David Willet
Associate Press Secretary
Sierra Club

This is a major heads up! The FBI, etc is using the time tested tactic of COINTELPRO's - Identify - Isolate and NEUTRALIZE, to persecute the more radical groups. To divide and conquer social movements is an old method of establishing and tightening social control on dissent. Once the State is able to isolate and target the ³radicals² from Earth First! to ELF, and ALF, then they can and will turn their sights on the harassment and destabalization of the established left groups such as Rainforest Action Network (RAN has already been the victim of right wing harrasment) NGO groups like the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, etc..

These organizations can insulate themselves temporarily by finger pointing - but that strategy will NOT serve the environmental or social justice movements currently under enormous pressures. Instead of unified, mutally supported campains - like the one that succeeded in Seattle on November 30, 1999, we will have a splintered, impotent, factionized, polarized, and defunct movements - and THAT ultimate and inevitable result will fulfill the mandates of the Bush Administration and the anti-terrorist legislation (The PATRIOT Bill, Homeland Defense) issued thereof.

Bushıs coronation was a tremendous set back for the enviromental movement, but this latest shenanigan from Congress, if successful, will sound the death knell for any chance of maintaining a comprehensive challenge to the ongoing and ever accelerating ecological devestation. We must STRENGTHEN alliances in the eco-defense movement - not shatter them.

As David Helvarg wrote in THE WAR AGAINST THE GREENS, large polluting and extractive industries often point to teenage eco-sabateurs and the like, and call them terrorists to make their own earth destroying enterprises ³look good² to the public and distract attention from the actual damage being inflicted on the environment by the unaccountable corporations.

The liberal components of the environmental defense movement must guard against such blatant manipulation and pressure from the federal government to ostracize and condemn the ³radical² components of resistance to ecological collapse. We must always focus attention and RE-FRAME the language to identify the real ³eco-terrorists² - the corporations inflicting the most massive and irreversable damage to the planetıs treasures and life support systems.

In other words, it is up to us, the public to assert and DEFINE what terrorism is and is not - and not allow the FBI to always determine what and who constitutes a terrorist threat.

Once they can get the NGO community to condemn ELF, ALF etc.. as "terrorists" the State will accomplish a number of goals.

1.)     They can and will destroy with militarized force, the percieved ³terrorist threat² posed by ELF and ALF. This could involve extreme police brutality and exorbant legal charges under the new anti-terrorist legislation, involving life sentences for petty vandalism and anyone found ³guilty by association.²

2.)     The FBI will be able to investigate and prosecute ³terrorists² with their ALREADY broad defenition of terrorism (prior to 9.11). A defenition that includes, the ³threat² posed by ³anti-globalization² activists, Reclaim the Streets, and ³Anarchists² (regardless of whatever and whomever ³anarchist² as a blanket designation is suppossed to refer to.) If we do not STAND IN SOLIDARITY - we will LEGITIMATE their absurd defenitions of terrorism.

3.)      The State, if successful in their divide and conquer strategy, will empower itself to target more moderate elements of the environmental and other movements and discredit the environmental critique.

We must also assert that terrorism is what we saw when the WTC was hit, and a terrible human toll was wrought. THAT is terrorism - not smashing a Starbucks window or lighting a bulldozer on fire - which while certainly illegal, does not constitutes terrorism. The truly horrific and murderous events of September 11th was a TERRORIST attack much like the bombing of hundreds of civillians and non-military targets in Afghanistan.

WE must re-frame and define and assert - not cower, capitulate, and divide our movements further.