By Tom Eley  | 20 April 2011

This article, the first of a four-part series marking the first anniversary of the BP Gulf oil disaster, reviews the systematic corporate and government cover-up of the BP disaster and its consequences. READ THE SECOND INSTALLMENT HERE

Our fellow creatures have suffered the most, but a similar disaster could happen again tomorrow, as the exploiters of the Gulf push on to restore "business as usual" and the government --in their pocket--does nothing. Disgusting and disgraceful.

One year ago today, on April 20, 2010, an explosion on the BP-run Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed 11 workers, injured 17 more, and led to the greatest single ecological catastrophe in US history. By the time the blown out Macondo well was capped on July 15, 2010, some 206 million gallons of oil had gushed out from the wellhead located one mile beneath the ocean’s surface and about 50 miles from Louisiana’s southeast coast. Millions more gallons of highly toxic chemical dispersant were dumped on the Gulf’s surface or released underwater.

The consequences of the disaster will be felt for decades. The spill directly impacted thousands of square miles of the Gulf of Mexico and coastline stretching from Texas to Florida, including estuaries, marshlands, and beaches. Hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents face financial hardship, including many thousands who lost their jobs as a result of damages to the fishing and tourism industries. Cleanup workers will suffer serious health problems as a result of acute exposure to toxins released by the oil and chemical dispersants. Numerous species of marine and coastal life may never recover.

In spite of the magnitude of the disaster and overwhelming evidence that basic safety concerns were flouted in order to speed the oil well into production, not a single executive from any of the corporations implicated in the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig—well owner BP, rig operator Transocean, and rig contractor Halliburton—has been punished. BP itself is flush with profits and cash. No new restrictions or regulations of any significance have been put in place on deep-sea oil drilling, and the Obama administration has since granted dozens of new permits. Obama’s “claims czar,” Kenneth Feinberg, who explicitly stated that his primary concern was protecting the viability of BP, has blocked compensation for the majority of victims.

Obama’s overriding concern from the beginning was to defend BP, one of the largest corporations in the world, and the oil industry as a whole. The result was a cover-up that began in late April 2010 and continues to this day. This cover-up, and the White House decision to leave BP in total control of the disaster site, clean-up, and response, were themselves criminal acts that flowed from the total subordination of all branches of government to the interests of the most powerful corporate interests.

In this the oil disaster was closely analogous to the response of the Bush and Obama administrations to the financial crisis of fall 2008. As in the aftermath of the financial collapse—when no effort was spared to advance the interest of the big finance houses that caused the crisis— the entire response to the Gulf oil disaster was tailored to meet the needs of BP.

The implications of this policy entailed more than shameless capitulation to BP. So long as the oil giant was left in charge and the profit drive continued to dominate the response, it was impossible to effectively deal with the blowout, or even to correctly estimate its size. The result was that BP and the Obama administration floundered from one debacle to the next, their efforts fatally compromised at every turn by the profit concerns that trump all other questions under capitalism.

The BP and White House cover-up began in the very hours after the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Even as the fire still raged, BP and Transocean transported the 115 survivors not to their families, but to a holding center where they were interrogated by BP lawyers and forced to take drug tests. With the media already broadcasting images of the blazing rig, their families had no idea whether they were dead or alive.

On April 22 the rig, still on fire, collapsed. Its riser pipe, which connected it to the wellhead one mile below, crumpled and burst. Coast Guard hearings in New Orleans later suggested that the rig collapse itself may have been caused by the haphazard response of the Coast Guard, whose vessels likely doused the rig with so much water that it capsized.

From that day on, the Macondo well released millions of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf. Yet on April 23, BP and US Coast Guard officer Mary Landry insisted there was no spill, claiming that oil visible on the surface was fuel from the collapsed rig. It was not until April 24 that BP admitted there was a spill, after the slick had become so large its origins could not be denied. At this point BP and the Obama administration claimed that a maximum of 42,000 gallons, or 1,000 barrels, per day were spilling into the Gulf.

At the same time, the administration displayed complete indifference to the most immediate victims of the spill—the workers on the rig. On April 22, two days after the explosion—with the fate of 11 missing men still unknown—a reporter asked White House press secretary Robert Gibbs if Obama had yet “reached out to anyone in Louisiana over the oil rig explosion.” Gibbs responded, “Let me check on that. I don’t believe so.”

For more than a week after the blast, the Obama administration limited its public comments largely to reiterating its support for the lifting of moratoriums on offshore oil drilling on the Atlantic coast, the northern waters of Alaska, and the eastern Gulf of Mexico. When asked at an April 23 news conference whether this disaster would cause Obama to reconsider these policies, Gibbs said flatly, “No.”

“We’ve taken swift action to ensure the safety of those that are there and to ensure the safety to the environment by capping the exploratory well,” Gibbs declared. “We need the increased production. The president still continues to believe the great majority of that can be done safely, securely and without any harm to the environment. I don’t honestly think [the disaster] opens up a whole new series of questions, because, you know, in all honesty I doubt this is the first accident that has happened and I doubt it will be the last,” Gibbs concluded. Obama did not make his way to the Gulf until Sunday, May 2, nearly two weeks after the explosion.

From the outset, administration officials acted as little more than BP spokesmen. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, pegged by Obama to head up its response to the crisis, repeatedly extolled BP. “I trust Tony Hayward,” Allen said of the BP CEO. “When I talk to him, I get an answer.”

Hayward’s “answers” were a series of lies. The CEO, who was paid upwards of $4 million annually by BP, declared that the Gulf of Mexico is a “very big ocean,” and in another occasion that the spill’s effects would be “very, very, modest.” Statements like these made Hayward a hated symbol of corporate arrogance. Perhaps his most memorable comment was his complaint about the personal strain the disaster put on him— “I want my life back,” he told struggling Gulf residents in late May.

Even though BP and the Coast Guard worked to block access to the site—in one instance Hayward was caught on camera yelling “get out of here” to a news crew attempting to view cleanup efforts— independent scientists soon found ways to refute the 1,000 barrel-per-day claim advanced by the government and BP.

Analyzing only the visible part of the spill, Ian MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University, estimated that 9 million gallons had been spilled by April 28, a rate of 1.3 million gallons (30,000 barrels) per day. SkyTruth, a non-profit environmental analysis firm, put the figure at 12.2 million gallons by May 2, about the same rate.

To deflect such criticism, the Obama administration knowingly promoted a lie. On April 28, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimated the rate of spillage from the blowout was at most 5,000 barrels or 210,000 gallons, five times BP’s estimate but only a sixth of that cited by MacDonald. Documents later gathered by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling revealed that the 5,000 barrels claim had no scientific foundation. It was based an internal NOAA e-mail written in the first days of the disaster by a scientist criticizing BP’s claim that the spill rate was 1,000 barrels per day. The commission also found that the White House acted to block NOAA from revising the spill rate upwards.

This 5,000 barrel-per-day figure was quickly seized on by the media and presented, uncritically, as the maximum level of the spill rate. The New York Times, for example, based a May 4, 2010 “news analysis” on the statistic, arguing that the spill was really not so bad (“Gulf Oil Spill Is Bad, but How Bad?”). The newspaper had earlier called on Obama not to step back from deep-sea oil drilling. (See, “New York Times minimizes Gulf oil spill”).

Had BP allowed independent analysis of the runaway well, it would not have been difficult to accurately estimate the rate of the spill. The Coast Guard, acting as a private security force for BP, blocked reporters from beaches and even from flying over the spill site. BP reportedly had 12 video cameras stationed near the wellhead beginning soon after the disaster, but these too were blocked from public view.

On May 12, BP finally released a short, pre-recorded clip of the underwater blowout. A journalist from National Public Radio (NPR) took the footage to three experts for separate types of scientific analysis. The results were shocking. Timothy Crone, a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, put the spill rate at 50,000 barrels (2.1 million gallons) per day. University of California astrophysics professor Eugene Chaing put it in a range of 20,000 to 100,000 barrels daily. Steven Wereley of Purdue University used particle image velocimetry to establish a spill rate of 70,000 barrels per day—which he later increased to 95,000 barrels—with a margin of error of 20 percent.

The Obama administration and BP simply ignored these analyses, falsely claiming that there was no way to know what the spill rate was, and that in any case knowledge of the dimensions of the spill would not impact the response.

These were lies. BP was aware of at least one of the several methods available for calculating spill rates. Early on in the blowout it had recruited two scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts to put in place a sonar measuring instrument precisely for that purpose. Richard Camilli and Andy Bowen, who have performed many similar measurements, “were poised to fly to the gulf to conduct volume measurements,” the New York Times reported on May 14. “But they were contacted [just before their departure] and told not to come, at around the time BP decided to lower a large metal container to try to capture the leak. That maneuver failed. They have not been invited again.”

The Obama administration finally authorized a semi-official Flow Rate Technical Group (FRTG), comprised of scientists and technical experts, to measure the rate of the blowout. On May 27, NOAA reported that, based on the work of the FRTG, the rate of oil lost was between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels per day, far more than the 5,000 barrel rate BP had long claimed.

This too turned out to be a distortion. The 12,000 to 19,000 figure represented the range of absolute minimum figures of the various scientists involved. They had not yet come up with a high-end range. After criticism from some scientists in the FRTG, on June 10, NOAA released a tentative range for the rate of the spill of between 30,000 barrels, low-end, and 50,000 barrels.

The final estimate of the FRTG, not released until the first days of August, arrived at a rate that varied between 53,000 barrels and 62,000 barrels per day, an amount equivalent to the quantity of oil spilled by the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster every week.

The capping of the well in mid-July did not end the cover-up. In early August, NOAA published a report claiming that much of the oil had been dispersed or dissolved. Carol Browner, the director of the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to assure the American people that “the vast majority of oil is gone.” The same day, Thad Allen, head of the National Incident Command, appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation” to congratulate BP, saying the company had done “very well” with operations at the wellhead.

Independent scientists immediately challenged these claims. Among them was Susan Shaw, the director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute, who told the press, “The blanket statement that the public understood is that most of the oil has disappeared. That is not true. About 50 percent of it is still in the water.” University of South Florida chemical oceanographer David Hollander described the statements as “ludicrous.”

Even if much of the oil was broken up into smaller droplets, it remains a threat to marine life. “The dissolved component of oil and the dispersed component of oil are still in the ecosystem, still causing damage,” marine biologist Rick Steiner told the World Socialist Web Site. “This has all fit into the modality of minimizing the damage from this disaster, because every bit of the truth reflects poorly on the administration and on BP.”

The National Commission on the BP oil spill has since taken the lead in the cover-up. President Obama formed the committee in May, appointing as co-chairs former Democratic Senator and Florida Governor Bob Graham and William Reilly, who led the Environmental Protection Agency under the Reagan administration during the time of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Reilly has spent the past 18 years on the corporate board of energy giant ConocoPhillips.

On November 8, the general counsel of the oil spill commission asserted that there is no evidence of criminal negligence in the lead-up to the disaster. If BP is found to have been criminally negligent, it could face fines of $4,300 for every barrel of oil spilled into the Gulf. If the disaster is determined to be the result of an accident, the fine will be about one third as much, a finding that would save the company billions.

“To date, we have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decision to favor dollars over safety,” commission counsel Fred Bartlit said. “We see no instance where a decision-making person or group of people sat there aware of safety risks, aware of costs and opted to give up safety for costs,” adding that he agreed with “90 percent” of BP’s internal findings on the disaster.

To be continued

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IN RECENT YEARS, agribusiness, the chief entity responsible for factory farms, the world’s worst pollutant of the atmosphere, water and oceans, and the main cause of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains, has used the Congresspeople it owns to pass some pretty outrageous legislation, primarily to deter animal rights activists from exposing some of the cruelest practices industrialized animal husbandry routinely employs to magnify its profits at the expense of everybody and everything. Will Potter has been chronicling this sordid affair from the start, with little competition throughout the mainstream corporate media (no surprise there of course).Below, some materials that sketch out the status of the current situation. The cynical branding of animal defenders as “terrorists” is deservedly called “the Green Scare” by Potter.  And keep in mind that all this “terrorism” crap we constantly hear, with quickly multiplying nuisances from airport scannings to real perils, like an encroaching police state, are the direct result of a criminal foreign policy implemented by the plutocracy for generations, and which eventually has elicited retaliation among some of the victims. If we had had a foreign policy as pure and righteous and noble as the prostituted politicians and media would have us believe, none of this would be happening.—Eds.

The American Animal Terrorism Act (AETA) is the main hammer being used by the system to crush anti-animal exploitation and anti-ecological abuse by business.  Read on to get a good idea what this latest concoction by the system portends for our civil liberties, and effective freedom in general.

The Green Scare: a threat to free speech and a case of insidious police power creep
by WILL POTTER on APRIL 15, 2011  | Material suggested by Merrilee C.
For a repository of Potter’s articles and associated materials, check his main site at http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/green-scare/

WILL POTTER sees a parallel between the accusation of some activists with the charge of “terrorism” by the government, and the use of the media in exploring these cases, to the effect of the persecution of leftists in the Red Scares, during the McCarthyist era. According to him, the Green Scare is this new phenomenon associated with environmentalist groups that may or may not engage in legal activities, who are being disproportionately attacked by the government for extra-legal explanations. He thinks that ultimately there is a threat to civil liberties that can progressively reach more groups and individuals.[2] He speaks of another age of repression in the US history.[3][4]

He believes the word “terrorism” is being used as a fear tactic to go after peaceful activists. He points out to obvious differences of what is generally considered to be terrorism and what these activists are about.[5] The real agenda is then associated with the defense of corporate profit and control over social activism.[6][7] Will Potter believes that the targeting of animal rights and earth liberation movements, considered the number one domestic terrorist threat by the FBI, has got nothing to do with security. He warns of a possible seeking of other groups protected by the first amendment, in the future. He makes clear that he is not about excusing acts that are considered criminal or about saying that they shouldn’t be prosecuted by law as such.[8]

In 2006, Potter spoke to congress about the AETA. Concerning this law, he has explained why he doesn’t believe that pushing for a broader basis of prosecution among activists will deter the more radical fringe. He says they are moved by ideology and not fear. Also, he called attention to the erosion of civil liberties for peaceful activists, while stressing the cause done in the name of state control and not security.[9][10]

_____________

What is the “Green Scare”?

Green Scare flier by Eberhardt Press.

Welcome to GreenIsTheNewRed.com! This website focuses on how fear of “terrorism” is being exploited to push a political and corporate agenda. Specifically, I focus on how animal rights and environmental advocates are being branded “eco-terrorists” in what many are calling the Green Scare.

Top of the Terrorism List

“The No. 1 domestic terrorism threat,” says John Lewis, a top FBI official, “is the eco-terrorism, animal-rights movement.”

The animal rights and environmental movements, like every other social movement throughout history, have both legal and illegal elements. There are people who leaflet, write letters, and lobby. There are people who protest and engage in non-violent civil disobedience. And there are people, like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, who go out at night with black masks and break windows, burn SUVs, and release animals from fur farms.

Animal rights and environmental advocates have not flown planes into buildings, taken hostages, or sent Anthrax through the mail. They have never even injured anyone. In fact, the only act of attempted murder in the history of the U.S. animal rights movement was coordinated by corporate provocateurs. Yet the FBI ranks these activists as the top domestic terrorism threat. And the Department of Homeland Security lists them on its roster of national security threats, while ignoring right-wing extremists who have bombed the Oklahoma City federal building, murdered doctors, and admittedly created weapons of mass destruction.
Defining the Green Scare
This disproportionate, heavy-handed government crackdown on the animal rights and environmental movements, and the reckless use of the word “terrorism,” is often called the Green Scare.

Much like the Red Scare and the communist witch hunts of the 40s and 50s, the Green Scare is using one word—this time, it’s “terrorist”—to push a political agenda, instill fear, and chill dissent. And much like the Red Scare, the Green Scare is operating on three levels: legal, legislative, and what we’ll call extra-legal, or scare-mongering.

Legal

The courts are being used to push conventional boundaries of what constitutes “terrorism” and to hit non-violent activists with disproportionate sentences.
▪    SHAC 7.  The SHAC 7 outside the courthouse in New Jersey.

A federal court convicted a group of animal advocates of “animal enterprise terrorism” for running a controversial website that supported both legal and illegal activity against a lab called Huntingdon Life Sciences. The site also listed addresses for corporations and corporate executives. The group, dubbed the SHAC 7, were never charged with breaking windows or releasing animals, but they vocally supported those types of activities. For that, they were convicted of “conspiring” to promote “terrorism.” Here’s a closer look at the SHAC 7.

▪    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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