Veterans Planning to Support #NoDAPL Bringing Body Armor, Gas Masks for Supposedly Non-Violent “Operation”

“Veterans Stand for Standing Rock, a contingent of more than 2,000 U.S. military veterans, intends to go to North Dakota and form a human wall in front of police, protest organizers said on a Facebook page,” Reuters reports.

This is…a little scary. Especially if you read a copy of the “operation order” they’re circulating.

You can read the document in full below. In it they refer to law enforcement as the “enemy.”

The organizers also point out that the national media will be watching their action, and so they urge non-violence:

But then organizers also tell attendees to kit out with body armor, gas masks, and shields:

It’s not an action of violence, they say, and yet they’ve already identified law enforcement as the “enemy” and instructed their people to prepare for violence with armor, etc.

This mission statement is also troubling:

To date the #NoDAPL movement has worked to get national media attention by instigating violent altercations with law enforcement.

If these activists are coming to North Dakota to peacefully demonstrate then they’ll have no problems, nor any need for armor or gas masks. But if they’re coming here to break the law, if they’re coming here to clash with cops in order to garner headlines from credulous national media reporters they probably will need those things. Because law enforcement has a duty to enforce the law and nobody – not even veterans working for a cause they believe in – is above the law.

Here is the full “operation orders” document. Which frankly comes off as the work of a bunch of pretentious poseurs.

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