25 August 20
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It's Live on the HomePage Now: Trump Walks Alone: Former US Allies Britain, France, Germany Join Russia and China in Forcefully Rejecting Trump Iran Sanctions Their joint statement said, “France, Germany and the United Kingdom note that the United States ceased to be a participant in the JCPoA in the wake of its withdrawal from the accord [in 2018].” Their foreign ministries underlined that they could “not support this initiative, which is incompatible with our current efforts to support the JCPoA . . . We remain engaged in favor of the JCPoA in spite of major challenges engendered by the withdrawal of the United States, and we are convinced that we must treat the question of the systematic non-compliance by the Iranians with their obligations under the JCPoA via a dialogue between the participants in the accord. We call urgently on Iran to reverse all its steps that are incompatible with its nuclear obligations and to return without delay to full compliance.” This is a stronger stance, and a more vigorous rebuke, to the US that the informed and canny Crisis Group had expected from the Europeans, and sounds precisely like what Russia and China have been saying.US secretary of state Mike Pompeo accused Europe of siding with Iran’s ayatollahs. I’m not sure what he expects to accomplish with this ayatollah-shaming, except to further anger his erstwhile allies, whom Trump has decisively alienated. Iran is elated. The Iran nuclear deal was signed between Iran and the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany in 2015, including the United States. It offered Iran an end to all international sanctions if it would mothball 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment program, which was for making fuel for its three nuclear reactors to produce electricity. In May, 2018, the Trump administration breached the treaty. The document contains a provision that allows any signatory to invoke “snapback,” restoring the UNSC sanctions on Iran enacted in 2007, if it can show that Iran did not fulfill its obligations under the treaty. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has argued that since the US is a signatory, it can still invoke snapback. Europe is raising one eyebrow and exclaiming, “You must be joking, monsieur!” The US ceased to be a participant in the Iran nuclear deal in May, 2018, and has no standing to now invoke the snapback clause. The wild and wacky Trump administration is perfectly capable of maintaining publicly that international UNSC sanctions on Iran have been restored even if no one goes along with Washington, of course. But it is simply a form of political theater. Since the US is already threatening third party sanctions on countries that deal with Iran, Washington is unlikely to be able to find new ways to twist Europe’s arm. For its part, Russia is openly defying the Americans and continuing to deal with Iran. China’s Xinhua news service reports that Russia’s Sergei Riabkov, the deputy minister of foreign affairs, declared Thursday that Russia will not cease its cooperation with Iran, despite American threats of sanctions. He said, according to the RIA Novosti press agency, “We are guided exclusively by our own interests and our obligations to international law.” He was indirectly responding to US secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s threat to sanction countries that opposed US efforts to reimpose sanctions on Iran. Riabkov said that Russia condemns the US intention to reestablish UN sanctions against Iran. He accused the US of tying the UN Security in knots with its “irresponsible enterprises,” and preventing the world body from undertaking a large contingent of questions relevant to its mandate. Nevertheless, he said, Russia would continue its dialogue with the US. China called the US move “illegitimate.” Beijing is preparing a wide-ranging program of investment in and trade with Iran valued at a mind-boggling $400 billion over 25 years, and clearly does not intend to allow Trump’s antics and Pompeo’s posturing to get in the way. Iran fully complied with the letter of the treaty until Trump breached it and imposed a financial and trade embargo on Iran that destroyed its petroleum industry and left it penniless. Europe was threatened with third party sanctions by the US Treasury Department and so was dragooned into going along with Trump’s blockade of Iran, much to the dismay of Tehran. Iran’s government can’t see why it should perfectly comply with a treaty when it has not only received none of the sanctions relief promised but has actually had much more severe sanctions imposed on it than when it had the full enrichment program. So, Iran has acted out a bit to pressure Europe, but in relatively minor ways. It wasn’t supposed to enrich higher than 3.67% but it went to 4.5%. This is a merely symbolic protest. You can’t do anything with 5% enriched uranium but use it for reactor fuel, same as 3.67%. The European members of the Security Council seem to me to be quite unreasonable in wanting Iran to remain in complete compliance even though they are complicit with Trump in destroying the Iranian economy. Where are Total S.A.’s and BP’s investments in Iran? What have the Europeans bought from Iran, as the standard of living of its people has plummeted under Trump’s tender mercies. Would France put up with being treated this way? Anyway, as with the vote last Friday in which the US could only find one ally (the tiny Dominican Republic) among the 14 other UNSC members for its resolution extending an arms embargo on Iran, so in this snapback move, Washington will go down to defeat. As for sanctions, the UN Security Council members likely believe that they only have to hold out until mid-January, and President Biden will rejoin the JCPOA, saving it and allowing them to jump into Iran trade and investments with both feet. |
John Oliver. (photo: HBO)
Juan Cole | John Oliver on Trump's Border Wall: 'Stupider Than I Thought Was Possible'
Adrian Horton, Guardian UK
Horton writes: "In the run-up to the 2016 election, John Oliver explained the destructive risks of then-candidate Trump's 'build the wall' sloganeering in a Last Week Tonight segment: it was 'transparently racist' as a mantra and both expensive and pointless as a policy. Four years later, Oliver returned to the subject on Sunday."
EXCERPT:
The new, 30-foot wall has disrupted animal migratory patterns and sliced up people’s land, “and the thing is, for what?” Oliver asked. “If this is about stopping drugs or people from entering the country, it’s worth remembering that most of that happens through our ports of entry.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general issued a report last month blasting the administration for not using a “sound methodology” in prioritizing investments along the border. In other words, said Oliver, “putting walls where we’ve been putting them just doesn’t make sense.” And that insanity costs money – “Mexico obviously is not paying for the wall,” said Oliver. “Instead, we are, and in the dumbest possible way.”
Only $5bn of the $15bn demanded by Trump for the wall was approved by Congress; to access the other $10bn, Trump declared a national emergency and tapped Pentagon construction funds meant to go to, among many other things, expansion of an overcrowded middle school on an Army base in Kentucky and critical repairs for a military daycare.
Nevertheless, the administration has continued to dole out massive contracts to wall-building construction firms, with the egregious example of North Dakota-based Fisher Sand & Gravel, whom Trump allegedly liked because the company’s owner, Tommy Fisher, frequently appeared on Fox News. Which makes sense, said Oliver – “Trump’s like a shut-in who sits at home all day and orders what he sees on Fox commercials. But instead of ordering LegendsXL male enhancement pills, he picks companies to build a giant wall across the southern border.”
Fished Sand & Gravel had some serious red flags: a federal lawsuit for sex discrimination, tax fraud charges, over 2,000 complaints from local, state and federal regulatory bodies, and 469 criminal charges for one asphalt plant in Phoenix.
Furthermore, Fisher Sand & Gravel linked up with a sketchy nonprofit called We Build The Wall – the same nonprofit which led to the arrest last week of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who prosecutors allege skimmed over $1m from the group.
But about $10m of the group’s supposed $25m crowdsourced haul went to Tommy Fisher’s company, which has built sections of wall on private property in New Mexico and along the Rio Grande in Texas that are already loose and likely to topple due to soil erosion, according to a ProPublica investigation.
“Fisher Sand & Gravel is a company with a checkered past, that partnered with a shady nonprofit whose backers are now under indictment for skimming money for their own use, in order to have a foreman who’s not an actual foreman help build a wall that looks like it’s going to collapse or get pushed over,” Oliver summarized. “And if you know anything about this administration, it will not surprise you to learn that Fisher has now wound up with over $2bn in border-building contracts.”
Should Trump be re-elected, this stupidity “is only going to accelerate,” said Oliver, noting that this is already happening; the administration has attempted to take private land by filing more eminent domain lawsuits during the pandemic than during any other time in his presidency, and has invoked a provision in a 2005 law to waive all legal requirements for construction, thus ignoring environmental regulations and or cultural heritage protections.
The devastation was predictable, said Oliver – “I know that, because we literally predicted it, but even I didn’t see some of this coming.” From the wall beauty contest to personalized bricks sold by Bannon’s scam charity, “all of this was stupider than I thought was possible.”
“Because the fact is: this wall is not a functional barrier. If anything, it’s a fucking monument to Trump,” Oliver concluded. “And there’s perhaps nothing more emblematic of his presidency than this wall – it’s destructive, pointless, ineffective, racist, weak and something that the damages of which we’re going to have to be dealing with for a very long time.”
A maquette of the proposed sculpture of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton with a list of other women who helped advance the cause. (photo: Glenn Castellano/New-York Historical Society)
Erin Thompson | The Banality of Evocation: How to Remember a Feminist Movement That Hasn't Ended
Erin Thompson, TomDispatch
Thompson writes: "On August 26, 2020, Alice in Wonderland will get some company. She will be joined in New York City's Central Park by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth, the first statues there of women who, unlike Alice, actually existed."
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Danielle Fuentes Morgan said she was asked to show identification in her own house by campus police officers who had followed her brother, Carlos Fuentes, to her front door. (photo: Danielle Fuentes Morgan/WP)
'I Wasn't Surprised. I Was Just Hurt': A Black Professor Says Police Demanded Proof She Lives in Her Own House
Teo Armus, The Washington Post
Armus writes: "It was still early on Saturday when Danielle Fuentes Morgan, a Black assistant professor at Santa Clara University, heard her brother knock on the door."
“I’m so sorry about this,” said Carlos Fuentes, standing on the sunny, palm-lined sidewalk across from the Northern California campus. “They’re demanding you come out and vouch for me.”
She didn’t need to hear more to understand what was happening. Standing right beside him was a campus police officer, who ordered Morgan to show her campus ID, prove she was on the faculty and that she did in fact live in the squat white bungalow she was already standing inside.
The “surreal” experience, Morgan, 36, told The Washington Post, shocked her and yet was an entirely predictable incident all at once.
“No one ever wakes up in the morning thinking that these things will happen,” the English professor said. But “being Black in America means there is an expectation that you have to show your papers, that you have to prove you are who you say you are and you belong where you say you belong.”
That Morgan was asked to do just that — on the idyllic Jesuit campus in Silicon Valley, where about 2 percent of the student body is Black and she is one of just seven Black faculty members — has rocked the tight knit school, bringing massive online attention to a county that recently declared racism a public health crisis.
In a letter to Santa Clara’s students and staff on Saturday, President Kevin F. O’Brien said he was “deeply sorry” about the incident, adding that “racial bias or profiling has no place on our campus.”
But Morgan said the incident was not any worse because of where — or to whom — it occurred. All Black people are too familiar with these kinds of experiences, she said, no matter their standing or accomplishments.
“There is no respectable enough. There is no articulate enough. There is no ‘enough’ that can protect you from this kind of trauma,” she added. “I wasn’t surprised. I was just hurt that it was taking place in this place that I love.”
A specialist in African American satire and comedy, Morgan had long dreamed of being a professor. While in college and graduate school, she especially looked up to Henry Louis Gates Jr., a celebrated Black Harvard literature professor whose texts on theory and criticism were often the first on her classes’ reading lists.
Like Gates, she told friends, she wanted her work to have an influence both within academia and in popular discourse.
A few years later, though, the Harvard professor attracted a very different kind of attention. Police officers in Cambridge, Mass., arrested him in 2009 as he was attempting to enter his own house, sparking a heated national debate on racial profiling that culminated in a “beer summit” at the White House.
A little more than a decade later, Morgan found herself in an on-campus situation eerily similar to what her academic icon experienced.
This weekend was supposed to be a reunion of sorts with Fuentes, her 32-year-old brother, a pianist, composer and music teacher who lives nearby in Sacramento. Although the two had made plans to see each other in the winter and early spring, the coronavirus pandemic had kept the siblings apart since Christmas.
Earlier this month, Fuentes was finally able to undergo a strict, 14-day quarantine and drive over to visit his sister and her husband. On Saturday morning, he left Morgan’s house for an 8:30 a.m. video call. Across the street on campus, he found a scenic outdoor spot, got out his books and laptop, and got to work.
Then, as Morgan recounted in a Twitter thread that went viral over the weekend, campus police officers approached Fuentes in the middle of his meeting and ordered him to move along.
“He’s been Black his whole life,” she wrote, “so he said ok.”
Four campus police cars then followed him to Morgan’s front door, where one officer — whom Morgan declined to identify — “very aggressively demanded” to see her campus ID.
The officer said her brother had been in the bushes and appeared to be homeless, telling Morgan, “[You need] to prove you are who he says you are and that you actually live here.”
Her husband, Matthew, who is White and works at Santa Clara’s marketing and communications office, joined in to push back. So did the officer’s supervisor.
“Well, it’s not your home,” the police told the couple. “The University owns it.”
Like others on the block, their house is owned by the university and leased out to early-career, tenure-track faculty, she told The Post. But when a neighbor left their house nearby to walk their dog that morning, the officers declined to ask them for ID, Morgan said.
Moreover, she added, the incident points to how Black students and faculty at Santa Clara have been disproportionately policed. In recent weeks, she told the police officers, White students on campus have been smoking marijuana up and down the street without masks and without incident.
O’Brien, the university’s president, said that campus safety officers would undergo racial sensitivity training and that he’s planning a schoolwide conversation on the incident. Santa Clara’s division of equity and social justice has also launched an investigation.
Yet Morgan said the implications of her Saturday morning go far beyond campus.
“It’s not extra sad or extra troubling because this happened to a college professor,” she said. “It’s explicitly sad because this should not be happening in the year 2020.”
Supporters react as Donald Trump holds a campaign rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (photo: Leah Millis/Reuters)
How Trump Let Covid-19 Win
German Lopez, Vox
Excerpt: "Trump's magical thinking couldn't beat the coronavirus. America is stuck with the consequences."
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A car crushed by debris from a building, damaged by the explosion on August 5 in Beirut, Lebanon. (photo: Marwan Tahtah/Getty Images)
After the Beirut Explosion, Disaster Capitalism Has Lebanon in Its Sights
Joseph Daher, Jacobin
Excerpt: "The explosion that devastated Beirut was an indictment of the parties that have misruled Lebanon for decades. Now, however, those parties are using the disaster as a pretext to deepen neoliberal policies, with French leader Emmanuel Macron and the IMF egging them on."
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The silhouettes of wind turbines at sunset on property used by EDP Renewables North America LLC's Lost Lakes Wind Farm in Milford, Iowa, on Sept. 15, 2016. (photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Tilting at Windmills: The FBI Chased Imagined Eco-Activist Enemies, Documents Reveal
Alleen Brown, The Intercept
Brown writes: "Federal and state law enforcement officers gathered in the Midwest in February 2019 to practice their responses to a fictional threat: wind farm sabotage."
At the wind energy industry’s behest, the FBI and DHS gamed out attacks against targets that they acknowledged face no threat.
They divided into four teams and pretended to be the bad guys, environmental saboteurs targeting the large grids of turbines that turn the wind into electric power. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Omaha, Nebraska, field office and the Iowa Division of Intelligence and Fusion Center had organized the “red hat” exercise, meant to provide insight into the minds of environmental activist adversaries that didn’t exist.
Each team developed an attack plan. One proposed ramming wind turbine infrastructure with a vehicle. Another sought to plant explosives on electrical transformers. And — although U.S. environmental saboteurs tend to not use guns — two of the teams suggested using firearms to attack electrical substations from a distance. The fact that cops themselves planned the attacks may have created a “bias toward the use of firearms,” the FBI later acknowledged in a pair of reports on the exercise obtained by The Intercept. However, the federal agents also concluded that “Environmental Extremists Likely Would Use Firearms To Circumvent Perceived Electrical Infrastructure Site Security Measures.”
The exercise was not conducted due to any imminent threat — a carefully noted fact included in the December 2019 and March 2020 reports. “Neither FBI Omaha nor the Iowa DOI/FC has intelligence suggesting environmental extremists intend to attack wind farms in Iowa,” both reports repeatedly state.
Why, then, spend public dollars on FBI role-playing? Because the energy industry wanted it. The exercise came “at the request of an USBUS private energy sector partner, following 14 environmental extremist attacks against transportation infrastructure in Iowa that services the energy sector, particularly oil pipelines,” said one of the documents about the exercise. Privately owned and operated companies and industry groups — none of which were named in the reports — were intimately involved in the exercise: An Iowa utility company and a wind energy lobbyist group provided information to help judge the fake attack plans and assess the fake “threat environment,” and an industry representative joined two of the teams, posing as an insider accomplice.
Though there was no indication an attack on wind power sites would occur, the report went on to say, if one hypothetically did, it could proliferate into many, with each set of attackers becoming more skilled in evading security and capture. “As attack methods become more sophisticated,” the report warned, “the chance for large-scale failure of the electrical grid becomes more likely.” Law enforcement ought to be on the lookout for activists undergoing gun training, activists in rural locations with large infrastructure, and activists casing wind power sites, the report advised. Neither the FBI, the Iowa Division of Intelligence and Fusion Center, nor the federal Department of Homeland Security, which helps coordinate regional fusion centers, responded to the Intercept’s questions about the documents.
The red hat exercise was the product of a national network of public-private law enforcement and security partnerships forged in the wake of 9/11. The Iowa fusion center is one of 79 intelligence hubs like it, designed to enhance coordination between federal and local police as well as select private sector players. Given their close collaboration with corporate partners, the centers serve as a vector for transmitting industry interests to law enforcement.
The reports on the joint wind power security exercise were obtained by The Intercept as part of BlueLeaks, a massive trove of law enforcement documents hacked from government web sites and published by the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets. The documents provide a detailed picture of how state, federal, and local law enforcement agencies have used the label “environmental extremist” to guide their policing. More than a dozen documents collected and disseminated by law enforcement fusion centers and reviewed by The Intercept describe the wild speculation, threat inflation, and close collaboration with the private sector inherent in law enforcement’s pursuit of eco-activists branded as extremists.
With industry encouragement and cooperation, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and local law enforcement agencies have long kept a wary eye on activists organizing against energy projects. Government officials have slapped the label of “environmental extremist” on individuals who have locked themselves inside oil and gas pipelines, turned off the valves controlling oil flow, or physically damaged construction equipment — as well as a range of people who have shared viewpoints or had contact with such activists. The moniker serves to place Indigenous and environmental defenders linked to relatively minor property damage or civil disobedience in a category alongside white supremacists conducting mass killings. Both are officially declared “domestic extremists” for the federal government’s purposes.
Information about such “environmental extremists” then gets shared, as it did in the wind power exercise, through the fusion centers, to both government officials and private sector partners. From the beginning, energy industry projects have received favored status and attention from the centers as “critical infrastructure.”
Brendan McQuade, a sociologist at the University of Southern Maine and the author of “Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision,” said he had never seen anything like the Iowa fusion center documents. “It’s paranoid threat inflation and a totally indefensible depoliticization of what might be the most important political question of our time, which is, What are we going to do about climate change? This erases that question and views anyone who is seriously committed to it as criminal.”
“I’m worried about the way this will polarize the struggle and justify aggressive responses to direct action,” he said.
Mike German, a liberty and national security fellow with the Brennan Center, who formerly worked as an FBI agent, added that the collaboration with the private sector serves to misplace public resources. “There are many entities out there that are at possible risk of some kind of criminal act. And yet you don’t see community groups who are at a threat of white supremacy being invited by the FBI to talk about how they can protect themselves,” he said. “They’re spending security resources on hypothetical threats against favorite entities while ignoring real threats against other communities or private entities.”
The Elusive “Environmental Extremist”
“Environmental extremism” is among a handful of categories of so-called domestic extremism — including “racially motivated violent extremism,” “anti-government extremism,” “animal rights extremism,” and “abortion extremism” — that the FBI monitors closely.
Who exactly are these eco-extremists? Under a section titled “environmental rights extremism,” a November 2019 reference guide to “violent extremism” published by the Colorado Information Analysis Center, a fusion center, and other state security agencies, which was released as part of BlueLeaks, lists a range of groups. Among others, they listed the animal liberation group Direct Action Everywhere, which has removed animals from factory farms in rescue actions, and the Earth Liberation Front, which had its heyday committing arsons in the ’90s. Also listed were East Boulder County United, a grassroots organization that promotes community consultation on oil and gas development; and 350 Colorado, the local chapter of a well-known national climate organization. Both groups have participated in and promoted nonviolent civil disobedience as a tactic to force public officials to appropriately address the climate crisis.
In a statement,Colorado Information Analysis Center spokesperson Micki Trost provided a justification for the labels, “We want to ensure that individuals have the opportunity to exercise their First Amendment rights in a safe and impactful manner,” Trost said. “We believe that information sharing on groups that have perpetrated crimes and disrupted peaceful protests helps local law enforcement better protect those that are lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights.”
According to an FBI and Department of Homeland Security document, “environmental extremists” primarily target the “extraction, use, and transportation of fossil fuels.” BlueLeaks documents from various regional fusion and homeland security centers, as well as other federal agencies, point to an array of fossil fuel industry opponents, including the climate direct action group Extinction Rebellion; the Oglala Lakota opponent of the Dakota Access pipeline Red Fawn Fallis, who remains imprisoned after being accused of firing gunshots during a struggle with law enforcement at a Standing Rock protest; Arctic drilling protesters who chained themselves to a ship in Washington; and anti-oil industry activists, who shut off a pipeline by turning a valve.
The only recent U.S. incident listed in the documents that resulted in loss of life involved Rory Gunderman, who, according to the South Dakota Fusion Center and Wyoming Criminal Intelligence Center, was associated with the movement Deep Green Resistance before he allegedly attempted to carry out a plot in 2015 to shut down the power grid. After police attempted to apprehend Gunderman, he took his own life.
Indeed, in various documents law enforcement agencies underline something that many environmental activists have themselves pointed out: Unlike other types of extremism, “environmental extremism” is aimed at property, not people. One bulletin published by the FBI and DHS noted the threat that such activists pose has decreased over the years and is lower than other types of extremism. However, their “desire” to commit crime “has not waned.”
Nevertheless, authorities are keen to view “environmental extremists” as a major threat. An FBI memo urges partner law enforcement agencies to coordinate with the Bureau on any incident involving environmental extremism. Federal agents, the memo says, are interested in who is training “environmental extremists,” in addition to knowing which purported extremists are involved in domestic or international criminal organizations, where they have traveled, and how they communicate.
And so law enforcement has continued to monitor activists’ activity, including through an online discussion forum, an environmental organization’s web site, and a bulletin that described how tactics utilized in the resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline could be repurposed against the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline in Minnesota, documents show.
To prepare law enforcement for encountering such alleged extremists, police attended trainings, including one offered in October 2019 by the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. According to one of the documents, a flyer, the training would be led by Steven Stanley, a “certified anti-terrorism specialist” working for the Sigma Group who planned to cover a remarkable range of “domestic terrorism topics.” His focus would be on ideologically left-leaning viewpoints, including “Global Anarchist Activity, Social and Global Justice Groups, Anti-War Activists/Militants, Anti-Nuclear Activists/Militants, Anti-Pipeline Activists/Militants, Anti-Police Movement, Antifa Movement (Antifascists), Animal Liberation Activists/Militants, Eco-Terrorism, Radical Environmental Groups, Radical Unions, [and] Protests Protest Activity/Dynamics.” Stanley also promised to show attendees a “private collection consisting of 40 years of radical books, magazines, patches, stickers, clothing, pictures, videos, DVD’S and much more.” Fifty-eight people registered for the course.
German, the former FBI agent, said that the result of so much attention on environmental activists is visible in police’s response to protests. “We’ve had a variety of unruly protests by armed, far-right militia groups that the police react to in a very calm manner,” he said. “And yet when you see a group of environmentalists or people who might look similar to the way environmentalists at a protest look, you see a hyper-aggressive police response, even though the level of violence coming from those groups is significantly lower.”
Comparing Pipeline Activists to Al Qaeda
In most of the fusion center documents revealed by BlueLeaks, it’s the language of “extremism” that suggests that law enforcement officers perceive a common thread between environmental activists and violent militants. One document, though, explicitly applied the lens the U.S. military used on groups like Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Iraq to community members opposing two natural gas pipelines in Virginia.
In September 2019, the Virginia Fusion Center issued a briefing titled “Criminal Environmental Groups Study and Adopt Militant Insurgent Strategies to Advance Goals in Virginia.” The Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley pipeline projects were in the midst of approval processes and under construction in the state at the time. A range of activists, environmental experts, and neighbors had organized to observe construction, file lawsuits, voice their dissent at public meetings, and hold protests — including a series of tree sits, where project opponents camped out in trees in the pathway of the pipeline.
The document concluded that “criminal environmental groups” organizing against pipeline construction would likely use the same four tactics as Al Qaeda: provocation, intimidation, protraction, and exhaustion.
Asked for comment, Virginia State Police Public Relations Director Corinne Geller explained to The Intercept: “This particular report was designed to provide regional law enforcement with an enhanced awareness of criminal activity that has been associated with various groups protesting environmental interests nationwide and worldwide. Sharing common tactics and strategies associated with criminal activity is invaluable to law enforcement agencies’ efforts to engage with and for the protection of local citizens/communities, as well as for the purpose of officer safety.”
Provocation was used by Al Qaeda, the fusion center report claimed, when militants destroyed the Al-Askari Mosque in Karbala, Iraq, in 2004 in an effort to set off a violent response in the majority Shia country toward the Sunni minority. (The mosque bombing actually took place in Samarra in 2006.) In turn, provocation, the document claimed, was also used by “criminal environmental groups” in 2016 in North Dakota, when private security contractors unleashed their dogs on Dakota Access pipeline opponents — the suggestion being that the Indigenous water protectors strategically incited the dog attacks to stir up conflict.
Insurgent groups use the tactic of intimidation, the document continued, by threatening violence against local community members who don’t submit to their cause. An individual associated with a “criminal environmental group” deployed a comparable tactic in Virginia, the document suggests, when they posted a comment on the Facebook page of a hotel that provided rooms to pipeline construction workers. “I hope that money lasts you for a lifetime because the people will be there every day making sure you never earn another dollar for the rest of your existence,” the comment said. The threat of protest was apparently comparable to a threat of physical violence.
The fusion center even quoted 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden describing his goal of exhausting the U.S. government by “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” Then it went on to note that “criminal environmental groups” would likely try to exhaust law enforcement and private businesses’ resources by building camps and distributing “extremist propaganda” to residents impacted by construction. Although the document title suggested activists were studying these tactics, the fusion center provided no evidence that was so.
In small print at the bottom, the fusion center wrote, “This document is not designed to compare criminal environmental groups to al-Qa’ida and associated movements” — despite the fact that it did exactly that.
The report repeatedly cited the book “The Accidental Guerrilla,” by David Kilcullen, a senior counterinsurgency adviser to the U.S. during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as a source. “Overall, in terms of content, the document doesn’t strike me as objectionable,” Kilcullen said when asked to comment on the document. “I am sure if they knew it was going to be leaked the authors might have framed the language differently, but it is an accurate reflection of how things work in these kinds of situations.”
In a recent article for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative Washington think tank where he is an adviser, Kilcullen argued that, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the U.S. might considered as being amid an “incipient insurgency.” He told the Intercept, “What’s perhaps a bit confronting is that people are now applying that logic to the United States — but the shocking thing is not that this is inaccurate, but rather that it’s now an increasingly accurate way of thinking about what’s happening on our streets and elsewhere.”
McQuade, the University of Southern Maine sociologist, said that, although this document was distinct from other fusion center documents he’s reviewed throughout his research, it shouldn’t be viewed as an aberration. “This is an insight into how security professionals view politics,” he said. “When your job is to defend the status quo at all costs, it isn’t a ridiculous overreach to apply a theory for defeating an armed movement in a developing country that has been in a civil war for decades against a protest movement in a country that isn’t at civil war.”
The danger, German said, was that law enforcement officers might unthinkingly take the document seriously. “I would put myself in the place of a brand-new police officer trying to protect his or her community, and not having a deep background in terrorism research, receiving this document,” German said. “Now anybody doing any activism in my community, I would automatically perceive as a threat — not just a threat of engaging in civil disobedience or vandalism but actually a terrorist threat.”
The fusion center claimed some individuals would be recruited into Virginia’s “criminal environmental groups” through what the unnamed author called “accidental guerrilla syndrome,” a process that leads someone who normally would not join an insurgent group to fight alongside one.
The proliferation of tree sits were signs that “accidental guerrilla syndrome” was already in the “contagion phase,” the document says. The memo pointed to Giles County, where tree-sitters with Appalachians Against Pipelines had gained support from neighbors, and Montgomery County, where a tree sit called Yellow Finch has been in place for two years. “If tree sits like these continue to develop, it may become more difficult for pipeline construction to continue and support for it may decrease,” the fusion center document concluded.
“If they can compare us to Al Qaeda, they can do anything to us,” said Dustie Pinesap, commenting from atop the Yellow Finch tree sit. “Last I checked we never picked up a Kalashnikov. We tend to see property damage or denial of use of property or any sort of damage or impeding of property rights as violent.”
Indeed, the document makes crystal clear that the fusion center conflated support for the projects with security. “Collaborative relationships between law enforcement and businesses, working with contractors or the energy companies may help identify criminal actors before violence or property destruction takes place,” the fusion center document says. It points to a suite of “counter insurgency strategies,” drawn from a Kunar Province road-building project in Afghanistan, that police — as well as the pipeline companies — could deploy to build community support.
“Organizations involved in pipeline construction” should consider “contracting local restaurants to provide lunch to pipeline workers each day,” the fusion center advises, in order to “spread economic engagement across the community.” Similarly, implementing the Kunar road’s “10 kilometer rule,” hiring workers within a certain radius of the construction zone, could “provide local residents a sense of pride and connection to the project.”
The pipeline companies might even consider a “youth employment campaign,” the publicly funded fusion center suggested. “If such a project was implemented in local Virginia communities, families would not support outside groups, individuals, or local opposition groups that hinder their children’s economic and skill gaining opportunities, much like the Afghan communities that rejected the Taliban and al-Qa’ida in their attempts to delay and disrupt the Kunar Road project because it directly affected their livelihood.”
“The constituency is clearly the private sector,” said McQuade, highlighting that the document’s goal did note even seem to be to protect the broader community that may be ambivalent about pipeline construction. “Those people are just pawns whose support needs to be won.”
German sees the fusion centers as captured by corporate PR campaigns seeking to portray themselves as victims of extremist violence. “Many of these are multinational corporations —they’re not even necessarily U.S. corporations — yet law enforcement seems to favor protecting them over their own communities,” German pointed out. “How many fusion center reports have we seen that document environmental damage done by criminal actions or negligent actions of corporations? Those are also criminal — those are within the jurisdiction of these law enforcement agencies — and arguably cost a whole lot more in economic damage to these communities than somebody turning a valve on a pipeline. Yet that’s not where we see law enforcement resources being spent.”
Law Enforcement Goes Don Quixote
Despite the comparisons to Al Qaeda and the descriptions of widespread monitoring of activists, several fusion center documents acknowledge that environmental defenders pose little threat to people — or even property. But intelligence analysts still had plenty of guesses about what might spark “environmental extremists” to commit so-called violence, defined to include property damage.
“Media attention given to related issues, such as exotic game hunting, may compel some individuals who had not been associated with the extremist movements to make threats of violence or commit other crimes,” a 2016 FBI report suggests.
The arrests of high-profile activists could also push people over the edge. When Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek were arrested last October for using a welding torch to poke holes in the Dakota Access Pipeline, the FBI and DHS assessed that “it is possible environmental extremists may commit criminal acts potentially destructive of critical infrastructure, such as property damage, to express solidarity with those arrested in the near term.” However, the document adds, there existed “no specific targeting or threat information” suggesting that this was actually true.
In the eyes of some intelligence analysts, even Covid-19 provided potential spark for environmental extremism. A daily intelligence briefing by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Interagency Counterterrorism Task Force provided analysis about how “Europe’s terrorists” might take advantage of the pandemic. “The Covid-19 outbreak could also lead to a rise of violent actions by the hands of environmental extremists. Economic difficulties, a lack of public support, and more urgent needs might thwart advances in the global warming agenda and interrupt green investments by national governments,” the document states. “Moreover, having witnessed the immediate environmental benefits due to radical actions like a global lockdown and economic disruption, eco-activists could be triggered to resort to violence.”
German framed much of the speculation as noise. “One of the problems with the buildup of these intelligence reporting platforms and the information sharing environment that was built after 9/11 was that they hired all these analysts who aren’t given a very specific mandate on what to report,” he explained. “They’re measured by the number of reports. After you’ve written about one problem in the criminal justice system, you run out of things to write about.”
Ultimately, the wind energy exercise in Iowa was inconclusive. The attacks might happen, or they might not: “Based on the Red Hat exercise, FBI Omaha and the Iowa DOI/FC estimated that, as wind energy projects become more common, there is a roughly even chance that attacks against wind energy assets in Iowa by environmental extremists will occur.” Even in the face of that analysis, though, the FBI declined to back down from its hypothesis: “The FBI’s official assessment is environmental extremists possibly will increase their criminal activity against the industrial wind industry.”
If anything, Germain said, the FBI’s foray into attacking windmills was counterproductive. “It is just dangerous for the FBI to be brainstorming ways for groups to attack private companies, putting that on paper, and then putting it in systems where it can leak out,” he said. “They created a security situation. This is a blueprint for how to attack wind turbines, and it doesn’t come from any terrorist group, it comes from the FBI.”
Down the road, police learning to view environmentalists as saboteurs could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “It’s creating a likelihood that when there are more confrontations over energy infrastructure,” McQuade said, “that the response will be extremely punitive and will escalate the struggle.”
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