Nearly 2,000 veterans planning to join Dakota protests have been directed to wear armor and gas masks in conflicts with police officers.
Veterans Stand for Standing Rock said Thursday that they will be facing “enemy” force in the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, as well as those in “state police agencies and private security contractors.”
The veterans group has raised more than $726,000 on a crowdsourcing website in hopes of sending veterans to support Standing Rock Sioux, the American Indian group opposing the multi-billion dollar Dakota Access Pipeline.
Standing Rock has consistently argued the so-called DAPL would trample on tribal lands and possibly poison waterways, including rivers such as the Missouri River and Lake Oahe in North Dakota.
“Enemy has rubber/plastic bullets, CS gas, pepper spray and an LRAD sound cannon,” the group wrote in an 11-page order posted online. “They will be limited in their violence against us by US and international human rights laws, a national press presence and observers from the US Congress.”
The protest could turn into military veterans facing off against fellow veterans.
Craig Stevens, a spokesman for the Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure NOW, one of the groups supporting the pipeline, told The Daily Caller News Foundation that 60 percent of the pipeline workers are also veterans.
“It’s important to remember that there are veterans on both sides of this issue,” Stevens said.
“We respect the service of all veterans, yet the notion that some would descend upon Cannon Ball as self-purported ‘human shields’ is both unnerving and unnecessary,” he said. “Protesters have had, and taken, the ongoing opportunity to protest for several months. Only when protesters have broken the law have they been arrested or asked to disperse.”
Construction on the pipeline is being delayed by the Obama administration, supposedly to give the government more time to determine the environmental impact it would have on Standing Rock’s reservation.
The Army Corps of Engineers, at President Barack Obama’s direction, moved to momentarily halt the project again despite having reviewed more than 1,200 pages of environmental and cultural analysis over the past three years, as well as consulting with 55 American Indian tribes nearly 400 times.
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