April 28, 2008
The Politics of Green Scare
By STEPHEN LENDMAN
In May 2005, FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism John Lewis told a Senate panel that ecoterrorism is "one of today's most serious domestic terrorism threats." Then the FBI's James Jarboe estimated that two organizations (the Earth Liberation Front - ELF and Animal Liberation Front - ALF) committed over 600 criminal acts since 1996, causing over $43 million in damage. For his part, Lewis said both groups committed more than 1100 such acts since 1976, "conservatively" resulting in around $110 million in damages.
What's going on, and is there anything to these charges? Coming from FBI sources makes them highly suspect, especially when there are two types of documented cases:
-- people guilty of non-violent offenses called "terrorism" and given excessively harsh sentences; and most disturbing
-- innocent people targeted, accused, convicted and sentenced to hard time for environmental activism or supporting animal rights; and that's on top of hundreds of other political persecutions and many thousands of innocent people (or petty criminals) in US prisons.
This behavior isn't new in America, but things heated up after 9/11 with the administration wasting no time getting going. That evening, George Bush addressed the nation and declared a "war against terrorism," asked for world support, and began the government's "emergency (preventive war strategy) response plans." It was planned and ready before 9/11 as a "war of terrorism" to defile the law, wage aggressive wars, usurp unprecedented powers, destroy our civil liberties, and convince the public to sacrifice freedom for the security they never got. In addition, the October 2001 USA Patriot Act (written well before 9/11) created the federal crime of "domestic terrorism" that broadened the definition and applied it to US citizens as well as aliens.
When John Lewis addressed another Senate panel in May 2004, he stated that "the FBI divides the terrorist threat facing (the country) into two broad categories, international and domestic....and during the past decade we have witnessed dramatic changes in the nature of the domestic terrorist threat." For a while "right-wing extremism" (loosely defined as the militia movement) overtook left-wing terrorism (but in) the past several years..