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Welcome to the post-constitutional America, where defense of animal rights and the earth is a terrorist crime.

In 1992, a decade before the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, animal exploitation groups such as the National Association for Biomedical Research successfully lobbied Congress to pass a federal law called the Animal Enterprise Protection Act (AEPA). This legislation created the new crime of “animal enterprise terrorism,” and laid out hefty sentences and fines for any infringement. The law applies to anyone who “intentionally damages or causes the loss of any property” of an “animal enterprise” (research facilities, pet stores, breeders, zoos, rodeos, circuses, furriers, animal shelters, and the like), or who causes an economic loss of any kind. The AEPA defines an “animal rights or ecological terrorist organization” as “two or more persons organized for the purpose of supporting any politically motivated activity intended to obstruct or deter any person from participating in any activity involving animals or an activity involving natural resources.” The act criminalizes actions that obstruct “any lawful activity involving the use of natural resources with an economic value.”

Like the category of “domestic terrorism” that is a keystone in the USA PATRIOT Act attack on civil liberties, the frightening thing about the AEPA is its strategic vagueness that subsumes any and every form of protest and demonstration against exploitative industries to a criminal act, specifically, to a terrorist act. Thus, the actions of two or more people can be labeled terrorists if they leaflet a circus, protest an experimental lab, block a road to protect a forest, do a tree-sit, or block the doors of a fur store. Since, under the purview of the AEPA, any action that interferes with the profits and operations of animal and environmental industries, even boycotts and whistle- blowing could be criminalized and denounced as terrorism. On the sweeping interpretations of such legislation, Martin Luther King, Mahatmas Gandhi, and Cesar Chavez would today be vilified and imprisoned as terrorists, since the intent of their principled boycott campaigns was precisely to cause “economic damage” to unethical businesses. And since the AETA, like the legal system in general, classifies animals as “property,” their “theft” (read: liberation) is unequivocally defined as a terrorist offense.

There already are laws against sabotage and property destruction, so isn't the AEPA just a redundant piece of legislation? No – not once understands its hidden agenda which strikes at the heart of the Bill of Rights. The real purpose of the AEPA is to protect animal and earth exploitation industries from protest and criticism, not property destruction and “terrorism.” The AEPA redefines vandalism as ecoterrorism, petty lawbreakers as societal menaces, protestors and demonstrators as domestic terrorists, and threats to their blood money as threats to national security. Powerful economic and lobbying forces, they seek immunity from criticism, to intimidate anyone contemplating protest against them, and to dispatch their opponents to prison.

Free Speech on Trial: The SHAC 7

Hovering over activists' heads like the sword of Damocles for over a decade, the AEPA dropped in March, 2006, with the persecution and conviction of seven members of a direct action group dedicated to closing down the world's most notorious animal-testing lab, Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS). Exercising their First Amendment rights, activists from the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) campaign ran a completely legal and highly effective campaign against HLS, driving them to the brink of bankruptcy. Alarmed by the new form of animal rights militancy, HLS and the biomedical research lobby commanded special sessions with Congress to ban SHAC campaigns (can you recall the last time animal rights activists and vegans held a special session of Congress to voice their demands against animal exploiters?). Using the AEPA, HLS successfully prosecuted the “SHAC 7,” who currently are serving prison sentences up to six years.

After the SHAC 7 conviction, David Martosko, the noxious research director of the Center for Consumer Freedom and a fierce opponent of animal rights, joyously declared: “This is just the starting gun." Indeed, corporations and legislators continue to press for even stronger laws against animal rights and environmental activism, as the Bush administration encloses the nation within a vast web of surveillance and a militarized garrison.

In September 2006, the US senate unanimously passed a new version of the AEPA (S3990), significantly renamed the “Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act” (AETA). To prevent critical discussion, the Senate fast-tracked the bill without hearings or debate, and just before adjourning for the election recess. In November 2006, the House approved the bill (HR 4239), and President Bush obligingly signed it into law. Beyond the portentous change in name, the new and improved version extends the range of legal prosecution of activists, updates the law to cover Internet campaigns, and enforces stiffer penalties for “terrorist” actions. Created to stop the effectiveness of the SHAC-style tactics that biomedical companies had habitually complained about to Congress, the AETA makes it a criminal offense to interfere not only with so-called “animal enterprises” directly, but also with third-party organizations such as insurance companies, law firms, and investment houses that do business with them.

Thus, the Senate version of the bill expands the law to include “any property of a person or entity having a connection to, relationship with, or transactions with an animal enterprise.” The chain of relations, like the application of the law, extends possibly to the point of infinity. As journalist Will Potter notes, “The clause broadens the scope of legislation that is already overly broad.” This problem is compounded further with additional vague concepts such as criminalize actions that create “reasonable fear” in the targets of protest, making actions like peaceful home demonstrations likely candidates for “ecoterrorism.”

Updated and fortified, the basic purpose of the AETA is to make it a terrorist crime publishable by imprisonment to cause any “animal enterprise” (and its supporting companies) to suffer a loss of profit, whether through sabotage (“property damage”) or by legal activities such as peaceful protests, consumer boycotts, and media campaigns (“economic damage”). AETA sentences first time violators up to six months in jail and $10,000 in fines, and a second offense may earn one up to 18 months in prison and a $25,000 fine. Seems non-violent, civil disobedience can be quite costly these days, earning burdensome fines, prison time, and the stigma of “terrorism.” The penalties escalate from there for acts that produce a "reasonable fear" of bodily harm or yield actual physical harm, even though the use of violence is unprecedented in the US animal rights movement.

"It's depressing to know that, just because of our beliefs involving animals, we are going to be branded terrorists if we protest," said Lori Nitzel, a Madison attorney and executive director of Alliance for Animals, a statewide group that pledges nonviolence. As the Equal Justice Alliance aptly summarizes the main problems with the AETA:

• It is excessively broad and vague.

• It imposes disproportionately harsh penalties.

• It effectively brands animal advocates as ‘terrorists' and denies them equal protection.

• It effectively brands civil disobedience as ‘terrorism' and imposes severe penalties.

• It has a chilling effect on all forms of protest by endangering free speech and assembly.

• It interferes with investigation of animal enterprises that violate federal laws.

• It detracts from prosecution of real terrorism against the American people.”

An Army of One

A sole voice of dissent in Congress, Representative Dennis Kucinich (D– Ohio) stated that the bill compromises civil rights and threatens to "chill" free speech. Virtually alone in examining the issue from the perspective of the victims rather than victimizers, Kucinich said: "Just as we need to protect people's right to conduct their work without fear of assault, so too this Congress has yet to address some fundamental ethical principles with respect to animals. How should animals be treated humanely? This is a debate that hasn't come here."

In response to Kucinich's concerns, Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) stated that Subsection (e) in the Senate bill, “rules of construction,” explicitly claims to protect legal protest actions, but Kucinich fails to counter that this minor clause conflicts with, and hardly counters, the overwhelming emphasis of the AETA, which is to criminalize any actions that cause “loss of profits” to a research lab, zoo, circus, breeder, or any other type of “animal enterprise.”

With appreciation for Kucinich's remarks, one finds a much more trenchant analysis in Will Potter's analysis of the AETA, Potter underscores numerous evasions, disingenuous clauses, and logical inconsistencies. Addressing Sensenbrenner's attempt to silence Kucinich on the question of First Amendment protections, Potter unravels the semantic chicanery and points out that:

[S]ome lawmakers adamantly maintained that “damages” means physical damage to physical property, and not the “loss of profits,” as defined by “economic damage.” If that's the case, why does the penalty section spell out sentences for “non-violent physical obstruction,” and for a crime that “does not instill in another the reasonable fear of serious bodily injury or death” and “results in no economic damage or bodily injury”? If this bill only targets property destruction and violence, which by definition would have to cause economic damage or instill fear, how does the penalty section include sentences for crimes that do neither? …Lawmakers could spell out the definition of “damage,” and note that `economic damage' (including the loss of profits) only applies to the penalty section of the legislation. In other words, spell out that the offense must include physically damaging property, but penalties for that can take into account the amount of impact that property destruction had on a corporation's “loss of profits.”

ACLU Betrayal

One of the most unfortunate aspects of the passing of this bill was the failure of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to challenge it. The ACLU did indeed write a letter to Congress about the passing of the AETA, to caution against conflate illegal and legal protest, but the organization failed to challenge the real terrorism perpetuated by animal and earth exploitation industries, and ultimately consented to their worldview and validity.

In an October 30, 2006 letter to Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee F. James Sensenbrenner and Ranking Member John Conyers, the ACLU writes that it “does not oppose this bill, but believes that these minor changes are necessary to make the bill less likely to chill or threaten freedom of speech.” Beyond proposed semantic clarifications, the ACLU mainly warns against broadening the law to include legal activities such as boycotts: “Legitimate expressive activity may result in economic damage…. Care must therefore be taken in penalizing economic damage to avoid infringing upon legitimate activity.”

Thus, unlike dozens of animal protection groups who adamantly reject the AETA en toto, the ACLU “does not oppose the bill.” In agreement with corporate interests, the ACLU assures the government it “does not condone violence or threats.” It thereby dodges the complex question of the legitimacy of sabotage against exploitative industries. The ACLU uncritically accepts (1) the corporate-state definition of “violence” as intentional harm to property, (2) the legal definition of animals as “property,” and (3) the use of the T-word to demonize animal liberationists rather than animal exploiters. Ultimately, the ACLU sides with the government against activists involved in illegal forms of liberation or sabotage, a problematic alliance in times of global ecocide. The ACLU thereby defends the property rights of industries to torture and slaughter billions of animals over the moral rights of animals to bodily integrity and a life free from exploitation and gratuitous violence.

The ACLU failed to ask the tough questions journalist Will Potter raised during his May 23, 2006 testimony before the House Committee holding a hearing on the AETA, and to follow Potter in identifying key inconsistencies in bill. Does the ACLU really think that their proposed modifications would be adequate to guarantee that the AETA doesn't trample on legal rights to protest? Are they completely ignorant and indifferent to the fact that the AEPA was just used to send the SHAC 7 to jail for the crime of protesting fraudulent research and heinous killing? And just where was the ACLU during the SHAC 7 trial, one of the most significant First Amendment cases in recent history? Why does the ACLU only recognize violations of the Constitution against human rights advocates? Do they think that animal rights activists are not citizens? Do they not recognize that tyrannical measures used against animal advocates today will be used against all citizens tomorrow? How can the world's premier civil rights institution is blatantly speciesist and bigoted toward animals? Why will they come to the defense of the Ku Klux Klan but not the SHAC 7? The ACLU silence in the face of persecution of animal rights activists unfortunately is typical of most civil rights organizations that are too bigoted and myopic to grasp the implications of state repression of animal rights activists for human rights activists and all forms of dissent.

Dispatches from a Police State

As a sign of things to come, in December 2006, a Portland, Oregon fur store owner urged the state to use the AETA against protestors of his store who “terrorized” him and affected his business. Corporate exploiters and Congress have taken this nation down a perilous slippery slope, where it becomes difficult to distinguish between illegal and legal forms of dissent, between civil disobedience and terrorism, between PETA and Al Qaeda, and between liberating chickens from a factory farm and flying passenger planes into skyscrapers. The state protects the corporate exploiters who pull their purse strings and stuff their pockets with favors and cash.

While animal rights activists are caught in the crosshairs of state repression, all forms of dissent have been targeted, and a broad pattern is emerging with undeniable boldness and clarity, alerting us to the systematic and full-scale assault the government has waged against the Bill of Rights. Recent documents obtained by NBC News, the ACLU, and other organizations show that the Defense Department, FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, Department of Homeland Security, and local police forces have unleashed a dragnet of surveillance on all manner of protest groups, from anti-ar activists to vegetarians, from children to grandmothers. Whether in the streets, military recruiting centers, classrooms, or churches, the government has monitored dissenting individuals and groups; they follow peaceful citizens, write down their names and license plates, and enter their information into massive databases, all organized under the rubric of security threats and terrorists.

The USA PATRIOT Act, signed into law in October 2001 and renewed in December 2005, overrides the Constitution and grants the state authority to unleash warrantless wiretaps and information searches (such as what materials one checks out at the local library). The newly bolstered PATRIOT Act allows secret service agents wider latitude to charge protestors at public events (such as political conventions and the Olympics) with disruptive behavior (if the President or any other person protection by the Secret Service is in attendance), with a possible penalty of six months to a year in prison.

Despite government denials, the USA PATRIOT is being used to curtail freedoms of US citizens. Among other things, the PATRIOT Act has been used to investigate students expressing anti- government views in schools, to harass and jail activists, to surveil doctors and scientists warning about the threat of bioterrorism in the US, to subpoena a university professor to appear before a federal grand jury that will consider bioterrorism charges against him for using biology equipment in his art, and to persecute an investigative journalist for unauthorized filming of an Exxon Oil refinery.

The government is collecting information about legal exercise of the First Amendment that goes far beyond any legitimate concern for actual terrorism and verges toward creating a garrison state that criminalizes freedom of thought and speech. None of it is accidental or random; it's all part of a pattern, of the MO of a paranoid Police State peddling fear and controlling dissent.

The bogus “war on terror” has served as a highly-effective propaganda and bullying device to ram through Congress and the courts a pro- corporate, anti-environmental, authoritarian agenda. Using vague, catch-all phrases such as “enemy combatants” and “domestic terrorists,” the Bush administration has rounded up and tortured thousands of non-citizens (detaining them indefinitely in military tribunals without right to a fair trial) and surveilled, harassed, and imprisoned citizens who dare to challenge the government or corporate system it protects and represents.

In yet another assault on the Constitution, in October 2006 the Bush administration signed into law the Military Commissions Act which denies habeas corpus rights to all non-citizens suspected of being threats to national security. This act is part and parcel of their self-aggrandized powers to torture detainees and flout the Geneva Convention. Whereas the Military Commissions Act targets non-citizens, many legal experts believe that it also targets American citizens, authorizing the president to seize American citizens, declare them “enemy combatants,” strip them of all legal rights, and thrown them into a military. According to the Washington Post reports, "The Bush administration is developing a parallel legal system in which terrorism suspects -- U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike -- may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and punished without legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary system, lawyers inside and outside the government say."

The massive police resources of the US state are being used far more to thwart domestic dissent than to improve homeland insecurity. While Big Brother is obsessed with the email, conversations, and meetings of people who know a thing or two about the duties of citizenship, the airlines, railways, subways, city centers, and nuclear power plants remain completely vulnerable to attack.

Hour by hour, day by day, our First and Forth Amendment rights (among others) are hemorrhaging and bleeding away into the sinkhole of corporate-state tyranny. As I write, there are new reports that the Bush Administration has collected reams of information on every airline passenger, and assigned each one a secret security rating (which can never know or protest), based on criteria such as the number of one-way trips one takes and preferred meal choices. Displaying the fascist poison spreading throughout the nation, former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, launched a speaking campaign in November 2006 to persuade lawmakers that free speech rights must increasingly give way to security needs.

This issue goes beyond Republicans vs. Democrats, as the latter have hardly distinguished themselves on civil liberties since 9/11 and we can expect little improvement in the future, even if they control the executive and legislative branches of government (it is significant indeed to note that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) co-sponsored the AETA). For what we have witnessed in the post-9/11 era is a sea-change in political thought, one that is rapidly constructing an authoritarian society where we are neither secure nor free. From coast to coast, citizens are resisting (such as efforts to declare the USA PATRIOT Act unconstitutional and to impeach Bush), but we are nowhere a critical mass yet. As citizens, it us our profound obligation to counter the forces of darkness descending upon us, and to begin building a truly democratic culture.

Web Resources
SHAC 7: www.shac7.com
Stop AETA: www.stopaeta.org
Equal Justice Alliance: http://noaeta.org/
ACLU FBI Spy Files: www.aclu-co.org/spyfiles/JTTFdocuments.htm
Greenscare: http://www.greenscare.org/
GreenIsTheNewRed: Greenisthenewred.com
Thomas Legislative Guide: http://thomas.loc.gov/