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Anyone hear about this guy in the tractor? He's a disgruntled tobacco farmer. The cops have a ton of streets blocked off, several federal buildings closed....
Took me almost 2 hours to get to work today. The dude has been sitting in that tractor for over a full day!!! They have a major traffic artery blocked, and it is causing the bridges to Virginia to slow to a crawl.
I'd say 90% of the people I talked to about this today just want to know why the cops haven't shot the dood yet. Screw the tranquilizers, people want him taken out! Its kinda sick in a way that people are ready to take such a drastic measure, but at the same time, we're sitting at code orange and we are using well over a hundred cops to sit around and watch this guy sit on a tractor in the middle of a pond?
We're about to go to war in Iraq and we can't handle a single guy in a tractor less than a quarter mile from the White House fence?
Some people made some good points too, if we need to evacuate a part of the city, it will be impossible to get to VA since some of the major arteries are blocked to get to a couple bridges.
I think when the whole thing is over I am going to hang up this sign on a pole right in the middle of the pond:
Man in D.C. Tractor Standoff Surrenders
6 minutes ago Add Top Stories - AP to My Yahoo!
By SIOBHAN McDONOUGH, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - A standoff near the National Mall between a disgruntled farmer and police ended peacefully Wednesday when the man surrendered after three days.
Dwight Watson, 50, of Whitakers, N.C., left the tractor he had driven into a pond near the Washington's monuments on Monday. He backed away from the tractor with his hands raised and was taken into custody.
Police said Watson claimed to have explosives when the incident began. Van Harp, FBI (news - web sites) agent in charge of the Washington office, refused to say whether any explosives were found in the tractor after the arrest.
U.S. Park Police Chief Theresa Chambers said Watson surrendered to a SWAT team comprised of FBI agents and park police. She said the North Carolina man negotiated the terms of his surrender with the team, but she did not disclose the conditions.
Watson kept law enforcement at bay while complaining that government policies were forcing him out of his family's tobacco-farming business. Streets remained closed for blocks during the standoff, snarling traffic for miles and forcing alteration of several bus routes.
A police helicopter kept watch from above and police tactical teams maneuvered in the area around the tractor. Watson had promised police negotiators that he would surrender, and authorities pressed him earlier Wednesday to make good on that pledge.
"Come on Dwight," a female police negotiator could be heard pleading over a megaphone. "You said you were coming out. You gave me your word. Come out now."
Washington residents — already jittery about the prospect of war, the possibility of retaliatory attacks and memories of jammed streets from the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon (news - web sites) in Virginia — wondered throughout the standoff how one farmer could create so much chaos for commuters.
"What this shows is, one or two people can really throw a metropolitan area into chaos," said Richard Clarke, who recently retired as one of the longest-serving, senior counterterrorism officials in the White House. "I assume that the sniper incident, the anthrax incidents and perhaps the tractor incident are not lost on people who might want to make further mischief in the future."
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