(This will probably be choppy and disjointed, and really, really long, because several things have conspired this afternoon to freak me out, so please bear with me.)
The SHAC 7 were found guilty: see, for instance, here (via Sarah Kramer’s blog) and here (via the Food Fight blog). Damn. It’s been hard to assemble a reliable picture of what exactly happened, particularly because I’ve only been able to find a couple of sites presenting the government’s side, and those have seemed more interested in the economic effects of the protests than in anything else (see, e.g., this statement before Congress from October 2005). Most of what I’ve been able to find has been from veggie sites, AR sites, and unabashedly leftist papers. (If you don’t know me personally, please keep in mind that I am in fact what we jestingly call a pinko commie leftist bleeding-heart treehugging wishy-washy tax-and-spend liberal and quite proud of it, so when I refer to “unabashedly leftist” publications, that’s actually a good thing. If you do know me personally, then you already knew that and this little digression has bored the pants off you.)
According to the Kerrville Daily Times (second news link above), “The defendants were not accused of directly making threats or carrying out vandalism. Instead, they were charged with inciting the harassment with their Internet postings.” As far as I can tell, the defendants were targeted for posting their opinions, and for reporting on the actions of others — some of which do seem to me to be harassment and vandalism, but — and this is the important bit — harassment and vandalism are illegal, but do not equal terrorism.
(ObNote: I’m not in favor of harassment, threats, or vandalism, feeling that they do more harm than anything, and they are not the path I choose or endorse. Peace, understanding, respect, siblingly love, acceptance of others, yadda yadda yadda = good things. I do support freedom of speech, though, regardless of whether I agree or disagree with the points the speaker is making. Now back to incoherent rant.)
My understanding of the whole situation is imperfect, I admit. I sort of stumbled across this whole issue midway through. Obviously, I can’t go the original postings to form my own opinion, so it’s hard to know for sure.
The aforementioned government page nearly killed me when I read this: “Extremists are very knowledgeable about the letter of the law and the limits of law enforcement. The SHAC website has a page devoted to instructing activists on how to behave toward law enforcement officers, how to deal with interrogations, and what to say — and not say — if they are arrested.” How dare those wacky activists give helpful hints about how to avoid making things worse for yourself if you are arrested! How dare they actually inform people about their rights under arrest! You can’t seriously tell me that other groups of varying ilk don’t tell people who are going to a protest what to do if they’re arrested — I know that, when I went to protests against the first Gulf War back in college, we were certainly told to behave ourselves, disperse peacefully if ordered to do so, and not cause trouble — and not say anything without representation, to avoid causing unintentional problems — if we should chance to be arrested, and all we ever did was march around waving signs and chanting.
I’m rambling. I suppose my point is that I don’t believe the defendants were guilty of inciting terrorism — bad judgment, I’d say, in posting personal information about employees, and possibly endangerment after a certain point. Calling it inciting terrorism seems like a dangerous precendent: does any dissent become terrorism, then, especially if it causes economic distress? Why go after the Web site people, instead of trying to track down the people who are overzealous and doing the actual threats and stone-throwing and so on? (Still doesn’t seem like even that’s really terrorism to me — illegal and opprobrious, I would say, and not effective long-term [my opinion; feel free to disagree as you wish], but not terrorism.)
Being the pessimist that I am, I wasn’t really surprised by the verdict, though the more I thought about it, the more I realized that a little, tiny, almost nonexistent part of me was, actually. I’d figured they’d probably get nailed for something, but I suppose I hadn’t expected the charge of inciting terrorism to stick. I mean, it seems so ludicrous.
I got so out of sorts that I had to call my actual mother right after work, sitting in my car in the freakin’ parking lot at work, so we could rant to each other. She told me about a vocal critic of the war in Iraq who has been invited to speak at U.S. colleges — but has been repeatedly denied a visa, despite having been allowed by Blair into Britain. (I tried Googling to identify this person, but found several potential candidates; spoiled for choice, I gave up.) She also told me about climate change researchers who were given 72 hours to turn over copies of all their published works and raw data to the U.S. government. (I tried the Chronicle of Higher Education’s site for this; they’re subscriber-only, but going here should let you at least see I’m not making this up. I also found the tantalizing [also subscriber-only] article “Undercover Among the Cages” that has the most perplexing lead-in I’ve read in ages: “Kate Turlington’s co-workers in the animal laboratory grew suspicious when they noticed that she never ate meat at lunch.” WTF?)
As a topper, I was just parking outside my building this evening when NPR announced that the Senate had renewed the Patriot Act. Agreement still must be reached with the House, but this news on top of everything else nearly made me start sobbing into my steering wheel.
I haven’t been terribly politically active for years; I found myself getting discouraged and then outright depressed, in a clinical sort of fashion. Eventually, I decided I couldn’t handle taking it so seriously, and forced myself to back off, but today has just made me want to do something about the way the country seems to be going. I told myself that everything goes in cycles and things will even out in the long run, but it feels like things are going too far, and it’s getting scary.* My mom suggested that I volunteer for political candidates, stuffing envelopes or something, but that won’t be possible really for, what, another year? I looked for some sort of Baking Against Bush Bake Sale that I could volunteer for, but wasn’t able to find anything, really. There’s got to be something around here somewhere: something I could do so I wouldn’t feel so powerless. (Given that last month, for the very first time ever, I got eight hits from government domains, I feel I should perhaps be more specific: the things I have in mind are no more radical than perhaps carrying a sign in a peaceful demo, or the aforementioned bake sale. We’re not talking property damage, or even rudeness: at worst, we’re talking perhaps a slightly tiresome and off-key sing-song of “Blowin’ in the Wind.”)
This post has taken me almost three hours to put together. Funny, that. You’d think it would’ve been more coherent, but there you go.
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*Note to Mark: Feel free to roll your eyes at this. I won’t hold it against you.
