The (scarcely noticed) persecution of animal defenders

Green Scare flier by Eberhardt Press.

▪    Operation Backfire.  Daniel McGowan, left, and Jonathan Paul.

That’s the name the FBI gave to the historic roundup of environmental and animal rights activists for a string of Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front actions, including arson in the name of protecting the environment. Before these defendants ever set foot in the courtroom, they were labeled in the press as “eco-terrorists.” The government successfully pushed for “terrorism enhancement” penalties in many of these cases. As a result, many of these activists are now in prison as “terrorists,” a label that drastically changes their prison life and will follow them long after release. Another result of the “terrorism enhancement” is that the FBI claims these cases as a victory in the “War on Terrorism.”

▪    Grand juries. In the name of investigating illegal activity, the government has been hauling lawful activists in front of grand juries where they must testify about their political beliefs and political associations, or face prison time. Activists like Jeff Hogg and independent journalist Josh Wolf have refused to cooperate with these witch hunts, and been punished for it. Elsewhere, noncooperation has derailed grand juries.

Legislative

Even with these sweeping, and successful, legal attacks on activists, corporations and the politicians who represent them want even more power.

▪    Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.  Project Censored honors Will Potter

With just six members of Congress in the room, just hours after lawmakers and celebrities were on hand to break ground for the new memorial honoring that terrorist Martin Luther King Jr., the House of Representatives passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, a law so vague and broad that the non-violent tactics of MLK and Gandhi are now “terrorism.” The bill expanded the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, the law used to convict the SHAC 7 of “animal enterprise terrorism” just months earlier. In true Orwellian doublespeak, proponents said the law couldn’t be used to convict so-called extremists, and must be expanded. Here is a closer look at the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.

▪    State-level Legislation. Even after the federal law passed, corporations still want more. There’s been a push for state “eco-terrorism” legislation similar to the federal AETA, including the the California Animal Enterprise Protection Act.

Extra-Legal

Perhaps the most dangerous wing of this Green Scare is the relentless scare-mongering.

▪    Ad Campaigns. Anonymous scare-mongering ads.

The new McCarthyists have used their deep pocketbooks and PR savvy to place a terrorist in every shadow. They’ve taken out full-page anonymous ads in both The New York Times and The Washington Post labeling animal rights activists as “terrorists” for being a little too successful, and knocking a controversial animal testing laboratory from the New York Stock Exchange.
▪    Public Relations Campaigns. Not even children’s movies are safe from the relentless green baiting and guilt by association. Industry groups labeled Hoot, a bestselling book and popular movie, “soft-core eco-terrorism” because the teenage protagonists try to save an endangered owl from developers. Apparently even E.B. White was an “eco-terrorist”: According to the Center for Consumer Freedom, the movie remake of Charlotte’s Web promotes animal rights extremism.
▪    Surveillance, Harassment and Infiltration. The corporate and government scare-mongering has been used to create a political climate that justifies surveillance and harassment of political advocates. For instance, the FBI is looking for informants to infiltrate vegan potlucks, Joint Terrorism Task Forces are spying on HoneyBaked Ham protestors, and corporations are tracking who activists are dating.

Secretive Political Prisons — Communications Management Units
The label of “terrorist” is applied to activists before they even enter a courtroom and, for those convicted, it follows them into the prison system. The government has acknowledged using secretive prison facilities on U.S. soil, called Communications Management Units, to house inmates labeled “domestic terrorists.”

Inmates and guards at the CMUs call them “Little Guantanamo.” They have also been described as prisons for “second-tier” terrorists.
According the Bureau of Prisons, these inmates “do not rise to the same degree of potential risk to national security” as other terrorism inmates. So who is imprisoned there?

The CMUs overwhelmingly include Muslim inmates, and have housed at least two animal rights and environmental activists: Andy Stepanian, who has been released, and Daniel McGowan, who is currently imprisoned at the CMU in Marion, Illinois.

Little information is available about the secretive facilities and the prisoners housed there. However, through interviews with attorneys, family members, and a current prisoner, it is clear that these units have been created not for violent and dangerous “terrorists,” but for political cases that the government would like to keep out of the public spotlight and out of the press.

So Why is This Happening?

Leaked State Department presentation about activists.

The government and corporations haven’t tried to hide the fact that this is all meant to protect corporate profits. The Department of Homeland Security, in a bulletin to law enforcement agencies, warned: “Attacks against corporations by animal rights extremists and eco-terrorists are costly to the targeted company and, over time, can undermine confidence in the economy.”

And in a leaked PowerPoint presentation given by the State Department to corporations, we learn: “Although incidents related to terrorism are most likely to make the front-page news, animal rights extremism is what’s most likely to affect your day-to-day business operations.”
Underground activists like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front directly threaten corporate profits by doing things like burning bulldozers or sabotaging animal research equipment. But they’re not the only ones.

The entire animal rights and environmental movements, perhaps more than any other social movements, directly threaten corporate profits. They do it every day. Every time activists encourage people to go vegan, every time they encourage people to stop driving, every time they encourage people to consume fewer resources and live simply. Those boycotts are permanent, and these industries know it. In many ways, the Green Scare, like the Red Scare, can be seen as a culture war, a war of values.

What Effect Has This Had?

The point of all this, according to the government, is to crack down on underground activists. But underground activists already know what they’re doing is illegal, and it hasn’t stopped them. In fact, it may have added fuel to the fire. For instance, the same day the SHAC 7 were convicted of “animal enterprise terrorism” for running a website that posted news of both legal and illegal actions, underground activists rescued animals from a vivisection lab and named them Jake, Lauren, Kevin, Andy, Josh, and Darius, after the defendants.

This is from the communiqué:

“And while the SHAC-7 will soon go to jail for simply speaking out on behalf of animals, those of us who have done all the nasty stuff talked about in the courts and in the media will still be free. So to those who still work with HLS and to all who abuse animals: we’re coming for you, motherfuckers.”

What Now?

So if outlandish prison sentences and “eco-terrorism” rhetoric aren’t deterring crimes or solving crimes, what’s the point?

Activists protest eco-terror legislation, and get results.

Fear. It’s all about fear. The point is to protect corporate profits by instilling fear in the mainstream animal rights and environmental movements—and every other social movement paying attention—and make people think twice about using their First Amendment rights.
Industry groups say “this is just the starting gun” for the Green Scare. But this could be the starting gun for activists as well. I’ve talked with hundreds of activists around the country over the years. There’s a lot of fear. But there’s also a lot of rage. And that’s a very good thing.
Because today’s repression may mimic many of the tactics of the Red Scare, but today’s response cannot. It’s not enough to cowardly distance ourselves from anyone branded a communist, I mean, terrorist. Naming names and making loyalty oaths didn’t protect activists then, and it won’t protect activists now.

The only way activists, and the First Amendment, are going to get through this is by coming out and confronting it head-on. That means reaching out to mainstream Americans and telling them that labeling activists as terrorists wastes valuable anti-terrorism resources and is an insult to everyone who died in the twin towers. That means reaching out to other activists and saying loud and clear that these activists are just the canaries in the mine.

Together, we can stop the cycle of history repeating itself.

•••

Florida Senator Says Undercover Videos Exposing Factory Farms are “Terrorism”

by WILL POTTER on APRIL 15, 2011
in TERRORISM LEGISLATION

Pigs in an intensive "factory farm" environment. Animals become mere cogs in a gigantic profitmaking mechanism. The incalculable suffering is routinely ignored.

Iowa, Florida, and Minnesota are all considering bills that single out animal and environmental activists who investigate cruelty and pollution at factory farms. Now, one Florida senator is going even further, and saying that these undercover investigations are “terrorism.”

As I wrote recently in this article about the bills targeting investigators and whistleblowers, groups like the Humane Society and Mercy for Animals have been incredibly successful at exposing the systemic animal welfare violations that take place in factory farms.

But according to Florida state senator Jim Norman, animal welfare advocates are only exposing these abuses to make money (yes, you read that correctly). Norman says of undercover investigators: “It’s almost like terrorism, the way they go in.”

This raises the question: who, exactly, are these activists terrorizing? It’s not consumers, who have a right to know what they are buying. It’s not the animals. And it’s not the government, which has used investigations to initiate recalls of unsafe eggs and beef.

It’s corporate profits.

I’ve written extensively about corporations, and the politicians who represent them, reaching further and further with their use of the word “terrorism.” But this just might take the cake. To Norman and the politicians behind these bills, “terrorism” means investigating what corporations are doing, letting consumers see what goes on behind closed doors, and having the audacity to think that people should be able to decide for themselves how they spend their money.

Green Scare, through his website, Green Is The New Red. He has written several articles on this topic, as well as participating in conferences and giving lectures on universities, with some of his papers found on courses. In 2006, he spoke to U.S. Congress about his reporting on these issues, and in 2008 an article on the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, from his website, was discussed in the book,Censored 2008, as one of the top 25 underscored news stories of 2007.

Will received his master’s in writing from the Johns Hopkins University and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in journalism.[1]

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