Biden nominates a domestic terrorist for head of the Bureau of Land Management.
https://andmagazine.com/talk/2021/0...nomination-to-head-bureau-of-land-management/
There has been a significant amount of coverage recently of Joe Biden’s nominee to serve as the head of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Tracy Stone-Manning was granted legal immunity back in 1993 for her testimony that she retyped and mailed an anonymous letter to the U.S. Forest Service on behalf of a friend, John P. Blount. The letter warned the Forest Service that trees in an area about to be logged had been spiked, meaning heavy metal spikes had been driven into the trees to deter logging.
Per the usual highly partisan coverage, the story is cast as follows. Ms. Stone-Manning made an innocent mistake in allowing herself to be used in this way. She is very sorry. She was never herself a bad actor. There is nothing to see here but an isolated youthful indiscretion.
As you might guess, all of this is at very best highly misleading and conceals a number of much more disturbing truths.
At the time Ms. Stone-Manning typed the letter in question Ms. Stone-Manning was, in fact, living with Mr. Blount. They were both members of a group called Earth First. Earth First was officially designated a terrorist group by the FBI. Ms. Stone-Manning was not only part of the group; she was the
editor of one of its publications.
Before mailing the letter Ms. Stone-Manning rented a typewriter and retyped it. She did so by her own admission, because she did want the letter on her personal computer and because her fingerprints were “all over the original.” These hardly sound like the actions of an innocent – unaware of the gravity of her actions. They sound a lot more like those of someone who is an active member of an underground organization involved in illegal activity.
Tree spiking is
not some innocent prank. It involves hammering metal rods up to ten inches long into trees so that they will be hit when the trees are cut down. Hitting a metal tree spike with a chainsaw will not simply damage or destroy the saw being used. It can result in life threatening injuries to the individual using the chainsaw.
The letter Ms. Stone-Manning typed advised the Forest Service that 500 pounds of “spikes measuring 8 to 10 inches in length” had been jammed into the trees of an Idaho forest. It concluded with this warning.
“P.S., You bastards go in there anyway and a lot of people could get hurt.”
Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, summed up the situation pretty clearly when he
said Stone-Manning “colluded with eco-terrorists who conducted extremist operations that aimed to maim and kill Idaho’s loggers and sawmill workers.”
