In May 2005, FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism John Lewis told a Senate panel that ecoterrorism is "one of today's most serious domestic terrorism threats." Then the FBI's James Jarboe estimated that two organizations (the Earth Liberation Front - ELF and Animal Liberation Front - ALF) committed over 600 criminal acts since 1996, causing over $43 million in damage. For his part, Lewis said both groups committed more than 1100 such acts since 1976, "conservatively" resulting in around $110 million in damages.
What's going on, and is there anything to these charges? Coming from FBI sources makes them highly suspect, especially when there are two types of documented cases:
-- people guilty of non-violent offenses called "terrorism" and given excessively harsh sentences; and most disturbing
-- innocent people targeted, accused, convicted and sentenced to hard time for environmental activism or supporting animal rights; and that's on top of hundreds of other political persecutions and many thousands of innocent people (or petty criminals) in US prisons.
This behavior isn't new in America, but things heated up after 9/11 with the administration wasting no time getting going. That evening, George Bush addressed the nation and declared a "war against terrorism," asked for world support, and began the government's "emergency (preventive war strategy) response plans." It was planned and ready before 9/11 as a "war of terrorism" to defile the law, wage aggressive wars, usurp unprecedented powers, destroy our civil liberties, and convince the public to sacrifice freedom for the security they never got. In addition, the October 2001 USA Patriot Act (written well before 9/11) created the federal crime of "domestic terrorism" that broadened the definition and applied it to US citizens as well as aliens.
When John Lewis addressed another Senate panel in May 2004, he stated that "the FBI divides the terrorist threat facing (the country) into two broad categories, international and domestic....and during the past decade we have witnessed dramatic changes in the nature of the domestic terrorist threat." For a while "right-wing extremism" (loosely defined as the militia movement) overtook left-wing terrorism (but in) the past several years....special interest extremism (from groups like) the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), and related extremists, has emerged as a serious domestic terrorist threat." That view is amplified on the FBI's web site that states the Bureau "is part of a vast national and international campaign dedicated to defeating terrorism" with ecoterrorism a key part of it.
The FBI defined it in 2002 to mean: "the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against innocent victims or property by an environmentally-oriented, subnational group for environmental-political reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target, often of a symbolic nature."
Activists refer to a tactic called "monkeywrenching" from the 1985 Dave Foreman/Bill Haywood-edited book "Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching." It describes it as:
-- "nonviolent resistance to the destruction of natural diversity and wilderness (and) never directed against human beings or other forms of life;
-- strategic....thoughtful (and) deliberate in order to succeed;
-- individual or very small (group actions) of people who have known each other for years (and have) trust and a good working relationship;
-- targeted (because) mindless, erratic vandalism is counterproductive as well as unethical;
-- timely (and) not....when there is a nonviolent civil disobedience action;
-- dispersed (to) hasten overall industrial retreat from wild areas;
-- fun (even though it's) serious and potentially dangerous;
I am a 72 year old, retired, progressive small businessman concerned about all the major national and world issues, committed to speak out and write about them.
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