<html>
<body>
<font size=3><br>
Testing the Limits of Dissent and Repression in the Green Scare<br>
By Dan Berger<br><br>
<br>
One of the biggest post-9/11 criminal cases involves the prosecution of
fourteen radical environmentalists on a slew of charges for property
destruction, mainly arson, and conspiracy. The actions for which they are
accused occurred date back as far as 1996 and include the multi-million
dollar destruction of a Vail ski lodge expansion in 1998. No one was hurt
in any of the actions, which were claimed by the Earth Liberation Front,
the Animal Liberation Front, or jointly by the equally shadowy and
decentralized groups.<br><br>
The FBI swooped up the defendants in December 2005 in multi-state raids
the government dubbed “Operation Backfire.” This massive operation
targeting the awkwardly named phenomenon of “eco-terrorism”--but which
environmentalists and civil libertarians are dubbing “the Green
Scare”--is at the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s assault on
domestic dissent under the auspices of fighting terrorism. The
“terrorism” these defendants are accused of, like other eco-militants
arrested in recent years, has targeted the property of large corporations
to the tune of more than $100 million--done intentionally without harming
anyone.<br><br>
Yet because the T-word is attached to the case, people are facing more
severe punishments than they might otherwise face for property
destruction--including the possibility of life in prison. Indeed, six of
the fourteen pled guilty shortly after their arrest in exchange for
reduced--but still lengthy--sentences. Part of their plea agreement,
however, mandates that the half-dozen eco-militants cooperate with the
state in ongoing investigations against radical environmentalists for the
rest of their lives.<br><br>
The case has been built on informants: the government’s star witness who
helped build the initial case is, by his own admission in a gossipy
article in the August Rolling Stone, a longtime drug addict who says he
took part in several of the arsons yet who faces no charges himself.
After the FBI starting applying significant pressure in the Pacific
Northwest through grand juries and home visits, other activists also
began cooperating as the government expanded the number of people
indicted to 18. Some remained defiant; Jeff Hogg spent six months in jail
for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury.<br><br>
Of the remaining eight defendants from the initial arrest, one person,
Bill Rodgers, committed suicide in his cell shortly after being arrested
in December. Three people remain at large, and four people--Nathan Block,
Daniel McGowan, Jonathan Paul, and Joyanna Zacher--changed their pleas to
guilty in November, after months of negotiation. As a condition of their
plea, however, these four defendants remain non-cooperative with the
state. As a result, prosecutors will seek a “terrorism enhancement”
charge in their case, attempting to add up to 20 years to the reduced
plea sentence.<br><br>
Many progressives haven’t paid much, if any, attention to the trial of
these eco-militants--feeling distanced, perhaps, from a movement that has
not only utilized illegal tactics but has generally done too little to
incorporate itself into a broader social justice initiatives and whose
militant sectors have earned the wrath of the FBI as the “number-one
domestic terrorist threat,” according to FBI deputy assistant director
John Lewis last year.<br><br>
But the ramifications of this case are too large to ignore, and not just
because it is likely that such militant actions will increase in number
as the earth’s destruction becomes more severe. <br><br>
One of the defendants is Daniel McGowan, an activist who has devoted
significant attention to exactly the kind of bridge building that the
environmental movement is in desperate need of. As with radical attorney
Lynne Stewart and incendiary professor Ward Churchill, the government has
gone after seemingly extreme radicals in the hope of cleaving off any
significant support from the left for people whose tactics or politics
prove controversial, even among progressive circles. Unlike Stewart and
Churchill, however, many of these eco-activists face up to life in prison
as a result of illegal activities and an investigation bolstered by
informants and surveillance.<br><br>
It is a strategy that has been used before, with some degree of success:
go after the apparent margins of the left as a way to limit the
parameters of dissent more generally. The targeting of clandestine
anti-imperialist militants and jailhouse activists of the 1980s with
experimental control unit prisons led to the more widespread use of such
draconian institutions. This includes the “supermax” prisons in Florence
, Colorado , and Marion , Illinois , as well as the other entire control
unit prisons, and the “special housing units” within most prisons, which
function as exceptionally austere prisons within existing prisons. In
both cases, according to groups like Human Rights Watch, prisoners are
separated from any human contact except the guards and confined to tiny
cells for 23 hours a day. Numerous psychologists have criticized such
institutions for the mental illnesses they engender in those
incarcerated.<br><br>
This case is also one where the worst of PATRIOT ACT surveillance and its
related snitch culture are being tested. The six who plead guilty in the
spring and summer are required to cooperate with prosecutors in
testifying against other defendants, numerous people have been hauled
before grand juries to testify about environmental activism in the
northwest (resulting in the incarceration of several people for refusing
to comply with the invasive and undemocratic subpoenas), and it appears
that the initial arrests were made on the basis of <br>
voluminous surveillance data. Besides informants, the case is evidently
built off the National Security Agency’s domestic spying
program.<br><br>
According to a September story in the Eugene Weekly, the government has
handed over “some 28,000 pages of documents, 71 CDs (likely recordings
made by snitches with wires), four DVDs and three videotapes. But they
hedged the request [from the defense] for information obtained by NSA
surveillance.” Since a federal judge in Detroit ruled domestic NSA
surveillance illegal for violating the Fourth Amendment, revelation of
warrantless wiretapping used in building a case against these radical
environmentalists could have rendered the government’s case null and
void. The judge presiding over the case ordered the prosecution to “find
out whether warrantless wiretapping was used to build a case against the
<br>
defendants,” the Weekly reported.<br><br>
Ultimately, however, the defense agreed to drop this motion when the four
defendants opted to plead guilty (presumably in exchange for lower
sentences). Still, these proceedings and the case overall mark an
important turning point in the existence of radical opposition within the
United States : can resistance movements develop and maintain
consciousness about non-cooperation with the repressive aims of the
state? And will the rights of people to oppose the government and
corporate agenda beat back the current Orwellian strategies of
control?<br><br>
Check out
<a href="http://www.greenscare.org/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.greenscare.org</a> or
<a href="http://www.supportdaniel.org/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.supportdaniel.org</a> for updates.<br><br>
Dan Berger is a writer, activist and graduate student in
Philadelphia . He is the co-editor of Letters From Young Activists:
Today’s Rebels Speak Out (Nation Books, 2005) and author of <br><br>
Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of
Solidarity (AK Press, 2006).<br>
</font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<font size=3 color="#FF0000">The Freedom Archives<br>
522 Valencia Street<br>
San Francisco, CA 94110<br>
(415) 863-9977<br>
</font><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/" eudora="autourl">
www.freedomarchives.org</a></font></body>
</html>