CORPORATISM - LOOKING GLASS NEWS | |
The Great Green Scare: The Cancer Agents of the FBI |
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by Jeffrey St. Clair Counter Punch Entered into the database on Monday, October 03rd, 2005 @ 15:10:59 MST |
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With nothing much better to do and an unlimited budget to burn, the
FBI is turning its mighty inquisitorial arsenal on environmental groups across
the country. Even now the feds are scouring green outfits from Moscow, Idaho
to Cancer Alley Parish, Louisiana, looking to round up bands of eco-terrorists,
the Osama Bin Ladens of the American outback. Back in Reagantime the rightwingers smeared environmentalists as watermelons:
green on the outside, red on the inside. In those halcyon days, economist John
Baden, major domo of a rightwing think tank called FREE and the Svengali of
the Sagebrush Rebels, made a small fortune hawking watermelon ties, woven of
the finest petro-polyester, to his retinue of oil execs, federal judges and
range lords. Now that cap-C Communism has faded into the oblivion of high school
history text books, the corporate world's pr mavens have had to concoct a new
spine-tingling metaphor to evoke the threat environmentalism poses to their
bottom line: eco-terrorism. Apparently, it's just a short step from al Qaeda to PETA.
That's right, the money you save from not buying fur may be going to finance
terrorist raids to liberate condemned mink from their isolation cages on rodent
death row in Corvallis, Oregon. Of course, the feds haven't had much luck finding Bin Laden. And our mean-spirited
Clouseaus didn't stop any of his kamikazes, even though their own agents shouted
out repeated internal alarums. And when the whistleblowing agents went public,
the FBI brass cracked down on them, gagged some and gave others, such as the
courageous Sibel Edmunds, the boot. Several of the feds' biggest terrorism arrests have blown up in their faces.
In Portland, Oregon, the FBI dramatically seized attorney Brandon Mayfield,
trumpeting to the press that the mild-mannered immigration lawyer was a long-distance
mastermind behind the Madrid train bombings, a kind of Fu Manchu in Birkenstocks.
The feds said the technicians in their crime lab had detected Mayfield's fingerprints
on a bag found near the bomb site that supposedly was linked to the terrorists.
After several harrowing weeks, he was released by a disgusted federal judge,
over the FBI's virulent objections, after Spanish investigators revealed that
the fatal fingerprint bore not the faintest resemblance to Mayfield's and, in
fact, belonged to an Algerian. Yet another crushing blow to the FBI crime lab.
And after four years, the FBI's snark hunt for the anthrax killer has
also come up empty. So perhaps tree huggers shouldn't sweat these menacing invigilations from the
big heat. Then again perhaps they should worry. What the FBI is truly proficient at is destroying the lives of innocent
people, such as Brandon Mayfield, Judi Bari and Wen Ho Lee. That's when they
don't simply kill you outright, as they did to Fred Hampton, the blameless men,
women and kids in that house of flames in Waco and Randy Weaver's wife, Vicki,
as she held an infant in her arms on the front porch of their cabin at Ruby
Ridge. Armed with the bulging array of new police and surveillance powers handed the
agency in the wake of 9/11, the FBI is now free to prowl unfettered by even
the thinnest strands of constitutional due process through the lives, email
and bank accounts of activists trying stop chemical plants from flushing toxins
into their water or logging companies from slaughtering 800-year old trees on
lands that are purportedly part of the public estate. In other words, the FBI is acting as a federally-funded paramilitary
force for the cancer industry and Extinction, Incorporated, as the Pinkerton
Agency and National Guard once did for Anaconda Copper and Standard Oil. Apparently, no one has told Robert Mueller that the corpse of Edward Abbey
has been moldering in the Arizona desert for 15 years, his place taken by touchy-feely
greens funded by organic body products companies, such as Julia Butterfly, who
would rather talk to trees than drive spikes into them for their own good. Of course, this kind of glaring nuance won't deter an agency that persists
in peddling the repeatedly discredited slur that Judi Bari bombed herself. Over on FoxNews, blinking eco-terrorist alerts have replaced Tom Ridge's color-coded
threat level as the latest alarmist metronome to distract viewer attention from
the plight of Karl Rove, the convictions of corporate tycoons and the deepening
bloodbath in Iraq. FoxNews devoted extensive coverage to congressional testimony earlier this
summer by John Lewis, the FBI's Deputy Director for Counterterrorism. Deftly
sidestepping border vigilantes, anti-abortion zealots, and white supremacists,
Lewis pointed to environmentalists as the great looming internal threat to the
security of the nation. Lewis breathlessly claimed that the FBI had documented
more than 1,200 acts of eco-terrorism over the last 15 years, inflicting $110
million in property damage-or about the same amount that timber companies steal
from the national forests each year. Oddly, executives at the Weyerhaeuser Company--a
repeat offender--haven't done any time in Pelican Bay lately. Once again these hotly reported stories have mostly fizzled out, with the supposed
acts of eco-terrorism turning to be insurance scams, disputes between neighbors
or angry employees venting their rage with a match and a gallon of gasoline.
In December of 2004, more than a dozen homes in a Maryland subdivision near
a wildlife reserve were torched. Before the embers from the smoldering houses
had cooled, the FBI publicly fingered eco-terrorists for the arson. But it soon
emerged that the fires in the largely middle-class black neighborhood had been
committed by a drunken gang of white power pyromaniacs called The Family. Close,
boys, but no cigar. Meanwhile, the Reverend Pat Robertson broadcasts assassination proclamations
on national television. Praise the lord and pay the hit man. Operation Rescue's
Randal Terry publicly threatened federal judges during the national trauma over
Terri Schiavo. One of David Horowitz's featured writers on Frontpage, a
certain Michael Calderon, called for "Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael
Parenti, Michael Moore, Ward Churchill, and [Justin] Raimondos to be found shot
full of holes." Another group of beer-gutted ultra-Patriots in Chicago
openly pleads online for the execution
of Stan Goff, Alexander Cockburn and your humble scribe. None of these would-be terrorists is currently deemed a public menace by the
FBI. Rev. Robertson's notoriously corrupt Operation Blessing is even sanctioned
to receive FEMA money. Over the past quarter of a century, only abortion providers and Muslim clerics
have been on the receiving end of more death threats than environmental organizers.
It comes with the territory. But these virulent acts of harassment--messages
often driven home with dead spotted owls, bullet casings, and rocks through
the front window--rarely rouse the interest of the FBI or even local cops. Apparently,
the agency doesn't consider the violent suppression of political speech a terrorist
act. The environmental movement hasn't issued any fatwahs lately. (Although there
may have been discussions at the crusty League of Conservation Voters of taking
some kind of preemptive action against Ralph Nader on the eve of the last election.)
Indeed, the greens haven't had many successes at all, since Clinton and Gore
drained the spinal fluid out of the big greens back in the mid-90s. With a few
feisty exceptions in Montana, Oregon and Louisiana, the movement is a paper
tiger these days. Paper tigers are easily intimidated into turning on their
own, which may be the point. The lack of a body count from green sleeper cells hasn't stopped the FBI from
amassing robust files on dozens of environmental organizers and environmental
groups. Of course, this is an agency that harbored files on Sinatra, Liberace
and Louis Armstrong. Satchmo, though, certainly posed a greater threat to the
nation's ruling elite than has ever been evinced by the National Audubon Society.
In these tremulous times, it's the environmental activist who doesn't have an
FBI file who should bear the greatest scrutiny--there's your potential infiltrator.
So perhaps the FBI had done the environmental movement a service. The next time
you're thinking about giving a green group a contribution, ask to see their
FBI file. If it's thinner than 100 pages, donate to another group. The feds seem to have a special fetish for Greenpeace. A recent lawsuit filed
by the ACLU forced the FBI to reveal that it had accumulated more than 2,400
pages of information on Greenpeace. While Greenpeace may be the Bush administration's
most visible environmental critic, this isn't your grandfather's Greenpeace,
which has largely abandoned the flashy direct actions of yore for glossy direct
mailings and run-of-the-mill lobbying efforts--think National Wildlife Federation
with tongue-piercings. And let us never forget that while Greenpeace has never been charged with any
terrorist act, it has been the victim of a lethal terrorist bombing. In 1985,
two French secret agents detonated three limpet mines on the hull of the Rainbow
Warrior while it was docked in Auckland Harbor. The explosions killed Fernando
Pereira, a Portuguese photographer. Even the feds can't cite a single death resulting from an alleged act of eco-terrorism.
But that doesn't matter. After the horrors of New Orleans, it should be clear
to all that it's the protection of property, not people, that really gets the
feds going. Destruction of property in the name of a political cause is now deemed an act
of terrorism that can carry with it prison terms equivalent to first-degree
murder and allows the FBI to deploy the extra-constitutional powers granted
by the Patriot Act and other anti-terrorism laws. Take the strange ordeal of Tre Arrow, who faces a life-sentence on federal
charges of burning a cement truck and logging equipment in the ancient forests
of Oregon. Today, Mr. Arrow, who denies the allegations against him, is being
held in Canada, where he is fighting extradition. Those machines torched in
the Oregon forests were valued at less than $500,000 combined. Yet Arrow, still
in his twenties, is looking at 70 years hard time in federal prison. Compare
that to the Nero of Tyco, Dennis Kozlowski, convicted, along with his partner
in crime Mark Swartz, of stealing $600 million from his company. Kozlowski will
be eligible for parole in seven years. Enron's Meyer Lansky (AKA Andrew Fastow),
the numbers man responsible for engineering an accounting scheme that resulted
in the largest bankruptcy in US history, got 10 years in Club Fed--and he almost
certainly won't serve all of that. They never do. As disclosed by former UPI editor Kelly Hearn in an excellent recent piece
for Alternet, under several state laws, and a bill currently being shepherded
through the US congress, you don't even have to destroy property to be considered
an eco-terrorist. All you have to do is block access to an animal research facility.
Chain yourself to the door of entry into a Dachau of the chimp world and you
might find yourself staring down a 20-year prison term, with all of your personal
and organizational assests seized, as if you were a Colombian drug kingpin.
Here the barbaric RICO statutes are being cast out as the agency's prosecutorial
driftnet. The crackdown on greens is happening at a time when legally sanctioned avenues
of dissent against polluters and pillagers of nature are being foreclosed daily,
as congress and the administration curtail abilities to appeal and litigate
federal rulings threatening the environment. It's even getting tougher and tougher
to find out what is actually going on. With 9/11 as the inevitable rationale,
the Bush administration has shuttered the Toxic Release Inventory, which disclosed
the kinds and amounts of pollutants spew into the water and air by chemical
plants, and squeezed the Freedom of Information Act in the name of national
security (read: corporate wet dream). What was once a fundamental right of remonstrance
against governmental and corporate outrages is now considered an act of sedition.
So this FBI witchhunt is already well underway and will soon be coming to a
community group near you. The lives of part-time activists, mothers, nurses,
students, will be turned upside down. They will be harassed, bullied and encouraged
to inform on their colleagues. Organizations will be infiltrated and wrecked
from the inside. False stories will be planted in the press. Environmental funders
will be scared off. Foundations will be audited, hauled before hostile congressional
committees and threatened with revocation of their tax status. It's a creepy
new twist in an old narrative. They got it all wrong, you say? Tough luck. Being an FBI agent means never having to say you're sorry. Just ask Richard
Jewel, the man they wrongly fingered for the Olympic Park bombings. |