[Ppnews] Green Scare 2006: Who’s Scaring Who?

[Political Prisoner News]

Green Scare 2006: Who’s Scaring Who?
The monkeywrench as a weapon of mass destruction
By Melissa Roberts

(originally printed in Works In Progress Vol. 17 No. 1, May 2006)

It should come as no shock that the U.S. 
government has perfected the art of deception 
while simultaneously criminalizing dissent. The 
agenda is clear: it intends to protect those with 
wealth and power, and will do so by any means 
necessary. The past year alone has revealed a 
campaign which includes: warrantless wiretapping; 
Presidential “signing statements” contradicting 
laws passed by Congress; and secretive 
“declassification” of information with intent to 
harm high-level dissenters. In short, those in 
power whose interests revolve around short-term 
profits at the expense of the long-term health of 
the planet and the majority of its inhabitants, are not to be hindered.

The Green Scare and “Operation Backfire”

A recent example is the “Green Scare”—a 
modern-day witch hunt of environmentalists 
reminiscent of the McCarthy-era “Red Scare”. 
December 7th, 2005, marked the beginning of the 
largest roundup of environmental and animal 
rights activists in U.S. history. The FBI sting 
centered on incidents of sabotage allegedly 
committed by the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and 
the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) primarily in 
the Pacific Northwest—Eugene, Olympia, 
Seattle—and extending to Colorado and California. 
Two Olympia activists have been arrested. 
Unfortunately, this is only the beginning of the 
campaign’s impact on the Olympia community. The 
nation-wide sweep of arrests, or “Operation 
Backfire,” is part of an FBI campaign against 
environmentalists who engage in a variety of 
tactics—including property destruction—as a means 
to defend wild lands, animals, and the integrity 
of the earth’s delicate balance. But here’s the 
clincher: they’ve been dubbed “terrorists”. In 
his campaign send-off, Attorney General Alberto 
Gonzales issued a January 2006 televised 
statement announcing a sweeping 65-count 
indictment which included conspiracy charges and 
declared “eco-terrorism” as “the number one domestic terrorist threat”.

Section 802 of The Patriot Act

The term ‘domestic terrorism’ was used to 
describe the deadly Oklahoma City bombing. After 
the introduction of the Patriot Act, the term was 
redefined as: “activities that involve acts 
dangerous to human life that are a violation of 
the criminal laws of the United States or of any 
State; appear to be intended 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
”

According to ACLU spokeswoman, Catherine Hazouri, 
the organization believes, “the current 
definition of terrorism is too broad. It sweeps 
up people who have no intent to harm human life, 
and this criminalizes dissent.” Mark Potok of the 
Southern Poverty Law Center adds, “What’s 
happened over the last few years is that both the 
FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have 
said that ‘eco-terrorism’ is the number one 
domestic terrorist threat facing the United 
States. And in my opinion, that’s simply ludicrous.”

An April 13, 2006, “Office of Intelligence and 
Analysis, Homeland Security Assessment Bulletin” 
cuts to the heart of the agency’s reasoning for 
labeling eco-activists as terrorists: “Attacks 
against corporations by animal rights extremists 
and eco-terrorists are costly to the targeted 
company and, over time, can undermine confidence in the economy.”

The Bulletin goes on to advise corporations about 
the potential “attacks” they can expect to 
encounter—citing actions allegedly inflicted by 
the recently-targeted group, Stop Huntingdon 
Animal Cruelty (SHAC): “Inundating a company’s 
computer server with email, causing it to crash 
(estimated damage: $1.25 million); using an 
auto-dialer to overwhelm the telephone services 
of an investment firm—which prevented customers 
from calling; an email harassment campaign which 
demanded that a firm sell its shares of HLS stock 
(the company lost $1.4 million from the sale); 
jamming phone lines with repeated calls to 
prevent it from doing business with potential customers.”

The Ruckus Society teaches a variety of civil 
disobedience skills, and founder John Sellers, 
has this to say about the Green Scare: “The fact 
that the FBI and the Attorney General
 can stand 
there with straight faces and say that the 
radical fringe of the environmental movement is 
the number one domestic threat to our national 
security is just outrageous. The founding fathers 
were very clear in writing that the duty of a 
citizen in an unjust society is to refuse to cooperate with the injustice.”

Traditionally, the people of the United States 
have cherished their right to dissent. As 
historian Howard Zinn notes, when the patriots of 
1773 felt unfairly treated by the ruling British 
government, they rebelled. The most famous 
example of early American sabotage was the Boston 
Tea Party. Early direct actions include: the 
Stamp Act protests of 1765, numerous acts of 
civil disobedience by slaves and abolitionists, 
strikes and sit-ins—all violated private property 
laws, but won rights for colonists, workers, and 
African Americans which we consider “basic human rights” today.

Despite this honorable tradition, today’s Patriot 
Act distorts the freedom that our patriot ancestors fought for.

Threat Level: GREEN
Crafting the Eco-Terrorist Myth

The Homeland Security “Citizen Advisory System” 
conveniently distills the nation’s “terrorist 
threat level” into a color-coded system, not 
dissimilar from weather-report icons. The “lowest 
risk” point on the scale is aptly colored: green. 
Environmentalists couldn’t agree more. In fact, 
they see themselves more as caped 
crusaders—selflessly risking life and limb to 
protect the planet and its inhabitants.

In 1989, a multi-year FBI COINTELPRO 
sting—complete with paid agent provocateurs and 
costing over $2 million—entrapped four Earth 
First!ers, and framed the perceived leader of 
EF!, Dave Foreman. Ilse Asplund speaks about the 
Arizona action, for which she was arrested and 
imprisoned: “I was involved in trying, very 
actively, to stop uranium mining and development 
on the San Francisco peaks—which is a mountain 
that is held sacred to twelve indigenous tribes 
that live in the area. One of the actions that we 
did was cut down some power lines to the Canyon 
Uranium Mine, which is situated at Red Butte—land 
that is sacred to the Havasupai and is essential 
to their creation story and the enactment of their ceremonies.

“Our legal system has a very hard time dealing 
with land as anything other than as a commodity, 
to be transferred into wealth to put in the 
pockets of certain individuals. And many people 
pay dearly for that transfer of natural resources 
and wealth. I felt that it was extremely 
important to make a statement that there are 
values in the land that support and nourish us 
that are above and beyond the rights of commodification.”
Rather than threatening human life, the Arizona 5 
were motivated by a human, as well as 
environmental threat. Dozens of Navajo people in 
Arizona have died prematurely of mining-related 
diseases, and passed on genetic defects after the 
first wave of uranium mining on their reservation 
in the late 1950s. "You look around the 
reservation and see so many elderly people who 
are crippled and can barely breathe," said Robert 
Stewart, Sr. of Tuba City, a Navajo who worked 
for five years in a mine in the mid- to late 
1950s. "This pretty much devastated much of a generation."

Today’s ELF and ALF strongly advocate “equality, 
social justice and compassion for all life." An 
equal respect for life is expressed in the Earth 
First! Journal’s definition of monkeywrenching: 
“nonviolent resistance to the destruction of 
natural diversity and wilderness. It is never 
directed against human beings or other forms of 
life. It is aimed at inanimate machines and tools 
that are destroying life. Care is always taken to 
minimize any possible threat to people, including 
the monkeywrenchers themselves.”

However, the competitive “man vs. nature” 
mythology appears quite rooted in the industry 
viewpoint. A February 2006 article entitled “Who 
Will Defend Industry Against Eco-Terrorism” which 
appears in none other than Capitalism Magazine, 
provides a glimpse. Author and resident fellow of 
the Ayn Rand Institute, Onkar Ghate asserts, 
“Environmental terrorism is a consistent 
expression of environmentalism's worship of 
wilderness. By making the preservation of 
untouched nature the ideal, environmentalism 
necessarily makes man, who survives by exploiting nature, the enemy.”

Ghate believes, “the ideology of environmentalism 
is not concerned with improving man's life on 
earth. If it were, it would not oppose but 
champion industrial progress—luxury homes, dams, 
highways, bioengineering, food irradiation, 
etc.—and the individuals who create it.” He goes 
on to warn: “If we value our lives, we must never 
make common cause with environmentalism, no 
matter how appealing a particular 
environmentalist project may seem. We must fight 
not only against particular environmental 
terrorists but also against the ideology that 
inspires them. But even more important, we must 
fight for rational values: man's life and industrial civilization.”

Government Response to Comparable Crimes

Environmentalists as “number one” in the domestic 
terrorism lineup flies in the face of unsolved, 
and in many cases, uninvestigated crimes that 
better fit under the moniker of 
terrorism—including 7400 hate crimes, and 450 
(corporate) environmental crimes threatening 
workers, public health, or the environment. 
Sabotage/vandalism crimes committed without 
political motivation receive far shorter 
sentences. And those with political motivation 
from the right wing side of the spectrum somehow escape the limelight.

According to Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty 
Law Center, “In the last 10 years or so, we have 
seen on the order of 60 major domestic terrorist 
plots coming from the radical right
 aimed at
 in 
many cases, mass murder
 of human beings. One of 
these plots—a plot to blow up a natural gas 
refinery by some Klansmen in Texas in 1997—would 
have resulted in
 the deaths of some 30,000 
people. The kind of fringes of the animal rights 
and environmental movements, on the other hand, 
while they engaged in arson and those kinds of 
acts, have killed
 no one. I think what the 
Patriot Act has the effect of doing is taking 
things like arson, which might have been punished 
by a few years in prison, and raised them to the 
level of bonafide international terrorism. That’s 
a bit of a frightening development.”

Meanwhile, Michael Fortier, who was convicted for 
his involvement in planning the Oklahoma City 
bombing which killed 168 people, was released 
from jail on January 20, 2006—coincidentally 
occurring the same day as several Green Scare 
arrests. Fortier served 10 years. In contrast, 
the government is threatening the 
environmentalists with extraordinary sentences 
ranging from 30 years to life plus 335 years.

Where Unchecked Power is Headed

In post 9-11 America, questioning official policy 
is considered suspicious activity—even those 
“working within the system”. Victims of 
warrantless spying include Quaker meetings, Code 
Pink, and Greenpeace, to name a few. The Legal 
Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, 
Bob Goodman illustrates how broad the 
government’s scope of dissent-quashing spreads: 
“There’s a Quaker meeting in Florida, for 
example, which was infiltrated and spied upon by 
the FBI and the Department of Defense. These are 
the Quakers, and the reason they were targeted 
was because they went around to high schools and 
talked against military recruitment. But even if 
we don’t agree with that, this is activity that 
is traditionally a part of robust free speech in the United States.”

Goodman talks about the ramifications of the 
government’s re-definition of ‘domestic 
terrorism’: “The legal definition of terrorism is 
clear. It is the use of illegal 
mechanisms—mechanisms that are criminal under 
American law—in order to affect public policy. 
This is a very disturbing turn in American 
jurisprudence
 because it says that people who, 
for example, engage in trespass, in a sit-in, 
when they’re told to leave a lunch counter, or 
sitting in a nuclear facility—that because 
they’re attempting to change public policy, are 
guilty of the crime of terrorism. Under this 
definition, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and 
many other great people—great Americans—would 
have been guilty of terrorism. And that’s absurd.”

“
[T]o call it terrorism means that you’re 
importing this idea
 into the notion of domestic 
political protest. So that people who are 
protesting now become, not political protesters 
(and if they commit a crime, they need to be 
charged with a crime, and convicted of it if 
that’s the evidence), now they’re terrorists. 
This means that now we can loosen all the 
constitutional guarantees
 in order to go after these political protesters.”

“
[O]nce there are ‘terrorists’ inside the United 
States, why can’t they be tortured? Under what 
circumstances will that be acceptable? And once 
someone is defined as a ‘terrorist’, or 
attempting to help a ‘terrorist’, it’s a short 
step, if a step at all, to being an ‘enemy 
combatant’—which means indefinite detention—which 
means there’s nothing to prevent them from 
dumping these people in Guantanamo so that there 
are no trials at all. That is the direction which 
this government is moving. And it’s terrifying.”

Grand Jury 101

Grand juries were originally formed to create a 
filter to stop unjustified felony cases at an 
early stage. Unlike a trial jury, which decides 
whether a suspect is guilty, a grand jury merely 
decides whether there’s probable cause to 
prosecute. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, it all went very wrong.

Grand juries actually function as modern-day 
inquisitions, and can include the following: 
detention and interrogation without probable 
cause; suspension of 1st, 4th, 5th (through 
forced immunity), and 6th amendments of the Bill 
of Rights; a defense attorney’s presence is 
forbidden; no judge is present; and the jury is 
not screened for bias. Those subpoenaed to 
testify are pressured under threat of 
imprisonment for the duration of the grand jury 
(usually a maximum of 18 months) if they decline. 
Any line of questioning can be pursued—regardless 
of its relevance to the indictment. Grand juries 
are used by prosecutors to cast a wide net into 
an entire community—gathering names, contact 
information, associations, personal history, 
romantic interests—in short, anything that can be 
used against activists and their community.

A common association with the word “indictment” 
is “guilty”. The Oxford American Dictionary’s two 
definitions explain why: “Indictment (n)—(1) a 
formal charge or accusation of a serious crime; 
(2) something which illustrates that a system or 
situation is bad and deserves to be condemned.” 
Thus, a contradiction exists within the word 
itself—one who is indicted is both “accused” and 
“guilty”. Thus, the vilification of a grand jury 
indictment, in effect, denies the accused their 
right to a presumption of innocence until a trial.

Resist the Grand Jury: It works!

In a September 2004 law enforcement analysis, 
authors Randy Borum of the University of South 
Florida and Chuck Tilby of the Eugene, OR Police 
Department admit: “Although Grand Jury 
investigations are routinely successful against 
criminals, they have been less successful against 
activists and ‘true believers.’ The criminal is 
generally motivated solely by his or her own 
self-interest, whereas activists are often more 
concerned with their beliefs and the effects 
their actions may have on others and on the movement more generally.”

Former Black Panthers Ray Boudreaux, John Bowman, 
Richard Brown, Hank Jones, and Harold Taylor, 
were subpoenaed to the SF Grand Jury in October 
2005, but refused to cooperate. In an attempt to 
coerce testimony, the government then imprisoned 
the five in Bay Area jails for the life of the 
Grand Jury. However, they all remained strong, 
resistant, and non-cooperative throughout, and 
all were released the next month.

What Can We Do?
(Your Rights: Use ‘Em or Lose ‘Em)

For starters, we can follow the Department of 
Homeland Security’s Security Advice to 
Corporations—simply substituting the word 
“community” for “corporate or company” and “recycling” for “trash”:
    * Encrypt outgoing electronic communication and attachments.
    * Implement a process to periodically change users’ computer passwords.
    * Install firewalls and continuously test 
systems to ensure hackers do not penetrate systems.
    * Install locks on all doors, filing cabinets and overhead storage areas.
    * Protect corporate rosters to prevent 
extremists from acquiring personal information 
such as organization structure, employee names, 
positions, phone numbers, email addresses, and home addresses.
    * Never discuss proprietary information with 
anyone without a need to know. Suspicious 
inquiries should be reported immediately. 
Inquiries may appear innocent at first, but gradually become more detailed.
    * Protect itineraries, vacation dates, 
locations, and reservations when traveling, 
targeting can occur at any time and in areas 
outside the work place and residence.
    * Always shred documents rather than throwing 
them in the trash. Seemingly innocuous 
information can be used to answer questions or 
fill information gaps that could later be used to 
target a company or employee.
What to do if the FBI Knocks on Your Door


to “just ask a few questions”
    * Remember the magic words: “I am going to 
remain silent. I would like to see a lawyer”. If 
your memory is prone to failure, attorney and 
anti-nuclear activist, Katya Komisaruk, 
recommends tattooing this mantra on a visible body part.
    * Take notes: time & date of visit; any 
information you have (name; physical 
descriptions; car make, model, color, license 
plate); anything about how the conversation went. 
Take their business card, if offered.

with a Subpeona
    * You are not required to open your door for 
anyone. The server is legally required to hand it 
to you, or can throw it at your feet if you are in the same room.

if they ask to search your home, car or belongings
    * Ask for a Search Warrant and ensure it 
explicitly matches their search. If they do not 
have a warrant or there is a mistake on it, say: 
“I do not consent to a search.”
    * If they have a legitimate Search Warrant, 
you are required to cooperate, but still have the 
right to remain silent (remember the tattoo).
Report all FBI knocking campaign “visits” to the 
Olympia Civil Liberties Resource: (360) 556-6878, 
email: <mailto:olycivlib at riseup.net>olycivlib(at)riseup.net.
Learn about the history of COINTELPRO and FBI 
entrapment, and take common sense precautions 
against infiltration—without succumbing to the paralyzing fear of inaction.
For more information
See the books Beat the Heat: How to Handle 
Encounters with Law Enforcement by Katya 
Komisaruk, (AK Press 2003), and War at Home: 
Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We 
Can Do About It by Brian Glick (South End Press, 1989).
Also visit the following websites: 
<http://www.olycivlib.org/>www.olycivlib.org, 
www.ecoprisoners.org, 
<http://www.fbiwitchhunt.com/>fbiwitchhunt.com, 
www.cldc.org, 
<http://portland.indymedia.org/en/topic/greenscare/>portland.indymedia.org/en/topic/greenscare. 

For Videos, 
<http://sourcecode.freespeech.org/sc302Ecotage/>sourcecode.freespeech.org 
(requires Quicktime).

Melissa Roberts is an Olympia-based activist who 
worked from 1992-94 as Administrator for Earth 
First! activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney’s 
civil rights lawsuit against the FBI and Oakland 
police department. In 2002, the jury found that 
the agencies violated the activists’ 
Constitutional rights, and mishandled the still 
unsolved 1990 car bombing that nearly killed Bari.



The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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