Obama Administration Targets Environmental and Animal Rights Activists as Eco-Terrorists
by Stephen Lendman
What began under George Bush continues under Barack Obama – targeting dedicated activists with “one of today’s most serious domestic terrorism threats,” according former FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterterrorism John Lewis before a Senate panel in May 2005. Called “eco-terrorism,” it grew out of the 2001 USA Patriot Act that created the federal crime of “domestic terrorism” and applied it to US citizens as well as aliens.
In his February 2002 testimony before the House Resources Committee, Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health, the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Section Chief, Counterterrorism Division, James Jarboe defined eco-terrorism as:
“the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against innocent victims or property by an environmentally-oriented, subnational group for environmental-political reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target, often of a symbolic nature.”
As a result, innocent people are targeted, accused, convicted and sentenced to hard time for constitutionally protected non-violent environmental activism or supporting animal rights. The so-called AETA 4 are four recent ones and face prosecution under U.S.A. v. Buddenberg for conspiracy to commit animal enterprise terrorism.
On February 19 and 20, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested Joseph Buddenberg, Maryam Khajavi, Nathan Pope, and Adriana Stumpo and charged them with conduct relating to protesting, chalking the sidewalk, chanting, and leafleting – constitutionally protected rights under the First Amendment, but no matter.
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