Terror

There is one source, O Athenians, of all your defeats. It is that your citizens have ceased to be soldiers.—Demosthenes

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

—Anonymous

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success and more dangerous to carry through, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has against him those who benefited from the old system; while those who should benefit from the new are only lukewarm friends, being suspicious, as men generally are, of something new and not yet experienced. In speaking of innovations, it is first necessary to establish whether the innovators depend upon the strength of others or their own . . . in the first case, things always go badly for them, in the second, they almost always succeed. From this comes the fact that all armed prophets were victorious and the unarmed came to ruin.—Niccolo Machiavelli

ALF and ELF—Terrorism Is as Terrorism Does

PAUL WATSON

Can the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front accurately be called terrorist organizations?

It depends on who is judging the actions. Accusations of terrorism are usually very subjective. There seems to be no objective adjudicator on the subject of terrorism. In fact, in the post-9/11 United States the label has been thrown about with such carelessness in the media that the very word is in danger of losing its significance. It is rapidly becoming the most commonly, carelessly, thoughtlessly and irresponsibly used word in the English language.

Terrorism can be objectively defined as any act of violence that utilizes tactics and strategies that involve non-combatants. Is the hijacking of two jumbo jets filled with innocent passengers and the crashing of these aircraft into the World Trade Center an act of terrorism? Of course it is. Was the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen an act of terrorism? The answer must be no. Only combatants were involved. The target was military. It was a violent act, but it was not a terrorist attack. Similarly, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a military attack and not an act of terrorism. In contrast, the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would qualify as terrorist attacks because the targets were civilians. Was the hijacking of a jumbo jet and crashing it into the Pentagon an act of terrorism? Yes, because although the target was unarguably military, the hijacking of the plane involved innocent civilians.

Terrorism thus defined is not a recent media invention. Terrorism has been an occupation of human cultures since the dawn of recorded history. Of course, it is not always viewed as such by those who are doing the recording. For example, during the Native American and US government conflicts, massacres of Indian villages were called battles, whereas the Battle of the Little Big Horn went down in American history as a massacre, although it was a clash of combatants. In Nicaragua, the contras were certainly seen as terrorists; the Reagan administration, however, saw them as freedom fighters. The British government certainly did not see the Boston Tea Party as a legitimate legal action, and all of George Washington's men were considered traitors and terrorists. Nathan Hale was hanged for terrorism, and Washington would have met the same fate if he had been captured.

It should be a simple matter to designate an attack as a terrorist attack or a military attack by identifying the target. All violent attacks on civilians by military, criminal, political, or religious groups can be legitimately labeled as terrorist attacks. But of course it is not so simple.

For example, one common definition of terrorism is the utilization of low-tech or no-tech weapons in the hands of civilians against high-tech weapons systems under the control of a government. Throw a Molotov cocktail onto a tank and you're a terrorist. Drop a napalm bomb on a school bus from a $100 million aircraft and you're striking a military target. It's all about the price of the hardware.

As I am writing this, I have just seen two back-to-back news stories on the television news. One story described how environmental “terrorists” released 10,000 mink from a mink farm. No one was hurt. Property was not damaged and 10,000 animals were spared a gruesome death by anal electrocution. The story that preceded it told how an Israeli military “strike” against Hamas killed six bystanders. Innocent people died, yet the media described it as a military strike.

When is terrorism not terrorism? The answer is when it is sanctioned by government, established institutions or religions—or when the media says so. The more dominant and powerful the governments, religions and institutions are, the more justified is the rationale for utilizing terror as an instrument of social or political change or as an instrument to defend the status quo.

We forget that Adolf Hitler was a democratically elected leader and thus any opposition in the thirties to his government by Germans or foreigners was a legitimate crime. Interference with the internment of Jews was a crime, and those who assassinated Nazi persecutors of Jews were in fact breaking the laws of a legitimate state and thus could be accused of terrorism. Although it was clearly illegal to oppose Jewish internment, it was still morally right, and sometimes the law had to be broken before the law broke those who were forced to break it for self-defense or to protect a life from the legal tyranny of the state. And that is what we have with the environmental and animal rights movements today. People are forced to disobey the law to protect life from the legal tyranny of the state.

How is this different from other movements or individuals who have taken the law into their own hands—for example, the anti-abortion activists who violate laws to protect unborn babies from the policies of the government? There is in fact no difference in basic principle, but there are differences in degrees of violence. Christian anti-abortion activists have deliberately murdered doctors and bombed civilians. Animal rights activists and environmentalists have not been implicated in a single murder or a conspiracy to commit a murder. Anti-abortionists argue that the doctors are killers and deserve to die. This argument is ridiculous coming from a group that describes itself as right-to-lifers. (And most right-to-lifers are also pro-capital punishment.) I was once forced to evacuate a radio studio after a person called in a bomb threat to protest my violence in shutting down a whaling operation. The hypocrisy is amazing and even amusing. However, animal rights and environmental activists who disagree with the philosophy of the anti-abortionists would be also hypocritical to condemn their tactics and strategies based simply on philosophical differences. They are, however, free to condemn their acts of murder and violence as morally unacceptable in themselves.

A terrorist is also not a terrorist if the acts of terror succeed in elevating the terrorist to the status of statesman. Michael Collins ceased to be a terrorist once the nation of Ireland was granted independence by Britain. The Irish employed terrorism as a weapon against the British, and they succeeded in achieving their military objective because of terrorism. Without tactics of terror, Ireland would not exist as an independent nation today.

One of the best examples of the legitimization of terrorism is postwar, British-ruled Palestine. There were a number of Jewish terrorist groups, the most famous being the Stern Gang, founded by Avraham Stern as a splinter group from the anti-British activist organization Irgun. The operations commander of the Stern Gang was Yitzhak Shamir, later to become Israeli foreign minister for the Likud Party. And this was a stepping-stone to holding the esteemed office of prime minister of Israel. When he appointed Shamir as Foreign Minister, Prime Minister Menachem Begin selected a man that he knew was responsible for two famous and violent political assassinations. Shamir had personally ordered and organized the killing of Lord Moyne, the British minister representative in the Middle East in 1944, and Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nation's special mediator on Palestine in 1948. But this was not unexpected or surprising from Menachem Begin, a former member of the Jewish terrorist group Irgun. It was Begin himself who had planted the bomb at the British headquarters in the King David Hotel in 1946, leaving 90 dead and 45 wounded. And this man was actually awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 32 years later in 1978.

After Israeli independence, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion banned and condemned both the Stern Gang and Irgun, although there was never any attempt to bring the terrorists to justice. On the contrary, streets were named after the assassins of Lord Moyne and Count Bernadotte, and Israel under Begin issued a commemorative postage stamp with the picture of Avraham Stern. Today, in its righteous condemnation of Palestinian terrorism, Israel has conveniently forgotten that it was violent terrorism in the form of assassinations and bombs that gave birth to the nation of Israel.

There is a word in Hebrew, mekhabbel, meaning a person who uses political violence, that Yitzhak Shamir and his colleagues used to proudly describe themselves in their armed struggle against the British. The word translated to “saboteur” in the forties, although the Stern Gang did considerably more than commit sabotage. The word has now changed in meaning to the more negative “terrorist,” as in “Palestinian” terrorist. In other words, once the objective had been achieved, the objective, i.e., the State of Israel, had to be protected from those who would take it away using the same means by which it was achieved.

Governments set the framework for the opinions and actions of their citizens. When Timothy McVeigh was asked how he could dismiss the children who died in the Oklahoma City bombing as collateral damage, he answered that it was a word he had learned from his government. “They told us that the children we killed in the Gulf War were collateral damage and they said that the children who were killed at Waco were collateral damage. What is the difference?”

When asked why he believed that violence was the answer to solving problems, McVeigh answered that his government had taught him that also, and that the government solved all problems through violence—including the problem of Timothy McVeigh, who was put to death by a government that pretended to oppose violence. The government did not disagree with McVeigh's tactics; they disagreed with his choice of targets.

In a violent society, we should not be surprised that people utilize violent solutions. Our media culture in fact indoctrinates each generation with years of exposure to films, magazines, books, and music that glorify violence and emphasize the achievements of violence. And all violence is justified by the perpetrators and their supporters, and condemned by those who disagree. In other words, all humans support violence when they agree with the philosophy of the perpetrators and condemn violence when they disagree with that philosophy.

Social change is a violent enterprise and always has been. There has never been a successful nonviolent social or political revolution in the history of humankind. Gandhi, of course, will always be trotted out as an example of nonviolent revolution. Unfortunately, it was not a non-violent struggle. Gandhi utilized nonviolence as a strategy against the British. It was their Achilles heel. Gandhian tactics would never have worked against a Hitler or a Stalin. And his tactics did not work completely with the British, either. The Indian Revolution was a multifronted struggle. There was violent resistance, one example being Subhas Chandra Bose and his organized armed opposition against the British Raj. Gandhi's followers were killed. Gandhi himself was assassinated.

The Civil Rights Movement in the United States was won through the martyrdom of the freedom riders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Although King and his followers are to be admired for their nonviolent tactics, the achievements were still won because of violence. Lives had to be sacrificed to force the government to change the status quo.

The activists of the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front are merely emulating the strategies and tactics of every other social and political movement that has ever existed but with one distinct difference—they have not killed anyone. Yet environmentalists and animal rights activists have been murdered, and the media is reluctant to portray the deaths as terrorism.

In 1985 agents of the government of France sank the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand and killed a photographer. Not one leader of any nation described the attack as terrorism. Yet when the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society sinks illegally operated whaling ships without injuring anyone, they are described as an eco-terrorist organization in some media, even though no legal charges have been brought. Fishing corporations eradicate entire species without a murmur from the media or governments, yet when Earth Island Institute calls for a boycott of tuna to protect dolphins, they are accused of advocating economic eco-terrorism.

There are indeed eco-terrorists. Exxon committed eco-terrorism in Alaska. Union Carbide committed acts of eco-terrorism at Bhopal, India. The forest industries commit eco-terrorism each day. These corporations will not be found on any federal list of “terrorist” organizations, because they have money, and money calls the shots in what Mark Twain once described as the “Parliament of Whores” in Washington, DC.

The wholesale destruction of our oceans and forests and the incredible assault on biodiversity is terrorism of the highest order—terrorism that is accepted by anthropocentric culture as normal. The fact is that we will lose more species of plants and animals between 1980 and 2040 than have gone extinct over the last 65 million years. This mass extinction is of greater significance and will have a far greater consequence than the present hominid on hominid terrorist attacks by all sides upon each other.

Where are groups like the ALF and the ELF heading? The answer is, wherever the participants wish to take them. These groups are not under the control of any government or organization. There is no central authority. They are completely unpredictable and as such practically unstoppable. They are simply reactions to a cruel culture that does not offer any legal form of redress and thus spawns the frustration and the anger that fuels activist organizations. People will be jailed and harassed within the entire movement, but this cannot be helped, because there is absolutely nothing that mainstream organizations can do to stifle the actions of underground organizations.

In fact, the entire world is now being divided into visible establishments at war with invisible resistance groups representing a host of issues, many of which are in conflict with each other. Some are good and some are bad, depending on the eye of the beholder. All are good in the eyes of their members and participants. Such is to be expected in a world with six and a half billion competing primate egos. As the populations increase further there will be more oppressive laws created to contain all these chaotic conflicts.

The challenge that the animal rights and environmental movements have is how to survive in systems where both movements are being marginalized by the establishment—global governments, media and financial institutions. Human nature being what it is, the movements will adapt to the more repressive measures, and the safest way to adapt is to go underground with operations through cell structures. In fact, it is repression that motivates underground resistance, and the greater the repression, the more resourcefulness is demonstrated by the resistance movements.

The best example of this is the fact that as lethally repressive as the Nazi regime was in Germany and Austria, the underground resistance was never neutralized. The French resistance never comprised more than two percent of French citizens, yet they practiced “terrorist” tactics against the Germans and helped to defeat the Nazis despite many losses. The majority of French citizens did nothing as the extremist groups fought and died for them. It was extremism as a reaction against an extreme action—the occupation of France.

The ELF and the ALF have already proven themselves to be highly adaptable and very resourceful. Very few of them have been arrested and convicted, and very few of their attacks have been successfully prosecuted—this from a movement that is relatively undisciplined compared to the resistance movements in other more traditional causes. By all accounts the ELF and the ALF are growing in strength, and this makes sense as both the animal rights movement and the environmental movements are also growing in strength every year. If the radical underground of these two movements represents only a fraction of one percent of all adherents to both causes, it still adds up to continued growth of the underground, because that small fraction is continually supplied from the ranks of the more mainstream of these groups, especially if it is seen that these mainstream groups are not accomplishing much. The irony, however, is that because of the extremist groups, the more mainstream groups are given legitimacy and a credibility that they would not otherwise have. The Sierra Club and the Humane Society of the United States both benefit, like it or not, from the actions of the ELF and the ALF. Because of extremism, moderates can make progress. The underground groups are simply the shock troops for the movement armies of supporters.

Just as Israel would not now exist if not for the actions of the Stern Gang and Irgun, the animal rights and environmental movements may not succeed without the ALF and ELF. The Civil Rights Movement had Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but it also had the Black Panthers. The Indian Revolution had Gandhi, but it also had Bose. The animal rights movement has Peter Singer, but it also has Rod Coronado. Movements are incomplete without diversity.

In fact, it is only through diversity that any movement can survive, and this diversity demands tolerance of all participating groups within the spectrum of action for each other. It makes little sense for a mainstream group to waste resources and time attacking the ALF or the ELF. There is nothing that a mainstream group can do to prevent actions by covert activist groups or individuals. Agreement to disagree is the only solution. When challenged to justify an action by a covert group, a mainstream group should reply by saying that it is unfortunate that the problem or the threat is so extreme that some people have been moved to take extreme measures to address it.

The bottom line is that, like them or hate them, the ELF and the ALF are here to stay for as long as the environmental and animal rights movements exist. They are both decentralized, diversely widespread, unknown and unpredictable, and their membership is so fluid and transient that it is virtually impossible to shut them down. In fact, they don't exist in any real sense as tangible entities. Both the ELF and the ALF are decentralized organizations of shadows. Arrest an activist, and that activist will be completely unable to betray more than a small group that would have no connection to any other group. The ELF and the ALF only exist as two sets of triple letters, sometimes scrawled on a wall in red paint, sometimes photocopied on a communiqué, sometimes shouted from the crowd.

A movement is simply a device to convey an idea into the hearts and minds of humanity. Ideas flow like water, over barriers and through obstacles, taking the path of least resistance and striking with the lethal force of a pounding surf, only to dwindle into puddles and drops that simply evaporate and disappear. Like a tidal wave, the water is gone before it is fully realized what has happened. Behind it, however, is a trail of destruction. The establishment may just as well attempt to stop the surf from crashing as try to stop covert activism. But ideas can simply crash on the rocks of culture without impact unless a movement focuses those ideas and delivers them with stunning results. The freeing of Nelson Mandela was an idea that gained momentum throughout the 1960s, the '70s and the '80s until it broke like a wave upon the dike of apartheid, overwhelmed it, and simply washed it away. No one in 1970 could have ever conceived of Nelson Mandela becoming president of South Africa. It was impossible. And the impossible happened, because of a movement that was both mainstream and covert, nonviolent and violent, but most importantly a movement whose time had come.

Can humanity learn to live in harmony within the bounds of the laws of nature? Will humanity put an end to the mass exploitation of other species? It sounds impossible now, but it is an idea whose time has not yet come. But the stream is moving and picking up speed, and this planet and all its nonhuman inhabitants may one day receive the miracle that they deserve—the miracle of living on a planet without fear of the species Homo sapiens.

The mainstream movement should accept the presence of the ELF and ALF and carry on doing mainstream work. The future will see escalation of covert tactics, and ALF and ELF attacks will increase. There is a large pool of anger and frustration to draw upon, and the more the movements are persecuted, the stronger they will become.

But there is one way to stop the ELF and the ALF. It's simple, really. All society needs to do is to eradicate its own violence against other humans, species, and ecosystems. The raison d'être must be removed and, after all, what are these movements demanding?

An end to cruelty, destruction and death and the right of all species to live in dignity.

Not such a bad objective, really. Why would anyone want to disagree with that?

Once this goal is achieved, the ELF and the ALF will fade away as mysteriously as they arose—as shadows into the mists of history.

The Rhetorical “Terrorist”: Implications of the USA Patriot Act on Animal Liberation

JASON BLACK AND JENNIFER BLACK

The United States has witnessed, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 tragedy, a heightened state of emergency and, consequently, an increase in national security measures. At the time of this writing, the US Senate and House remain tangled in a debate over the creation of a Department of Homeland Security. Additionally, the Department of Transportation and the National Transportation Safety Board continue making attempts to bolster airport safety measures, including enhanced luggage inspections, detailed body searches, and what civil libertarians deem unnecessary acts of profiling. These contemporaneous measures, while original in scope, find their roots in the passage of the USA Patriot Act, a legislative device passed on October 26, 2001, designed to curb terrorism and quell national outrage over the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

The Patriot Act proposes “to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, (and) to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools.”¹ The Act seeks to modify and build upon prior discussions of terrorism located in Title 18 of the United States Code. Title 18, in sum, encapsulates America's criminal codes, including acts against property, person, and nation. The Act, however, crafts an overly broad definition of what constitutes, and thus what can be punished as, an act of terrorism. The American Civil Liberties Union and other libertarian watchdogs have worked to alert the American public to the negative implications of the Patriot Act. They have warned, “Congress is about to pass a law that drastically expands government's power to invade our privacy, to imprison people without due process, and to punish dissent. More disturbing is the fact that this power grab over our freedom and civil liberties is in fact not necessary to fight terrorism.”² The ACLU's worry resonates particularly clearly with movements in the vanguard of social change. That is, “imprisoning without due process” for mere “dissent” violates the basic tenets of protest and activism.³ When a “dissenting” group—whether established or underground—can attract the label of “terrorist,” activism is squelched, and individual liberties are at stake. When that activism takes the form of animal liberation, which society views as an “extreme” act, threats to personal freedoms are increased exponentially.

One group that will undoubtedly be disadvantaged by the broad definition of “terrorist” in the Patriot Act is the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and similar cells of animal liberators in the United States. The ALF “is an international organization that seeks the total elimination of animal abuse and suffering at the hands of humans.”⁴ The group contains cells all around the world, including pockets of activists in the United States. The way in which the ALF seeks to fulfill its purpose is “by performing nonviolent direct actions and liberations.”⁵ Animal liberation first received institutional threats in the United States with the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992, which directed a joint study between the attorney general and the secretary of agriculture “on the extent and effects of domestic and international terrorism on enterprises using animals for food or fiber production, agriculture, research, or testing.⁶ The result, a 1993 Department of Justice report, forever linked liberation with the rhetorical notion of “terrorism,” and moreover tied animal liberators with the label of “terrorist.” The Patriot Act extends the bond between the ALF and terrorist activity first established in 1992 by expanding the definition of what constitutes terrorism in the wake of the September 11 tragedy.⁷

The present essay strives to uncover the rhetorical “terrorist” of the USA Patriot Act, the new institutional definition of terrorism that may, in the future, present dire consequences for both animal liberators and those who support animal liberation action. We argue first that the Patriot Act presents a spurious, broad characterization of terrorism that constructs animal liberation as a “terrorist” act. Second, we contend that the ALF and miscellaneous liberation cells should not fall under the precepts of the Patriot Act. Throughout both arguments, we will critique the Act as potentially dangerous for the animal liberation and animal rights movements in the United States, in that the movement faces a number of legal repercussions for their actions.

The Patriot Act, Title 18, and Animal Liberation

In the past, Title 18 referred to acts committed by internationals as the primary category of terrorism. The Patriot Act adds that “an act of terrorism means an act of domestic or international terrorism.”⁸ This new rhetorical construction henceforth employs three criteria in determining the classification of an act as domestic terrorism. First, an act must be dangerous to human life and violate any state's criminal laws. Second, the act must appear to be intended to perform at least one of the following tasks: “to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.”⁹ Third, the terrorist act must occur primarily within the United States' territorial jurisdiction.

The second criterion exerts enormous consequences for animal liberation. According to Harold Guither, the ALF intends not violent or injurious measures, but rather actions designed to intimidate animal users and pressure decision-makers and governmental agencies. These aims are achieved through:

Break-ins and destruction of laboratory equipment; damage to vehicles owned by research institutions; trespassing and blocking of entrances to research facilities; bomb threats; threat or destruction of research data and audio and video tapes; taking employment in research facilities to spy on the operations and taking illegal photos of the operations; and vandalism and attempted arson to offices and animal and poultry production facilities.¹⁰

The strategy of the ALF, then, is to damage physical property and cause economic hardship in order to undermine the heinous animal producing industries. These actions, however, are purely surface representations of a far deeper goal, the abolition of animal use. The ALF holds that such abolition can only be achieved through forms of symbolic coercion and persuasive measures directed at policy-makers and elite audiences, i.e., industry leaders, mainstream media. If this is the case, then animal liberation unfortunately fits under the new institutional definition of domestic terrorism. Statements such as “Arson has always been a valuable asset; it makes animal use unprofitable, it is the ultimate pressure point. Fire removes the apparatus . . . adding to the overall financial burden”¹¹ place the ALF under the Patriot Act's aegis.

The United States government has not only amended its definition of terrorism, it has also modified the potential punishment for such actions. Perhaps the most important amendment dealing with punishment regards the removal of a statute of limitations for certain terrorist offenses.¹² These offenses include those that result in—or create a foreseeable risk of—death or serious bodily injury to another person. By adding the caveat of a “foreseeable risk” as a possible cause for eradicating statutes of limitation, almost any activist action—whether liberation-oriented or not—could qualify as terrorism. Most social “extremism,” because it threatens the dominant public in more radical rather than conciliatory ways, contains some sort of potential risk of hazard. So, for example, the 1987 destruction of a veterinary diagnostic center under construction at the University of California-Davis could conceivably have created a risk of human death or injury.¹³ The assumption that an unfinished building would be empty would not hold weight. The chance that a rogue worker might still be in the building at, say, 3 A.M. would constitute enough circumstantial evidence to charge an animal liberator with terrorism, regardless of whether the action was committed 10 years ago or 10 days ago.

Before we move the focus of our analysis from the individuals who commit supposed “terrorist” actions to those who harbor and/or conspire with them, it is important to briefly discuss the act of animal “theft.” Animal liberation is obviously one of the primary tactics utilized by the ALF, since one of its goals remains “to liberate animals from places of abuse and place them in good homes where they can live out their natural lives free from suffering.”¹⁴ Liberation of animals could easily be viewed as “theft” of animals, and could thus be seen as criminal. The portion of Title 18 that deals with theft, however, has not been affected by the changes brought about through the Patriot Act. In other words, the theft of a living being alone does not classify one as a “terrorist” according to the Patriot Act. The legislation offers no new categories of theft qua theft as an act of terrorism. Instead, the theft of animals (or “property” as the Act deems them), combined with breaking into, setting fire to, or destroying an animal industry facility, classifies one as a “terrorist.” Since, however, one cannot liberate an animal without at least “breaking and entering,” the liberating of an animal will ultimately pull an activist into the Act's definition of “terrorist” by implication of the break and enter criterion.

Other amendments involve particular actions and their corresponding punishments. For instance, Title 18 previously designated as the maximum penalty for a crime of arson “not more than 20 years.” The Patriot Act amends this punishment to read: “for any term of years or for life.”¹⁵ Hence, in addition to being labeled “terrorist,” a suspected animal liberator may face punishment commensurate with the charge of terrorism. Rather than the three and a half years' incarceration served by Melanie Arnold, an animal liberator arrested in England for firebombing a dairy, liberators could be sentenced to life imprisonment. So, Arnold's “firebomb attack against 36 large milk tankers which caused £2 million worth of damage” would, in the United States, possibly result in a sentence ranging from a few years to life.¹⁶ The Act similarly modifies the punishment for other so-called terrorist acts, as well, ranging from sabotage to mass destruction.¹⁷

Animal liberators are not the only individuals susceptible to the Patriot's Act's rhetorical terrorist label. In fact, the Act states explicitly the dangers for people aiding so-called acts of terrorism, or even conspiring to aid a liberator.¹⁸ So, for instance, if an animal rights organization were to provide “material” support to a cell of liberators—recalling that animal liberation is akin to terrorism according to the Patriot Act—its leadership could be punished with a prison sentence of up to 15 years. Before the Patriot Act, the maximum sentence for those providing support to alleged terrorists was up to 10 years' incarceration. Additionally, if a death results from an aided action, the leadership—or anyone extending corporeal sustenance—could suffer a life sentence in prison. The court is left to decide a suitable punishment. Given the United States' current state of emergency and obvious bias against those associated with any semblance of “terrorism,” the prospect of the court's decision is both frightening and threatening.

As with the act of providing material support, the act of harboring or concealing terrorists has been modified. This section of the Patriot Act was added to USC Title 18, Section 113B, and thus arises as a new indictment of so-called terrorism. Acts relating to “arson and bombing of property, risking or causing injury or death” are hit especially hard within this segment. Now, anyone thought to harbor or conceal a terrorist—in the case of animal liberation, a safe house or facility that receives liberated animals from laboratories, factory farms, or fur farms—can receive upwards of 15 years imprisonment, an increase of five years from the previous version of Title 18. In addition, if human harm or death occurs, a life prison sentence could be imposed on those alleged to hide or harbor a “terrorist” under the Patriot Act.

Finally, the scariest amendment—and similarly the most violative of civil liberties—involves penalties for conspiring to (a) commit a terrorist act, (b) provide material aid to a suspected terrorist, or (c) harbor or conceal a suspected terrorist.¹⁹ This portion of the Patriot Act should signal red flags for any individual even remotely associated with, or interested in, animal liberation. President George W. Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the radical-to-moderate right, and other architects of the Patriot Act have designed this loophole to give them the power to, veritably, charge anyone with “terrorism.” If monied and influential politicians can name Arab peoples terrorist simply because of religious affiliation or skin tone, imagine what the animal industry and its well-paid lobbyists and politicians can do to a “conspiring” animal liberator.²⁰ Is the writing of this essay, or the publishing of this volume, considered a conspiratorial act? Under the Patriot Act, there exists no barricade to the contrary; for, even “talking” about someone else's participation in animal liberation might spark a McCarthyite investigation into one's motives for such talk. This final amendment presents the most danger for the simple reason that there are few rules that apply. Similar to America's red scare in the 1950s, all an institutional accuser need do is point the finger.

One group of so-called Animal Liberation Front conspirators that could face significant danger from this portion of the Act is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Many, particularly the US Department of Justice, have questioned PETA's connections to animal liberators. For instance, the organization is cited as “publicizing the Animal Liberation Front's statements” following various animal liberations and acts of ecotage, or economic sabotage.²¹ Animal welfarists, who often find themselves at odds with animal rights advocates, argue that PETA president Ingrid Newkirk's books (e.g., Free the Animals) demonstrate a connection between the nation's leading animal rights organization and “terrorist” tactics such as animal liberation.²²

It seems possible that PETA's real—or imagined—connections to animal liberators could mean the organization will find itself a target of the Patriot Act. Take, for instance, the 1989 arrest of ALF raider Roger Troen, who was convicted of theft, burglary, and conspiracy. PETA helped pay Troen's legal tab, and even publicly announced its participation to members and the press. Also, PETA has also been under attack by consumer groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom for providing material support to liberators such as Rod Coronado (convicted of arson), Gary Yourofsky (charged with mink liberation), and Josh Harper (convicted of striking a law enforcement officer). If these scenarios were unfolding in the present, PETA could be held liable as a “terrorist” based on the Patriot Act. That is, PETA's material support of Troen, Coronado, Yourofsky, and Harper—not to mention the suspicion of conspiring with these activists to commit animal liberations—would place PETA under the Act's aegis.

Similarly, PETA often supports undercover investigations, wherein animal rights activists gain employment at various laboratories and factory farms to document abusive conditions. These operations often precede break-ins and liberations at these locations. Under the Patriot Act, PETA's humane motives in sponsoring undercover investigations could be seen as conspiracies to commit acts of “terrorism.” With the unchallenged methods and unbridled power that Attorney General John Ashcroft presently exerts, he no doubt might query whether PETA engages in investigations to document animal brutality or to “case out” the venue in question.

ALF and the Misnomer of “Terrorist”

The fundamental principle of the Patriot Act is to punish those individuals committing acts of terrorism that intend to harm or injure the American public, the United States government, or American industries. We argue that the Animal Liberation Front, and additional cells of liberators, does not fit into this construction primarily because of the lack of intention to harm or injure inherent in their actions. Let us not forget that animal liberation argues from a pro-animal stance, not an anti-institutional standpoint. That is, the ALF and others intend to save animals from human use and abuse. As the ALF exhorts, it exists “to reveal the horror and atrocities committed against animals behind locked doors, by performing nonviolent, direct actions and liberations . . . (and) to take all necessary precautions against any animal, human and nonhuman, harm.²³ Thus, the ALF aims to exact a positive effect for animal welfare, not to create a negative impact on human welfare. Moreover, the actions taken to reach these goals employ nonviolence as a method—a sure sign that the ALF means no harm to humans. Even when an action such as arson is undertaken, it is done so under extreme care to ensure that no human (or animal) life is imperiled beyond the economic damage intended.

In contrast, let us examine the quintessential terrorist act, the actual instance of inhumane malice that gave birth to the Patriot Act in the first place. The following discourse is excerpted from Osama bin Laden's October 7, 2001 address outlining the rationale behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks:

God Almighty hit the United States at its most vulnerable spot. He destroyed its greatest buildings. Praise be to God. Here is the United States. It was filled with terror from its north to its south and from its east to its west. Praise be to God. What the United States tastes today is a very small thing compared to what we have tasted for tens of years. Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and contempt for more than 80 years. Its sons are being killed, its blood is being shed, its holy places are being attacked, and it is not being ruled according to what God has decreed. . . . When Almighty God rendered successful a convoy of Muslims, the vanguards of Islam, He allowed them to destroy the United States.²⁴

The motive behind bin Laden's attack was the wholesale destruction of the American system. His intended method employed to achieve this goal was the extermination of the American public. The several thousand who perished stand as a symbol for the populace of the United States. Compare bin Laden's motive and method to the Patriot Act's stated purpose, “to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world,” and to the Act's characterization of terrorism as “acts dangerous to human life.”²⁵ Undeniably, the events of September 11 constituted the purest definition of terrorism in accordance with the Patriot Act. Here we find individuals who agitate for no reason other than to harm others.

Appraising Rod Coronado's February 1992 raid on an animal research facility at Michigan State University, we find that his motives and methods are quite different from those of the terrorists whom the Patriot Act seeks to punish. Coronado represented the goals of animal liberators—to save animals—with his break-in and arson. He achieved this goal through inflicting economic damage. The ALF Primer explains the connection between liberation as a motive and material sabotage as a method: “ethical vandalism and sabotage does help liberate animals. It makes animal abusers pay for repairs and increased insurance with money they would reap from their blood trades. People will stop abusing animals when they lose money doing it.”²⁶ Coronado's harm was not meant to damage for the sake of damage. Bin Laden's “damage,” if you will, was undoubtedly meant to cause harm. Coronado acted with a positive goal of saving life, not the destructive intent of harming life.

Viewing these contradictory examples, we conclude that true terrorists take as their goal the indiscriminate destruction of (for the US-focused purposes of this discussion) the United States government, capitalistic industries, and/or the American public. These true terrorists are not opposed to sacrificing human life to achieve their goals. In fact, their motives and methods are circular. That is, terrorists annihilate people to devastate the United States, and they achieve this national devastation through the taking of human life.

The ALF and other animal liberators should not be considered terrorist. When taken at its root, liberation is not primarily anti-institutional; rather, it is pro-animal life; it is not primarily about breaking the law, but about ending suffering. In practice, illegality may occur, but it is always performed with human safety and ethical responsibilities in mind. In theory, then, animal liberation is nonviolent and law-abiding. It is horrible enough that efforts at preserving animal life and the environment are punishable under Title 18 as it was originally designed. To then link compassionate and benevolent actions to “terrorism” represents the true capricious, unscrupulous, and evil nature of the USA Patriot Act.

Implications of the Patriot Act

The present essay does not seek to suggest ways that individuals and groups interested in animal liberation should undertake direct action in the age of the Patriot Act. We have sought instead to high-light the changes that the creation of the Patriot Act made to Title 18, and to stimulate a discussion of what consequences these additions may have on those individuals who participate in animal liberation actions. Although the question of “what next” retains vital importance to the future of animal liberators everywhere, it is not one that has been addressed in this analysis. Certainly, though, our analysis uncovers, for those who theorize about methods of liberation, that there are new challenges in the wake of the Patriot Act.

The most profound implication generated from this essay involves forewarning animal liberators (including the ALF) about the potential effects the Patriot Act could have on their efforts and individual liberties. As we have indicated, the term “terrorist” can apply to almost any person or group agitating against the dominant public, particularly the United States government and its according industries. With this in mind, anyone can retain the label of “terrorist,” if from nowhere else than the Act's open definition of “conspirator.” One intention of this essay, then, is informing animal rights circles and animal welfare organizations, not to mention underground liberators, of the danger implicit in their actions. The Patriot Act could impress a challenge far stronger than that of the 1993 US Department of Justice report to the liberation causes and personal freedoms of activists. Recall that even tenuous association with the ALF might satisfy the Patriot Act's definition of harboring, concealing, or supporting an alleged terrorist.

Animal liberators and those who support them should take note that the United States government is fully aware of extremist activities, and now possesses a necessary tool—the Patriot Act—to surveil, infiltrate, and prosecute liberation cells. But this tool is sharpest and best used when liberators provide rhetorical fodder that the establishment can use against groups like the ALF. With this in mind—and as communication scholars—the ALF would probably do well to “cool” its rhetoric and reduce the amount of attention it draws from Attorney General Ashcroft and the rest of the Patriot Act backers. As Stewart, Smith, and Denton note, there are “rhetorical” movements and those agitative groups that “speak” through action.²⁷ Liberators' sentiments may be better voiced through clandestine actions than through media-driven campaigns or careless sound bites calling attention to operations that the Patriot Act labels “terrorism.”

Animal liberators should also take care to monitor for the proverbial “mole” or “plant” in their underground cells. Just as Alex Pacheco was able to infiltrate the Silver Spring primate lab in order to expose and prosecute its leadership, so too can the government and its monitoring bodies turn the tables on animal liberators and rightists. Care should be taken to work with participants who can demonstrate continued involvement in animal rights activities, and who boast a long-term track record of reform and abolition. Proven experience in animal rights circles is something government “moles” often cannot fake, especially given the close network of rights organizations and liberation cells. If an individual's contacts or past activities seem “off,” it is advisable to do some more digging into the person's reason for getting involved. Of course, maintaining masked and nameless relationships with other members of cells is still vital. Remember, the Patriot Act cannot label “terrorist” whom it cannot find.

Second, the identity of “terrorist” requires a clearer definition. The Patriot Act needs to specify its “terrorist” in more accurate terms, namely as an individual, group of individuals, or socio-political enclave committing acts against America's landscape and institutions for the purposes of harming the touchstones of the United States: capitalism, democracy, free markets, and representation. Animal liberators are not out to end democracy, attack any religion, or promote a fanatical nationalism. Liberators seek, instead, a fair existence for animals—one that involves neither injury nor death perpetrated by superfluous human exploitations of animals for their skins, their flesh, their milk or eggs, their entertainment value, or as test subjects.²⁸ If a “patriot” is one committed to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—as goes the American standard—then liberators should be placed alongside American revolutionaries, abolitionists, civil rights activists, and human rights champions as the highest echelon of “patriot.”

Unfortunately, it appears that America's knee-jerk reaction to the September 11 tragedy was to create standards that apply to nearly any scenario involving even slight disagreement with United States policy. Understandably, the American public was scared. The response to such fear, however, should not undercut the tenets of our freedoms. Given the far-reaching power granted to American authorities via the Patriot Act, any form of protest may soon come under fire. Will PETA's famous tofu-cream pie slinging soon be viewed in the same vein as flying a jumbo jet into a skyscraper or a symbol of America's military-industrial complex? After all, says the Patriot Act, any action against government or industry that could potentially cause harm characterizes an actor as a prospective terrorist. The National Dairy Council, whose executives PETA has targeted, represents an industry, and a pie to the face could, we suppose, injure or blind the intended recipient. This scenario seems far-fetched, but if the Patriot Act remains in effect—and garners the support and corroboration of contemporaneous measures such as the Department of Homeland Security bill—the reality of such minor acts of protest is possible association with the term “terrorism.” Starting with animal liberation and moving to animal rights, activism on the part of nonhuman beings might suffer its strongest opposition ever with the advent of the Patriot Act and its oppressive impact.

Notes

1. Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001, 107^th Cong., 1^st sess., 2001.

2. American Civil Liberties Union, “Letter to the House Urging them to Vote ‘No’ on the Patriot Act,” October 12, 2001, www.aclu.org.

3. See Charles J. Stewart, Craig Allen Smith and Robert E. Denton, Jr., Persuasion and Social Movements, 3d edition (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1994).

4. “The ALF Primer,” www.animalliberationfront.com/ALFront/ALFPrime.htm.

5. Ibid.

6. United States Department of Justice, Report to Congress on the Extent and Effects of Domestic and International Terrorism on Animal Enterprises. Washington, DC, August 1993.

7. The USA Patriot Act, a 342-page bill, includes a number of revisions to Title 18 and various sections of the United States Codes that the present essay does not address. The forthcoming analysis focuses only on the sections of the Patriot Act dealing specifically with definitions of terrorism. For a more detailed account of the Act, refer to House Resolution 3162, in the public record. For an online version of the Act, see www.eff.org or www.aclu.org.

8. USA Patriot Act, Sec. 802.

9. Ibid.

10. Harold D. Guither, Animal Rights: History and Scope of a Radical Social Movement (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), p. 156.

11. Rod Coronado, “The Flames of Victory: An Interview with Convicted ALF Activist Melanie Arnold,” No Compromise, March 7, 2000, nocompromise.org/issues/05flames_mel.html.

12. USC Title 18, Sec. 3286; USA Patriot Act, Sec. 809.

13. Rod and Patti Strand, The Hijacking of the Humane Movement (Wilsonville, OR: Doral Publishing, 1993), p. 178.

14. Guither, p. 155.

15. USA Patriot Act, Section 810.

16. Coronado, p. 3.

17. See USC Title 18, Sec. 810 of the USC; USA Patriot Act, Sec. 810.

18. USC Title 18, Sec. 2339A[a]; USA Patriot Act, Sec. 810.

19. USC Title 18, Sec. 811; USA Patriot Act, Sec. 811.

20. See ACLU “Letter.”

21. United States Department of Justice report, p. 23.

22. See Daniel T. Oliver, Animal Rights: The Inhumane Crusade (Bellevue, WA: Merrill Press, 1999), Strand and Strand, and Guither.

23. “The ALF Primer.”

24. Osama Bin Laden, “Bin Laden's Warning: Full Text,” British Broadcast Corporation News, October 7, 2001, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia.

25. USA Patriot Act, Sec. 802.

26. “The ALF Primer.”

27. Stewart, Smith and Denton, p. 125.

28. “The ALF Primer.”

It's War! The Escalating Battle between Activists and the Corporate-State Complex

STEVEN BEST, PHD

Many activists do not understand the revolutionary nature of this movement. We are fighting a major war, defending animals and our very planet from human greed and destruction.—David Barbarash, former ALF Press Officer

We have given all of the collaborators a chance to withdraw from their relations [with Huntingdon Life Sciences]. We will now be doubling the size of every device we make. Today it is 10 lbs, tomorrow 20 . . . until your buildings are nothing more than rubble. It is time for this war to truly have two sides. No more will all of the killing be done by the oppressors, now the oppressed will strike back. We will be nonviolent when these people are nonviolent to the animal nations.—Communiqué from the Revolutionary Cells Animal Liberation Brigade after the 2003 bombings of Chiron and Shaklee Corporations

Right now we're in the early stages of World War III. It's the war to save the planet. [Direct] action will be getting stronger. Eventually there will be open war.—Paul Watson

The time has come for [animal] abusers to have but a taste of the fear and anguish their victims suffer on a daily basis. —Justice Department Manifesto

Is it my imagination, or is all hell breaking loose? Through increasingly militant and globalized actions, vegan, animal rights, and environmental activists have caught the attention of government and the animal and earth exploitation industries. The struggle has escalated to intense battles in the countryside, the streets, urban centers, suburbs, courtrooms, boardrooms, classrooms, mass media, and major political forums such as the US Congress. The level of conflict suggests a new social war that has been long in coming. As stated earlier in this volume by British ALF press officer Robin Webb, “Animal liberation is not a campaign, not just a hobby to put aside when it becomes tiresome or a new interest catches your eye. It's a war. A long, hard, bloody war in which all the countless millions of its victims have been on one side only, have been defenseless and innocent, whose tragedy was to be born nonhuman.”

“War” entails violence, hatred, bloodshed, and an escalation of conflict when dialogue fails. In the insightful words of General Karl von Clausewitz, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” He might just as well have stated the converse—“Politics is the continuation of war by other means”—for in our uncivil global village the distinction between war and politics is meaningless. War is the intensification of the conflicts inherent in politics, and politics is the waging of war through nonmilitary means such as class warfare or economic policies that are as devastating to people as dropping bombs (as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund wreak havoc on underdeveloped countries by enforcing harsh austerity policies, or as the US blockade of Iraq before the 2003 war killed over one million people, half of them infants and small children).¹

In the battle over animal rights, negotiations are breaking down and boundaries are being erased on both sides. Government and industry thugs unleash violence on activists, while groups such as the Animal Rights Militia, the Justice Department, the Hunt Retribution Squad, and the Revolutionary Cells openly advocate violence against animal abusers. More and more activists grow tired of adhering to a nonviolent code of ethics while violence from the enemy increases. Realizing that nonviolence against animal exploiters in fact is a pro-violence stance that tolerates their blood-spilling without taking adequate measures to stop it, a new breed of freedom fighters has ditched Gandhi for Machiavelli and switched principled nonviolence with the amoral (not to be confused with immoral) pragmatism that embraces animal liberation “by any means necessary.”

A new civil war is unfolding—one between forces hell-bent on exploiting animals and the earth for profit whatever the toll, and activists steeled to resist this omnicide tooth and nail. We are witnessing not only the long-standing corporate war against nature, but also a new social war about nature.

A Specter Haunts Society: Animal and Earth Liberation

If the animals could fight for themselves, there would already be a lot of dead animal abusers.—Robin Webb

So far no one on the other side has ever been seriously harmed or killed. But that may now change.—Ronnie Lee

We're a new breed of activism. We're not your parents' Humane Society. We're not Friends of Animals. We're not Earthsave. We're not Greenpeace. We come with a new philosophy. We hold the radical line. We will not compromise. We will not apologize, and we will not relent.—Kevin Jonas

Revolution is necessary in the United States, and that revolution would naturally have to involve the use of violence as well as other tactics. . . . [Violence] has to be used if people are serious about progressing social and political movements in this country.—Craig Rosebraugh, former ELF spokesperson

Without question, the major conflicts of the day in many nations, such as the UK and the US, are not over gender, race, class, or the war in Iraq, but rather globalization and the exploitation of animals and the earth. The class struggle is over; mainstream feminists, gays and lesbians, and people of color are safely marginalized in their fragmented identity politics; and Leftists and postmodernists posture as “radicals” and harmlessly conjure up esoteric theory-babble in seminars and conferences. Meanwhile, the new ecowarriors light up the night skies with their demands to free animal slaves and protect the earth. In the UK, one terrorism expert claims that since the ebbing of tensions over Northern Ireland, the animal rights movement is the main source of “violence.”² In the US, the top two “domestic terrorist” groups are not the usual suspects of armed militiamen, violent hate groups, or rabid right-wing government foes who bomb federal buildings and murder people, but instead the balaclava-wearing men and women of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF).

In a revolutionary rethinking of humanity's relationships to other species and the natural world, entirely new ethical paradigms and cosmologies are being forged. With forces of change emanating from both underground and aboveground movements, animal rights and radical environmental activists are pushing and guiding human beings to a new evolutionary crossroads through the force of legal and illegal direct action tactics. Here, humanity can either come to terms with the omnicidal nature of capitalism and the violent pathologies of dominionist identities, or it can take a rapid ride into oblivion.

The animal and earth liberation movements are vivid examples of the escalation of conflicts over the meaning and future of the natural world: Should animals and the earth exist for their own sake or for human use? Should they thrive in wild conditions or be slaughtered, altered, colonized, genetically modified, and even destroyed by technology and invading human armies? Societies are becoming divided over the politics of nature as intensely as the US was over the politics of race decades ago.

Because the state is so strong in its monopolization of the means of violence, this is not a war of opposing tanks and troops, but rather a guerrilla war in which liberation soldiers disperse into anonymous cells, descend into the underground, maneuver in darkness, deploy hit-and-run sabotage strikes against property, and attempt to intimidate and vanquish their enemies. As shown time and time again, from Vietnam to the quagmire of Bush's invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, guerrilla warfare favors David over Goliath; it can bedevil and even defeat the mighty machines of the US government.³ Consequently, the state should not be overly confident about its ability to crush animal and earth liberation movements, as ecowarriors in turn should never doubt their power to shake the foundations of the nihilistic, murderous, life-devouring system of advanced capitalism.

The new battlefield is a crucial testing ground for modern nation-states (can they adhere to peaceful enforcement of the law and protect basic democratic rights like free speech?) and the animal and earth liberation movements (can they creatively exercise nonviolent approaches and refrain from harming people?). Hardly a day goes by, it seems, that the ALF and the ELF do not free animals from their cages in fur farms and laboratories or destroy the property of industries that kill animals and damage the environment. From burning biotech research labs and ski lodges to firebombing meat companies and pouring acid on SUVs, the ALF and ELF inflict substantial property damage on industries. According to FBI testimony to Congress in February 2002, since 1996 the ALF and ELF together have committed over 600 “criminal acts” that caused $43 million in damage to animal industries.⁴ The toll clearly continues to mount as, for instance, the September 2003 ELF strike on six San Diego homes under construction alone wrought $50 million in damages, the costliest sabotage action to date.

With the destruction of animals and the environment on the rise, the forms of resistance themselves have become more intense, as animal rights and environmental activists do “whatever it takes” to stop the devastation of life and land. One finds clear signs of an escalating war in their rhetoric, tactics, and targets. Where once, for instance, radical environmental groups limited themselves to rural areas such as the Pacific Northwest and focused on logging issues, now the battle has moved into urban and suburban centers such as San Diego, Los Angeles, Bloomington, and Long Island. Isolated acts of monkey-wrenching against logging equipment and trees to be cut has escalated to major arson and bombing. In order to target sprawl and destruction of wilderness and wildlife, the ELF has begun to torch and attack new housing developments, SUVs, and Hummers. Some (non-ALF) animal liberation groups like the Animal Rights Militia and Justice Department advocate violence (see the Introduction), and new factions like the Revolutionary Cells use explosives, declare themselves “for animal liberation through armed struggle,” and threaten, “this is the endgame for animal killers . . . there will be no more quarter given, no more half-measures taken.”⁵ The Revolutionary Cell bombings of Chiron Corporation in August 2003 and Shaklee Corporation in September 2003 because of their ties to Huntingdon Life Sciences signal a clear intensification of animal liberation struggles. Emergent groups that see even the ALF as too conservative are beginning to steer a part of the animal rights movement in more militant directions; they wish exploiters to sample a taste of the fear and pain they dole out to animals, and they intend to fight violence with violence.

As Rod Coronado observes, “There's a whole bunch of disenfranchised Americans resisting the lifestyles they were raised in and they want an upswing in activity.”⁶ The ELF emerged in 1992 as a radicalization of Earth First! tactics that activists felt were too timid, and the dynamics of struggle can easily advance beyond property destruction. Thus, Ron Arnold, executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, rightly asks, “What happens when the next generation comes along and gets tired that these arsonists, the ecoterrorists, aren't doing enough?”⁷ Earth First! activist Tim Ream predicts, “There is every indication that we will see more political violence. There is a war against the earth happening today and we know the government isn't going to solve the problem.”⁸ Rik Scarce, author of Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement, saw a turning point in environmental defense action with the ELF torching of a Vail ski lodge in 1998, such that “a whole different scale of sabotage had become acceptable.” Scarce believes that “the environmental movement has been radicalized permanently. I don't rule out the next step . . . that people will be killed.”⁹

When presented with ALF and ELF claims that no one has ever been injured or killed in their actions, critics respond, “Not yet.” But even some insiders believe that the day will come when malcontents from the newest crop of ecowarriors will follow in the footsteps of radical anti-abortionists and begin to kill animal abusers at their homes or offices. “People who abuse animals deserve all they get,” says ex-ALF activist Keith Mann. “If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword.”¹⁰ In a September 2002 communiqué, the ELF stated: “While innocent life will never be harmed in any action we undertake, where it is necessary, we will no longer hesitate to pick up the gun to implement justice, and provide the needed protection for our planet that decades of legal battles, pleading, protest, and economic damage have failed . . . to achieve.” Former ELF spokespersons Craig Rosebraugh and James Leslie Pickering openly defend violence as a legitimate tactic against exploiters and urge activists to go beyond the limitations of direct action against property by small cells of individuals in order to create a radical anti-capitalist social movement: “We believe that a revolution is necessary in the United States of America to rid the world of one of the greatest terrorist organizations in planetary history, the US government.”¹¹

In turn, industries and the government have stepped up their own responses to the new militant direct action movements. Under Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft, the state has so far avoided the kind of murderous assaults the FBI earlier unleashed on the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and MOVE while intensifying the attack on other fronts.¹² For now at least, they have put away their guns (but not always their fists and batons) in order to play legal (and illegal) hardball with the new crop of radicals. Especially in the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration took firm measures to criminalize animal rights and environmental protests and, indeed, nearly every form of dissent. The corporate-state complex is applying old laws in new ways (e.g., using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations [RICO] act, which was originally designed to stop organized crime), enforcing oxymoronic “free speech zones,” breaking up demonstrations with gratuitous force and violence, and creating new legislation, such as the “Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act” and the USA Patriot Act, that grants the state frightening powers of surveillance, search and seizure, and political repression.

Thus, in order to disrupt and destroy opposition to the prevailing economic and political order, industries and government deploy systems of intense surveillance, grand juries, witch hunts, police dragnets, and political repression. The war between activists and the corporate-state complex unfolds simultaneously on many levels: material (physical violence used on occasion by both sides), paralegal (civil disobedience by activists and unconstitutional repression by the state), legal (courtroom battles and statutes used against activists as they seek to enforce or create laws that protect animals and the earth), and semantic (the politics of the discourse of “terrorism”).

With the earth in grave crisis, animals dying by the billions, democracy under attack, and the corporate-state complex besieged by liberation, anti-globalization, and antiwar movements, the US and other capitalist nations are torn asunder by intense social conflicts in which the politics of nature takes on an increasingly significant role. In conditions where compromise or negotiation seem ever more remote possibilities, the gloves are coming off as opposing sides assume positions of war.

Patriot Games

The state . . . is the most flagrant negation, the most cynical and complete negation of humanity.—Michael Bakunin

If you harbor a terrorist, if you feed a terrorist, you're just as guilty as the terrorists.—George W. Bush

After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the state created the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which enhanced state powers of surveillance, repression, and deportation of foreigners as it undermined civil liberties. When terrorists hijacked and crashed planes on September 11, 2001, a new political order was born. In October 2001, one month after the attack, the Bush administration bulldozed through Congress a frontal assault on civil liberties perversely titled the “USA Patriot Act” (a surreal acronym for “Uniting & Strengthening America Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act”).¹³ Exploiting the new climate of fear, the Bush team claimed that a free nation must give way to a secure nation. From the offices of a questionable presidency, we now have neither.

Framed as legislation to combat terrorists, the Patriot Act proposes bold new measures to undermine the Constitution. A Trojan horse for tyranny, this 342-page tome aims to dismantle the very freedoms for which true patriots have died. It pulls together a mishmash of provisions to augment state power. Some changes eliminate existing legal loopholes that mitigate government authority, some update laws for the age of the Internet, and some grant the Justice Department powers previously proscribed by Congress but passed because of the urgency of a response to 9/11.

Perhaps most importantly, the Patriot Act builds on laws created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a secret court created in 1978. The purpose of FISA was to review requests for surveillance of suspected spies, terrorists, and other foreign enemies of the US in order to collect intelligence information. Unlike other courts, the FISA court did not require probable cause that a crime was being committed to obtain a warrant. Attorney General John Ashcroft has tried to argue that the Patriot Act grants the authority to use FISA to conduct a criminal investigation and expand the powers of the executive branch accordingly. This would in effect override the Fourth Amendment that “no warrant shall issue, but upon probable cause.” The seven members of the FISA court—which refused only one out of 12,000 surveillance requests over the course of two decades—unanimously rejected Ashcroft's interpretation of the Patriot Act, viewing it as an abuse of government authority. In a decision that chastised the FBI for misleading them on more than 75 of the applications they had approved, they denied Ashcroft their approval in August 2002. But Ashcroft argued that the FISA court exceeded its authority, and an appeals court over-turned the decision.¹⁴

The Patriot Act shifts the focus of FISA from foreign to domestic intelligence, thereby targeting not only foreign spies and terrorists but also American citizens. By weakening the already permissive nature of FISA and by applying these diminished standards to domestic criminal investigations, the Patriot Act reendows the government with COINTELPRO-like powers to spy, invade, disrupt, and violate constitutional rights. To use FISA secret courts and procedures for domestic investigations, the FBI need only claim that foreign intelligence gathering is a “significant”—but not necessarily the “primary”—purpose of investigation.

The Patriot Act dissolves the system of checks and balances that supports the Constitution, as the executive branch of government seizes control of legislation and the courts. Under the banner of fighting terrorism, power is becoming increasingly centralized in the Leviathan of the state as other branches of government become rubber-stamp mechanisms and alibis for totalitarianism. The Patriot Act violates numerous constitutional rights, such as the First Amendment rights to free speech and freedom of assembly, the Fourth Amendment right to security from unreasonable search and seizures, and the Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights to basic protections during criminal proceedings. Among other things, the Patriot Act arrogates to the executive office the authority—without need to show evidence of grounds for suspicion—to demand from librarians and bookstores lists of materials checked out or purchased, to undertake clandestine sneak-and-peek operations in the homes and workplaces of terrorism suspects, to monitor any citizen communications by phone or the Internet, and to allow indefinite detention of non-citizens while denying them legal counsel. In the new Panopticon Surveillance State, government agencies can collect and share information on anyone with minimal or no judicial review, as the executive office minimizes the information citizens can gather on corporations and on government itself through Freedom of Information requests. Building on infamous Carnivore data mining techniques to buttress the “Total Information Awareness” program or state variations on it (see below) that could come straight out of George Orwell or Philip K. Dick, the state can amass an encyclopedic wealth of information on any individual they target and nullify rights to privacy and freedom of speech.¹⁵

Perhaps most alarmingly, the Patriot Act created a new legal category of “domestic terrorism” that is defined broadly enough to have a chilling effect on political activity. Casting its dragnet far and wide, the Patriot Act declares that the crime of “domestic terrorism” occurs when a person's action “appears to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population [or] to influence the policy of government by intimidation or coercion.” Interestingly, through this new form of citizen coercion the Patriot Act falls under its own definition and by logic should annul itself. Practically, however, this definition of terrorism will stretch to fit civil disobedience and virtually any protest activity. In Bushspeak, protest and coercion, citizen and terrorist, are cunningly conflated.

The new definition of terrorism is a direct challenge to liberation groups, like the ALF and ELF, that are deemed security threats. The penalties for liberation activities are far greater than previously defined. The crime of arson against a vivisection laboratory, for example, formerly carried a penalty of not more than 20 years, but the Patriot Act amends the law to read “for any term of years or for life.” It also has removed the statute of limitations for specific “terrorist” offenses, including those that create a “foreseeable risk” of death or injury to another person. The maximum penalty for providing material support to, harboring, or concealing a “terrorist” increases from 10 to 15 years in prison (see Black and Black in this volume).

But, given the strategic vagueness of Patriot Act language, nearly any protest group can fit the terrorist definition. How much latitude is granted under the phrase “appears to be”? Just what is it to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population” or “to influence the policy of the government by intimidation or coercion”? Protests often are intimidating, and their entire point is to “influence” social policy. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), for instance, might be classed as a “terrorist organization” for their financial support of well-known animal rights “terrorists” such as Rod Coronado, Gary Yourofsky, and Josh Harper. Following bureaucratic logic, PETA is guilty of “harboring,” “aiding,” or “lending material support to” “terrorists,” all punishable crimes under the Patriot Act. Indeed, right-wing industry front groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom have a field day smearing PETA and even more conservative organizations such as the Humane Society of the United States as “terrorist” organizations. Presumably, activists who organize a vegan bake sale to support tree-sitters or political prisoners could be indicted for “aiding terrorists.” The Patriot Act is a menacing weapon in the hands of the government whereby once they vilify someone as a terrorist, they can then apply repressive Patriot Act laws and spread guilt by association.

This government repression and hysteria has weighty implications for grassroots activists, too. If an animal lover shelters dogs rescued from a laboratory by the ALF or houses a “terrorist,” he or she could be arraigned under the Patriot Act. A foreign student involved with PETA, Greenpeace, or certainly the ALF, can be deported for assisting a “domestic terrorist” organization. Speaking out in support of the ALF or ELF can earn one a criminal charge, as can taking pictures of animal abuse in laboratories or factory farms and slaughterhouses. In the Orwellian dystopia of “Homeland Security,” where truth is falsehood and falsehood is truth, documenting animals tortured in a slaughterhouse is terrorism, but beating and killing them in unspeakably vicious ways is free enterprise. According to an official FBI definition, “Eco-terrorism is a crime committed to save nature.” It speaks volumes about capitalist society and its dominionist mindset that actions to “save nature” are classified as criminal actions while those that destroy nature are sanctified by God and Flag.

“Shock and Awe” Attacks on Democracy

The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.—John Adams

Under current federal law, there are unreasonable obstacles to investigating and prosecuting terrorism.—George W. Bush, September 11, 2002

Two years after the attacks, it is no longer possible to view these changes [brought on by the Patriot Act] as aberrant parts of an emergency response.—Michael Posner, the Executive Director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights

In the era of the Patriot Act, one can expect more state repression and less government accountability to Congress, the courts, and citizens. As stated by the Center for Constitutional Rights in their “Erosion of Civil Liberties in the Post 9/11 Era” report, “These Executive Orders and agency regulations violate the laws of the US Constitution, the laws of the United States, and international and humanitarian law. As a result, the war on terror is largely being conducted by executive fiat and the constitutional liberties of both citizens and non-citizens alike have been seriously compromised.”¹⁶ The problem is not a legitimate war on real terrorists, but the hyperbole of the threat and the exploitation of 9/11 to justify unleashing draconian rule and to advance corporate interests. According to Laura Murphy, Director of the ACLU's Washington National Office, “The [Patriot Act] goes far beyond any powers conceivably necessary to fight terrorism in the United States.”¹⁷ To borrow a phrase from Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse, the Patriot Act creates “surplus repression,” that is, repression far beyond what is necessary for minimal social organization or, in this case, to fight foreign terrorists.¹⁸

The Patriot Act sets back the struggle for civil liberties by decades and has already created a new “normalcy” of political repression, but it was only the opening volley of the Bush administration as it launched another front in its real war—the assault on democracy.¹⁹ Every bad horror movie has its sequels, and it is no different in this case. Whereas the Patriot Act was enacted to hurt foreigners and non-citizens the most, its successors are designed to come after American citizens themselves.²⁰ The Son of Patriot Act authorizes increases in domestic intelligence gathering, surveillance, and law enforcement prerogatives that are unprecedented in US history.

In February 2003 a watchdog group called the Center for Public Integrity reported that they had obtained a leaked copy of draft legislation—dated January 9, 2003 and stamped “confidential”—that the Bush administration had told the Senate Judiciary Committee did not exist.²¹ The legislation is titled the “Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003,” or, as it is unaffectionately known, Patriot Act II.²² Like the opportunistic debut of Patriot Act I, which exploited the 9/11 tragedy and widespread fears of additional terrorist attacks, Patriot Act II reveals that the Bush administration was waiting for the next terrorist attack or its war with Iraq to spring more booby-trapped legislation on Congress requiring emergency passage. If approved, Patriot Act II will plant dangerous landmines in the path of every activist and nonconformist in this country. Many members of Congress, however, are more circumspect and skeptical this time around and are challenging further efforts to erode the Constitution (see below).

In addition to increasing secret surveillance and requiring even less juridical or political oversight of executive power, Patriot Act II creates new crimes and punishments for nonviolent activities. It calls for 15 new death penalty categories for “terrorism.” It authorizes secret arrests for anyone involved with an organization deemed “terrorist,” and it makes giving donations to such a group a criminal action. As the government and sundry industries involved in animal exploitation try to make the “terrorist” tag stick to groups like PETA and Greenpeace, contributors to those organizations risk being identified as “terrorists.” If Patriot Act II is passed, the government will keep a DNA base on all “terrorists” and put their pictures and personal information on a public Internet site. Most alarmingly, the government could strip Americans of their citizenship and deport them if they belong or give “material support” to a “terrorist” group.

These measures go far beyond Patriot Act I. They assail legal forms of protest and dissent, while threatening to exile those who belong to or support “terrorist” organizations—PETA and Greenpeace today, the Humane Society of the United States and the Sierra Club tomorrow. With a broad brush, the state intends to paint a scarlet letter on the forehead of every activist. This proposal subverts the very principles and logic of democracy; it does so, grotesquely, in the name of patriotism.

The public exposure of Patriot Act II was a momentary setback for the Bush and champions of the new Security State, but not a fatal blow, as they have been able to sneak key elements of the Act into other forms of legislation. Fragmenting and dispersing it among other bills, couching its insidious policies in cryptic language and fine print, and attaching it to legislation sent to Congress at the last minute to preclude careful reading and possible public debate, leaders of the new administration continue to chip away at the Constitution and balance of powers. In this manner, and while the nation was focused on the capture of Saddam Hussein, Bush surreptitiously signed into law the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 on December 13, 2003.

This act surpasses the Patriot Act to grant the FBI unprecedented power to obtain financial records from institutions without permission from a judge through a court order or need to prove just cause. Whereas the Patriot Act required the FBI to submit subpoena requests to a federal judge, now an FBI agent simply drafts a “national security letter” that claims the targeted information is relevant to a national security investigation. In addition, the law broadens the definition of “financial institution” so that it can acquire significantly more data on individuals through an expanded number of businesses that include travel agencies, real estate agents, stockbrokers, the US Postal Service, jewelry stores, casinos, and car dealerships. The law also forbids subpoenaed businesses from revealing to customers, the press, or anyone else that the government demanded financial records. Only after the law was passed did many stunned members of Congress realize what they had signed. Meanwhile, the administration and its allies continue to smuggle other aspects of Patriot Act II into proposed bills, as Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Republican allies have drafted the Victory Act (Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations) that would make drug possession a terrorist offense (creating the new crime of “narco-terrorism”), facilitate the use of illegal wiretaps, and expand federal power to intercept communications and administer subpoenas for terrorist investigations.

Lobbying for Tyranny: The Texas Eco-Terrorism McBill

This legislation takes more than “a bite out of crime,” it jails and penalizes animal and eco-terrorists and their sympathetic financial agents for what they are—domestic terrorists.

—Sandy Liddy Bourne, daughter of G. Gordon Liddy and advisor to the American Legislative Exchange Council's Homeland Security Working Group

While the ALF ransacks research laboratories and the ELF scorches SUVs and condos, the corporate-state complex is busy working to rig the rules of warfare to its advantage. The assault on animal rights and environmental organizations is happening from the top down and the bottom up, on the federal and state levels. The bills currently being debated in various states are the result of alliances between corporations and professional lobbying groups, and their goal is to thwart any challenge to industry rights to killing and predation.

Deepening a dynamic as old as our nation, corporations are finding new methods and resources to gain access to politicians and policy makers. Powerful lobbying organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) operate as think tanks and policy makers that charge corporate clients thousands of dollars a year to join.²³ Membership earns corporations privileged access to policy meetings that invite their input in drafting new laws and bring them into direct contact with politicians. According to a Washington Post report, “Of the country's 6,500 state legislators, 3,000 belong to ALEC, including dozens of leaders of state legislatures and senates. Twelve sitting governors are ALEC graduates, as are 77 members of Congress.”²⁴ Corporations and trade organizations can dictate laws and public policy while hiding their tracks behind such lobbying organizations. ALEC has been in the business of corporate policy prostitution for 30 years and currently operates with an annual budget of nearly $6 million.

One key function of groups like ALEC is to draft model bills that advance corporate interests and then float them in state legislatures across the country. ALEC has written over 3,100 bills and passed 450 into law in various states. Not coincidentally, as they push legislation criminalizing dissent, ALEC has over a dozen clients involved in the prison industry and has played a crucial role in passing dozens of tough anti-crime bills such as the “three strikes” laws. The group has thereby helped to significantly increase incarceration rates in the US, and it intends to add animal rights and environmental activists to their client list.

This is obvious if one considers Texas House Bill 433, a recent draft legislation that seeks to capitalize on federal efforts to criminalize animal rights and environmental activism, and is pending in Pennsylvania, Maine, New York, and other states.²⁵ Texas HB 433 involved a partnership with ALEC and the US Sportsmen's Alliance (USSA), a militantly anti–animal rights organization comprised of hunters, fishermen, trappers, and “scientific wildlife management professionals.” They defend their right to kill animals through grassroots coalition support, ballot issue campaigning, and lobbying efforts. In August 2002 Rob Sexton of the USSA spoke to ALEC's Task Force on Criminal Justice about the growing “terrorist threat” of animal rights groups. In December 2002 the committee, headed by Representative Ray Allen (R-Dallas), voted to accept HB 433, and in February 2003 the “Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act” was sent to the Texas legislature.

The USSA claims that they only seek to protect wildlife interests and prevent illegal actions, and do not intend to inhibit the constitutional rights of their critics. This lie is contradicted first by the fact that Texas and other states already have laws in place to prohibit criminal actions against property, and second in that the bill unambiguously attacks basic rights. The real agenda of the USSA clearly is not to stop actions that already are illegal, but to criminalize any currently legal activities, such as protests or demonstrations, that pose threats to their bloodletting.

As evidence of the interests sponsoring HB 433, the bill singles out animal and environmental industries for special legal protection. HB 433 defines an “animal rights or ecological terrorist organization” as “two or more persons organized for the purpose of supporting any politically motivated activity intended to obstruct or deter any person from participating in any activity involving animals or an activity involving natural resources.” The bill criminalizes actions obstructing “any lawful activity involving the use of a natural resource with an economic value,” such as mining or foresting, or obstructing a lab, circus, zoo, or other institution that uses animals for research or economic assets.

Like the Patriot Act and its more recent counterpart, the language here is willfully vague, but the purpose is quite specific: to cripple the animal rights and environmental movements by kneecapping their right to dissent. Under HB 433 and its numerous clones, two or more people can be labeled terrorists if they leaflet a circus, protest an experimental lab, block a road to protect a forest, do a tree-sit, block the doors of Neiman Marcus, or potentially impede industry profits in any fashion, presumably even through education. HB 433 clearly violates the First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly as it threatens the privacy rights of individuals and freedom of the press. Andrew Becker of the Sierra Club observes that “The legislation is so sweeping and nebulous it could also cover nonviolent civil disobedience or even ordinary environmental activism.”²⁶ Following measures that have been attempted in states such as Illinois, Missouri, and New York, the bill classifies as a felony “terrorist” action the photographing or videotaping of animal abuse in a facility such as a puppy mill, factory farm, or slaughterhouse.²⁷ HB 433 and its clones intend to make it a class D felony to unlawfully enter any animal facility for the purpose of taking photographs or using a video recorder “with the intent to defame the facility or facility's owner.” Missouri SB 657 declares it a felony offense “if a person photographs, videotapes or otherwise obtains images without the express written consent of the animal facility, from a location not legally accessible to the public.”²⁸

This means that animal abuse is no one's business but that of the “property owner,” and exposés of cruelty, rather than the cruelty itself, would become outlawed, the offenses punishable by up to six months in jail.²⁹ Thus, it appears that the terrorists are not the monsters who club pigs to death with metal pipes, but rather the activists, whistle-blowers, or investigative reporters trying to document such sadistic abuse. Like Patriot Act II, the Texas eco-terrorist bill aims to criminalize donating money to any group smeared as “terrorist,” and requires that all guilty individuals supply their names, addresses, and a recent photograph to post on a public Internet database.

After being slammed with criticism from outraged citizens and groups including the Humane Society of the United States, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Texas Humane Legislative Network, the Sierra Club, and the American Civil Liberties Union, Allen backed off HB 433, and it died in the House Committee on Defense Affairs and State-Federal Relations in May 2003. But in March 2003 Allen resubmitted a similar bill, HB 1516, which aims to escalate criminal penalties for actions against animal and natural resource industries.

Any bills modeled after HB 433, such as those introduced or considered in Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and New York, could take effect in any state at any time. The Missouri bill attempting to outlaw photographing animal facilities died in committee in May 2003, but a similar bill passed the Ohio senate in May 2003 and won approval in the Oregon senate in June 2003. On January 1, 2004, a new California state law went into effect, based on ALEC's “Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act” model, that banned activists from trespassing on animal farms. The law significantly raised the trespassing penalties from a citation and a $10 fine to a misdemeanor punishable by six months in jail and/or a $1,000 fine.

Clearly, animal rights and environmental activists are becoming a threat, and corporate exploiters will go to any lengths—from shredding the Constitution to creating a fascist police state—to protect their profits and plunder. Michael Ratner, a human rights lawyer and vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, claims that the Texas bill is unprecedented in its assault on freedom. “This is unique. Even under the definition of domestic terrorism in the Patriot Act, you have to at least do something that arguably threatens people's lives. The definitional sections of this legislation are so broad that they sweep within them basically every environmental and animal rights organization in the country.”³⁰

Pump Up the Volume: The War of Words

Actions by special interests groups, including animal rights groups, are the most dangerous threat to this country.—FBI agent testifying before Congress, February 2002

Let's call the ELF and the ALF for what they truly are—terrorist organizations. It is imperative to treat all acts of terrorism equally.—Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR)

Make no mistake, the violent methods used by these [eco]criminals are nothing short of acts of terror.—Rep. Scott McInnis (R-CO)

Today's animal rights and environmental movements bear the stigma of “violent extremism” and “domestic terrorism.” They contain factions and figures that defend the legitimacy of violence against human beings, though they have yet to commit any. The new liberation movements must now confront spying, infiltration, harassment, and persecution by a government that exploits public anxiety about the “international terrorist threat” and paranoia over domestic security to advance its own agendas. The state's goal is not merely to felonize property destruction “crimes,” but also to re-categorize them as forms of domestic terrorism, to prosecute them under racketeering laws, and, with the Patriot Act and its offspring, to considerably increase the penalties for property destruction and “support” of “eco-terrorism.”

Enemies of the ALF and ELF want to change the classification of their actions from vandalism, arson, and property damage to offenses punishable under the jurisdiction of Homeland Security. After the summer 2003 ELF attacks on SUVs and Hummers in California, for instance, Chris Chocola (R-IN) introduced legislation in his home state (his district houses the main assembly plant for Hummer H2s) to make arson a federal crime that falls under the rubric of terrorism. If Chocola gets his way, a convicted offender will be punished with a jail sentence of five years to life. Instead of passing legislation to force automakers to improve emission standards, Chocola bows to his corporate bosses with a measure that would severely penalize strikes on gas-guzzling, super-polluting tanks that have no place on any road.

Just as during the anti-communist hysteria of 1950s, all the government has to do to legitimate its crackdown on dissent is to define an individual or group as “terrorist,” and the repression follows as if a fait accompli. The government and exploitation industries are inciting a war of rhetoric—a Machiavellian battle that has nothing to do with truth and everything to do with monopolizing the means of communication and the power to shape public consciousness. Appropriating the lens and pages of like-minded corporate media giants, the corporate-state complex tries to delegitimate liberationists through a verbal war based on lies, slander, misrepresentation, distortion, fabrication, and outrageous hyperbole.

On September 12, 2001, as the smoke was still rising from the rubble of the World Trade Center, US representative Greg Walden (R-OR) declared that the ELF poses a threat “no less heinous that what we saw occur yesterday here in Washington and New York.” When SHACtivists set off harmless smoke bombs in two Marsh insurance buildings in Seattle in July 2002, Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske called the stunt “domestic terrorism.” The Center for Consumer Freedom found the prank to evoke “horrifying parallels with last September's attack on New York City” and proclaimed, “It's time to start using the ‘T’-word.”³¹

Never mind the difference between two smoke bombs and two passenger plane missiles, between people who were mildly irritated at most and thousands who died horrible deaths, and between an action in defense of innocent animals and a paradigmatic terrorist strike that murdered thousands of civilians. Trying to inject some sanity into the debate, an ALF representative wrote:

One simply cannot compare the events of September 11 to the illegal direct actions taken by underground groups and individuals for animal and earth liberation. Flying fully loaded planes into office towers [resulting] in massive loss of life and injuries is something that is on a completely different level than the actions [of the ALF and ELF]. Aside from the obvious differences of philosophy between real terrorists and animal and earth activists vis a vis the injuring or [taking] of life, the horrific actions we witnessed on September 11 represent what real terrorism is all about, and what violent people are capable of doing. To compare this to the actions of people who work to save animal lives and our planet while explicitly not using violent means is, frankly, ridiculous. Furthermore, to label nonviolent activists as “terrorists” is a slap in the face to everyone who has been killed or who is suffering as a result of September 11.³²

In an October 23, 2001 story, the ultra-conservative CNSNews.com hypothesized that the ALF could be behind a wave of anthrax attacks on US citizens, since they were known to invade laboratories and could be working with foreign terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda.³³ In August 2002 SHACtivists in Boston and San Antonio were brought up on the RICO act and charged with attempted extortion, threats to burn a dwelling, stalking in violation of a restraining order, criminal harassment, and conspiracy. Since the Boston activists hailed from Britain, the press suggested that, like Al Qaeda, “terrorism” was being exported through an international ring. An August 21, 2002 Boston Herald opinion column provides this evidence of growing readiness to malign any act of resistance today as terrorism: “If it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, call it a duck. Members of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty are engaged in nothing more than terrorism that so far hasn't killed anybody. It has no place in American life. . . . This moral monstrosity has to be nipped in the bud.” Nothing, of course, is said about the sadistic cruelty toward animals at HLS and the ethical motivations of activists tried and hanged in the media.

The legal and rhetorical fronts of the war heated up in February 2002 when George Nethercutt (R-WA) introduced the Agroterrorism Prevention Act HR2795. This bill seeks to establish a five-year mandatory sentence for firebombing and would allow prosecutors to seek capital punishment against anyone who causes the death of another person during an attack on an animal or plant enterprise. Moreover, Nethercutt's bill aims to create and maintain a national clearinghouse to collect data on ALF- and ELF-type crimes, while extending the RICO act to “ecoterrorism.” Rep. Darlene Hooley (D-OR) submitted a similar bill, the Environmental Terrorism Reduction Act, thereby seeking to outlaw protests “committed in the name of the environment.” House Forest and Forest Health Subcommittee Chairman Scott McInnis avers that the “ecoterrorists” are not “nature-loving hippies,” but rather “hardened criminals” to be likened to Timothy McVeigh. Not to be outdone, Nethercutt called the ALF and ELF our “homegrown brand of Al Qaeda.” In a move reminiscent of the McCarthy hearings in the US during the 1950s, McInnis, Nethercutt, and other members of Congress demanded that mainstream environmental groups publicly disavow the tactics of the ALF and ELF—and gave them a deadline. “National environmental organizations need to know, you are either with us or you are against us. You need to choose which side you are on, and know we will be watching,” said Nethercutt.³⁴

The Alice in Wonderland hyperbole that seems a genre rule of state and corporate criticism completely misrepresents animal liberation struggles as it undercuts the ability to identity real evil and violence in our social world.³⁵ In headlines and text, reporters affix the term “ecoterrorist” to animal rights and environmental activists as if it were a neutral or natural designator that demanded no argument or explanation. Quite commonly, media reports refer to the “violent campaign” that the ALF, the ELF, or SHAC is waging against animal exploiters without ever defining violence or suggesting that what these groups are attacking is wrong or violent. Rather, they print uncritical and false claims, as in the case of a US News and World Report article on SHAC, entitled “Terrorize people, save animals.” The article states: “Commercial test labs like Huntingdon are a critical link in the health-care system”—ignoring a half-dozen exposés that proved HLS to be a barbaric and fraudulent operation.³⁶ When the corporate-state complex cautions, “It is only a matter of time before somebody gets hurt” in the direct action movements on behalf of animals, they ignore the fact that someone already has been hurt—the billions of animals killed every year in factory farms, slaughterhouses, vivisection laboratories, and the “entertainment” industries.

Will the Real Terrorists Please Shut Up?

I called [animal rights activists] terrorists. I grouped all [terrorists] together because it's really pretty hard to distinguish one from the other.—Utah state representative Paul Ray

You could call us “terraists.” We value animal life and more. We strive to reduce the sum total of suffering, not only to people but to all other species and to the earth.—Ingrid Newkirk

The state and corporate deployment of the T-word in response to nearly every challenge to their corrupt and violent authority renders the highly charged term “terrorist” banal and meaningless. As many activists are unwilling to endure this rhetorical fusillade without a struggle, they have entered into the semantic battlefield with the intent of providing more accurate and objective definitions of terrorism and establishing the identity of the real “terrorists” (see Watson and “Defining Terrorism” in this volume).³⁷

The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) provides a prime example of how exploitation industries abuse terrorist discourse for their own political agendas, as they demonize animal rights and even vegetarian groups as “fanatics,” “terrorists,” or “front groups for terrorism.” A front group if ever there were one, CCF is a coalition of 30,000 restaurant, alcohol, and tobacco companies adamantly opposed to vegetarianism; animal rights; anti-biotechnology activists; anti-smoking lobbying; organic foods advocates; critics of fast food, saturated fat, and cholesterol; and any “food cop” who dares to question or regulate consumption of the goods related to their industry.³⁸ A vivid illustration of economically conditioned blindness, CCF denies the dangers of secondhand smoke and alcohol-impaired driving, the problem with schools hawking soda pop to students for big contract money, and even the obesity epidemic in American society, a serious problem to which the media has given considerable attention in the last few years. No vegetarian or animal rights groups fall outside the huge net they cast over today's “nanny culture” of “politically correct whiners.” Their goal, completely decontextualized from weighty ethical and political issues, is to protect “the public's right to a full menu of dining and entertainment choices.”³⁹ The organization aims to wage a propaganda war against activists in a position to influence consumer behavior; hence, according to leader Rick Berman, their main strategy is “to shoot the messenger. . . . We've got to attack their credibility as spokespersons.”⁴⁰

Besides SHAC and PETA, CCF's favorite target is the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an organization led by Dr. Neal Barnard and composed of scientists, medical doctors, researchers, and others who advocate veganism and the abolition of animal experimentation. Since 2000 PCRM has been featured regularly in the mass media, debating Dr. Robert C. Atkins over the validity of his high-protein diets and attacking the food pyramid as a form of institutionalized racism that neglects the health concerns of minority peoples in order to sell meat and dairy products.⁴¹ PCRM also has publicly urged the government to sue meat retailers for the devastating effects of their products on public health, much in the same manner that tobacco industries have been targeted. In a September 1999 press release, Dr. Barnard warned of the health risks of meat consumption and stated, “It's time we looked into holding the meat producers and fast-food outlets legally accountable.”⁴²

The CCF rejects PCRM's claims to scientific legitimacy and denounces them as a “terrorist front group” for PETA and SHAC. While gunning to repeal PETA's tax-exempt status, they “expose” the financial and organizational ties between PCRM and PETA (PETA gives PCRM money, and the two groups share similar funding sources) and between PCRM and SHAC (Barnard worked with Kevin Jonas, former spokesperson of the ALF and current member of SHAC, on a major letter-writing campaign).⁴³ In a January 2002 press release, CCF called on PCRM to “stop portraying itself as a medical organization and come clean about its connections to extremist animal rights organizations responsible for acts of violence and millions of dollars in the destruction of property.” PCRM, they say, is “no more than a puppet for PETA to use in spreading its virulent anti-choice rhetoric.” PCRM's superb health education campaigns are rejected as nothing but “junk science” and efforts “to dispense dangerous animal rights orthodoxy masquerading as nutritional advice.” CCF conveniently ignores certain facts, such as the 16 major research studies that link milk consumption to maladies like prostate cancer and heart disease, and they somehow neglect to disclose their own status as an organizational facade for sundry industries profiting from killing animals and poisoning the public.⁴⁴

CCF decries the destruction of inanimate property but shows zero regard for the billions of animal lives destroyed every year in slaughterhouses and laboratories. They excoriate PCRM for their “junk science” but praise HLS—notorious for its drugged-out and drunk employees who falsify data—as scientifically respectable. They say that PETA and other groups use “scare tactics [that] are designed to intimidate people into accepting a ridiculously small set of food choices,” ignoring the rich diversity of a vegetarian diet.

It's clear that public discourse and thought have shifted toward more conservative directions and a deeper bias against direct action when “progressive” groups like the anti-racist Southern Poverty and Law Center join in the fray of stigmatizing the ALF and ELF as “domestic terrorists.” Their article “From Push to Shove” is a misinformed diatribe against the new direct action movements. It uncritically accepts the glib propaganda of the corporate-state complex and bemoans legitimate strikes such as the action against the notorious Coulston chimpanzee compound in Alamogordo, New Mexico (so egregious that even the US government shut it down).⁴⁵ Brian Levin, a criminal justice professor and director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino, lumps ALF and ELF actions against property with violent racist and homophobic assaults on people. From his blinkered perspective, both types of actions are equally “hate crimes.” Levin ignores the true hate crimes—the contempt and hatred that exploiters have for animals and the earth—as he fails to grasp the love of life and nature that motivates ALF and ELF actions.

Post-Constitutional America

The next thing you known they'll be calling in artists, actors, and anyone else they can think of to ask of them, “Are you now or have you ever been a vegetarian?”—Bruce Friedrich

A madness is sweeping the nation no less absurd, outrageous, frightening, and irrational than the Red Scare of the 1950s. The Patriot Act expands government's law enforcement powers as it minimizes meaningful review and oversight by an independent judicial body. When not altogether overridden by executive power, the disempowered courts are compelled to grant orders authorizing surveillance so long as the FBI, CIA, or Justice Department says the magic words, “This is a terrorist investigation,” or simply, “Do it.” The Bush administration's steps to criminalize dissent are straight out of the film Minority Report, where you are guilty until proven innocent, and the government condemns you even for thinking an illegal thought, arresting you before you can choose whether or not to put that thought into action.

As the US government moves ever closer to tyranny, it collapses differences between violent and nonviolent protest, between terrorist and citizen, between Al Qaeda and PETA. Patriot Act I was just the first incursion in the new war against democracy, and the enemy is quickly advancing on activist positions. We are all under attack—not just the ALF and ELF, but also mainstream groups and indeed any citizen who dares to rise from his or her stupor before the TV screen to assume a political stand in the streets. Every dissenting citizen is now treated like an “enemy combatant.” Rather than bickering among themselves and condemning each other's tactics, animal advocates ought to be lining up against the common enemy of the corporate-state complex.

The new concept of patriotism is marketed with as much truth and logic as the packaging of Happy Meals. Government doublespeak defines peace as war and war as peace, (corporate) criminality as principled moral action and principled moral action as criminal behavior. But we need to stop expecting truth from the state and begin to see it for what it really is—a bureaucracy that monopolizes the means of violence and exists largely as a political tool for the economic interests of ruling elites. The FBI has always worked to impede domestic civil liberties and halt radical movements dead in their tracks. The stories of agent-heroes fighting to protect American democracy against gangs, the mafia, and sundry evil types are the fables (always encouraged and preapproved by the FBI) of comic books and television shows. Since its inception the FBI has monitored domestic radicalism and dissent, and it has jailed, beaten, and murdered radicals in this country. As evidenced by their infamous counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) during the 1960s and 1970s, the FBI has infiltrated, disrupted, and destroyed radical social organizations, using techniques ranging from surveillance and agents provocateurs to framing and assassination. To the extent the animal rights, environment, anti-globalization, and antiwar movements grow strong, they will try to do it to them, too.

Liberty and democracy have precious little breathing space in the straitjacket of neo-McCarthyism and Homeland Security. Following a peaceful protest in 1998 against Neiman Marcus for selling fur, a Dallas court barred Megan Lewis from further animal rights protests.⁴⁶ In October 2001 the Secret Service and Durham police questioned a college freshman about an anti-Bush poster hanging in her dorm room. After the launching of the 2003 war against Iraq, national media conservatives routinely branded antiwar protestors as traitors who should be jailed. When Baghdad fell, anchor Neil Cavuto of the conservative Fox News channel, which boasts “fair and balanced” coverage, announced to critics of the war, “You were sickening then; you are sickening now.” The yellow-ribbon-tying masses equate patriotism with blinkered jingoism, as Paleolithic “America, love it or leave it” cries ring throughout the wasteland of talk radio. Across the nation, antiwar activists were surveilled, harassed, and arrested for the crime of exercising their constitutional rights. The shrill attack on the Dixie Chicks (much of it organized by conservative media giant Clear Channel Communications) for voicing their right to a critical viewpoint about President Bush is a clear indicator of the barbaric impulses stirring in the nation, irrationally oblivious to the fact that if the troops in Iraq were fighting for anything, it was precisely for the Dixie Chicks' right to dissent. Hollywood blacklisting is back as outspoken critics of Bush's war against Iraq (Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Martin Sheen, and others) are banned from events and suffer retaliation for their views. In February 2003 a man was arrested in a New York shopping mall for refusing to remove an antiwar T-shirt he was wearing. Many outrageous incidents involving state harassment result from one person reporting another to authorities. In 2002 John Ashcroft tried to implement Operation TIPS (Terrorist Information Prevention System), in which individuals were asked to monitor their fellow citizens and to report suspicious behavior. The program was not approved, but its Website, now defunct, claimed at one time that over 200,000 tips had been filed since September 11, 2001.⁴⁷ In the case of the man detained by FBI agents in an Atlanta coffee shop in June 2003, a fellow “citizen” turned him in for reading an article entitled “Weapons of Mass Stupidity.”

For many years, conservative organizations in academia have been monitoring what “liberal” professors say about topics such as the war and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, recently founded a new conservative group, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which blasted dozens of professors for not showing sufficient patriotism after 9/11. Cheney considers college and university faculty to be “the weak link in America's response to the attack,” perhaps because in those institutions there are still some embers of free thinking glowing.⁴⁸ How long can it be before industries sponsor Websites monitoring what professors say about vegetarianism, animal rights, environmental issues, and direct action?

Increasingly, animal rights activists are being brought before grand juries and charged with violations of the RICO Act. Grand juries are nothing but repressive mechanisms designed to coerce activists to supply them with information under the threat of 18 months in prison for non-compliance, all without a right to have counsel present. On February 12, 2002, for instance, Congress summoned former ELF spokesperson Craig Rosebraugh to Washington, DC for its special oversight hearing on Eco-terrorism and Lawlessness on the National Forests. Rosebraugh pleaded the Fifth Amendment to most questions, exasperating his inquisitors. In written testimony, he defiantly championed the cause of animal and earth liberation as he took the government to task for its own state-sponsored terrorism against people all over the globe. “In fact,” he notes, “the US government by far has been the most extreme terrorist organization in planetary history.”⁴⁹ Surveilled and harassed continuously for exercising his right to free speech on behalf of the ELF, Rosebraugh presents a case study in state repression and the political consequences of the Patriot Act.⁵⁰

SHACtivists in the UK and the US are getting the same treatment as they face an increasing number of grand jury subpoenas, RICO charges (that they violated federal racketeering laws by banding together in an interstate network to force companies to change their business practices), and new “exclusion zone” laws that severely inhibit their controversial protest tactics. Since the precedent set by the National Organization for Women in its use of the RICO act against abortion protesters, it has become common for corporations to use RICO to fight activists. HLS and Stephens Inc., HLS's main financial backer before it pulled out in 2002 due to relentless pressure from SHAC, filed a lawsuit against In Defense of Animals, the Animal Defense League, and SHAC, charging them with organized harassment. The state of Oregon, subject to numerous arson attacks on behalf of environmental causes, expanded RICO laws to include actions against logging. As in the 1998 case where Stephens Inc. filed a suit against PETA, many such suits are settled out of court. But they cost organizations time, money, and resources, and often result in muffling public criticism of corporate evil.⁵¹

Both in the US and internationally, the state is increasingly targeting activists for undercover infiltration and raids. On July 30, 2002, nine members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Canada's national police agency, smashed down the door at the home of ALF spokesperson David Barbarash. They ransacked his place, seizing computers, floppy disks, videos, photographs, mail, and personal belongings. On the flimsiest justification, an arbitrarily chosen newspaper article in which Barbarash espouses the basic animal liberation line he has championed hundreds of times, the RCMP was granted permission for a search warrant. In his August 19, 2002 statement through Frontline Information Service, Barbarash observed: “This raid was not about animal rights issues or actions; this raid was about how we all have lost a large chunk of basic civil liberties and human rights. It's about how we really do live under the rule of a police state where it's no longer allowable to speak your mind or express beliefs which oppose oppression, and which challenge the corporate/military governments. To do so risks raids, possible arrest and lengthy jail terms.”⁵²

Such a risk was taken in February 2003, when Fresno State University hosted a national conference on “Revolutionary Environmentalism.” Could there be free speech without state surveillance and harassment, in an academic setting, featuring radicals doing no more than expressing their views? The event brought together activists from Earth First!, former members and representatives of the ALF and ELF, and prominent academic writers in order to speak to students, faculty, and a community audience of over 600 people. Local agricultural producers and SUV dealers were outraged that the university would sponsor “criminals” and “terrorists,” and hired extra security to foil the midnight raids of the invading terrorists who had come only to talk about urgent social issues and explain the reasons for their radicalism. To advance the war against terrorism, the FBI planted six agents in the hotel housing the conference participants. Critics tried to stop the conference, but the university courageously defended it on the grounds of free speech and the need to understand contemporary liberation struggles. Months afterward, however, Fresno State capitulated to the FBI when the bureau subpoenaed a tape of the conference's evening community panel. The university and the state failed the free speech test.

After the controversial Fresno conference, Virginia Tech's Board of Visitors unanimously approved a resolution to ban from the campus any group or individual that has advocated or participated in “illegal acts of domestic violence or terrorism.” In January, the USSA challenged Michigan State University for hosting a site for the Animal Legal and Historical Center, which serves as a resource for animal activists and legal researchers. Mining, timber, and construction lobbyists urged lawmakers to halt funding for the University of Montana's environmental studies program, claiming that it was damaging the state's economy. In late February, reports surfaced that Virginia Beach undercover officers had infiltrated three meetings of Dolphin Liberty, a group opposed to a proposed exhibit of dolphins at the Virginia Marine Science Museum. In early 2003 anti–animal rights forces launched an assault on numerous universities that sponsored forums for animal rights and environmental ethics.

During a March 2003 presentation to Minnesota law enforcement officers and emergency management officials, Captain Bill Chandler noted that although his state harbored violent neo-Nazi and right wing militia groups like the Aryan Nation and Posse Comitatus, ALF and ELF cells were the most dangerous threats, even “more dangerous in Minnesota than Al Qaeda.” In late April 2003 the FBI interrupted a University of Minnesota meeting of the Student Organization for Animal Rights, asking for the names of all members of the group during the past few years. That same day, the FBI raided both SHAC's New Jersey office and the Seattle home of ALF supporter Josh Harper. In August 2003 FBI agents descended on a California home searching for a videotaped talk by Rod Coronado as possible evidence relating to SUV attacks during his visit to the area. Two months before, Coronado had found a Global Positioning Device under his car, obviously placed there to monitor his movements. In January 2004 the FBI shut down three venues for the Total Liberation Fest in Erie, Pennsylvania before the event finally transpired thanks to the flexibility and persistence of its organizers. Federal agents placed surveillance cameras throughout the area, monitored them continuously with agents in SUVs, infiltrated and recorded the events, and asked local homeowners for permission to occupy their attics to stand guard against the high-level threats to Homeland Security from bands playing music and activists speaking.

These are not just isolated events, but rather strategic interventions by the state in a systematic and coherent policy of repression, particularly against the new militancy in the animal rights and environmental movements. Never strong, civil liberties and constitutional rights in this country are becoming ever more fragile, tenuous, and precarious. The US political system is morphing into a post-constitutional dystopia.

Creeping Fascism

We have no desire whatsoever to in any way erode or undermine constitutional liberties.—John Ashcroft

Let's go fuck 'em up.—Miami cop overheard at the November 2003 FTAA protest

When a long train of abuses and usurpations . . . evinces a design to reduce the people under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. The oppressed should rebel, and they will continue to rebel and raise disturbance until their rights are fully restored to them and all partial distinctions, exclusions, and incapacitations are removed.—Thomas Jefferson

In September 2003 the government announced the creation of a master “Watch List” of more than 100,000 terrorist suspects. The list tracks suspected foreign terrorists as well as citizens the government deems tied to “domestic terrorism.” Ashcroft promoted it as “one-stop shopping” for police on the lookout for all possible “terrorists,” including those in animal rights, environmental, or antiwar protest groups. Privacy advocates objected that the list grants the state ever-greater powers to track and compile information on citizens whose only relation to “terrorist” activities is that they are affiliated with or support legal protest and lobbying organizations.⁵³

Ashcroft's list signifies a dangerous new trend involving the compilation, centralization, and sharing of information on citizens—between corporations and the state, and within government at the federal, state, and local levels. The airline industry is one area in which this dynamic is at work. To replace the current system of terrorist watch lists, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) developed a new airline passenger–screening system called Computerized Airline Passenger Pre-Screening System II. CAPPS II uses a vast data-mining program to check names against commercial databases and a watch list of suspected terrorists and people wanted for violent crimes. While the TSA claims CAPPS II will make flying safer without impinging on individual privacy rights, critics argue that it would create yet another plank in an oppressive surveillance system. In March 2003 Delta was the first airline to volunteer to implement the CAPPS II system, which conducts background checks on all passengers and assigns them a threat level—red, yellow, or green—to determine if they should be subjected to increased levels of security or even refused boarding.⁵⁴ The TSA has put over 1,000 citizens on a “no-fly” list, targeting “security risks” such as Greenpeace activists.

In September 2003 Congress moved to delay the planned debut of CAPPS II until the General Accounting Office can certify that it will not falsely target innocent passengers. At the same time, JetBlue Airways confirmed that they had violated their own privacy policy. At the TSA's request and with their help, Jet Blue provided five million passenger itineraries to a defense contractor in order to test a Pentagon pattern recognition technology designed to screen out terrorists who might intend to infiltrate or attack US Army bases worldwide. The contractor, Torch Concepts, augmented the list of names and itineraries with additional sensitive personal information such as Social Security numbers and income level by purchasing the information from a data-aggregation company. It used the data to test the feasibility of a passenger-profiling system like CAPPS II. Thus, the TSA, the army, an airline carrier, and a data warehouse company conspired to violate the Privacy Act. Today, many companies profit off the commodification of the personal information they collect and compile—information that would allow them to create a detailed profile of a person's life to be sold or shared with law enforcement agencies. CAPPS II and its analogues, as Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist has said, are clearly part of “a series of police power and informational privacy power grabs that flowed from September 11.”⁵⁵ In this spirit, in January 2004, Northwest Airlines admitted that in 2002 they gave information on more than 10 million passengers to NASA to be used for anti-terrorist research. After the JetBlue scandal, Northwest publicly stated that it would not release passenger data, but, unlike JetBlue, the airline also denied that it had done anything wrong.

Across the country, the FBI, state anti-terrorist squads, and local police monitor, gather, and share intelligence on protest activities and groups. State authorities at all levels routinely surveil direct action sites like Indymedia and infiltrate announced demonstrations. The California Anti-Terrorism Information Center keeps tabs on political activity and uploads information into criminal and anti-terrorism data-bases used by law enforcement officials to surveil and disrupt protests. The involvement of terrorist watch organizations in legal protests blurs the boundaries between political involvement and terrorism. As former California state Attorney General's office spokesman Mike van Winkle sagaciously revealed to Oakland Tribune reporters, “You can make an easy kind of link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that [protest]. You can almost argue that a protest against that [war] is a terrorist act.”⁵⁶ In May 2003 the Denver Post revealed that Denver police had gathered information on peaceful protestors and civil rights groups and delivered it to the FBI's Joint Terrorist Task Force and other law agencies in an eight-state region.⁵⁷ Working with the FBI, the Denver police have created files on 208 organizations and 3,200 individuals.⁵⁸ In addition, a Boulder law enforcement agency monitored Rocky Mountain Animal Defense, a peaceful local animal rights group, and sent the information to Denver for inclusion in spy files.⁵⁹ Across the nation, police in numerous states are cooperating to create a centralized database of information on citizens in forms such as the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX) (see below).

Protestors of all kinds are monitored, harassed, assaulted, and prevented from congregating and demonstrating by cops in full riotgear—as they were during the November 2003 protests of the Free Trade Areas of the Americas (FTAA) meeting in Miami. Police repression was particularly intense at the May 2003 Biodevastation 7 Forum in St. Louis, organized as a critical response to the World Agricultural Forum hosted by Monsanto. Over 30 people planning on attending the conference and subsequent protest were arrested beforehand on petty charges such as riding a bicycle without a license. In their pre-emptive strike, the “Pre-Crime” police repeatedly interrogated activists, searched their vehicles, and raided their homes and offices. Such actions by federal agencies and local police are clear violations of constitutional rights, but in the shadow of the Patriot Act they become standard operating procedures. In October 2003 Greenpeace boarded a vessel eight miles outside of Miami and waved a banner criticizing Bush for illegal logging policies. In retaliation, Ashcroft dredged up an 1872 “sailor monger” law and charged Greenpeace with an illegal action, thereby threatening their tax-exempt status.

In November 2003 a classified FBI document surfaced that confirmed what every government critic already knew. In a directive sent out to more than 17,000 state and local police agencies on October 15, 2003, the FBI warned about planned antiwar demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco and urged authorities to report suspicious behavior to the FBI. The document proved that, similar to the COINTELPRO era of the 1960s, the FBI is advocating spying on peaceful protestors engaged in nothing more than lawful forms of dissent. In its zeal to squelch dissent against the Iraq war and discontent with the federal government, the FBI's policy is to treat citizens exercising their constitutional rights like terrorists.⁶⁰

Free speech cannot survive in an atmosphere of surveillance, intimidation, harassment, and arrest. The thought that one's name might end up in a police file for speaking out or attending a protest, or that one might be severely beaten by police during a peaceful demonstration, is a strong deterrent for many citizens contemplating involvement in civic affairs. If one analyzes the key defining criteria of fascist regimes in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere—such as militarism, jingoism, national security obsessions, disdain for human rights, state-controlled mass media, and bogus elections—one finds uncanny similarities in the US under Bush and the Patriot Act.

A crucial element in fascist systems of domination is the loss of privacy. Clearly we live in an advanced surveillance society—what some call the “transparent society”—where our speech and movements are recorded and monitored by computers, cameras, microphones, retinal and facial recognition systems, data mining systems, and fingerprints. Some of these measures protect us from assault or identity theft, but they also erode our privacy rights and supply personal information to businesses and the government. After 9/11, retired Admiral John Poindexter resurfaced to propose a “Total Information Awareness” project designed to collect all informational footprints an individual leaves behind, ranging from doctor's visits and travel plans to ATM withdrawals, book purchases, and email correspondence. In response to public outrage, Congress cancelled funding for the totalitarian information awareness program in September 2003, but a group of 13 states were independently working on the same effort in the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX). Appropriately titled, the MATRIX is a data mining system that under the pretense of ferreting out dangerous “terrorists” would allow states to collect and share a wealth of information on any citizen almost instantaneously. “I won't lie to you,” said Lt. Col. Ralph Periandi of the Pennsylvania State Police, “This system is not just being used to investigate terrorism.”⁶¹

The Patriot Act has not been around for long, but it has already dramatically altered the political landscape. On March 24, 2003, the Washington Post reported that since 9/11, Ashcroft personally has signed more than 170 “emergency foreign intelligence warrants,” three times the number authorized in the preceding 23 years. On May 18, 2003, the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that in the first two months of 2003, the FBI filed terrorist charges against 56 people, but an investigation found that 41 had nothing to do with terrorism. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, the FBI and the Justice Department issued dozens of “national security letters” that require businesses to turn over all electronic records on their employees' finances, phone calls, emails, and other personal information. The story makes no mention of surveillance of political activists, although from the government's perspective they may well fall into the vague category of “other national security threats” whom Ashcroft and crew can target at will.

Congress will re-examine the Patriot Act in 2005, but by then inertia may have set in and the new security culture and “war on terrorism” may still be considered the nation's top priority. On May 8, 2003, Senator Orrin Hatch, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, tried to pass a bill that would make the “anti-terrorism” powers of the Patriot Act permanent, and thereby abolish the “sunshine” review of 2005. Fortunately, Hatch was firmly checked by both Democrats and Republicans who are increasingly alarmed about the Bush agenda to erode civil liberties in the name of national security. Still, a compromise bill that expands government power to use secret surveillance against “terrorist suspects” passed in the Senate by a vote of 90 to 4. The struggle to preserve constitutional rights is eternal and ongoing. As mentioned, new laws such as the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal 2004 have already been passed that widely disseminate repressive elements of Patriot I and II, making Patriot Act-style legislation more entrenched and harder to rescind. There is no shortage of legislators creating new laws to perpetually erode constitutional rights in the name of fighting terrorism.

Beginning with the Reagan administration in the 1980s, conservatives have labored to roll back the clock on the environmental and social gains of the 1960s and 1970s, and the social welfare policies stemming from the 1930s. Indeed, Bush's time machine reaches back centuries, not decades, as he and his cronies methodically work to annul the US Constitution and the historical gains of the eighteenth-century period of Enlightenment and emerging democratic sensibility. The Bush administration, corporate lobbying groups like ALEC, and pro-violence organizations such as the USSA are exploiting fear and paranoia of terrorism for their own advantage in order to justify their assault on freedom. The Bush administration in particular is shamelessly trying to gain from the tragedy that took the lives of thousands of innocent civilians on 9/11 in order to advance its own agendas and protect corporate profits, while shielding itself from public scrutiny.

The current wave of tyranny is part of a larger class warfare plan that includes subverting liberties, destroying social programs, and invading nations in order to benefit corporations and the super-wealthy. Bush quickly distinguished himself as one of the most dangerous individuals to emerge in recent history, and he is determined to fulfill what he sees as America's manifest destiny: the extension of American power throughout the world.

One Struggle, One Fight

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.—Ben Franklin

I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and to revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.—Henry David Thoreau

We have seen only a few of many portals through which one can view the intensifying drama surrounding the struggle between vegetarian, animal rights, and environmental activists and the corporate-state complex. From the CCF to the FBI, from the USSA to Congress, industries and their government allies are fighting back at “extreme” animal rights and environment groups, as direct activists and liberationists redouble their efforts amid ferocious repression. While opponents rev up the propaganda machines in their effort to strip away the Robin Hood mystique of liberationists, ecowarriors try to unmask the government and corporations as the repressive forces they are. As evidence of increasing tensions, and especially after the events of September 11, there has been a growing tendency here and abroad to criminalize animal rights activities and to brand them not simply as “radical” or “extreme,” but rather as “terrorist”—a term that should be applied not to acts of ethical sabotage, but rather to the willful inflicting of pain and violence on innocent living beings for nefarious political or economic goals. As the CCF, George Nethercutt, Ray Allen, Brian Levin, and others impugn the ALF and ELF as extremists and fanatics, a cursory examination of their worldview, policies, and rhetoric should suffice to establish the identity of the real zealots and dangers to society.

The ironies are all too painful. When beagle puppies are crippled and punched in the face, when monkeys are strapped into restraint devices that smash their skulls, when kittens have their brains invaded with electrodes, and when rabbits and guinea pigs are pumped with toxic chemicals until they die, we are asked to believe that this is science, not terrorism. When over 10 billion animals each year in the US alone are confined and killed in unspeakably vicious ways by food industries, we are told this is business, not terrorism. In this sick and violent society, property is more sacred than life, and thus only those who destroy property are branded as criminals while the real terrorists perpetuate the “banality of evil” (Hannah Arendt) through the daily affairs of torture and killing. For every scratch an activist might inflict on an animal exploiter, a sea of blood flows from the bodies of animals; consequently, it is the height of perversity to brand activists rather than animal exploitation industries as the ethical misfits.

Clearly, in the era of the Patriot Act, the stakes of fighting for animal rights are now much higher, and this should prompt new reflection on tactics for both aboveground and underground activists. Activists must not be afraid or intimidated, but they also need to know their rights, or what is left of them, to exercise high levels of security, and to know the costs of sabotage actions.⁶² Words define reality, and the animal and earth liberation movements must resist being defined as violent fanatics and extremists. They must defend themselves rhetorically and philosophically, establishing a sharp distinction between animal and earth liberation, property destruction, protests, and demonstrations on one side, and bona fide violence and terrorism on the other side. They must expose for all to see the charlatans and real terrorists in state and corporate garb who fulminate against honorable dissidents and freedom fighters from behind their Oz-like curtain.

It is imperative to spread awareness about the history and nature of state repression, from the first Red Scare of the 1920s and the COINTELPRO operations in the 1960s and 1970s to today's Patriot Act and neo-McCarthyism. It is important to know what murderous crimes the US government has committed against radical individuals and groups in the past in order to understand what it is capable of doing today.⁶³ Although the government has the right and the duty to stop genuine terrorists who pose threats to the nation and its citizens, it can and must do this without violating the Constitution, basic human rights, national sovereignty, and international law. The state cannot hide its own crimes under the mantle of Homeland Security. The government wants citizens to believe that security, not liberty, must be the overriding national goal for the indefinite future. If the public allows it, the state will deploy this false dualism from now on to keep chipping away at personal liberties until none are left. If the mission of terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda is to destroy what is left of Western democracy, then, with the help of Bush and Ashcroft, they are succeeding brilliantly.

In addition to growing Congressional opposition to the tyranny of the Patriot Act,⁶⁴ there is hope in the news that 159 towns and cities—as well as the states of Alaska, Hawaii, and Vermont—have created Bill of Rights Defense Committees and passed resolutions against the Patriot Act. From Ithaca, New York to Oakland, California, city councils have condemned the Patriot Act as unconstitutional and devoid of moral legitimacy. Taking more than just symbolic action, Ithaca and other communities require city employees (e.g., librarians) to adopt a policy of non-cooperation with the Patriot Act if government action against terrorism violates the civil rights and liberties of people within their communities. In effect, entire cities and states are adopting policies of civil disobedience as they pit individual rights and state duties against the federal government. Where Congress often has proved cowardly and inept in its duties, city governments are taking on protection of the Constitution as their own responsibility. As one member of the Oakland Civil Rights Defense Committee said, “Congress hasn't been able to check this unconstitutional executive grab, so it is up to us to reclaim our fundamental rights of free speech, free association, due process and equal protection.”⁶⁵

If it is not already obvious, the struggle for animal rights is intimately connected to the struggle for human rights—for free speech, freedom of association, freedom from search and seizure, a fair trial, and so on. The animal rights community can no longer afford to be a single-issue movement, for now in order to fight for animal rights we have to fight for democracy. As different expressions of peace and justice struggles, progressive human and animal rights organizations need to identify important commonalities and form alliances against capitalism, militarization, patriarchy, state repression, and many other social pathologies that affect everyone, whatever their gender, sexual preference, class, race, or species.

It is time once again to recall the profound saying by Pastor Martin Niemöller about the fate of German citizens during the Nazi genocide: “First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the communists and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me—and by then there was no one left to speak out for me.”

Attacks on foreigners are preludes to attacks on US citizens, which are overtures to assaults on the animal rights and environmental activist communities, which augur the fate of all groups and citizens in the nation. In the world of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, the FBI, the CIA, and the corporate conglomerates, we are all becoming aliens, foreigners to their pre-modern barbarity by virtue of our very wish to uphold modern liberal values and constitutional rights. Like “the war on drugs,” the “war on terrorism” is phony, a front for the war on privacy, liberty, and democracy. Only counter-terrorists can defeat terrorists. May the armies of the animal, earth, and human liberationists rise and multiply in a perfect war against the oppressors of the earth.

Notes

1. See Rania Masri, “The Women and Children of Iraq Are Under Siege,” The Prism, www.ibiblio.org/prism/Mar97/iraq.html.

2. “Animal rights, terror tactics,” BBC News, August 30, 2000. See news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/902751.stm.

3. On guerrilla warfare, see Mao Tse tung, On guerrilla Warfare (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961) and Che Guevara, guerrilla Warfare (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985). For an excellent analysis of how low-tech guerrilla warfare in Vietnam defeated the US military machines, see William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986).

4. “The Terrorist Threat Confronting the United States,” Congressional Statement, Federal Bureau of Investigation. See www.fbi.gov/congress/congress02/watson020602.htm.

5. For the text of their communiqué, see directaction.info/news_sept30_03.htm.

6. Stacy Finz, “Activists see more violence from extreme protesters,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 6, 2003.

7. “Eco-terrorists top FBI's list,” Denver Post, December 15, 2003.

8. Finz, op cit.

9. Greg Avery, “Eco-terror act at Vail unsolved 5 years later,” Daily Camera, October 19, 2003.

10. Paul Harris, “Death risk as animal rights war hots up,” The Observer, March 11, 2001.

11. For Rosebraugh's defense of violence as a political tactic, see his book The Logic of Political Violence: Lessons in Reform and Revolution (Portland, OR: Arissa Media Group, 2003).

12. See Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther and the American Indian Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1990).

13. The text of the Patriot Act is available on the ACLU Website (www.aclu.org).

14. “Appeals panel rejects secret court's limits on terrorist wiretaps,” CNN, November 19, 2002.

15. Wired magazine explains, “The FBI's controversial Carnivore spy system, which has been renamed DCS1000, is a specially configured Windows computer designed to sit on an Internet provider's network and monitor electronic communications. To retrieve the stored data, an agent stops by to pick up a removable hard drive with the information that the Carnivore system was configured to record.” See Declan McCullagh, “Anti-attack Feds Push Carnivore,” Wired, September 12, 2001.

16. See www.ccr-ny.org/v2/reports/docs/Civil_Liberties.pdf.

17. ACLU Website, October 14, 2001.

18. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974).

19. See “Assessing the New Normal: Liberty and Security for the Post-September United States,” www.humanrightsfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/pdf/AssessingtheNewNormal.pdf. The site features lengthy criticisms of the Patriot Act.

20. After 9/11, thousands of Arab and Muslim immigrants, and various foreigners, were rounded up and jailed for months without formal charges or the right to legal counsel. None of them were charged with terrorism. See Karen Rignall, “Beyond Patriotic,” www.alternet.org/story/17098/beyond_patriotic/.

21. Charles Lewis, “The Assault on Liberty,” The Center for Public Integrity, September 17, 2003; for further information on Patriot Act II, see www.aclu.org.

22. The draft of the bill is available online at www.eff.org/Censorship/Terrorism_militias/patriot2draft.html. For a recent update on the political struggle in Congress over the Patriot Act and related legislation, see “The Impact of the USA PATRIOT Act: An Update,” at www.fepproject.org/commentaries/patriotactupdate.html. Since the state is constantly trying to pass new anti-terrorist legislation, one must be continually vigilant and regularly monitor sites such as the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (www.bordc.org).

23. For a critical debunking of the powerful corporate interests behind ALEC, see www.alecwatch.org; see also “Private Sector Shaping Public Policy,” www.opensecrets.org/newsletter/ce45/ce45.01.htm.

24. Ira Chinoy and Robert G. Kaiser, “Decades of Contributions to Conservativism,” The Washington Post, May 2, 1999.

25. For the text of the bill, see www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlo/78r/billtext/HB00433I.HTM.

26. Brad Knickerbocker, “New laws target increase in acts of ecoterrorism,” The Christian Science Monitor, November 26, 2003.

27. See Bill Berkowitz, “Factory Farms Fancy Secrecy,” www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=13266. Illinois House Bill 5793—which “makes it a crime to be on a farm (or any other ‘animal facility’) and photograph or videotape pigs or any other animals without the consent of the owner if [there is] one” and if the “intent is to ‘damage the enterprise’ ”—passed 128 votes to 0 in the House in April 2002, and at the time of this writing is still is up for vote in the Senate. Berkowitz cites the Peoria Journal Star, which reported, “The stated need for the law, according to legislative analysis, is to protect the food supply from terrorists.” If the law were approved, unauthorized recording of waste spillage or animal abuse would become a crime punishable by up to six months in jail, while the real criminals, the mass murderers of animals, go about business as usual. Efforts to link ALF or ELF actions to threats to the American food supply are just one step away from Nethercutt-type accusations of “agroterrorism,” a highly charged term that invites severe repression by the state.

28. The texts of these bills, along with updates about recent legislative action, can be found on the Website of the Humane Society of the United States, www.hsus.org. For an overview of recent state efforts to pass anti-”terrorist” legislation, see the “State Legislation Addressing Terrorism,” National Conference of State Legislatures, December 2001, www.ncsl.org/programs/press/2001/freedom/terrorism01.htm.

29. As evidence of this mentality, a January 19, 2003 letter to the Salt Lake Tribune blasted the “environmental terrorists” who broke into a hog farm, but offered no criticism of the institution of factory farming and mass slaughter of pigs.

30. Karen Charman, “Environmentalists = Terrorists: The New Math,” tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/7748.

31. The Center for Consumer Freedom, “Special Report: It's time to start using the ‘T’ word,” www.consumerfreedom.com/headline_detail.cfm?HEADLINE_ID=1544. Other anti-animal rights lists such as AnimalRights. Net regularly feature “animal rights terrorism” in their headlines. The New York Post jumped on the bandwagon during Craig Rosebraugh's appearance before the Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health, with the headline “Terror Takes the Fifth,” (February 18, 2002). The Wall Street Journal joined in the fray with “Terrorist Buds: Bombing in the name of ‘Mother Earth’ isn't cool” (February 14, 2002). The article berated the ELF as a “band of stoned arsonists” and “our domestic, tree-hugging Al Qaeda.” The opposition is not above lying and distortion campaigns. After the national animal rights conference in summer 2002, for instance, infiltrators from the Sportsmen's Alliance quoted Paul Watson out of context to make it appear that he saw the taking of human life in order to save endangered species as nothing more than “collateral damage,” and reported that “Animal Rights Conference Encourages Terrorism,” a story that was picked up by newspapers around the country. For Watson's rebuttal, see “Pirate or Policeman: High Seas Activist Says He Fights to Uphold Law,” abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/seashepherd020801.html.

32. “North ALF Press Office 2001 Year-End Direct Action Report,” www.tao.ca/~naalfpo/2001_Direct_Action_Report.pdf.

33. Tom DeWeese, “The Eco-Terrorist Anthrax Connection,” CNSNews.com Commentary, October 23, 2001.

34. Testimony of Congressman George R. Nethercutt, Jr., Resources Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health, Subcommittee Hearing on Ecoterrorism and Lawlessness on the National Forests, www.cdfe.org/nethercutt.htm.

35. On the negative consequences of the deployment of terrorist discourse, see “Living in Fear: How the US Government's War on Terror Impacts American Lives” and other essays in Cynthia Brown, ed., Lost Liberties: Ashcroft and the Assault on Personal Freedom (New York: The New Press, 2003). Also see Benjamin R. Barber, Fear's Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).

36. April 8, 2002. Critics think SHAC may lose the public relations war for itself and the ALF. As the Boston Globe wrote in an editorial entitled “Animal Extremism,” “If SHAC activists seek to illuminate the condition of laboratory animals, they have failed. Their own tactics reveal a disturbing willingness to inflict suffering” (August 22, 2002). Other newspapers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer and Seattle's Everett Herald have also denounced SHAC as “violent criminals” and “domestic terrorists.”

37. In November 2002 demonstrating an unusual example of academics involving themselves in public debate, two Portland State University professors decried the linkage of the terrorist label to environmental activism. They authored a faculty resolution that passed 46–9 condemning the use of “inflammatory terms such as ‘terrorism’ and ‘ecoterrorism’ ” and sent the resolution to the mayor and city commissioners.

38. For an exposé of the Center for Consumer Freedom and the interests they represent, see “Impropaganda Review: A Rogue's Gallery of Industry Front Groups and Anti-Environmental Think Tanks,” www.prwatch.org/improp/ddam.html.

39. CCF often uses this phrase at the end of their press releases; see for instance “DISMISSED: US District Court Judge Tosses Out Frivolous Fast Food Lawsuit,” www.consumerfreedom.com/release_detail.cfm?PR_ID=14.

40. Berman cited at www.prwatch.org/improp/ddam.html.

41. See, for example, “Racism in the US Dietary Guidelines?”, www.pcrm.org/health/Commentary/commentary9906.html.

42. PCRM News Release, www.pcrm.org/news/health990924.html.

43. See CCF, “PCRM: PETA Comrades' Ridiculous Marketing” (January 18, 2002), and activistcash.com.

44. In September 2001 PCRM received some much-deserved legitimation when the USDA panel of experts agreed that the claims made by the “milk mustache” and “got milk?” advertisements were untruthful.

45. Intelligence Report, Fall 2002. See www.cdfe.org/splc_report.htm. See also Friends of Animals' critique of SPLC's use of terrorist discourse against animal rights groups by Lee Hall: “Of Babies, Bathwater, and the Animal Rights Movement,” Actionline, Summer 2003, friendsofanimals.org/action/summer2003/splc.htm.

46. Will Potter, “The New Backlash: From the Streets to the Courthouse, the New Activists Find Themselves Under Attack,” The Texas Observer, September 14, 2001.

47. See www.politechbot.com/docs/tips.deleted.112002.html.

48. See her “Defending Civilization” report at www.artsci.wustl.edu/~stone/cheneyreport_original.pdf.

49. Craig Rosebraugh, “Written Testimony Supplied to the US House Subcommittee on Forest and Forest Health for the February 12, 2002, Hearing on ‘Ecoterrorism,’ “ www.protectcivilliberties.com/written%20testimony.pdf.

50. For details, see Craig Rosebraugh, Burning Rage of a Dying Planet: Speaking for the Earth Liberation Front (New York: Lantern Books, 2004).

51. For further details on these incidents and the use of law and the IRS to suppress activism, see Potter, op. cit.

52. “Canadian Secret Police Raid Anarchist Activist's Home for US Authorities,” www.ainfos.ca/sup/ainfos00247.html.

53. See “Administration Creates Center for Master Terror ‘Watch List,’ ” The New York Times, September 17 2003.

54. See www.boycottdelta.com/index.html, which points out that information collected on passengers can be stored for up to 50 years and can be easily hacked, and that background checks damage one's credit ratings. See also Michelle Delio, “Privacy Activist Takes on Delta,” Wired, March 5, 2003.

55. See Ryan Singel, “CAPPS Navigates Unfriendly Skies,” Wired, August 26, 2003. On the JetBlue scandal, see www.dontspyonus.com.

56. Ian Hoffman, Sean Holstege and Josh Richman, “Analysts saw protesters as terrorists,” Oakland Tribune, May 18, 2003.

57. Mike McPhee, “Denver police shares its ‘spy files,’ ” Denver Post, December 15, 2003.

58. Kristie Reilly, “Warning! You Are Being Watched,” In These Times, September 19, 2003.

59. “The real extremists: Police surveillance of peaceful groups crossed the line,” Daily Camera, May 21, 2003.

60. Curt Anderson, “FBI Publicly Denies Spying on Protesters,” Associated Press, November 26, 2003.

61. Dave Lindorff, “Still Watching: Private industry moves in to compile personal data,” In These Times, November 11, 2003. Also see Nancy Kranich, “MATRIX and the New Surveillance States,” www.fepproject.org/commentaries/matrix.html.

62. For activist legal resources, see www.cala-online.org/civil_liberties.htm.

63. On the sordid history of US political repression, see Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: 1870 to the Present (Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1978) and Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1942–Present. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003).

64. In July 2003, for instance, the House voted 309 to 118 to advance a Republican-sponsored amendment to block Patriot Act secret “sneak and peak” searches of homes and offices.

65. See Bill of Rights Defense Committee Resolution, www.bordc.org/Oakland-res.htm.

Afterword

The ALF: Who, Why, and What?

INGRID NEWKIRK

I would hazard to say that no movement for social change has ever succeeded without “the militarism component.” Not until black demonstrators resorted to violence did the national government work seriously for civil rights legislation. In the 1930s labor struggles had to turn violent before any significant gains were made. In 1850 white abolitionists, having given up on peaceful means, began to encourage and engage in actions that disrupted plantation operations and liberated slaves. Was that all wrong?

Henry David Thoreau, addressing the execution of John Brown, wrote, “It was John Brown's peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere with the slaveholder in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him.” And it was John Kennedy who said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Who wants to fight? Not those who end up fighting. All they want is change, but society is complacent and society is slow, and society is too convenience-oriented to listen and voluntarily change its habits. Society has to be pushed into the future.

There is a difference between violence to property and violence to people, of course. The ALF would not hurt a mouse, but it will burn a building. To equate the two is to establish a fixed devotion to property as something holy. When carried to its extreme this is the kind of thinking that leads police officers to shoot to death people who are taking things from stores.

Thinkers may prepare revolutions, but bandits must carry them out. In the course of any public struggle there comes a time when a law obeyed reluctantly or without thought is discredited. Today, the question of violating the laws that offer a layer of extra, and I think unconstitutional, protection to those who abuse animals, that exempts them from being civilized and respectful toward animals, is discredited.

Disobedience frightens us. But Christian Bay, the author of Civil Disobedience, remarked, “The widespread tendency to recoil from the very concept of disobedience in a society priding itself on its liberties, is a measure of the degree of immunity to real social change that has been achieved by our present socioeconomic and political system in the US.”

Today, this question of violating the laws that indemnify animal abusers looms before us just as it did in the past for those who wished to free other slaves, human slaves, from the shackles we now see on elephants in the circus, and the exploitation we now see of monkeys and rats in laboratories. We may wish for change to spring out of pleasantries, but it won't. As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

If a concentration camp or laboratory is burned, that is violence, but if it is left standing is that not more and worse violence? In a broiler house, 30,000 chickens are crammed into crates every six to eight weeks, breaking their wings; then they are thrown like sacks onto trucks, whisked down the highway in the cold or heat, hung upside down by their feet, and, protesting as best they can, panic in their hearts and eyes, their throats are slit. Isn't the chicken house today's concentration camp?—or do we not believe that it is wrong to make victims and to deride and persecute those we do not relate to? Will we condemn its destruction or condemn its existence? Which is the more violent wish?

If a property stands as a mechanism, a platform, or a vehicle for violence, shouldn't it be destroyed?

We have to ask why there is a need for an ALF. No doubt it is because there are people whose sense of urgency at the pain and slaughter of others does not allow them to wait for a couple of decades for change. Perhaps their pain is more intense than the pain of those of us who weep and know things are wrong and work within the framework of an exploitative society, geared to continue that very exploitation, in the hope that “one day” things will be different.

Perhaps the ALF exists because of complacency. After all, if peaceful dialogue worked, there would be nothing for the ALF to do; it would not have a job. So, when a hundred years or more of writing polite letters fails to effect vital change, should we condemn those who are compelled to try something stronger or condemn those who refused to change?

How many of us would be content writing letters to the editor and politely talking about the situation if our very own loved ones had been snatched away from us and were being imprisoned and tortured? Would we sit back if our sisters were being force-fed bleach? Well, someone's sister is being force-fed bleach as I write this. We know about it, but we continue sitting here. Should we blame the ALF for getting up and trying to stop it?

In Europe, the ALF is large and its agents are fearless. People will go to jail if they must. They understand that from the outset. It is no surprise to them. They do not whine and ask for much if they draw the short straw. They go, learn, wait, and inspire from inside. They know their lot is far superior to that of those they fight for. Rod Coronado, a Native American animal liberationist who spent several quiet, dignified years in a federal penitentiary in the US, calls them “warriors.”

It is these warriors who provide the prod in the ribs to both conservative animal protectors and animal exploiters alike. Their very existence is an indictment of how society changes. It is also, perhaps, the animals' greatest hope.