Peaceful Anti-Fracking Activists Pursued by FBI as 'Eco-Terrorists'

Sunday, March 11, 2012 by Common Dreams
Continued FBI surveillance of environmental activism amidst expanding definitions of 'eco-terrorism'

In recent years, the broad definition of 'eco-terrorism' has come to include environmentalist activities ranging from arson to setting mink free at fur farms to protests in front of the homes of corporate executives. Environmental activists have seen increased imprisonment (including maximum security sentences) for non-violent crimes.

Now, as the FBI suggests that 'eco-terrorism' is in decline, the Washington Post reports hat the FBI has increased heavy surveillance of environmentalists including anti-fracking protesters.
Will Potter, who's work exposes the growing expansion of governmental prosecution of environmental activists, comments, among others.

Juliet Eilperin at TheWashington Post reports:

Ben Kessler, a student at the University of North Texas and an environmental activist, was more than a little surprised that an FBI agent questioned his philosophy professor and acquaintances about his whereabouts and his sign-waving activities aimed at influencing local gas drilling rules. 

“It was scary,” said Kessler, who is a national organizer for the nonviolent environmental group Rising Tide North America. He said the agent approached him this past fall and said that the FBI had received an anonymous complaint and were looking into his opposition to hydraulic fracturing, also known as “fracking.” The bureau respected free speech, the agent told him, but was “worried about things being taken to an extreme level.” 

Even as environmental and animal rights extremism in the United States is on the wane, officials at the federal, state and local level are continuing to target groups they have labeled a threat to national security, according to interviews with numerous activists, internal FBI documents and a survey of legislative initiatives across the country.

Iowa Gov. Terry Brandstad (R) signed a law this month, backed by the farm lobby, that makes it a crime to pose as an employee or use other methods of misrepresentation to get access to operations in an attempt to expose animal cruelty. Utah passed a similar bill, nicknamed an “ag-gag” law, on Wednesday. Last month, Victor VanOrden, an activist in his mid-20s, received the maximum sentence of five years in prison under a separate Iowa law for attempting to free minks from one of the state’s fur farms. [...] 

“There’s been very little change under the Obama administration,” said Will Potter, author of the book “Green is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Movement Under Siege.” After factoring in several state initiatives on top of federal enforcement, Potter said, “The political climate as a whole has gotten a lot worse.” 

In the past few years FBI agents have suggested District police monitor animal rights protests outside the Vanguard Group’s offices downtown because of its investment in a controversial animal testing facility, and they have mined a Web site, the North American Animal Liberation Press Office, for hints on upcoming activities, according to FBI documents obtained by Ryan Shapiro, an animal rights activist, through a series of Freedom of Information Act requests and other contacts. [...] 

The FBI agent, David Rogers, told Kessler he started looking into him after receiving an anonymous tip. Rogers, along with a Dallas police officer, also approached Kessler’s philosophy professor, Adam Briggle, last month. Briggle, who chairs a citizens advisory group aimed at imposing new restrictions on rules governing gas drilling in the Denton area, said the two men spoke to him for half an hour about subjects including his course syllabus and the line between civil disobedience and terrorism. 

“I don’t know how law enforcement works, but it seemed like a total fishing expedition to me,” Briggle said, adding that when they discussed the controversy surrounding fracking, “they pointed to the Pacific Northwest and how there’s a culture up there of eco-terrorism, and they wanted to keep it from spreading down here. . . . To have the FBI come in here and interrogate me as an academic, it was pretty off-putting.” [...] 

[Ryan Shapiro, an animal rights activist] questioned this surveillance. He and four others are suing the federal government on the grounds that the American Enterprise Terrorism Act has a chilling effect on free speech, since they are now intimidated from “documenting conditions on factory farms so [consumers] can make informed choices about if they want to continue to pay people to abuse animals on their behalf.”

Goodbye Obama

So Long Labor and Greens!

by GEORGE OCHENSKI

 

It’s getting harder and harder to figure out how President Obama is going to win re-election when his administration continues to abandon its base in favor of traditional Republican supporters. Nothing illustrates this better than two recent incidents.

OnThursday, Aug. 25, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told reporters labor is planning to scale back involvement in the Democratic Party. Then the State Department, headed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave a green light to construction of 1,700-mile Keystone XL Pipeline that will carry crude oil from Canada’s tar sands across Montana, to refineries in Texas and Louisiana. Ironically, the latter decision comes as hundreds of America’s top environmentalists are being arrested for protesting to stop that pipeline.

The reasons for the two actions are different, but the effect—losing long-time allies–is the same.

As Politico’s Byron Tau reported, Trumka made his comments during a breakfast speech sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor. They must have Obama’s campaign staff sweating bullets. “We’re going to use a lot of our money to build structures that work for working people,” Trumka told reporters. “You’re going to see us give less money to build structures for others, and more of our money will be used to build our own structure.”

What Trumka was referring to is the union’s plan to launch a so-called Super PAC, now authorized by the Supreme Court’s decision that allows entities such as corporations and unions, among others, to spend unlimited funds on campaigns. The reason, he said, is that “the day after Election Day,” in 2008, “we were no stronger than we were the day before.” Trumka said some of the member unions intended to skip the 2012 Democratic Party convention altogether.

Big Labor’s gripes with Obama primarily focus on free-trade agreements that ship jobs overseas to cheap labor while America’s workers are abandoned. Trumka told reporters that Obama “started playing on the Republican ground,” adding: “As we approach this Labor Day, our working-class people are looking for three things: jobs, jobs, jobs.”

Yet, even as the AFL-CIO filled the air with ominous threats to Democrats and Obama, Obama’s administration deemed it prudent to not just abandon environmentalists, but to do so with a slap in the face.

So far, more than 300 people have been arrested in front of the White House in what is easily the longest and largest environmental protest in recent times. Among those were a number of Montanans, including Livingston’s Margot Kidder, who is best known for playing Lois Lane in the Superman movies and who in real life is a super advocate for women and the environment.

The concerns of the pipeline protestors are not theoretical. The State Department’s conclusion in its final Environmental Impact Statement is that the pipeline would have “no significant impact on the environment.” Both the Environmental Protection Agency and some of the nation’s leading environmental scientists disagree.

The EPA estimates that extraction of oil from Alberta’s tar sands creates 80 percent more carbon emissions that extracting and refining oil from more traditional sources. Add to that the destruction of Alberta’s boreal forests, the ongoing pollution of major rivers like the Athabasca and the enormous toxic storage ponds, and giving the Keystone XL pipeline the green light to enable and enhance tar sands extraction is anything but environmentally benign.

NASA’s lead climatologist, speaking to the National Press Club recently, laid it out rather bluntly: “We have a planetary emergency,” Dr. James Hansen said, stressing that if we continued to burn oil at our current rate, we would lose 20 to 40 percent of all species on the planet within the century, see an increase in disastrous weather events and “ruin the future for our children.” Following his remarks, Hansen accompanied 60 religious leader to protest in front of the White House and joined the ranks of 140 more people arrested Aug. 29 for trying to stop the pipeline.

Adding insult to injury, Paul Elliot, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager for her presidential bid, is now a lobbyist for the Keystone XL pipeline. And, according to emails released by WikiLeaks, the State Department’s former energy envoy, David Goldwyn, “alleviated” the concerns of Canadians about getting approval for the pipeline and went further by coaching them to improve their “oil sands messaging” by “increasing visibility and accessibility of more positive news stories” on the issue. In a disgusting demonstration of the inbred corruption that plagues D.C.–and which Obama pledged to stop—Goldwyn left the State Department and went to work for a Washington lobbying firm, recently testifying in favor of the pipeline before a Congressional committee.

One might wonder how the State Department could claim to be objective in its review of the pipeline, given the ongoing political manipulation to push the project through.

The Koch Brothers, who already import a quarter million barrels of tar sands oil per day, and have funded endless efforts to deny global warming, are pushing approval of the pipeline—which only makes the actions of the Obama administration more puzzling. A New Yorker investigative report last year said the Koch Brothers were “waging war on Obama.” They stand to profit immensely should the pipeline be built.

While telling Americans he would change the way business is done in the White House, Obama has continued the oil-baron, big-corporate policies of the last President Bush. If it’s goodbye to labor and goodbye to greens, come the 2012 elections, it’ll be goodbye to Obama.

America's Worst Generation?

Who's Really to Blame for the Gulf?
By STEVEN HIGGS

For we radical environmentalists, whose warnings and arguments have been ignored, maligned and ridiculed since the Reagan Revolution dawned three decades ago, the Gulf of Oil disaster evokes a wicked brew of emotions and attitudes.

On the one hand, we feel the pain and horror of the unfolding environmental disaster as acutely as those who occupy the bioregion. We radicals have spent our entire lives fighting to protect the wildlife and natural features of the Gulf and every other coast, shoreline, riverbed or stream bank, wherever they've been threatened, which is everywhere. Despite the ennui that comes from witnessing first-hand decades of unrelenting ecological degradation, we still feel the pinch every time a special place is lost.

We can't help but revel in the never-ending spew of vitriol and venom aimed at BP, one of the planet's most contemptible corporate polluters. We delight in watching the arrogance and hypocrisy of the drill-baby-drills and political pimps -- like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, and U.S. Senators Mary Landrieu from Louisiana, John Cornin from Texas and Lamar Alexander from Tennessee -- exposed with such laser-clear light.

And seriously, who can't muster a little chuckle watching the nightly images of those who have built careers emasculating the federal government whining because the feds aren't there to save their asses? Democrats and Republicans, they need to burn-baby-burn at the polls every November until they are all gone. And then they should be prosecuted for crimes against democracy and the environment.

Naturally, we're not surprised that President Barack Obama again has been caught clueless. He did put Ken Salazar in charge of the Department of the Interior, with responsibility for regulating oil rigs like the Deepwater Horizon. Days before the platform exploded and the gushing and lying and despoliation commenced, the president declared deep-water drilling safe.

And he still wants to drill. He thinks nukes are clean energy, for god sake. The guy is clueless.

We do empathize with those whose lives and livelihoods have been destroyed, even if the Karma at work is elementary. (Lie with bugs, you're going to get bit, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama.) Most of us became radical environmentalists because similar fates befell people or places we love.

But on the other hand, the blame game that consumes the mainstream media's attention is downright infuriating.

BP is no more responsible for the Deepwater Horizon explosion and leak than a 14-year-old kid is for skipping classes when her parents don't care. BP and other oil companies tap oil wells a mile below the sea's surface with inadequate disaster plans because they are allowed to. They're guilty. But they're not to blame.

Barack Obama inherited the government that Ronald Reagan envisioned when his revolution took root -- emasculated, ineffective, incapable of acting. He can't save the environment or the people in the Gulf. He bears no blame for it, no matter how dense he is.

***

If blame for this catastrophe must be assigned, the far-and-away largest chunk goes to the baby-boom generation.

The boomers came of age during the Great Society and were among the most educated and enlightened generations in history. They engaged politically in their youth and learned how to make democracy serve the best interests of its citizens. They opposed and eventually stopped an immoral war, helped drive the Civil Rights and Women's Rights agendas and ushered in eras of unprecedented creativity, freedom and expression.

They also understood Silent Spring and grasped the significance when the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland in 1969. Richard Nixon didn't sign the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act or the National Environmental Policy Act because he cared about the environment. He did so because the public, driven by the boomers' agenda, left him no political choice.

But when Ronald Reagan asked in 1980 if they were better off than they had been four years before, the boomers reacted as if he were swinging a bright, shiny object before their eyes, a la a Twilight Zone episode. They forgot where they had been, what they had learned, and what they stood for. They internalized the fundamental principle of Ronald Reagan, that selfishness and greed are laudable human values.

They turned off, tuned out and dropped off the face of the political planet.

They devolved from citizens to consumers and spent the next three decades gorging themselves on fossil fuels. Climate change be damned. More gas. More oil. More petroleum. They drove out of the cities, built bigger houses, bought bigger vehicles (an SUV for every kid!) and didn't give a damn about anything or anyone other than themselves.

Through their political detachment, they enabled the liars and thieves who have engineered as great a transfer of wealth from the many to the few as the world has ever witnessed. They turned blind eyes to the blatant plutocratic corruption that plagues the political system at every level. Enough of them voted for George W. Bush that Big Oil was able to steal two presidential elections and lay the framework for the Gulf of Oil disaster.

As pitifully as the truth about the environment has been presented to them by what passes for the "news" media in our age, Earth Day-raised boomers didn't have to put themselves out to get the facts. Driven by the hubris of human beings like BP's Tony Hayword and Texan John Cornin, their environment, indeed their own bodies, are soaked with poisons, the most dangerous of which are derived from oil. It ain’t quantum physics. It’ common sense.

The facts are now, and always have been, readily available for those boomers who cared enough to be informed. Hell, all they had to do was look at their children and grandchildren to realize something is wrong at the most elemental levels of life. As former New York Times environmental reporter Philip Shabecoff and his wife Alice detail in their book Poisoned for Profit, one in every three American children today has a chronic and usually incurable illness or condition -- a developmental disability like autism or ADHD, a birth defect like cleft palette, lead poisoning, asthma or cancer. If obesity is added to the list, it's almost half -- 45 percent.

Have the boomers really not noticed?

No, environmental reality couldn't have been more clear. But in their self-indulgent, Reaganite mindsets, the boomers ignored, maligned and ridiculed the truth. They punted. And four decades after Silent Spring and Cuyahoga, their children's bodies are brimming with pesticides, and the Gulf is on fire.

The boomers are to blame. Any honest book about them would have to be titled America's Worst Generation.