I’ve been receiving a flood of emails from people who have called their members of Congress, raised concerns about the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, and been met with a barrage of misinformation. Here’s an email being distributed by the office of U.S. Representative Rick Larsen, with my responses and clarifications.
—— Forwarded Message
From: “Dabbs, Michael” [...]

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The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is on the suspension calendar to pass the House today. The suspension calendar is for “non-controversial” bills, so lawmakers can pass a bunch of them at once and save time. Considering the vast First Amendment implications of this bill, and the number of groups that have opposed, it’s particularly outrageous [...]

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The NewStandard has an article by Megan Tady available online today, highlighting some of the concerns raised with the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.
An excerpt:
Will Potter, a journalist who tracks how the so-called “war on terror” affects civil liberties, questions the motives behind the legislation.
“If this legislation is only going after so-called violent extremists, how [...]

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Grand juries have been used around the country in political witch hunts and fishing expeditions to go after law-abiding activists. The activists are called before the grand juries, which are ostensibly investigating actions by underground groups, and pressed to testify about their political activities. Activists, in turn, frequently refuse to answer questions about their political [...]

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It remains to be seen how the animal rights and environmental movements will respond to the sentencing of the SHAC 7, but one thing seems to be clear: it hasn’t phased underground, illegal activists one bit.
On Tuesday, Wayne Parry of the Associated Press quoted a spokeswoman for the SHAC 7 saying that the government’s [...]

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Many activists I talk with constantly bash “the media,” as if news operations are one gelatinous mass of reporters sharing a brain, hive-style. Contemporary journalism is in a pretty sorry state, I completely agree: more and more news outlets are owned by fewer and fewer corporations, that in turn own other corporations. The emphasis [...]

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I just ran across this backgrounder on “American Militant Extremists” by the Council on Foreign Relations.
I wanted to flag this excerpt for everyone:
Not all politically motivated violence qualifies as terrorism (for instance, the FBI and some terrorism experts did not regard the Unabomber, who says his antimodern beliefs were behind a seventeen-year mail-bombing campaign, [...]

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There’s a heated campaign going on in England to block the construction of a controversial animal testing facility at Oxford University. I’ve written a bit about the heavy-handed protest bans at the building site, to silence dissent.
Now, in the name of protecting against “animal rights extremists” and “eco-terrorists,” animal rights activists have been banned from [...]

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The National Lawyers Guild has called the FBI’s “Operation Backfire” unconstitutional, and part of an orchestrated campaign to silence dissent. The group’s press release issued Monday is the first time I’ve seen the guild, which prides itself on liberal-to-leftie politics, come out against these witch hunts. It’s a great step in the right direction, and [...]

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The Brooklyn Rail has a profile up today of Daniel McGowan, a well-known activist in the NY area who is facing life in prison. McGowan and 14 others were arrested earlier this year as part “Operation Backfire,” a government roundup of activists in the name of fighting “eco-terrorism” and property crimes.
Many of those targeted [...]

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