Matt Smith at The SF Weekly has a great column this week on the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. Smith hits home a few key points about AETA, particularly the double-speak of corporations and lawmakers like Diane Feinstein:
Feinstein cites protesters’ harassment of researchers who use animals at UC San Francisco and at Chiron Corporation in Emeryville, and says the school has had to spend millions on security; the new bill, the release notes, will “expand current law to address violent tactics used by animal rights extremists to frighten law-abiding citizens away from their work.”
The thing is, however, that violence, threats, vandalism, and harassing assaults of the sort described by Feinstein are already illegal. Her bill criminalizes ordinary protest activities that weren’t illegal before.
As a case in point, see the benchmark prosecution under the previous, milder, narrower version of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, in which six activists were jailed a week before Thanksgiving for sentences ranging from three to six years for running a Web site that supported a campaign against a New Jersey laboratory called Huntington Life Sciences that tests pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and dyes on animals. It was the first trial and conviction under the previous Act. An international campaign against the lab’s British parent company, which had been the subject of a U.K. documentary on animal cruelty, had brought the company to the edge of bankruptcy.
And he was kind enough to use some info from GreenIsTheNewRed.com:
“Here is an assault on civil liberties that’s upfront and blatant — labeling activists as terrorists. Yet this passed without hardly any scrutiny. It was stunning how easily this went through. And in my mind it’s one of the most egregious civil liberties abuses America has seen,” adds Will Potter, author of Greenisthenewred.com, a blog dedicated to examining how anti-terrorism has been used as a pretext for cracking down on activism.