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Title: Green Scared? Author: CrimethInc. Date: February 22, 2008 Language: en Topics: Green Anarchism, FBI, green scare, eco action, analysis, Rolling Thunder, ELF, repression Source: Retrieved on 8th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2008/02/22/green-scared
For years, the FBI targeted ecological activists as their #1 priority.
This is one of the chief reasons environmental devastation has continued
unchecked.
At the end of 2005, the FBI opened a new phase of its assault on earth
and animal liberation movements—known as the Green Scare—with the
arrests and indictments of a large number of activists. This offensive,
dubbed Operation Backfire, was intended to obtain convictions for many
of the unsolved Earth Liberation Front arsons of the preceding ten
years—but more so, to have a chilling effect on all ecological direct
action. In the following analysis, originally published in Rolling
Thunder in 2008, we review everything we can learn from the Operation
Backfire cases, with the intention of passing on the lessons for the
next generation of environmental activists.
Of those charged in Operation Backfire, nine ultimately cooperated with
the government and informed on others in hopes of reduced sentences:
Stanislas Meyerhoff, Kevin Tubbs, Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, Suzanne Savoie,
Kendall Tankersley, Jennifer Kolar, Lacey Phillabaum, Darren Thurston,
and, much later, Briana Waters. Four held out through a terrifying year,
during which it seemed certain they would end up serving decades in
prison, until they were able to broker plea deals in which they could
claim responsibility for their actions without providing information
about others: Daniel McGowan, Jonathan Paul, Exile (aka Nathan Block),
and Sadie (aka Joyanna Zacher)[1]. Another defendant, William Rodgers
(aka Avalon), tragically passed away in an alleged suicide while in
custody shortly after his arrest. Fugitive Justin Solondz was captured
in China in 2009 and completed his sentence in January 2017; Rebecca
Rubin turned herself in in 2012, after many years on the run, and was
sentenced to five years in prison. Joseph Dibee was extradited from Cuba
to the US in August 2018 to face charges. One more defendant has been
charged but not found.
The months following the launch of Operation Backfire saw an
unprecedented increase in government repression of anarchist
environmental activists, which came to be known as the Green Scare.
Longtime animal liberation activist Rod Coronado was charged with a
felony for answering a question during a speaking appearance, and faced
potentially decades in prison. Six animal rights activists associated
with SHAC, the campaign against animal testing corporation Huntingdon
Life Sciences, were sentenced to several years in prison, essentially
for running a website. Animal liberationist Peter Young, who had spent
seven years on the run from the FBI, had finally been captured and was
being threatened with double jeopardy. Tre Arrow, famous for surviving a
100-foot fall when police and loggers forced him out of a forest
occupation, was fighting extradition from Canada to the United States to
face arson charges. Innumerable people were subpoenaed to grand
juries,[2] and some did jail time for refusing to cooperate. Perhaps
most ominously of all, three young people were set up by an agent
provocateur and arrested on conspiracy charges without having actually
done anything at all. Two of them, Zachary Jenson and Lauren Weiner,
pled guilty and became government informants; the third, Eric McDavid,
who has contracted life-threatening health problems as a consequence of
being denied vegan food by his jailers, was recently found guilty and
awaits sentencing.
This phase of the Green Scare seems to be drawing to a close. Most of
those apprehended in Operation Backfire are now serving their sentences.
The first of the SHAC defendants has been released from prison. Peter
Young has been out of prison for a year and is doing speaking tours. Rod
Coronado’s trial ended in a deadlock, and he took a plea in return for a
short sentence when the government threatened to bring further charges
against him. It’s been months now since a new high profile felony case
was brought against an environmental activist, though federal agents
have been poking around in the Midwest. It’s time to begin deriving
lessons from the past two years of government repression, to equip the
next generation that will take the front lines in the struggle to defend
life on earth.
In some anarchist circles, the initial onset of the Green Scare was met
with a panic that rivaled the response to the September 11 attacks.
This, of course, was exactly what the government wanted: quite apart
from bringing individual activists to “justice,” they hoped to
intimidate all who see direct action as the most effective means of
social change. Rather than aiding the government by making exaggerated
assumptions about how dangerous it is to be an anarchist today, we must
sort out what these cases show about the current capabilities and limits
of government repression.
The purpose of this inquiry is not to advocate or sensationalize any
particular tactic or approach. We should be careful not to glorify
illegal activity—it’s important to note that most of even the staunchest
non-cooperating defendants have expressed regrets about their choices,
though this must be understood in the context of their court cases. At
the same time, federal repression affects everyone involved in
resistance, not just those who participate in illegal direct action; the
Green Scare offers case studies of the situation we are all in, like it
or not.
Operation Backfire took place against a backdrop of government
investigation, harassment, and profiling of presumed anarchists in the
Pacific Northwest. It is no coincidence that Eugene, Oregon was a major
focus of the Operation Backfire cases, as it has been a hotbed of
dissent and radicalism over the past decade and a half—although
repression and other problems have taken a toll in recent years. We
can’t offer a definitive analysis of the internal dynamics of the Eugene
anarchist community, but we can look at how the authorities went about
repressing it.
One useful resource for this inquiry is “Anarchist Direct Actions: A
Challenge for Law Enforcement,”
an article that appeared in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism in 2005,
authored by Randy Borum of the University of South Florida and Chuck
Tilby of the Eugene Police Department. According to Jeff (“Free”) Luers,
Tilby was one of the cops who surveilled Free and his co-defendant
Critter on the night of their arrest in June 2000. Tilby has given
presentations on the “criminal anarchist” movement to law enforcement
groups, and was intimately involved in the Operation Backfire cases,
even making statements to the media and providing a quote to the FBI
press release at the end of the Oregon federal prosecution.
Surprisingly, the article does not explicitly reference Eugene, Oregon
at all. Besides Tilby’s byline at the beginning, there’s no indication
that the paper was co-written from Eugene. All the same, the article
provides several important clues about how the government proceeded
against the Oregon defendants and those who were perceived to support
them.
The authors centralize the importance of intelligence and informants for
repressing criminal “anarchists,” while acknowledging the difficulty of
obtaining them. In the case of grand jury subpoenas, anarchists
regularly fail to comply, and support groups are often set up for those
targeted; one of the more recent examples of this was Jeff Hogg, who
received a grand jury subpoena while the Backfire prosecutions were
underway and was jailed for nearly six months in 2006 as a result. The
authors warn that “investigators and law enforcement officers should be
cautious during questioning not to divulge more to the subject about the
case (via questions), than is learned through their testimony.” Indeed,
questions asked by grand juries turned up more than once in the pages of
the Earth First! Journal, which was edited from Eugene for a time. It is
extremely important to support those under investigation and keep
abreast of investigators’ efforts. Some believe that the Backfire
investigation only arrived at a position of real strength once such
support started to weaken in Oregon.
Regarding infiltration, “Anarchist Direct Actions” advises that:
What we know of the early Backfire investigation points to a strategy of
generalized monitoring and infiltration. While investigators used
increasingly focused tools and strategies as the investigation gained
steam—for example, sending “cooperating witnesses” wearing body wires to
talk to specific targets—they started out by sifting through a whole
demographic of counter-cultural types. Activist and punk houses as well
as gathering spots such as bars were placed under
surveillance—anarchists who drink should be careful about the way
alcohol can loosen lips. Infiltrators and informants targeted not only
the most visibly committed anarchists, but also bohemians who inhabited
similar cultural and social spheres. Police accumulated tremendous
amounts of background information even while failing to penetrate the
circles in which direct action was organized. The approximately 30,000
pages of discovery in the Oregon cases contain a vast amount of gossip
and background information on quite a few from the Eugene community.
A similar profiling methodology appears to have been used in nearby
Portland, Oregon. In March 2001, for example, a large-scale police raid
was carried out on a house party attended by Portland punk rockers. The
attendees were photographed and questioned about the Earth and Animal
Liberation Fronts. Some were arrested and charged with kidnapping and
assault on an officer—a standard over-charging which eventually led to
plea deals. The defendants from the raid were videotaped at their court
appearances by officers later identified as Gang Enforcement Unit
members. In the aftermath of this raid, cops routinely harassed punks on
the street, demanding to be told whether they were anarchists.
In retrospect, it seems likely that such efforts were not meant simply
to intimidate Portland’s punks, but to uncover information relevant to
the anarchist and ALF/ELF cases of the time. This may have been a wrong
step in the Backfire investigation; right now there’s no way to know. We
do know, however, that “wide net” approaches by the state can be
effective at stifling socially aware subcultures, even when they uncover
no real links to radical action. Fortunately, in Portland those affected
by the raid came together in response, aiding each other, limiting the
damage done, and taking advantage of the situation to draw attention to
police activity.
Another point of speculation is the degree to which authorities fostered
division and infighting within radical circles in Eugene. This was a
common COINTELPRO[3] tactic, and is probably still in use. Borum and
Tilby hint at this in the final section of their paper, “Law Enforcement
Strategies/ Implications”:
For those familiar with Eugene radical circles, this brings to mind the
heated conflicts over gender and feminism within that community. There
is no concrete evidence that government operatives were involved in
escalating such debates, and we should be careful not to jump to
conclusions; such speculation can only assist the state by propagating
paranoia. However, law enforcement from local to federal levels must
have been aware of the vulnerabilities that opened up when real debates
turned to groupthink and factionalism in Eugene. Tilby and his cohorts
must have used such insights to their advantage as they devised
anti-anarchist strategies. By the time Operation Backfire grand juries
began following up on real leads in Eugene, many who could have come
together to oppose them were no longer on speaking terms. While this
does not justify the lack of integrity shown by those who assisted grand
juries, it does offer some context for why the grand juries weren’t
resisted more effectively.
Borum and Tilby close their paper by urging investigators to display
“patience and persistence”—and indeed, patience and persistence
ultimately paid off in Operation Backfire. This is not to lend
credibility to the notion that “The FBI always get their man.” The
investigation was riddled with errors and missteps; plenty of other
actions will never be prosecuted, as the authorities got neither lucky
breaks nor useful cooperation. But we must understand that repression,
and resistance to it, are both long-term projects, stretching across
years and decades.
According to some accounts, one of the most significant leads in
Operation Backfire came from a naĂŻve request for police reports at a
Eugene police station. According to this version, the police deduced
from this request that they should pay attention to Jacob Ferguson;
Ferguson later became the major informant in these cases. It is less
frequently mentioned that the police were accusing Ferguson of an arson
he did not participate in! With Ferguson, the unlikely happened and it
paid off for the authorities to be wrong. Later on, when agents made
their first arrests and presented grand jury subpoenas on December 7,
2005, two of those subpoenaed were wrongly assumed to have been involved
in attacks. Their subpoenas were eventually dropped, as the authorities
gained the cooperation of more informants and eventually made moves to
arrest Exile and Sadie instead.
The investigation was not as unstoppable and dynamic as the government
would like us to think, although the prosecution gathered force as more
individuals rolled on others. The authorities spent years stumbling
around, and they continued to falter even when prosecution efforts were
underway—but they were tenacious and kept at their efforts. Meanwhile,
radical momentum was less consistent.
Let’s review the arc of radical activity in Eugene over the past decade.
The anticapitalist riot of June 18, 1999 in Eugene led to jubilation on
the part of anarchists, even if one participant spent seven years in
prison as a result. The participants in the June 18 Day of Action had
put up a fight and fucked up some symbols of misery in the town,
catching the police unprepared. The pitched battles on the streets of
Seattle later that year at the WTO meeting only reinforced the feeling
that the whole world was up for grabs. Most of the active anarchists in
Eugene had never lived through such a period before. Despite the paltry
demands and muddled analysis of much of the official “antiglobalization”
movement, there was a sense that deeper change could be fought for and
won. Being an anarchist seemed like the coolest thing you could be, and
this perception was magnified by the media attention that followed. The
ELF was setting fires all over the region at the time.
A series of reversals followed. In June 2001, Free received his initial
sentence of 22 years and eight months. The following month, Carlo
Giuliani was murdered on the streets of Genoa during protests against
the G8 summit in Italy. While both of these tragedies illustrated the
risks of confronting the capitalist system, Free’s sentence hit home
especially hard in Eugene. In the changed atmosphere, some began
dropping away and “getting on with their lives”—not necessarily
betraying their earlier principles, but shifting their focus and
priorities. This attrition intensified when American flags appeared
everywhere in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Anarchist efforts did
not cease, but a period of relative disorientation followed. A year and
a half later, the invasion of Iraq provided another opportunity for
radicals to mobilize, but some consistency had been lost in the Eugene
area. And all the while, FBI employees and police kept their regular
hours, day in and day out.
Law enforcement received its most significant breakthrough in the
Backfire cases—even though it started as an incorrect hypothesis—just
before Free’s sentencing, in the period between anarchist jubilation and
the shift to the defensive. The same fires that were incorrectly linked
to Ferguson were used to justify Free’s stiff sentence, which
intimidated some anarchists out of action. There was not enough
revaluation, learning, and sharpening of skills, nor enough efforts at
conflict resolution; the retreat occurred by default. What would have
happened if the Backfire investigation had continued under different
circumstances, while radicals maintained their momentum? That would be
another story. Its conclusion is unknown.
Repression will exist as long as there are states and people who oppose
them. Complete invulnerability is impossible, for governments as well as
their opponents. All the infiltrators and informants of the Tsarist
secret police were powerless to prevent the Russian revolution of 1917,
just as the East German Stasi were unable to prevent the fall of the
Berlin Wall even though they had files on six million people.
Revolutionary struggles can succeed even in the face of massive
repression; for our part, we can minimize the effects of that repression
by preparing in advance.
For many years now anarchists have focused on developing security
culture, but security consciousness alone is not enough. There are some
points one can never emphasize too much—don’t gossip about sensitive
matters, share delicate information on a need-to-know basis,[4] don’t
surrender your rights if detained or arrested, don’t cooperate with
grand juries, don’t sell other people out. But one can abide by all
these dictums and still make crucial mistakes. If anti-repression
strategies center only on what we should not talk about, we lose sight
of the necessity of clear communication for communities in struggle.
State disruption of radical movements can be interpreted as a kind of
“armed critique,” in the way that someone throwing a brick through a
Starbucks window is a critique in action. That is to say, a successful
use of force against us demonstrates that we had pre-existing
vulnerabilities. This is not to argue that we should blame the victim in
situations of repression, but we need to learn how and why efforts to
destabilize our activities succeed. Our response should not start with
jail support once someone has been arrested. Of course this is
important, along with longer-term support of those serving sentences—but
our efforts must begin long before, countering the small vulnerabilities
that our enemy can exploit. Open discussion of problems—for example,
gender roles being imposed in nominally radical spaces—can protect
against unhealthy resentments and schisms. This is not to say that every
split is unwarranted—sometimes the best thing is for people to go their
separate ways; but that even if that is necessary, they should try to
maintain mutual respect or at least a willingness to communicate when it
counts.
Risk is relative. In some cases, it may indeed be a good idea to lay
low; in other cases, maintaining public visibility is viewed as too
risky, when in fact nothing could be more dangerous than withdrawing
from the public eye and letting momentum die. When we think about risk,
we often picture security cameras and prison cells, but there are many
more insidious threats. The Operation Backfire defendants ended up with
much shorter sentences than expected; as it turned out, the most serious
risk they faced was not prison time, after all, but recantation and
betrayal—a risk that proved all too real. Likewise, we can imagine Eric
McDavid, who currently awaits sentencing on conspiracy charges, idly
discussing the risk factor of a hypothetical action with his supposed
friends—who turned out to be two potential informants and a federal
agent provocateur. Unfortunately, the really risky thing was having
those discussions with those people in the first place.
Conventional activist wisdom dictates that one must not mix public and
clandestine activity, but Daniel McGowan’s case seems to contradict
this. McGowan was not brought to trial as a result of investigations
based on his public organizing, but rather because he had worked with
Jacob Ferguson, who turned snitch under police pressure. Though the
government was especially eager to convict him on account of his
extensive prisoner support work and organizing against the Republican
National Convention, McGowan received tremendous public support
precisely because he had been so visible.[5] Had he simply hidden in
obscurity, he might have ended up in the same situation without the
support that enabled him to weather it as successfully as he did—and
without making as many important contributions to the anarchist
movement.
Considering how many years it took the FBI to put together Operation
Backfire and the prominent role of informants in so many Green Scare
cases, it seems like it is possible to get away with a lot, provided you
are careful and make intelligent decisions about who to trust. McGowan’s
direct action résumé, as it appears in the government arguments at his
sentencing, reads like something out of an adventure novel. One can’t
help but think—just seven years, for all that!
The other side of this coin is that, despite all their precautions, the
Green Scare defendants did get caught. No matter how careful and
intelligent you are, it doesn’t pay to count on not getting caught; you
have to be prepared for the worst. Those who are considering risky
direct action should start from the assumption that they will be caught
and prosecuted; before doing anything, before even talking about it,
they should ask themselves whether they could accept the worst possible
consequences. At the same time, as the government may target anyone at
any time regardless of what they have actually done, it is important for
even the most law-abiding activists—not to mention their friends and
relatives—to think through how to handle being investigated, subpoenaed,
or charged.
The Green Scare cases show that cooperating with the government is never
in a defendant’s best interest. On average, the non-cooperating
defendants in Operation Backfire are actually serving less time in
proportion to their original threatened sentences than the informants
despite the government engaging the entire repressive apparatus of the
United States to make an example of them. Exile and Sadie were
threatened with over a thousand years in prison apiece, and are serving
less than eight; if every arrestee understood the difference between
what the state threatens and what it can actually do, far fewer would
give up without a fight.
In the United States legal system, a court case is essentially a game of
chicken. The state starts by threatening the worst penalties it possibly
can, in hope of intimidating the defendant into pleading guilty and
informing. It is easier if the defendant pleads guilty immediately; this
saves the state immense quantities of time and money, not to mention the
potential embarrassment of losing a well-publicized trial. Defendants
should not be intimidated by the initial charges brought against them;
it often turns out that many of these will not hold up, and are only
being pressed to give the state more bargaining power. Even if a
defendant fears he won’t have a leg to stand on in court, he can obtain
some bargaining power of his own by threatening to put the state through
a costly, challenging, and unpredictable trial—to that end, it is
essential to acquire the best possible legal representation. When a
defendant agrees to cooperate, he loses all that leverage, throwing
himself at the mercy of forces that don’t have an ounce of mercy to
offer.
As grim as things looked for Sadie, Exile, McGowan, and Jonathan Paul
through most of 2006, they looked up when McGowan’s lawyer demanded
information about whether prosecutors had used illegal National Security
Agency wiretaps to gather evidence against the defendants. The
government was loath to answer this question, and for good reason: there
had just been a public scandal about NSA wiretaps, and if the court
found that wiretaps had been used unconstitutionally, the entire
Operation Backfire case would have been thrown out. That’s exactly why
so many members of the Weather Underground are professors today rather
than convicts: the FBI botched that case so badly the courts had to let
them go free.
No matter how hopeless things look, never underestimate the power of
fighting it out. Until Stanislas Meyerhoff and others capitulated, the
linchpin of the federal case in Operation Backfire was Jacob Ferguson, a
heroin addict and serial arsonist. Had all besides Ferguson refused to
cooperate and instead fought the charges together, Operation Backfire
would surely have ended differently.
If becoming an informant is always a bad idea, why do so many people do
it? At least eleven high profile defendants in Green Scare cases have
chosen to cooperate with the government against their former comrades,
not including Peter Young’s partner, who informed on him back in 1999.
These were all experienced activists who presumably had spent years
considering how they would handle the pressure of interrogation and
trial, who must have been familiar with all the reasons it doesn’t pay
to cooperate with the state! What, if anything, can we conclude from how
many of them became informants?
There has been quite a bit of opportunist speculation on this subject by
pundits with little knowledge of the circumstances and even less
personal experience. We are to take it for granted that arrestees became
informants because they were privileged middle class kids; in fact, both
the cooperating and non-cooperating defendants are split along class and
gender lines. We are told that defendants snitched because they hadn’t
been fighting for their own interests; what exactly are one’s “own
interests,” if not to live in a world without slaughterhouses and global
warming? Cheaper hamburgers and air conditioning, perhaps? It has even
been suggested that it’s inevitable some will turn informant under
pressure, so we must not blame those who do, and instead should avoid
using tactics that provoke investigations and interrogations. This last
aspersion is not worth dignifying with a response, except to point out
that no crime need be committed for the government to initiate
investigations and interrogations. Whether or not you support direct
action of any kind, it is never acceptable to equip the state to do harm
to other human beings.
Experienced radicals who have been snitched on themselves will tell you
that there is no surefire formula for determining who will turn
informant and who won’t. There have been informants in almost every
resistance movement in living memory, including the Black Panther Party,
the Black Liberation Army, the American Indian Movement, and the Puerto
Rican independence movement; the Green Scare cases are not particularly
unusual in this regard, though some of the defendants seem to have caved
in more swiftly than their antecedents. It may be that the hullabaloo
about how many eco-activists have turned informant is partly due to
commentators’ ignorance of past struggles.
If anything discourages people from informing on each other, it is blood
ties. Historically, the movements with the least snitching have been the
ones most firmly grounded in longstanding communities. Arrestees in the
national liberation movements of yesteryear didn’t cooperate because
they wouldn’t be able to face their parents or children again if they
did; likewise, when gangsters involved in illegal capitalist activity
refuse to inform, it is because doing so would affect the entirety of
their lives, from their prospects in their chosen careers to their
social standing in prison as well as their neighborhoods. The stronger
the ties that bind an individual to a community, the less likely it is
he or she will inform against it. North American radicals from
predominantly white demographics have always faced a difficult challenge
in this regard, as most of the participants are involved in defiance of
their families and social circles rather than because of them. When an
ex-activist is facing potentially decades in prison for something that
was essentially a hobby, with his parents begging him not to throw his
life away and the system he fought against apparently dominating the
entirety of his present and future, it takes a powerful sense of right
and wrong to resist selling out.
In this light, it isn’t surprising that the one common thread that links
the non-cooperating defendants is that practically all of them were
still involved in either anarchist or at least countercultural
communities. Daniel McGowan was ceaselessly active in many kinds of
organizing right up to his arrest; Exile and Sadie were still committed
to life against the grain, if not political activity—a witness who
attended their sentencing described their supporters as an otherworldly
troop of black metal fans with braided beards and facial piercings. Here
we see again the necessity of forging powerful, long-term communities
with a shared culture of resistance; dropouts must do this from scratch,
swimming against the tide, but it is not impossible.
Healthy relationships are the backbone of such communities, not to
mention secure direct action organizing. Again—unaddressed conflicts and
resentments, unbalanced power dynamics, and lack of trust have been the
Achilles heel of countless groups. The FBI keeps psychological profiles
on its targets, with which to prey on their weaknesses and exploit
potential interpersonal fissures. The oldest trick in the book is to
tell arrestees that their comrades already snitched on them; to weather
this intimidation, people must have no doubts about their comrades’
reliability.
“Snitches get stitches” posters notwithstanding, anarchists aren’t
situated to enforce a no-informing code by violent means. It’s doubtful
that we could do such a thing without compromising our principles,
anyway—when it comes to coercion and fear, the state can always outdo
us, and we shouldn’t aspire to compete with it. Instead, we should focus
on demystifying snitching and building up the collective trust and power
that discourage it. If being a part of the anarchist community is
rewarding enough, no one will wish to exile themselves from it by
turning informant. For this to work, of course, those who do inform on
others must be excluded from our communities with absolute finality; in
betraying others for personal advantage, they join the ranks of the
police officers, prison guards, and executioners they assist.
Those who may participate in direct action together should first take
time to get to know each other well, including each other’s families and
friends, and to talk over their expectations, needs, and goals. You
should know someone long enough to know what you like least about him or
her before committing to secure activity together; you have to be
certain you’ll be able to work through the most difficult conflicts and
trust them in the most frightening situations up to a full decade later.
Judging from the lessons of the 1970s, drug addiction is another factor
that tends to correlate with snitching, as it can be linked to
deep-rooted personal problems. Indeed, Jacob Ferguson, the first
informant in Operation Backfire, was a longtime heroin addict. Just as
the Operation Backfire cases would have been a great deal more difficult
for the government if no one besides Jake had cooperated, the FBI might
never have been able to initiate the cases at all if others had not
trusted Jake in the first place.
Prompt prisoner support is as important as public support for those
facing grand juries. As one Green Scare defendant has pointed out,
defendants often turn informant soon after arrest when they are off
balance and uncertain what lies ahead. Jail is notorious for being a
harsher environment than prison; recent arrestees may be asking
themselves whether they can handle years of incarceration without a
realistic sense of what that would entail. Supporters should bail
defendants out of jail as quickly as possible, so they can be informed
and level-headed as they make decisions about their defense strategy. To
this end, it is ideal if funds are earmarked for legal support long
before any arrests occur.
It cannot be emphasized enough that informing is always a serious
matter, whether it is a question of a high profile defendant snitching
on his comrades or an acquaintance of law-abiding activists answering
seemingly harmless questions. The primary goal of the government in any
political case is not to put any one defendant in prison but to obtain
information with which to map radical communities, with the ultimate
goal of repressing and controlling those communities. The first deal the
government offered Peter Young was for him to return to animal rights
circles to report to them from within: not just on illegal activity, but
on all activity. The most minor piece of trivia may serve to jeopardize
a person’s life, whether or not they have ever broken any law. It is
never acceptable to give information about any other person without his
or her express consent.
We must not conceptualize our response to government repression in
purely reactive terms. It takes a lot of resources for the government to
mount a massive operation like the Green Scare cases, and in doing so
they create unforeseen situations and open up new vulnerabilities. Like
in Judo, when the state makes a move, we can strike back with a
countermove that catches them off balance. To take an example from mass
mobilizations, the powers that be were eventually able to cripple the
so-called anti-globalization movement by throwing tremendous numbers of
police at it; but in the wake of lawsuits subsequently brought against
them, the police in places like Washington, D.C. now have their hands
tied when it comes to crowd control, as demonstrated by their extreme
restraint at the IMF/World Bank protests in October 2007. We’re in a
long war with hierarchical power that cannot be won or lost in any
single engagement; the question is always how to make the best of each
development, seizing the initiative whenever we can and passing whatever
gains we make on to those who will fight after us.
There must be a way to turn the legacy of the Green Scare to our
advantage. One starting place is to use it as an opportunity to learn
how the state investigates underground activity and make sure those
lessons are shared with the next generation. Another is to find common
cause with other targeted communities; a promising example of this is
the recent connection between animal liberation activists in the Bay
Area and supporters of the San Francisco Eight, ex-Black Panthers who
are now being charged with the 1971 murder of a police officer.
In reflecting on Judge Aiken’s sentencing, let us put aside, for the
time being, the question of whether executives who profit from logging,
animal exploitation, and genetic engineering are “doing what they need
to do to survive.” Let’s allow to pass, as well, the suggestion that
those who run these industries are more likely to enter into a “real
dialogue” with environmentalists if the latter limit themselves to
purely legal activity. Let’s even reserve judgment on Aiken’s attempt to
draw parallels between domestic violence and sarcastically worded
communiqués—which parallels the prosecutors’ assertion that the ELF,
despite having never injured a single human being, is no different from
the Ku Klux Klan.
There is but one question we cannot help but ask, in reference to Judge
Aiken’s rhetoric about cowardice: if she found herself in a situation
that called for action to be taken outside the established channels of
the legal system, would she be capable of it? Or would she still insist
on due process of law, urging others to be patient as human beings were
sold into slavery or the Nazis carted people off to Dachau? Is it fair
for a person whose complicity in the status quo is rewarded with
financial stability and social status to accuse someone who has risked
everything to abide by his conscience… of cowardice? Perhaps Aiken would
also feel entitled to inform John Brown that he was a coward, or the
Germans who attempted to assassinate Hitler?
Once this question is asked, another question inexorably follows: what
qualifies as a situation that calls for action to be taken outside the
established channels of the legal system, if not the current ecological
crisis? Species are going extinct all over the planet, climate change is
beginning to wreak serious havoc on human beings as well, and scientists
are giving us a very short window of time to turn our act around—while
the US government and its corporate puppeteers refuse to make even the
insufficient changes called for by liberals. If the dystopian nightmare
those scientists predict comes to pass, will the refugees of the future
look back at this encounter between McGowan and Aiken and judge McGowan
the coward?
We live in a democracy, Aiken and her kind insist: bypassing the
established channels and breaking the law is akin to attacking freedom,
community, and dialogue themselves. That’s the same thing they said in
1859.
Those who consider obeying the law more important than abiding by one’s
conscience always try to frame themselves as the responsible ones, but
the essence of that attitude is the desire to evade responsibility.
Society, as represented—however badly—by its entrenched institutions, is
responsible for decreeing right and wrong; all one must do is
brainlessly comply, arguing for a change when the results are not to
one’s taste but never stepping out of line. That is the creed of
cowards, if anything is. At the hearing to determine whether the
defendants should be sentenced as terrorists, Aiken acknowledged with
frustration that she had no control over what the Bureau of Prisons
would do with them regardless of her recommendations—but washed her
hands of the matter and gave McGowan and others terrorism enhancements
anyway. Doubtless, Aiken feels that whatever shortcomings the system has
are not her responsibility, even if she participates in forcing them on
others. She’s just doing her job.
That’s the Nuremberg defense. Regardless of what she thinks of McGowan’s
actions or the Bureau of Prisons, Aiken is personally responsible for
sending him to prison. She is responsible for separating him from his
wife, for preventing him from continuing his work supporting survivors
of domestic violence. If he is beaten or raped while in prison, it is
the same as if Aiken beat or raped him. And not just McGowan, or Paul,
or Sadie or Exile, but every single person Aiken has ever sent to
prison.
But Aiken and her kind are responsible for a lot more than this. As the
polar icecaps melt, rainforests are reduced to pulp, and climate change
inflicts more and more terrible catastrophes around the planet, they are
responsible for stopping all who would take direct action to avert these
tragedies. They are responsible, in short, for forcing the wholesale
destruction of the natural environment upon everyone else on earth.
Aiken might counter that the so-called democratic system is the most
effective way to go about halting that destruction. It sure has worked
so far, hasn’t it! On the contrary, it seems more likely that she cannot
bring herself to honestly consider whether there could be a higher good
than the maintenance of law and order. For people like her, obedience to
the law is more precious than polar icecaps, rainforests, and cities
like New Orleans. Any price is worth paying to avoid taking
responsibility for their part in determining the fate of the planet.
Talk about cowardice.
So—if McGowan and the other non-cooperating Green Scare defendants are
not cowards, does that mean they are heroes?
We should be cautious not to unthinkingly adopt the inverse of Aiken’s
judgment. In presenting the case for the government, Peifer described
the Operation Backfire defendants’ exploits as “almost like Mission
Impossible.” It serves the powers that be to present the defendants as
superhuman—the more exceptional their deeds seem to be, the further out
of reach such deeds will feel to everyone else.
Similarly, lionizing “heroes” can be a way for the rest of us to let
ourselves off the hook: as we are obviously not heroes of their caliber,
we need not hold ourselves up to the same standards of conduct. It is a
disservice to glorify McGowan, Exile, Sadie, Peter Young, and others
like them; in choosing anonymous action, they did not set out to be
celebrated, but to privately do what they thought was necessary, just as
all of us ought to. They are as normal as any of us—any normal person
who takes responsibility for his or her actions is capable of tremendous
things.
This is not to say we should all become arsonists. There are countless
paths available to those who would take responsibility for themselves,
and each person must choose the one that is most appropriate to his or
her situation. Let the courage of the non-cooperating Green Scare
defendants, who dared to act on their beliefs and refused to betray
those convictions even when threatened with life in prison, serve as
reminders of just how much normal people like us can accomplish.
[1] After this writing, it came to light that Sadie and Exile hold both
racist and transphobic views. The anarchist community has parted ways
with them.
[2] In theory, the task of a grand jury is to examine the validity of an
accusation before trial. In practice, grand juries are used to force
information out of people: by granting an individual immunity regarding
a specific case, a grand jury can compel him or her to answer questions
or else go to prison for contempt of court.
[3] The FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) existed
officially from 1956 to 1971 and probably continues to this day in some
form. Aiming to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise
neutralize” the activities of groups like the Black Panther Party, the
Program utilized a wide variety of dirty tricks. Houses and offices were
searched and documents stolen without any warrants having been issued;
rumors were spread in order to foster mistrust and even violence between
different organizations or factions within them; group members were
harassed through the courts or even wholly framed for crimes they did
not commit; infiltrators and agent provocateurs were distributed within
target constituencies; no act of psychological warfare or blatant
violence was ruled out. The program was finally exposed when radicals
broke into an FBI Office and seized documents relating to the secret
program, circulating them to various sources under the name of the
“Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI.”
[4] It does appear that Operation Backfire defendants could have done
better at limiting the flow of information inside their circles. Rather
than organizing in closed, consistent cells, the defendants seem to have
worked in more fluid arrangements, with enough crossover that once a few
key participants turned informant the government had information about
everyone.
[5] This is not to say that all visibility is good visibility. Media
attention was a significant factor in the conflicts that wracked Eugene.
Such visibility can divide communities from within by creating the
appearance that spokespeople have more power than everyone else, which
provokes jealousy and stokes ego-driven conflicts whether or not what’s
on the screen reflects reality on the ground. Those who fall prey to
believing the media hype about themselves become dependent upon this
attention, pursuing it rather than the unmediated connections and
healthy relationships essential for long-term revolutionary struggle;
the most valuable visibility is anchored in enduring communities, not
media spectacles. There are reasonable arguments for using the media at
times, but one must be aware of the danger of being used by it.