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Comment by algaeontoast | Hacker News Reader

It’s not surprising, given a number of groups with similar intent were openly planning to intimidate or kill border patrol agents (govt employees) and have attacked govt buildings (shots fired at a building in San Antonio, woman with a firebomb in an ICE facility, man who shot at agents and tried to firebomb an ICE facility...)

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If there's evidence of an individual threatening to kill a law enforcement officer I have a hard time believe they won't be arrested, unless the investigating officer(s) or prosecutor(s) don't feel it's credible for one reason or another.

Are the events you listed connected to these groups specifically?

I don't have a problem with the government monitoring groups that are protesting to make sure no violence occurs, but I do have a problem with the US military performing law enforcement actions on American soil. Posse Comitatus exists for a reason.

well... that paints an entirely different picture than the one in the article which is a bunch of smiling old ladies, men and adolescents. None of them look like they're about to go Rambo, unless it's a gross misrepresentation of the majority of those there.

The truth is probably in the middle...this is the Intercept after all. They've defended Assad, Maduro, Putin, etc somehow saying their internal corruption/slaughters were because of the US.

And they may well be monitoring far right protestors as well.

And the intercept that's way out on a limb with the likes of appeasers for dictators like George Galloway and Sad to say Jeremy Corbin compared to main stream left wing politics.

Many of Assad's were. Not that he isn't responsible for his own actions, but the US put him in a position to kill far more people than he would have otherwise been incentivized to fight. The "Syrian Civil War" would have been brief with few casualties, were it not for US intervention and support of the rebels. We turned a tussle that would have played itself out in a couple of months into a decade-long quagmire that has killed countless civilians, decimated the country, pulled in armies from around the world, and on several occasions toed the line of nuclear war.

There are cases in which half-assed actions in favor of "good" (allowing that for the sake of argument) are way worse than doing nothing. Syria was one of them. Predictably.

Quite possibly a worse strategic blunder than Iraq, to boot. And I'm a libby-lib who protested that war.

There are two different groups of anti-war people: 1. People love peace and don't want war, but also they don't understand sometime war might be necessary 2. People who knew that specific war (Iraq war) would have very severe calculable and incalculable consequences that eventually hurt US.

Which group did you belong to?

As contrast let me tell you that they're also 2 groups of people outside of the US who supported the war: 1. Those shares the "values/belief" with US and saw the war would spread democracy and more importantly would deter dictator countries like China, and 2. Those who already knew the action would fail to prove democracy can be applied to any country, would weaken US so the world would be more balanced. History proved the 2nd group are correct.

Chiefly #2 on both counts. I didn't see it as strategically useful, nor as in fact advancing any kind of humanitarian or idealistic vision (brand, rather, if we're being frank) for the US.

I end up agreeing with the anti-war-for-morality's-sake folks more often than not, though, mostly because US foreign policy on that front is kind-of shit, generally speaking, and because my inclination is to default to their position absent a compelling reason to oppose it.

I would hope that national security decisions by a world Superpower are not being made even in part based on the demeanor of the individuals in the photographs taken and published by the news media.

of course not, but news like this tends to shape how we think about the protests in general when clearly there are those who have pure intentions. If they are having data collected on them as well, regardless of whether that's constitutional, they should, at the very least, not be grouped into the same category of those for which the justification is based on threats of attack.

> man who shot at agents and tried to firebomb an ICE facility...

Yes, and what happened to that guy? (Willem van Spronsen)

Also last I checked he didn't shoot at agents, he tried to set their (empty) cars on fire and was shot for refusing to disarm himself. This is technically arson, but different from the "he tried to burn down a building with people in it" narrative the authorities tried to push for a while.

> openly planning to intimidate or kill border patrol agents

Sorry, what? Citation needed on that one.

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