The Alaskan Dispatch reports:
When agents with the Alaska Environmental Crimes Task Force surged out of the wilderness around the remote community of Chicken wearing body armor and jackets emblazoned with POLICE in big, bold letters, local placer miners didn’t quit know what to think.
Did it really take eight armed men and a squad-size display of paramilitary force to check for dirty water? Some of the miners, who run small businesses, say they felt intimidated.
Others wonder if the actions of the agents put everyone at risk. When your family business involves collecting gold far from nowhere, unusual behavior can be taken as a sign someone might be trying to stage a robbery. How is a remote placer miner to know the people in the jackets saying POLICE really are police?
Miners suggest it might have been better all around if officials had just shown up at the door — as they used to do — and said they wanted to check the water.
Obama, Assad, Morsi, …. what’s the difference?
And what was the area rife with when they broke into a family home to seize that Cuban boy some years ago? Hostile opinions?
The reason for the SWAT team supposedly was the area was rife with drug and human trafficking. A town of 17, so close to nowhere that you could see it very clearly is a center for drugs and human trafficking? Totally believable.
Gene’s comment is unfortunately not sarcastic and it’s not just the EPA. What the Feds did to Gibson Guitars under the Lacy act is reprehensible. I have read numerous stories lately about small businesses being raided by SWAT type teams for tax violations or less. We need to stop this before we end up like Egypt or Syria.
Just about every tin-horn government operation has its own swat team these days. And, unfortunately, that is true
Gene, the really sad thing about your sarcastic (I hope) comment, is that it’s totally believable that is the case.
Nothing extraordinary at all. Everybody knows that miners are the enemy of the people, as are conservative bloggers and their readers. It would be foolish to face one’s enemy empty-handed and unprotected.