Police Trained to Treat Keystone XL Protesters as 'Terrorists' (View TransCanada's Powe... - 0 views
www.alternet.org/...tivists-anti-terrorist-statues
surveillance state corporatist government keystone pipeline
shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Jun 13
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It’s often difficult to gauge just how much fear activists instill in the powers that be. But on Wednesday, environmental activists protesting the Keystone XL pipeline saw firsthand how much TransCanada, the corporation in charge of the pipeline, is shaking in its boots. Bold Nebraska, a grassroots landowner advocacy group, obtained TransCanada's presentation slides (below) via a Freedom of Information Act request to the Nebraska State Patrol. These slides revealed that TransCanada provided training to both federal and local police forces on how to crack down on environmental activists, even going so far as to train them to arrest the activists under anti-terrorism statutes.
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Lauren Regan, legal coordinator for Tar Sands Blockade and executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center said, “This is clear evidence of the collusion between TransCanada and the federal government assisting local police to unlawfully monitor and harass political protestors.”
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Another slide lists all of the laws the activists can supposedly be found violating, and a presentation suggests that the activists are planning “terrorist acts,” and can thus be charged via anti-terrorism statutes
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According to the presentation, there are eight signs of terrorism, including “surveillance,” “suspicious persons” and “terrorism funding.”
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Well, now we know that it ain't just the IRS harrassing conservatives. This is all very reminiscent of the situation in the 80s, when New Right activists successfully prompted federal, state, and local police to investigate anti-herbicide activists as "marijuana growers" and touted a propaganda line that environmentalism was a plot funded by the KGB to overthrow the U.S. government. Unfortunately, there were too many Reagan Administration appointees who believed it. The result: a Presidential declaration of "War on Drugs" and a national surveillance program of environmental activists instigated under cover of that program.