Animals

The AETA and the Green Scare: Making McCarthy Proud

by Stephanie Ernst

categories: Activism and Actions, Green Scare and AETA, Politics and Law, Animal Rights

Published October 05, 2008 @ 07:09AM PT

A highly controversial bill with the potential to strip certain individuals and groups of free-speech and assembly rights—because their stance challenges the government and one of its primary bedfellows—is hurriedly passed through the first of two legislative bodies in the overnight hours just before everyone is set to go home for recess. It is then passed through the other legislative body via a fast-track method that is intended only for noncontroversial bills (such as naming a post office). This latter method bypasses the usual procedures and rules for making legislation, and in this case, only 1 percent of the legislative body is present to vote—six members. And this law—anything but minor, harmless, or everyday—applies the terrorism label to, and increases penalties for, a whole new class of nonviolent activists.

Under the newly passed law, anyone who causes so much as a $10,000 profit loss to a government-bedfellow corporation, even through nonviolent civil disobedience, may be prosecuted as a terrorist; causing profit loss to such a business through protest and civil disobedience—without causing any bodily harm to anyone—can bring a 20-year prison sentence.

Mere interference with an industry protected under this law or communication with someone who engages in illegal activities as outlined by the law can be prosecuted.

In essence, the law singles out, and imposes harsher penalties on, a specific group of people solely because of their (nonviolent) political ideology.

Where might this be taking place? China? North Korea? Iran?

Try the United States. And welcome to the Green Scare, in which the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) passed in 2006 with not a bit of attention from the mainstream media and in which activists for Earth and animals have been dubbed the number-one domestic terrorism threat—despite never having injured, let alone killed, a single person.

Even under the slightly less vague precursor to this law, animal advocates were arrested for maintaining a Web site that reported on and rhetorically supported legal and illegal activism; they were arrested for “conspiring” to “promote” terrorism. They are now imprisoned, not for taking any actions themselves, but for voicing support for the actions—actions that, again, did not involve physical injury to anyone.

In today’s climate, the FBI tries to infiltrate peaceful social groups in order to spy on their monthly potlucks. And why do these gatherings warrant suspicion? Because of what food they do and do not serve. And activists peacefully handing out pamphlets on public property are spied on, handcuffed, searched, arrested, and charged (and their house keys never returned to them) even though they have broken no laws.

Meanwhile, the State Department gives its animal-abusing corporate buddies lessons on how to protect their profits in the face of activism, admits that animal rights activism threatens corporate finances far more than national security, and warns corporations to be careful because many activists unfortunately “know what their rights are”—even though the government is doing its best to stifle those rights on the corporations’ behalf.

Through severe, utterly disproportionate fines and prison terms, the AETA seeks to deter activists from invoking their rights to free speech and assembly and from engaging in civil disobedience, the most effective tactic of social justice movements. If the law had been enacted decades ago, luminaries such as Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King Jr. all could have been charged as terrorists.

Visit GreenIsTheNewRed.com for detailed analysis of the AETA and other Green Scare coverage from the inestimable journalist Will Potter. The following links lead to AETA and related analysis and commentary from GreenIsTheNewRed.com as well as other sources:
AETA Fact Sheet (Center for Constitutional Rights)
Analysis of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (GreenIsTheNewRed.com)
The Chilling Effect (by Will Potter, in Satya)
Equal Justice Alliance: Defending Freedom of Speech and Assembly
Animal Enterprise Terrorism 101 (by Will Potter, in Herbivore)
Will Potter Talk about Activist Repression (video)