Environmental and Animal Rights Activists Targeted as Eco-Terrorists and Jailed in Little Gitmo

An article a few days ago about.Daniel McGowan, an activist convicted in 2006 for his role in two Earth Liberation Front arsons in opposition to genetic engineering and to the logging of old-growth forests, was eye opening. McGowan was sentenced to 7 years and the court also applied what’s called a 'terrorism enhancement' which got him sent to a CMU. the article was on the website 'Green is the New Red' which concentrates on stories how animal rights and environmental activists are being targeted as 'eco-terrorists'  throughout the US and what their incarceration in the secretive prison units officially named Communication Management Units [CMU] and more commonly known as 'Little Guantanamos' means for American's safety, freedom and constitutional rights.

Following a link in that article to the Democracy Now interview with Andrew Stepanian, an animal rights activist also secretly jailed in a CMU opened my eyes even wider. Yesterday i watched another Democracy Now interview. This one was with an animal rights investigator detailing how he has spent over a decade secretly filming animal abuse and why that work is now imperiled by a wave of laws sweeping the country. These laws, like the one currently being adopted in Indiana, commonly called 'ag-gag' laws, actually extend far beyond the activities of animal welfare advocates to include environmentalists who defy publication bans to report on clearcutting, fracking, or in the current fiasco in Mayflower Arkansas, oil pipeline spill devastation.

The Little Gitmos were opened by the Bush administration. The first in 2006 in a special isolated wing of the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. A second was opened last year by Obama's Bureau of Prisons in Marion, Illinois. Most of the prisoners held in the CMUs have been Muslim men, but there have also been several political activists, including environmental and animal rights activists.

After reading of and listening to these stories it seems clear that the US's loud and proud boasts about being a 'Government of Laws' now thinks itself 'Above the Law'. The laws, as Cicero wrote in the days of the Roman Republic, “are silent in time of war." But unlike in Cicero's time the current empire feels free to declare war on an undefinable enemy like terrorists, on ideas which can have no defined territory and on drugs all of which create wars that have no end.

Canadians and folks in other vassal states shouldn't spend any energy feeling safe and superior because their laws are quietly evolving into 'harmonization' with the US's. Up here in Canuckistan the Harper regime is spending $billions on new prisons while the serious crime rate is plunging. Who do they expect to be filling all those new cells? Maybe they're planning on an influx of 'foreign funded environmental radicals' to lay down in front of the pipeline building bulldozers. Maybe a buncha 'idle' First Nations folks bent on defending their constitutional guarantees by defending the water, air and animals their cultures have lived in harmony with for thousands of years. Maybe you, maybe me, maybe the only moral address soon will be 'Little Gitmo'.