a “security operation” because
owner Rick Barclay insisted that the BLM was notorious for burning down
miners’ cabins in the backwoods, and he believes they would have
destroyed his mine if he had not called for help.
BLM spokesman Jim Whittington told Hatewatch that these were absurdly
groundless fears. “The idea that we would go in on Friday and wipe
everything off the claim is just not true,” he said. “It has no basis in
reality.”
There were few guns on display, and no threats or intimidation. A
large group of black-clad “III Percent” movement followers from Idaho
made their presence known, but the crowd and the speakers remained
relatively sedate. Even with such sedate activists, the BLM and the U.S.
Forest Service closed their joint offices as a precautionary measure.
Only five people spoke, including both of the mine owners and two local
Oath Keepers. Within an hour, everyone was gone.
Rick Barclay
The issue persists, however. The miners and the “Patriots” insist the
BLM’s issuance of a letter of non-compliance amounts to a denial of due
process, and the Oath Keepers have insisted their presence is about
“defending the Fifth Amendment rights” of the miners.
Rick Barclay, one of the mine owners, told Hatewatch that the BLM had
violated his due process in the letter. “They short-circuited the due
process by telling me I have to remove my equipment before I ever even
get a hearing,” he said.
However, the letter of noncompliance is clear that removal of the
cabin and equipment are only among the mine owners’ three options, and
says at the end: “If you do not agree and are adversely affected by this
decision you may ask for a review by the State Director … or you may
appeal to the Interior Board of Land Appeals.”
Barclay filed paperwork in his appeals process on Wednesday, but
indicated that he hoped the Oath Keepers would stay on site until he
actually has a hearing. “After I get my day in court and get a stay,
then they will go home,” he said. “Just because I turned in my paperwork
doesn’t mean the BLM won’t come up there tomorrow and set everything on
fire.”
What began as a paper dispute over the language in a claim for an old
gold mine in the hills of southwestern Oregon has lurched into what the antigovernment “Patriots” arriving on scene seemingly hope will be an armed confrontation with federal authorities.
Most of those arriving at the scene of the dispute over the Sugar
Pine Mine near tiny Merlin, Ore., and nearby towns such as Grants Pass
and Medford, believe they are engaging in a stand against a tyrannical
federal government and the Bureau of Land Management – the second
chapter in a fight that began a year ago with the Bundy Ranch standoff.
But as the mine owners now are stressing
to the militia members and antigovernment activists pouring into the
valley after heeding the call: “This is NOT a standoff with BLM. We are
NOT promoting any confrontation with BLM. This is a security operation
for the protection of Constitutional Rights.”
“If you are on a fringe element, and you’re here to protest, or
provoke a reaction with the federal government, I don’t want you here,”
said Joseph Rice, the “security coordinator” for the Josephine County
chapter of the Oath Keepers, in a YouTube video on the Oath Keepers
site. “Let me repeat that: If you’re here to protest and to provoke a
reaction with the federal government, I do not need you.”
Since the people arriving in Oregon are apparently ready for action,
and there isn’t any action on the horizon other than in a courtroom or
at an administrative hearing, they’re taking matters into their own
hands.
Today, they’re planning a “Sugar Pine Mine Support Rally” outside the combined offices of the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service in Medford. Organizer Kerby Jackson urged all supporters who couldn’t attend to hold protests outside their local BLM offices.
“We are calling on all miners, loggers, farmers/ranchers and freedom
lovers everywhere who are tired of government abuse to tell the BLM that
the people of this country that they are sick to death of the way that
they have been conducting themselves,” he wrote on Facebook.
Jackson is one of the ringleaders of a group at the center of the
dispute, which includes the mine’s co-owners, Rick Barclay and George
Backes, who both have expressed affinities for the Oath Keepers’
“constitutionalist” beliefs. They and the Josephine County chapter of
the Oath Keepers last week sent out a nationwide plea for help in protecting the mine from the BLM.
Coming the same week as the one-year anniversary of the Bundy Ranch standoff, the story was widely circulated by websites as Alex Jones’ InfoWars and the similarly conspiracy theorist website NextNewsNetwork,
whose reporter interviewed Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes about
the scene in Oregon. “Our goal is to make sure the miners have their day
in court and due process,” Rhodes said.
And Oath Keepers are coming come en masse to ensure that happens.
Among those who have come to the mine is Arizona militiaman Blaine Cooper, who made a video widely seen on YouTube urging Patriots to make their way to Oregon.
They’re calling it a “security operation” largely because owner Rick
Barclay insists that the BLM is notorious for burning down miners’
cabins in the backwoods, and he believes they’d have destroyed his mine
if he had not called for help. Cooper was last seen leading a group of anti-Obama protesters outside the White House, including several who demanded the president be hung.
So far, the mine’s owners have seemed to welcome support from the antigovernment movement.
“I’m absolutely positive the BLM has not destroyed my property
because it has been protected, as have my rights, by a group of folks,”
Barclay said in a video posted on the Josephine County Oath Keepers
site. “They came at my request. I requested their presence. I still
request their presence, until such time as I achieve my due process.”
BLM employees are somewhat flabbergasted that a dispute over unfiled
paperwork could somehow erupt into a situation in which weapons are now
being brandished.
“From our perspective, it’s been pretty much the same thing we always
do,” BLM spokesman Jim Whittington said. “This is not a process that is
new to us. We have hundreds of claims down here, and it’s not uncommon
for us to come across operations that are not in compliance or don’t
have documentation. So it’s kind of a shock to have this blow up like
this.”
What the Oath Keepers will do now is anyone’s guess, considering that
guards on the dirt road leading up to the staging area are reportedly
turning away anyone without specific permission from the Oath Keepers.
The Sugar Pine Mine is an old claim dating, its owners say, to 1865.
It is located on land administered by the BLM, though Barclay and his
peers claim, much like Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy did, that federal
jurisdiction doesn’t extend to their claim. Also like Bundy, Barclay
claims that his title to the mine preceded Oregon and federal
jurisdictions and that federal officials hadn’t sent them proof that the
BLM had obtained surface rights to the mining claim.
Whiting explained that the owners’ complaints about nonresponses to
document requests were a matter of impatience: “They filed a bunch of
FOIAs and we’re like any government agency that’s inundated with FOIAs,
it’s just the nature of the business. We answered two last week, two
this week, and another one is coming next week.”
As for the mine owners’ fears that BLM would destroy their property,
Whittington said it’s just a groundless charge. “The idea that we would
go in on Friday and wipe everything off the claim is just not true,” he
said. “It has no basis in reality.”
He reminded Hatewatch: “These are public lands. The road going
through their claim is a public road. Even if they did have surface
rights, BLM could still come in there and inspect the mining claim to
make sure they were following the law.”
Whittington said that so far, BLM employees in the field haven’t had
any ugly incidents. However, office workers manning their phones in the
past week have had to deal with a barrage of threats from anonymous
callers angered after reading the Internet accounts from Oath Keepers
and other “Patriots.”
“We take threats to BLM employees and other federal employees
seriously, and we will investigate those threats. As long as those
threats are under investigation, then we are not going to comment on the
particulars of those threats. There have been threats, but they have
all been by phone,” Whiting said.
In the meantime, rumors are beginning to circulate of dissension
within the ranks of the gathered Oath Keepers – a familiar scenario that
also manifested itself at the Bundy Ranch after a few weeks of forced
togetherness among the gathered “Patriots” there, who eventually broke apart amid acrimony and pointed guns.
As the Thursday event approached, even Rick Barclay was sounding eager for his would-be defenders to leave.
In an interview with the Medford Mail-Tribune,
he denounced the scene near his mine: “What you’re seeing is mostly a
spectacle caused by social media and ‘keyboard commandos’ whooping it
up.” He seemed eager to draw a curtain on the drama.
“As soon as I get my court arrangements made, the Oath Keepers are leaving,” he said. “It’s OK. It’s going to be OK.”
Chris Simcox during an earlier hearing in his child-molestation trial
Nobody in the suburban Phoenix neighborhood knew who Chris Simcox was, at least not by the
Minuteman movement persona he had cultivated on television only a few short
years before. As far as Michelle Lynch knew, he was just the dad who would hang
out and watch the kids play outside, like involved dads do
“I had met him just a few times,” she recalled in an interview,
describing the period in early 2013 when they lived in the same suburban
Phoenix apartment complex. “He was always outside the apartments that we lived
in. There were a lot of families like that, especially around 4:30, 5 o’clock,
all the families would come outside and the kids would all play. There was
always a ton of children outside, and he was always outside with his kids.
“I remember once he said to me, ‘You know, my motto is, if
there’s light outside, there’s no reason to be inside.’ … And I thought, ‘Oh,
you know, he’s an involved father,’ but that didn’t last long.
“All of a sudden they were always inside. And you know, he had kid stuff on his
back porch, and my daughter liked going over there because they could paint and
stuff.” The girls enjoyed each other’s company. There were sleepovers. There
was candy.
That all culminated – after months of manipulation of her
daughter – with the then-5-year-old girl telling her mother about how Simcox
had molested her one night in February. It happened as they were going to bed
together one night in May – three months later.
Even after she informed police and they began investigating Simcox, the
manipulation continued.
After his
arrest in July 2013, his ability to toy with her daughter changed
dramatically, but not entirely: Simcox has delayed the trial multiple times,
and eventually asserted
and obtained his right to represent himself in court, raising the specter of
the alleged perpetrator cross-examining his victim on the witness stand.
To Michelle Lynch, that was the final manipulation, and a
chance for Simcox to traumatize her daughter a second time.
And until the Arizona
Supreme Court intervened last week, that prospect very nearly became a
reality after both the trial judge and an appeals-court panel decided to let
the trial proceed with Simcox having the right to cross-examine all witnesses,
including a third young girl who is expected to testify about his similar
attempts to abuse her.
Meg Garvin
“This is just crazy,” says victim’s rights expert Meg Garvin,
executive director of the National Crime Victim Law Institute. “We shouldn’t
ask the victims that much, and we don’t need to ask them that much. Because you
can balance these easily.
“I actually don’t think this is as hard as some courts are making it,” Garvin
explained in an interview. “The individual’s right to self-representation has
well been acknowledged to be limited. You can put reasonable limits in place.
And when those limits are necessary to protect someone else’s constitutional
rights, particularly a state constitutional right, which is the one at issue
here – although at other times it can be a federal constitutional right to
privacy, depending on the type of question being asked – then the answer should
be pretty straightforward: have a standby counsel ask the questions.”
Daphne Young of Childhelp, an Arizona nonprofit that advocates for abused and
neglected children, said that permitting such a situation would be a gross
mistake.
“When a potential predator has the opportunity to
cross-examine a child victim of sexual abuse, there’s a great risk for
intimidation, manipulation and re-victimizing of that young victim,” Young
told KPHO-TV. “When you consider all the verbal and non-verbal cues that a
predator uses to groom a young victim, there’s a lot that can happen under the
nose of the judges and even experts in the field because of the intimate
relationship that abusers use to create silence.”
The trial judge in the case, Superior Court Judge Jose
Padilla, is no stranger to controversy. In
2009, he came under harsh criticism for having refused to allow a Phoenix
woman named Dawn Axsom to move herself and her son out of state to avoid
violence that she feared at the hands of her ex-boyfriend, who a short while
later shot and killed both Axsom and her mother before killing himself.
Michelle Lynch said that her greatest concern in all this is
that, if Simcox gets his way, he’ll traumatize her daughter all over again. She
described
to Hatewatch how her now-7-year-old girl broke down in hysterics when
informed recently that Simcox might be asking her questions directly.
“I am concerned that the system will make my daughter a
victim again,” she said. “There’s no reason for this to be happening. If there
is this consensus as to it not being appropriate, I don’t understand why it is
happening.”
She looks back on the situation now with a mother’s guilt,
knowing there were abundant signals that something was amiss. “I felt bad
because I trusted him,” she said. “There was this candy thing. The kids have
all mentioned candy, which was how he lured them.
“I remember one day the doorbell rang and my son answered
the door, and Chris and his daughter were standing at the door, and Chris
handed my son a two- or three-pound bag of Skittles, and told my son to give it
to my daughter for being a good girl. And at the time I couldn’t understand why
someone would give that much candy to a child. It didn’t even register.”
That happened sometime after the February molestation, but
before Lynch finally learned in May from her daughter that Simcox had molested
her. “It had been happening for a couple months,” she said.
Then came what seemed like an interminable period between
her report to police and Simcox’s arrest. “When I told police, and they were
investigating him for over a month, my daughter and I were dodging him,” she
said. “I mean, he would walk by our house and we wouldn’t go outside. The
minute we got home we would run up our stairs and close the door.
“His daughter gave mine this handmade birthday invitation.
And I told [my daughter] she couldn’t go, and she wanted to write a letter. I
actually have the letter she wrote. She responded with, ‘I’m sorry, [Girl 2], I
can’t go to your party because your dad is doing disgusting things to me.’ ”
No one in the neighborhood seemed to have any idea that the
person they were dealing with was Chris Simcox, the onetime nationally famous
leader of the “Minuteman” nativist border-watch movement. As
early as 2005, Simcox’s erratic behavior – including allegations of an
attempt to molest another ofhis
daughters – had been explored in detail by the SPLC. Even as late as 2010, he
had managed to remain in public view, running
briefly for the U.S. Senate in Arizona.
Yet in the little neighborhood where he moved after
divorcing his third wife, Simcox was just another guy. It never crossed Lynch’s
radar, at least not until she reported him to police, that he was someone quite
well-known.
“My older [teenaged] son, once he looked up who this guy
was, after the Scottsdale police department told me who he was, my son started
sleeping with a knife under his pillow,” Lynch recalled.
Once Lynch realized who he was, though, more of the pieces
fell in place. “Those personalities like Chris have the narcissistic traits,
and that’s the first thing I think of when it comes to him, you know,” she
said.
“I really feel like because of the kind of person he is, I
think he’s trying to make a comeback to being a nationally known person again.
Especially with representing himself and all that. In all honesty, he’s going
to make a mockery of himself. Because once people start to hear what he is
going to throw out there as his evidence – it’s absolutely ridiculous.” Indeed,
Simcox
has hinted that he plans to present a “grand conspiracy” defense predicated
on the idea that he is being persecuted by nefarious forces.
Seeing justice served on Simcox is only part of her intent,
though. Her chief focus is seeing that her daughter is treated the right way by
the justice system. As she explained to Judge Padilla in a letter pleading to
keep Simcox from questioning her daughter directly on the stand:
I understand that within the justice system, all accused have specific rights
that officials do their best to uphold so to be fair and maintain the integrity
of the Constitution, but it is my hope that my daughter’s rights are also taken
into consideration and [she] is given the opportunity to progress and not
regress due to the ensuring of one individual’s rights over another.
Meg Garvin says that these kinds of conflicts in pro se cases happen on “a not-infrequent basis.” She says that
while it’s rare, there have been cases where accused perpetrators directly
cross-examined their ostensible victims. But she insists that there’s no reason
for that to happen.
“This isn’t that complicated. To ensure that the defendant’s
rights, the real test is if he is directing his representation, and he would
still be able to direct the questions,” Garvin said. “The victim would not have
to be subjected to a very intrusive, invasive and harassing moment where the
perpetrator is essentially assaulting again.”
Yet even though it seems simple, instances such as this one
happen all too often in the American legal system, Garvin says. “Courts
routinely defer to defendants’ rights without doing an appropriate calculus of
the victims’ rights,” she said.
Michelle Lynch believes there’s a real cost to that. “There’s a lot of people
out there that don’t even pursue stuff like this because they’re frustrated with
the criminal-justice system,” she said. “And I get it. I fully understand, now
that I’ve been through this process, why people would just give up and not do
anything about it. But I’m a very strong-willed person.”
Back when I was putting together a piece for Seattle magazine about the threats posed by increased shipping in orcas' territory to the endangered Southern Resident population -- particularly the lethal specter of increased oil traffic -- I noted that one of the secondary threats posed by these large ships (including, possibly, coal ships coming from Cherry Point, north of Bellingham) is the terrific amount of racket they put up:
Along the western shore of San Juan Island, across Haro Strait, the view
that most people observe when the killer whales are present is
generally a placid one: The only noises are the sounds of the currents
rushing, the “koosh” of the whales as they surface and blow plumes into
the air—although at times, the calm is broken by the engines of the
boats, sometimes 30 vessels at a time, that come crowding around the
whales to get a close look at them. If there are large ships in view,
they are mostly distant and seem almost silent as they glide past.
But
drop a hydrophone into those same waters and the picture changes
dramatically. There will be whales, all talking in their distinct
Southern Resident dialect to each other and echolocating for fish. There
will be the whale-watch boats, whose engines are mostly short-lived
whines and low-level thrums. And then there will be large cargo ships.
Because sound travels so well in water, a ship or a orca can be heard
across great distances. The underwater sound of a loud ship passing a
mile or two away produces a sound that compares to the sound a chainsaw
might make in the air.
Val Veirs, a semi-retired physics
professor, listens to all this racket, and monitors and records it with
an array of hydrophones he has set up off his waterfront home on the
west side of San Juan Island. What he and his fellow scientists have
found is that killer whales will more often than not increase the volume
of their vocalizations when there is higher background noise from boats
and ships around them. Researchers at NOAA Fisheries are still studying
whether whales fall completely silent because noisy ships are around.
But,
according to Veirs, it’s inevitable that these noise
levels—particularly the high-frequency component of ship noise—are going
to affect their abilities to communicate and hunt, both of which are
closely connected to sound. Vocalizations not only appear to play a role
in the social component of their salmon-hunting behavior, the orcas
also rely directly on echolocation.
Veirs says the ship-noise
potential for all this traffic worries him when it comes to the whales.
“Right now, about 60 percent of the time, there’s no ship within hearing
range,” he says. “But if you put a couple thousand more ships per year
in there, it seems to me you’ll end up with about 30 percent of the
time...that the whales are able to communicate without interference from
vessel noise.”
At the time I put the piece together, the conventional wisdom among whale scientists (including those at NOAA/NMFS, who I queried regarding the issue) was that whale-watching tour boats were
a bigger problem for whales, because the frequencies of noise they
created were more in the zone used by orcas and dolphins, whereas big
ships created lower-frequency noise that was less likely to interfere. Now, there is further research to corroborate Veirs' views:
Marla Holt, a research biologist with NOAA's Northwest Fisheries Science Center, has found that loud boat noise forces endangered orcas to raise the volume of their calls.
But the question, Holt says, is "so what? What are the biological consequences of them doing this?”
To
answer that question, Holt and her NOAA colleague, Dawn Noren, a
research fishery biologist, studied captive bottlenose dolphins.
They
had the dolphin swim into a floating plastic helmet device and whistle
at a normal level for two minutes. Then they rewarded the dolphin with
fish. The device measured how much oxygen the dolphin used to accomplish
that task.
Holt and Noren found that when the dolphin was whistling harder and louder its metabolic rate rose by up to 80 percent above normal resting levels.
Just
like with humans, when marine mammals' metabolism goes up, they burn
more calories. Dawn Noren calculates that a dolphin making the louder
call for two minutes would burn the same amount of calories it would get
from eating half of a small fish.
These studies mainly looked at vocalizations, which appear to be the main way that orcas communicate. But even more important is the effect on their echolocation sense, which is fundamental to their ability to hunt prey. As Veirs explained it to me, some of this is just the sheer physics involved: When the volume of noise is that high, the amount of loss in the signal return from an echolocation click can be enough to render their ability to see underwater almost useless.
The studies also did not distinguish between noise from whale-watching boats and from large freighters. But what Veirs told me was that while the whale-boat noise could be intense, and it made a significant contribution to the problem, the biggest and most constant contributor to background noise, by far, was large shipping vessels.
My own experience corroborated what Val Veirs was saying. I own a hydrophone (thank you, Cetacean Research Technology) that I take kayaking with me, and I drop it in whenever whales are present (and sometimes even when they are not, just to see if I can catch any sound of them from a distance), and I've been using it for a number of years. That experience has made it clear to me that
large vessel noise is far, far more likely to disrupt and disturb orca
communication. After awhile you have to take the headphones off for some ships because
they throw up such a racket.
[You don't need to go out in a kayak to experience this for yourself. You can listen to the stationary hydrophones at Veirs' observatory overlooking Haro Strait at the Orcasound link here -- or to the Lime Kiln Lighthouse hydrophone at the same website. Even if it's quiet when you start it up, leave it on for awhile and a ship will come by,]
It seemed obvious to me that the sheer
volume issue alone was going to interfere with orcas' abilities to get
clear signals back from their echolocation clicks. The volume of
large-vessel noise was much more intense, and much, much more sustained.
And indeed, I have heard orcas shut up when big ships were present, and
start vocalizing again when their noise went away. An example of this occurred the same summer I was out gathering some of the material for the Seattle article, and I described it there:
In calm seas off the west side of San Juan Island, my kayak bobs gently
in a kelp bed. In the water about a quarter-mile distance from me, orcas
mill and frolic, most likely hunting their favorite chinook salmon. I
drop my hydrophone (an underwater microphone) into the water to listen
to their distinct calls.
A low clanging—whang, whang, whang—fills
my headphones. It is the steady and overpowering sound of a cargo ship,
one of the regular features of underwater life in the San Juan Islands’
Haro Strait.
At first, a quick scan of the horizon doesn’t
reveal the source of the noise. Finally, I spot it: A lone log-bearing
ship heads out to the open sea around the very southern tip of Vancouver
Island. Whang, whang, whang. It is at least nine miles away.
Finally,
the ship rounds the bend, and the sea quiets for just a moment before
the orcas’ distinct whistles, grunts and rat-a-tat-tat-tats fill the
water. These are J pod whales from the Salish Sea’s famous and
endangered Southern Resident orcas, and they are making the well-known
calls known as “S1.”
Seemingly energized, the whales head toward
my kelp bed and surround it, chatting loudly and rolling in the kelp.
It crackles and pops underwater as the orcas rip up fronds while
“kelping” themselves, something the Southern Residents are fond of
doing, apparently for the massaging effect.
I recorded the whole event, which I've embedded below. This is the whole 24-minute recording. Now, I recommend using this file non-passively: trust me, you will want to skip over the clanging ship noise, which dominates the first five minutes. But I've included it here so you can get a sense of what I'm talking about regarding the incessant and pervasive quality of the noise from big ships. Once you get a taste of that, skip forward to about the 5:00 mark and you'll hear the orcas -- which had been milling off a rocky point, well within my view but not uttering a peep the whole time -- chirp up as soon as the ship noise fades away.
One of the fun things about this encounter was that I was indeed in a kelp bed, so when the orcas came by, I was well out of their way (you can hear me making some ungodly noise in a few spots on the recording as I repositioned myself into the middle of the kelp). What I also didn't realize is the amount of tearing and breaking of the kelp fronds that occurs when orcas "kelp" themselves, as they were doing here. That's all the crackling and popping you hear amid the vocalizations.
Here's a somewhat more pleasant version, with the extraneous ship noise and some of the silent spaces and paddling/repositioning noises edited out. This is the one you want to just hit "play" on:
The larger and more significant takeaway from this is that scientists should probably take a longer look at the effects of large ship noise, and begin thinking about ways to mediate that. Considering the amount of money that we're seeing go up and down Haro Strait, we have to know that making any changes there is going to be an uphill battle. But it may prove to be an important component of recovering this endangered population.
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