[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 118 (Thursday, July 20, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1480-E1481]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


            WESTERN PAPERS DECRY ATTACKS ON RESOURCE AGENTS

                                 ______


                           HON. GEORGE MILLER

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, July 20, 1995
  Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, we are all familiar with the 
rhetoric of the special interests who benefit from public resources--
mining companies, subsidized irrigators, timber companies, coal 
companies. We hear the same inflated rhetoric from the leaders of the 
media, county rights, property rights, and Western movements:

       The government is threatening our property; the government 
     is controlling our land; the government is conspiring to take 
     away our liberties.

  And, moreover, we are told that these allegedly anti-Western actions 
are promoted by Eastern elites who just don't understand the Western 
way of life.
  The fact is that vigorous defense of our public resource and 
environmental protection laws is spread throughout the West and the 
Southwest just as it is through every other region of the country. 
People in Utah and Montana, California and Oregon, Idaho and Arizona 
are just as outraged by our giving away of billions of dollars to 
international mining corporations as people in New York and Florida. 
They are just as angered by the billions we waste on subsidized forest 
practices or irrigation subsidies.
  The so-called Western voices we hear, in many cases, are the voices 
of anti-government extremists and the free-enterprise spouting but 
publicly subsidized corporations that are conspiring to destroy sound 
management practices.
  No aspect of the extremist assault on the environment is more 
outrageous than the growing threats, intimidations and assaults on law 
enforcement officials who defend public resources and the people who 
use them. This House just voted to cut law enforcement funds for the 
Bureau of Land Management, on whose lands more than 12,000 crimes 
occurred last year. We have been unable to secure formal hearings in 
the Judiciary and Resources Committees on the issues of militias and 
attacks on Federal law enforcement officials. So, the attacks go on, 
the threats go on, and the Republican leadership of the Congress turns 
a deaf ear--or worse--to this scandalous behavior.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, the fact is that people in the West do not share 
the extremist analysis or the extremist agenda. As usual, it is a tiny 
fraction of people who, for whatever misguided reason, have decided 
that the government is the enemy. Large numbers of Western Members of 
the House have joined us in passing legislation to protect the 
environment and to reform resource policy as recently as last year.
  The reason is that westerners don't like to see their lands 
desecrated or their resources exploited any more than southerners or 
easterners. If you're a taxpayer living in Boise or Billings, or Salt 
Lake, or Seattle, you're every bit as outraged as the hundreds of 
millions of dollars with which we subsidize grazers, or irrigators, or 
mining companies. People are moving to these Western areas because they 
treasure the land and want it preserved, not opened up, blown up and 
peeled back in the relentless search for private profit.
  I want to insert into the Record a recent editorial from the Seattle 
Times-Intelligencer, a distinguished Western newspaper, that speaks 
eloquently to these issues. I am also including an editorial from the 
San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle that speaks to the obsession of 
the Republican leadership with the Waco shootout but its seeming 
indifference to the threats to public officials.
                 [From the Seattle Post Intelligencer]

              Rising to the Defense of Federal Land Agents

       A member of Congress finally has stood up to defend federal 
     land managers in the West who have been under attack from 
     extremists who imagine that they are above the law.
       Rep. George Miller, D-Calif. has called for Congress to 
     examine what can be done about the rising tide of violence 
     against government officials who are discharging their legal 
     duties. He rightly chastised Western congressional colleagues 
     who carelessly ``legitimize'' their paranoid fringe 
     constituencies.
       Violence toward and intimidation of federal officials is 
     simply unacceptable, and no member of Congress should be in 
     the business of appearing to indulge it.
       Officials of the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, 
     Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service all 
     report instances of violent acts and threats against their 
     employees. The BLM has been bombed in Nevada, and guns have 
     been drawn on national park rangers and fish and wildlife 
     agents, Miller said.
       Miller said the Western lawmakers most guilty of providing 
     a small group of extremists ``the political space to continue 
     the attacks'' are Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, who recently 
     advocated taking guns away from law officers on federal 
     lands; Rep. Helen Chenoweth, R-Idaho, for stating that 
     citizens have good reason ``to be afraid of their 
     government,'' and Rep. Barbara Vucanovich, R-Nev., who 
     suggested that federal officials can avoid having guns drawn 
     on them by ``exhibiting sensitivity.''
       All of those lawmakers ought to know better. They deserve 
     condemnation, not to mention a generous dose of ridicule, for 
     their irresponsible statements.
       Miller also found fault with House Speaker Newt Gingrich's 
     fulsome remark that ``The thing Easterners ought to 
     understand . . . is that there is across the West a genuine 
     sense of fear of the federal government. This is not an 
     extremist position in much of the West.''
       We beg to differ, Mr. Speaker. If there is any genuine 
     sense of fear across the West, it's a fear of lawless 
     lunatics, not of the duly sworn agents of representative 
     democracy.
       ``Will the speaker next rise with words of sympathy for the 
     `genuine fear' felt by the Bloods and the Crips, by the Aryan 
     Nation and by the Ku Klux Klan?'' Rep. Patricia Schroeder, D-
     Colo., asked in a floor speech.
       It is indeed ``irrational,'' as Miller contends, to suggest 
     that the federal government should retreat from its duties 
     because of the paranoid delusions of a few frustrated 
     citizens who fantasize that fish and wildlife agents are the 
     vanguard of a tyrannical New World Order.
                                                                    ____

     [From the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, July 16, 1995]

Whacked Out on Waco--The Only Conspiracy House Republicans Will Find in 
    Hearings on the Branch Davidian Siege is Their Own: To Get the 
                               President

       If you believe this week's hearings into the 1993 Waco 
     disaster will ferret out the truth, you might as well join 
     the National Rifle Association, become a survivalist and move 
     to Montana.
       The hearings, called by House Republicans to investigate 
     the siege of the Branch Davidian compound and its conclusion 
     by holocaust, aren't about law enforcement. They're about 
     politics.
       They seek to embarrass President Clinton and butter up 
     those increasingly visible radical right wingers who believe 
     in the black helicopters and buy into the theory that 
     maintenance marks on Indiana road signs are really secret 
     codes for invading United Nations troops.
       It's really too bad the Rev. Jim Jones isn't around to tell 
     the House ``probers'' how he was harassed by government 
     agents and forced to dispense poisoned Flavor-Aid to more 
     than 900 of his followers in the Guyanese jungle. Just like 
     David Koresh, Jones oozed phony charisma, stockpiled weapons 
     and kept his enslaved and soon-to-be-slaughtered followers, 
     including children, in brainwashed thrall.
       The truth about Jonestown is that Jim Jones was a mass 
     murderer.
       The truth about Waco is that Koresh was a mass murderer. He 
     gave the orders to start shooting when federal agents showed 
     up in February 1993, resulting in a bloodbath. And he gave 
     the orders to incinerate four score of his followers 51 days 
     later when agents started to knock down the walls of his 
     hypocrisy.
       The feds made serious mistakes--but they were acting at all 
     times to save lives, not snuff them out. After the final 
     raid, Attorney General Janet Reno became a folk here because 
     she shouldered the blame. But she relied on bad information: 
     There was no evidence children were being abused inside the 
     compound. A September 1993 Treasury Department report--
     thicker than the San Francisco telephone white pages--details 
     the bad decisions. Heads rolled, and policies changed.
       Preoccupied with elections and its ``Contract With 
     America,'' the GOP couldn't get to oversight until now. The 
     grotesque irony is that these congressional hearings take 
     place when the terror of the Oklahoma City bombing is still 
     in people's bones. How can House Republicans skip over the 
     murder of 168 innocent Americans in order to dredge up ghosts 
     of Waco?
       Politics conquers all.
       Incidentally, David Koresh is not the optimal Republican 
     poster boy.
       The hearings we need would inquire into real enemies: the 
     paramilitary groups of disillusioned, disaffected souls who 
     pose a threat to American values and lives. The Oklahoma City 
     bombers--perhaps acting to ``avenge'' Waco--demonstrated the 
     danger. Law-abiding citizens are, and ought to be, scared 
     stiff of these gunslinging conspiracy nuts.
       In a sense, the Waco hearings provide cover for a new-found 
     right to hate government. The motto becomes: ``Don't tread on 
     me--or I'll blow you up,'' Great stuff to stamp with a 
     congressional seal.
       Congress isn't famous for consistency. Still for budget 
     whackers, this bunch sure can spend the bucks on show 
     hearings.
       Instead of this ox goring--if we must indulge the inbred 
     cousins of James Watt who wind up in Congress--let's throw a 
     big, old-fashioned ox roast. Guests can eat the beast, chug 
     Coors beer, listen to Pat Boone, snip a 

[[Page E1481]]
     little barbed wire, shoot targets in the head and maybe do a little 
     strip mining. Everybody goes home fat and happy instead of 
     hot to put a bullet through the first federal agent they run 
     across.
       Consider it Wise Use.
       

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