I was on Democracy Now this morning talking about my investigation of Communication Management Units, secretive prison facilities housing inmates of being tied to “terrorism” groups. They overwhelmingly include Muslim inmates, along with at least two animal rights and environmental activists. Here’s the video from the segment.

It was really an honor to be on the award-winning program, one of the few media outlets that have consistently broken and reported critical investigative stories. It’s really amazing what Amy Goodman, Mike Burke and all the staff put out on a daily basis. Please check out the whole program (the first half has a great interview about the Bush administration’s torture policies). My segment starts at about the 30 minute mark.

Josh Harper wrote this letter to the attendees of the Let Live conference in Portland, OR. Harper is one of the SHAC 7, and is currently in prison on “animal enterprise terrorism” charges. I read this at the opening session of the conference.

Dear friends,
Let me just start by expressing how happy I am to be writing something for a conference in Portland. It is the city where I got my start as an animal rights activist back in nineteen-diggety-five. The Kaiser had stolen the word “ninety,” so we had to say “diggety” instead. Man, you young activists today have no idea how good you have it. Back in the 90s there were only about 10 vegans in all of Portland and we all hated each other.

Still, we couldn’t use the horse-drawn buggies at the time, so we had to ride on each others’ backs to protests. I remember carrying Craig Rosebraugh up Burnside in the snow to a McDonald’s demonstration, and when we finally got there he didn’t bother to feed or water me! Burnside was a lot steeper then, too. I couldn’t even complain; in solidarity with the cities horses, I had taken a vow of silence, so instead I just bit and kicked the crap out of him.

But, rapid aging aside, I truly do have incredible memories of my time in Portland. Some of them joyous and some of them sad. I hope that no one minds if I share one of the sad ones today. My apologies to those who’ve already heard it.

Shortly after I moved to Portland from Euguene. I got one of my many shitty jobs. This one was at a parking garage. My uniform included a forest green polo shirt with a huge golden “M” emblazoned on the chest. The shirt was made with an unholy blend of polyester, neoprene, and uranium. Which made me a bit of an outcast in the trendy northwest neighborhood where I’d found a cheap apartment above a boiler room. If it can be said that I didn’t fit in amongst the neighbors, than the same is even more true for another new resident I was just about to meet.

Construction in the hills above my building was displacing critters whose homes were falling beneath bulldozers and chainsaws. One of these creatures, a small deer mouse, took shelter in a rock wall next to the Plaid Pantry on 23rd and Glisan. When I first saw her, she was skinny and terrified. She would huddle as far back in the wall as possible. Only occasionally darting out to snatch a bite of bread I would leave for her.

As time went by, she got a little bolder though, until eventually her true personality as the world’s punkest mouse broke through. She started out taking seeds from birdfeeders and graduated to stealing the seed right out of the bags when yuppies came to fill the feeders. She never strayed too far from the wall. I could usually find her when I needed a reminder of the strength possessed by the smallest of us. She was my sister at arms, a fellow rebel in the fight against this joy-crushing society.

Sadly, not everyone in the neighborhood embraced her presence. One day when I was returning from the parking garage, I noticed a woman wearing fur, standing near the deer mouse’s wall. Since I’m a total conflict gypsy, I approached her to discuss the lives lost for her fashion choices. As I got close I overheard her saying how horrible it was to have “rats” living in such a nice neighborhood. I confronted her and said that my mouse friend was doing her no harm. In the ensuing argument, she spit on me and sped off. I trudged home with fur scum saliva drying on my shoulder and arm and forgot all about the incident until a few days later. On my way to work I saw that someone had left yellow rat poison pellets on the sidewalk near the wall. I scooped them all up and crossed my fingers that none of them had already been eaten. I worked a double shift that day and tried not to think about the grim possibility awaiting after I clocked out. But, as I returned home that evening, I soon saw that the worst case scenario had become reality. There was the deer mouse slowly crawling through the dirt and oil and grime of the Plaid Pantry parking lot.

I found a box in a garbage can and lifted my friend inside. I walked her down to Couch Park and placed her on the dirt beneath a tree. She was so light. Her fluffy coat made her look much bigger. And yet, in that tiny being there was a thirst for life I seldom see in the grey people shambling from home to work to home again. As she lay dying, she looked at me in the eyes, and I knew she was questioning me. Why? Why is my life being taken away when I love it so dearly? If we had shared the same language, I may have answered her—for avarice, for human arrogance and greed, and my species’ sick desire to control and destroy everything that reminds us of the wildness we’ve lost.

The light faded from her eyes, and I buried my poor deer mouse friend in the park. I have never been the same.

This conference will give you many opportunities—from learning new skills to making new contacts. But today you also have another opportunity, just as I did that night in the park. Right here and now, you have the opportunity to firmly turn your back on speciesism and dedicate your life to freeing countless billions from tyranny. You can choose to push yourself further in whatever forms your activism takes, whether that means getting past shyness in order to do outreach or getting past razor wire in order to do liberations. My greatest hope is that those of you hearing these words will make the choice to persevere in this struggle and actualize a world free from animal slavery, even if it takes the rest of your life and many more generations to get there. Our fellow animals deserve no less. Thank you for listening and for all that you do in support of our cause.

From 19-diggety-5 till death,
Josh

When environmental and animal rights advocates are sentenced to lengthy prison terms—many as “terrorists”—they depend on the support of friends, family and the larger activist community. They need money in their commissary account. They need books and magazines. They need visitors, phone calls, and perhaps above all else, according to many current and former prisoners I’ve interviewed, they need letters: sometimes mail call is the only thing to look forward to in prison. The support, or lack of support, of these activists also sends a message to the government and to other activists.

But doing all this prison support work can be time consuming and draining. Base-line decisions have to be made about what, at bare minimum, qualifies a prisoner for support from the wider activist community. And lately, many activists have been struggling with what disqualifies a prisoner from receiving support.

Chris “Dirt” McIntosh attempted to burn down a McDonalds in Seattle, in 2005, and is serving an eight-year prison sentence (his guilty plea dropped it down from a minimum of 30, as the government was pushing to use “terrorism” laws against him). The crime was claimed by both the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front.

The Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Network just announced it is ending all support for McIntosh, and encouraging others to do the same, after investigating racist and sexist comments he has made. The support network says:

1) McIntosh has adopted White Supremacist views whilst in prison. A number of people have contacted ELP saying that McIntosh has started to associate with a racist gang and has even gone as far as to get a racist ‘white power’ tattoo. In a letter to one of his supporters McIntosh enclosed a photo of himself and referred to his tattoo which was not visible in the photo. He told another supporter how he would show off his tattoo upon his release from prison.

[As an aside, that’s quite a strikingly different prison experience than, for instance, http://www.myspace.com/andystepanian Andy Stepanian, who just sent a letter celebrating the work of the Black Panthers and urging animal rights advocates to support the San Francisco 8. “The Panther fed our mornings with free breakfasts and our hearts with power. The Panther took this love and handed it to our captors like Valentine's flowers. The Panther stole the hearts of the ghetto and white privilege alike.”]

2) McIntosh, through his Social Darwinian beliefs, thinks that ‘might makes right’, or as he puts it in one of his letters “supremacy to the strongest”.

3) McIntosh has told at least one female supporter that it is okay for a man to rape a woman (under his ‘might makes right’ theme).

4) ELP has had it confirmed that since going into prison McIntosh has abandoned his vegetarian diet and has reverted to eating meat.

I have never spoken with McIntosh, but on his website there are some notes along those lines. In October, 2007, he wrote that he had asked to be removed from prisoner support lists because “I had become frustrated and disillusioned by the resistance to evolution within the struggle… Also, I don’t understand why the foremost natural law – might makes right – is not held paramount.” He then had a change of heart, saying “I need mental and emotional support.”

This isn’t the first time prisoner support networks have struggled with these issues. Resist.ca, an anarchist collective that hosts websites and provides technical support to activists, came under fire recently for hosting the website of Darren Thurston’s support group. Thurston, you’ll remember, is one of the cooperating defendants in the Operation Backfire cases, where activists were rounded up and charged with serious property crimes committed in the name of defending the environment. [Here’s a previous post on Thurston, “Cooperator, Snitch or Something Else?”]

A couple groups have refused to work with Resist.ca any longer. Here’s a statement from one:

Wii’nimkiikaa removed its site from resist.ca as an act of solidarity with those ‘Green Scare’ defendants who have chosen not to collaborate nor snitch on others. ‘Wolves Not Sheep’, the archive of the Vancouver Native Youth Movement also removed its site from resist.ca at the same time for the same reasons.

But as someone commented in a discussion on the Infoshop website:

I’ve read one irresponsible call for activist sites to boycott Resist. This takes criticism and differences of opinion to a puritanical level, which I can’t support. Our radical tech infrastructure, as well as much of our alternative media, are in a precarious situation already. Organizing a campaign to disrupt a radical ISP over a difference of opinion is in my opinion just as bad as snitching.

What do you think? What are the bare-minimum requirements for supporting “Green Scare” prisoners?

This is an update on Daniel McGowan, one of the Operation Backfire defendants who recently reported to prison after being sentenced as a “terrorist.” It’s from Family and Friends of Daniel McGowan:

July 26, 2007

I’m pretty convinced at this point, nearly 20 months after my arrest, that I am incredibly lucky to have the best support network I have ever seen, the aptly named Family and Friends of Daniel McGowan. No offense is meant to any other defendant (or prisoner) support group, but I’ve only experienced the love and support of my crew. That intense support – moral, legal, financial and otherwise – has made all the difference to me and it’s why I write today with acceptance of my current situation and with clear conscience. Ok, maybe not full acceptance – I mean, I still have eyes and ears and can see what is going on in America’s prisons.

I can remember a conversation I had in early January 2006 with my wife jenny. I was in Lane County Jail in Oregon and my bail hearing was a few weeks off but she told me, “We put a website up for you – supportdaniel.org.” That news helped sustain me through my 23 hour lockdowns knowing my friends had my back and the country would soon hear about the Green Scare being promoted by the good ol’ US of A. To name or attempt to list the many things my support network has done would be a failure. The list is too long and surely I would forget many things. More than things I could list are the intangibles – the subtle and not-so-subtle hints – “Either way, we got your back”, “I don’t care if you did it or not”, “We’ll be here to the end”. Most recently, I’ve had people remind me they will be there with a hug the day I walk out of these prisons.

This will sound cliché, and it is, but maybe that’s a sign you are doing something right. Mail call is my favorite time of the day! You’ve heard this before, maybe from Josh Harper, Peter Young or Jeff Free Luers and others. Since I’ve been here at MDC, I have been embarrassed (in a good way) over and over, each and every day by the insane amount of mail, books and magazines I get. It keeps me reading for hours and although I cannot write people back right now, I at least have a mountain of mail to chip away at. I get this mail because my support network sends out countless bulletins on my list, myspace, IMCs, etc and has printed over 250,000 flyers with my mug on it and because my wife works her ass off on my website. I could go on forever praising people but it can never fully express how thankful I am for all of the support. Solidarity is what makes this term on the “disabled list” doable. (sorry for the sports reference – I stole that one from a friend.)

As always, please keep my codefendants Sadie (statename Joyanna Zacher), Exile (statename Nathan Block) and Jonathan Paul (set to be sentenced in early August) on your mind and in your hearts. All of us are or will be in federal transport soon – a very stressful and chaotic affair.

Finally, I’ve read a few good books lately and highly recommend them:
Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine (Editor), Laura Allen (Editor), and July Oskar Cole (Editor) (2007). This anthology of writings on water range from dam removal, international water struggles and Manifest Destiny to grey water system construction. This book made me long for the outside where I could set up a grey water system in my own backyard. Published by Soft Skull Press and available there or through AK Press.

The Fight in the Fields: César Chávez and the Farmworkers Movement by Susan Ferriss (Author), Ricardo Sandoval (Author), Diana Hembree (Author). I was so hopelessly ignorant of the plight of farmworkers in California before reading this excellent book. I still am but realize there is a tremendous amount to learn from this hard-working and fairly successful movement. It also made me think a lot about the recent campaigns against Taco Bell and Burger King by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida.

Love and rage,
Daniel