rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (06/24/91)
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THE CIVIL LIBERTIES ELECTRONIC FORUM
Networking the National Lawyers Guild Civil Liberties Committee
Chip Berlet - SYSOP (System Operator)
Operating 24 hours-2400-1200/300 baud
617-221-5815
Spying on Greenpeace & Other Environmental Groups
by Chip Berlet
Environmental activists over the past two years have
reported a series of incidents involving surveillance, police
overreaction, and harassment that leads then to believe they are
being targetted by a campaign to discredit them and hamstring
their attempts to exercise their consstitutional rights. Many of
those targetted are members of the environmental group Greepeace,
and it's not just a problem in big cities, as one person fighting
a rural toxic waste dump found out the hard way.
Mike Buckner's family has deep roots in central
Georgia--relatives have lived there since 1832--so he was
apprehensive when he learned of plans to build a toxic waste
incinerator there. Buckner, who works for the post office, and
other concerned citizens came to believe that state and county
officials and corporate interests had rigged the planning and
hearing process. County officials had voted in secret to
nominate the site, and the first suitability study neglected to
mention health and environmental concerns. Then, according to a
local lawyer who sued the state, several state officials admitted
they had voted for the Taylor-county site because "it was the
governor's wish."
Now, the local people were being invited to a town meeting
called by the consulting firm hired to do a second study. But
this company had close ties to Waste Management Incorporated, the
corporation that wanted to build the incinerator. The local
people were angry. "They call all these meetings," Taylor
resident Ben Parham told a local paper, "and they don't amount to
a tinker's dam."
Mike Buckner sat next to Brian Spears, an experienced civil
rights attorney from Atlanta, who recalls "the courtroom was
nearly packed with some 250 people." As the meeting opened,
Katrina McIntosh walked forward to present the panel with a
suitcase stuffed with fake money as "welcome gift." Halfway up
the aisle, she was intercepted and hustled out by officers of the
Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Others began to throw more wads
of fake money at the consultants.
After the consultant's presentation, it became clear that
the hearing would go as some of the others had before--no
opportunity for opponents of the incinerator to speak. So they
turned to their last resort. Somebody tripped the switch on a
tape recorder in a locked briefcase in the balcony, and the
strains of the Beatles hit "Money" filled the courtroom. Taylor
County Sheriff Nick Giles ordered his deputies to silence the
case, which was attached by a chain to a chair bolted to the
balcony floor. They complied, smashing it with their boots.
"The protests were certainly colorful," says Spears, "but
they were harmless, and definitely not criminal." Yet Buckner
was placed on administrative leave for three weeks after Sheriff
Giles falsely told Buckner's supervisors that Buckner was
involved in the "disruption." Buckner also was interrogated by
his superiors. "I was asked what I knew about bombings of
federal officials and bomb threats at the meeting and other
things I had never heard of," says Buckner. He was asked if he
was a member of Greenpeace.
Local environmental activists tell Spears they now are
worried about attempts to discredit them. A local newspaper
reported that the authorities were compiling information about
potential troublemakers. Sheriff Giles is quoted saying "We have
photographed the crowds at every meeting. We know who is at
these meetings. We have videotapes of some meetings." Jan M.
Caves, whose family owns property next to the proposed site, told
reporters of "an air of harassment towards the opponents [of the
incinerator] adding that some had become too intimidated to speak
out. "The harassment has become unbelievable," says incinerator
opponent Marie McGlaun.
What happened in Taylor County is not unique. The
environmental movement is entering a new era, one in which the
traditional channels of reform--the courts, the hearing room and
the legislature--are proving increasingly unresponsive to the
concerns of ordinary citizens. At the same time, the
overwhelming influence of big business in setting priorities,
such as where incinerators should be sited or how much old growth
should be clearcut, is becoming obvious.
In response, average people are beginning to act in defense
of their country, their homes and their environment, often using
tactics that are traditionally drawn upon in this situation: sit-
ins, demonstrations, and other time-honored acts of civil
disobedience. And for their trouble, they are being treated as
criminals and subjected to surveillance and retaliation in the
workplace.
Their tactics, pioneeered by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi, are being recast by the media and
others as "terrorism." In parts of the country, legal
authorities are levying fines and setting bail for environmental
activists that equal or in some cases exceed those leveled at
suspects held for muder and other violent crimes. Even worse,
some people are being singled out by the police and the FBI as
well as private interests solely on the basis of their activities
in defense of the environment.
In Arizona, revelations of possible cover-ups and illegal
collusion between the state and a company planning to build an
incinerator led to vocal and active opposition from a local
group. A hearing last may in the town of Mobile, southwest of
Phoenix, dissolved into a shouting match when the hearing officer
tried to oust hundreds of concerned citizens who crowded the back
of the hearing room. With no provocation, officers arrested 18
activists and dragged them outside, using high voltage "stun
guns" on five of them.
Fourteen activists were locked in a sheriff's van at the
side of the highway and denied phone calls or legal counsel until
the hearing ended. Seven of them have since been charged with
disorderly conduct. After the incident, it was discovered that
the EPA had forwarded videotapes showing some of the activists at
a demonstration in California to police authorities in Arizona.
These same citizens were picked out of the crowd and arrested.
In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, an activist with Bucks People
United to Restore the Environment (B-PURE), was pulled by police
from a township meeting and held illegally in a holding cell
without charges. His request to use a phone was refused. His
crime? He had approached the chairperson and demanded that more
chairs be added to accomodate the people who were unable to fit
into the meeting room.
In Astoria, Oregon, ten Greenpeace activists were held
overnight without bail after being arrested on class-C
misdemeanor charges (one step above a parking ticket) during an
antinuclear demonstration. The only other person refused bail in
recent history by the judiciary in Clatsop county was a man
charged with two murders. In Texas a local magistrate demanded
$100,000 bail for a Greenpeace activist who blocked a railroad
track, roughly ten times the bond set for some drug dealers and
murders in the same jurisdiction.
The loose group of activists known as Earth First! is being
subjected to particularly harsh treatment. No person associated
with Earth First! has ever assaulted anyone; the only felony
conviction of a person associated with the group was for the
crime of pulling up survey stakes. But last year in Arizona,
four activists associated with Earth First! were arrested on
conspiracy charges including the organization's founder, Dave
Foreman, whose alleged crime was to have donated some money for
the other activists to use in an illegal operation. After the
arrests, it was revealed that the FBI spent some $2 million on a
two-year campaign to infiltrate Earth First!, largely through an
undercover agent named Michael Fain. Fain befriended several
environmentalists, forming a romantic relationship with one, and
according to several witnesses, joined in illegal witnesses and
encouraged the activists to act illegally.
At one point, Fain accidentally left his hidden tape
recorder on and recorded a conversation reflecting his
frustration with having failed to get Foreman to incriminate
himself. [Foreman] was there, but he doesn't even mention it
(illegal activities). . . Foreman isn't the guy we have to pop--I
mean in terms of an actual perpetrator. [Foreman] is the guy we
have to pop to send a message." This and other evidence adds
ammunition to the charge that the prosecution of these activists
is politically motivated.
Perhaps the most chilling example was the reaction of local
police and the FBI after the mysterious May bombing of the car
carrying Earth First! activists Darryl Cherney and Judi Bari.
Although the pair had received dozens of death threats and had
not been associated with violence of any kind, they were
immediately arrested by local police and charged with carrying
the bomb.
Two months later, the District Attorney declined for the
third time to prosecute, and the case appears to have collapsed
for lack of evidence. But in the hours after the bombing,
Oakland police ransacked the home of a group of local activists
without a search warrant. Lawyers also were turned away from the
local jail, where friends and acquaintances of Bari and Cherney
were questioned and held without charges or legal counsel for
seven hours. Bari's lawyer had to get a court order to see her
client in the hospital. The FBI implied that it had the evidence
to prosecute all along, creating a climate of suspicion and anger
toward Earth First! and environmentalists in general. Even now,
according to environmentalists in California, the FBI
investigation has yet to follow up on several obvious clues,
including the death threats received by the pair in the months
before the bombing.
Many observers suspect political motivation in the FBI's
biased investigation of the Earth First! bombing incident. Two
alliances of individuals and groups including Friends of the
Earth, the Sierra Club, California Congressman Ron Dellums, Earth
Island Institute president Dave Brower, Greenpeace, the American
Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization for Women
have drafted letters calling for an investigation of FBI and
Oakland police conduct in the case.
But the public is not inclined to believe that federal and
local agencies are capable of bias of this sort. While no
evidence has yet surfaced to suggest that there has been any
wrong-doing this time, the history of FBI activities regarding
protest groups is not encouraging. "We don't like to face this
aspect of our society," say Spears, "but it is part of the
historical record." As the environmental movement grows in
numbers and impact, there is little reason to believe it will
remain free of the harassment that has been visited upon every
other significant social-change movement in U.S. history.
Brian Glick is an attorney and author of a handbook on
resisting FBI activities called War at Home. Glick concludes
that historically, "dissenting groups came under attack as they
began to seriously threaten the status quo." Since the
environmental movement "threatens to meddle with people who
control billions of dollars, it should be no surprise when they
fight back," says Glick, "especially as corporate and government
officials come to realize how dramatically they will have to
restructure their activities in response to the environmental
crisis."
Another area where environmentalists face unfair harassment
is in the courts and through overreaction on the part of police
departments. As we have seen, judges and prosecutors can arrange
for high bail, ignore due process and otherwise harass activists
when they are so inclined. While activists can countersue in
cases of outrageous conduct, this involves considerable time and
expense.
Police who are told to prepare for "radical
environmentalists" during marches and other forms of peaceful
protest will not necessarily exercise the restraint appropriate
to the activity of the protesters. When marchers approached the
headquarters of American Cyanamid in Bound Brook, New Jersey, to
protest the company's practice of sending mercury-contaminated
waste abroad, county police in riot gear rushed the crowd,
grabbed several marchers and clubbed them to the ground.
Fortunately the incident did not escalate.
"We were peaceful, and we announced our intention to be non-
confrontational in advance," says Peter Bahouth, Executive
Director of Greenpeace in the United States, one of the marchers
beaten and arrested. "The media's treatment of incidents like
this paints a picture of wild and unreasonable environmentalists
marching in the streets, and it portrays the pursuit of healthy
debate as dangerous. The first point is not true, and if people
are intimidated into not speaking out, we lost the most vital
part of our democracy."
From one perspective, this escalation of public activism and
government and corporate response is a measure of the movement's
success. The 8,000 or so community groups that have formed
around toxics issues in the United States have proven a
significant impediment to the toxic waste handling industry as
well as a thorn in the side of major polluters. Thanks to the
efforts of a handful of dedicated activists, the razing of the
nation's last stands of old growth forest has become a national
issue that could seriously affect the profits of several major
corporations. Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior was blown up by the
French government precisely because it represented the first
creditable threat to their nuclear testing program; more
threatening to France than U.N. censure, international
condemnation and a 1973 International Court of Justice decision.
And now the movement confronts an inevitable backlash. What
the environmental community fears most is that the present trend
will not abate, and that innocent, concerned individuals will be
injured or persecuted for their beliefs. The confluence of
interests on the "other side" of this debate--the "growth-at-any-
cost" wing of big business, the legislatures and the
government--is now openly linking environmentalism with lack of
patriotism, an end to the "American way of life" and other vague
rhetorical horrors. "As the Cold War thaws," says David
Chatfield, chairman of the board of Greenpeace in the United
States, "we may be entering an era in which government, industry
and the media substitute the Green Menace for the Red Menace."
When ordinary citizens begin to be treated as criminals,
public discourse is inhibited and democracy begins to break down.
"This is a period of time that requires a renewed focus on basic
rights," says Bahouth. "We want to create a climate in which
people can speak out freely and participate, without fear of
violence, jail or harassment."
This is an edited version of an article which was published in
Greenpeace magazine.