Open in TheBrain

PROPERTY

7/20 triggered by secret police violence and surveillance in the name of protecting buildings from grafitti

but see pvt prop rights used by anti-greens for years, w/ legal fdns

in bill of rights, my property cannot be taken or searched

right calls burning trash in street or breaking a window violence.

corp person says a corp = person/human; "violence" equates stuff w/ ppl [slavery ppl = property]

material goods are how i demonstrate i am a winner (smart and hard work/virtue god's favor) vs those poor POC lazy sinful losers, so OK to use FORCE to protect (gets?!) stuff, and call destruction of stuff violence

now secret spy and police justified by protecting fed property (or even a rebel statue not owned by feds):

==

kyle in kenosha goes to defend PROPERTY



MMA

September 3, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five

JESSE WATTERS (HOST): The problem is, you know, this is Western civilization. This is Europe here. We have lost the connective tissue between the United States and Europe. We are now the true beacon of freedom, and we can't lose what we have in Europe. We have to cradle it. We have to nurture it, because if it dies and that flame is extinguished, that's a huge problem for the West, when you see China coming up, when you see the Muslims start to rise up. This culture and this tradition of freedom and liberty and property has to be maintained, and if it's not, bad things are going to happen not just here, to the entire world.

---


mta email 2 25

property in const POCLAD

The U. S. Constitution: Pull the Curtain


===

FASHY

September 25, 2024, edition of Fox News' The Five

GREG GUTFELD (CO-HOST): Let's not forget, there is a story to be told about January 6th. It's -- days before it, Trump met with senior Pentagon officials with a directive to protect property and people, and -- including using the National Guard, and it was ignored. This is a contradiction of the DOD IG report, so people need to know that. If you're going to ask questions about that, you know -- the whole commission was designed for this election. It was all designed for this. And they've squeezed the juice out of this lemon. Now it's time to squeeze the commission. Put those jerks behind bars.

===


an 1 23

https://www.alternet.org/american-politicians/

Our political class does not govern. It entertains. It plays its assigned role in our fictitious democracy, howling with outrage to constituents and selling them out. The Squad and the Progressive Caucus have no more intention of fighting for universal health care, workers’ rights or defying the war machine than the Freedom Caucus fights for freedom. These political hacks are modern versions of Sinclair Lewis’s slick con artist Elmer Gantry, cynically betraying a gullible public to amass personal power and wealth. This moral vacuity provides the spectacle, as H.G. Wells wrote, of “a great material civilization, halted, paralyzed.” It happened in Ancient Rome. It happened in Weimar Germany. It is happening here.

Governance exists. But it is not seen. It is certainly not democratic. It is done by the armies of lobbyists and corporate executives, from the fossil fuel industry, the arms industry, the pharmaceutical industry and Wall Street. Governance happens in secret. Corporations have seized the levers of power, including the media. Growing obscenely rich, the ruling oligarchs have deformed national institutions, including state and federal legislatures and the courts, to serve their insatiable greed. They know what they are doing. They understand the depths of their own corruption. They know they are hated. They are prepared for that too. They have militarized police forces and have built a vast archipelago of prisons to keep the unemployed and underemployed in bondage. All the while, they pay little to no income tax and exploit sweatshop labor overseas. They lavishly bankroll the political clowns who speak in the vulgar and crude idiom of an enraged public or in the dulcet tones used to mollify the liberal class.

Donald Trump’s seminal contribution to the political landscape is the license to say in public what political decorum once prohibited. His legacy is the degradation of political discourse to the monosyllabic tirades of Shakespeare’s Caliban, which simultaneously scandalize and energize the kabuki theater that passes for government. This burlesque differs little from the German Reichstag, where the final cri de coeur by a mortally ill Clara Zetkinagainst fascism on August 30, 1932, was met with a chorus of taunts, insults and jeers by Nazi deputies.

H.G. Wells called the old guard, the good liberals, the ones who speak in measured words and embrace reason, the “inexplicit men.” They say the right things and do nothing. They are as vital to the rise of tyranny as are the Christian fascists, a few of whom held the House hostage last week by blocking 14 rounds of voting to prevent Kevin McCarthy from becoming Speaker. By the time McCarthy was elected on the 15th round, he had caved on nearly every demand made by the obstructionists, including permitting any one of the 435 members of the House to force a vote for his removal at any time, thus guaranteeing political paralysis.

The internecine warfare in the House is not between those who respect democratic institutions and those who do not. McCarthy, backed by Trump and far-right conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, is as morally bankrupt as those trying to bring him down. This is a battle for control among con artists, charlatans, social media celebrities and mobsters. McCarthy joined the majority of House Republicans in support of a Texas lawsuit to void the 2020 Presidential result by preventing four states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia — from casting electoral votes for Biden. The Supreme Court refused to hear the lawsuit. There isn’t much in the Freedom Caucus extremist positions, which resemble those of Alternative fur Deutschland in Germany and Fidesz in Hungary, McCarthy doesn’t embrace. They advocate greater tax cuts for the wealthy, further deregulation of corporations, a war on migrants, more austerity programs, champion white supremacy and accuse liberals and conservatives who do not line up behind Trump of treason.

“I want you to watch Nancy Pelosi hand me that gavel. It will be hard not to hit her with it,” McCarthy said in audio posted to YouTube by a Main Street Nashville reporter in 2021. Pelosi, for her part, called McCarthy a “moron,” after he said that a possible renewed mask mandate was “a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state.” This is what passes for political discourse. I yearn for the time when political rhetoric was geared to the educational level of a 10-year-old child or an adult with a sixth or seventh-grade education. Now we speak in imbecilic clichés.

This political vacuum has spawned anti-politics, or what the writerBenjamin DeMott called “junk politics,” which “personalizes and moralizes issues and interests instead of clarifying them.” Junk politics “maximizes threats from abroad while miniaturizing large, complex problems at home. It’s a politics that, guided by guesses about its own profits and losses, abruptly reverses public stances without explanation, often spectacularly bloating problems previously miniaturized(e.g.: [the war in] Iraq will be over in days or weeks; Iraq is a project for generations).”

“A major effect of junk politics — its ceaseless flood of patriotic, religious, macho and therapeutic fustian — is to pull position after position loose from reasoned foundations,” DeMott noted.

The result of junk politics is that it infantilizes the public with “year-round upbeat Christmas tales” and perpetuates the status quo. The billionaire class, which has carried out a slow motion corporate coup d’état, continues to plunder; unchecked militarism continues to hollow out the country; and the public is kept in bondage by the courts and domestic security agencies. When the government watches you twenty-four hours a day, you cannot use the word “liberty.” That is the relationship between a master and a slave. The iron primacy of profit means that the most vulnerable are ruthlessly discarded. Supported by Republicans and Democrats, the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates to slow economic growth and increase unemployment to curb inflation, exacting a tremendous cost on the working poor and their families. No one is required to operate under what John Ruskin called “conditions of moral culture.”

But the second result of junk politics is more insidious. It solidifies the cult of the self, the amoral belief that we have the right to do anything, to betray and destroy anyone, to get what we want. The cult of the self fosters a psychopathic cruelty, a culture built not on empathy, the common good and self-sacrifice but on unbridled narcissism and vengeance. It celebrates, as mass media does, superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and an inability to feel guilt or remorse. This is the dark ethic of corporate culture, celebrated by the entertainment industry, academia and social media.

The essayist Curtis White argues that “it is capitalism that now most defines our national character, not Christianity or the Enlightenment.” He assesses our culture as one in which “death has taken refuge in a legality that is supported by both reasonable liberals and Christian conservatives.” This “legality” ratifies the systematic exploitation of workers. White excoriates our nationalist triumphalism and our unleashing of “the most fantastically destructive military power” the world has ever known with the alleged objective of “protecting and pursuing freedom.”

“Justice, under capitalism, works not from a notion of obedience to moral law, or to conscience, or to compassion, but from the assumption of a duty to preserve a social order and the legal ‘rights’ that constitute that order, especially the right to property and the freedom to do with it what one wants,” he writes. “That’s the real and important ‘moral assessment’ sought by our courts. It comes to this: that decision will seem most just which preserves the system of justice even if the system is itself routinely unjust.”

The consequence is a society consumed by excessive materialism, pointless soul-destroying work, suffocating housing developments closer to “shared cemeteries” than real neighborhoods and a license to exploit that “condemns nature itself to annihilation even as we call it the freedom to pursue personal property.”

The billionaire class, for the most part, prefers the mask of a Joe Biden, who deftly broke the freight railway unions to prevent a strike and forced them to accept a contract a majority of union members had rejected. But the billionaire class also knows that the goons and con artists on the far right will not interfere in their disemboweling of the nation; indeed, they will be more robust in thwarting the attempts of workers to organize for decent wages and working conditions. I watched fringe politicians in Yugoslavia, Radovan Karadžić, Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tudjman, dismissed by the political and educated elites as buffoons, ride an anti-liberal wave to power in the wake of widespread economic misery.Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Citibank, Raytheon, ExxonMobile, Alphabet and Goldman Sachs will easily adapt. Capitalism functions very efficiently without democracy.

The longer we remain in a state of political paralysis, the more these political deformities are empowered.As Robert O. Paxton writes in “The Anatomy of Fascism,” fascism is an amorphous and incoherent ideology. It wraps itself in the most cherished symbols of the nation, in our case, the American flag, white supremacy, the Pledge of Allegiance and the Christian cross. It celebrates hypermasculinity, misogyny, racism and violence. It allows disenfranchised people, especially disenfranchised white men, to regain a sense of power, however illusory, and sanctifies their hatred and rage. It embraces a utopian vision of moral renewal and vengeance to coalesce around an anointed political savior. It is militaristic, anti-intellectual and contemptuous of democracy, especially when the established ruling class mouths the language of liberal democracy but does nothing to defend it. It replaces culture with nationalist and patriotic kitsch. It sees those outside the closed circle of the nation-state or the ethnic or religious group as contaminants who must be physically purged, usually with violence, to restore the health of the nation. It perpetuates itself through constant instability, for its solutions to the ills besetting the nation are transitory, contradictory and unattainable. Most importantly, fascism always has a religious coloring, mobilizing believers around rites and rituals, using sacred words and phrases, and embracing an absolute truth that is heretical to question.

Trump may be finished politically, but the political and social decay that created Trump remains. This decay will give rise to new, perhaps more competent, demagogues. I fear the rise of Christian fascists endowed with the political skill, self-discipline, focus and intelligence that Trump lacks. The longer we remain politically paralyzed, the more certain Christian fascism becomes. The January 6 mob assault on the Capital two years ago, the polarization of the electorate into antagonistic tribes, the economic misery afflicting the working class, the rhetoric of hate and violence, and the current dysfunction in the Congress is but a glimpse of the nightmare ahead.



property is sub-human:

11 21 no lnx

AA] Pastor tells congregation 'the best person to rape is your wife'

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement November 23, 2021

A Seventh-day Adventist pastor told his Bronx, New York congregation that wives belong to their husbands, as property, and they must "submit" themselves to their husbands, even if that means being raped by them.

"Wives, you must submit to your husbands," Pastor Burnett Robinson said, as shown in the video below.

"I would say to you gentlemen, the best person to rape is your wife," he added in his November 13 sermon, as Religion News Service reports.

"In this matter of submission, I want you to know upfront ladies, that once you get married, you are no longer your own. You are your husband's. You understand what I'm saying? I emphasize that because I saw in court the other day on TV where a lady sued her husband for rape. And I would say to you gentlemen, the best person to rape is your wife. But then it has become legalized."

RNS notes that "Robinson was apparently preaching from a passage from the New Testament's Letter to the Ephesians, in which the Apostle Paul says, 'Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.'"

A Change.org petition with over 1100 signatures is calling for Robinson's resignation.

The Grand Concourse Seventh-day Adventist church has apologized and placed the pastor on leave, according to its website. Robinson has led that church as senior pastor since 2013.

This author will not post the video directly, but it can be seen here.


521 raw an

Some members of a rural Wisconsin community wanted to demonstrate a commitment to inclusion during the racial protests last year, but the debate over how to express that has ripped the town apart.

Older white conservatives in Marathon County, whose 135,000 residents are 91 percent white and backed Donald Trump by more than 56 percent in each election, objected to naming theresolution "No Place for Hate," which they found too inflammatory, and the county board's executive committee shot down "A Community For All" last week with a 6-2 vote, reported the *New York Times*.

"They're creating strife between people labeling us as racist and privileged because we're white," said supervisor Arnold Schlei, a 73-year-old retired veal farmer and longtime board member. "You can't come around and tell people that work their tails off from daylight to dark and tell them that they got white privilege and they're racist and they've got to treat the Hmongs and the coloreds and the gays better because they're racist. People are sick of it."

The proposed resolution grew out of the protests over George Floyd's police killing, with the county's people of color wanting an acknowledgement that they faced some disparities based on race -- but conservatives have been whipped into a froth by local GOP chairman Jack Hoogendyk, who claims it would "end" private property and lead to "race-based redistribution of wealth."

The resolution, of course, would not do those things, but even acknowledging the existence of racism in the community is too much for some residents.

"[Systemic racism] doesn't exist here," said dairy farmer James Juedes, a public opponent of the resolution who's also organized counter protests against Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

"I have yet to recall any type of racial instances that has been reported in this community that has caused any type of stress," Juedes said.

La'Tanya Campbell, a 39-year-old Black social worker who was at the meeting last week, related a different experience. Ms. Campbell works as an advocate for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking, and said she sometimes had to enlist white colleagues to help clients find apartments to rent in Wausau.

"Typically, the racism you experience is behind closed doors, but since I've started on this resolution I can't believe some of the things that I'm hearing," Campbell said. "You feel unsafe being a woman, I feel unsafe being a Black woman, and doing anti-oppression work, it adds up."

The experience has been crushing to non-white residents, who say they're disappointed in their conservative neighbors for seemingly turning their backs -- or worse.

"I don't have the same type of confidence or faith in the community like I used to," said supervisor Ka Lo, a 39-year-old of Hmong descent who fielded death threats during the debate. "I was born and raised here, and I don't recognize the community that I grew up in right now."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB


right whataboutism gaza air strikes (but also lots of pll/kids killed)


Back in 1928 — the year in which Republican Herbert Hoover was elected president of the United States and the start of the Great Depression was only a year away — a typo occurred with a written opinion by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Pierce Butler, who was quoted as using theword "property" when he meant to say "properly." But journalist Adam Liptak, in an article published by the New York Times on October 18, stresses that Butler's typo lived on for many years despite a correction.

"The mistake appeared in a slip opinion issued in 1928, soon after the Court announced a decision in a zoning dispute," Liptak explains. "It contained what seemed like a sweeping statement about the constitutional stature of property rights."

Initially, Butler's opinion read, "The right of the trustee to devote its land to any legitimate use is property within the protection of the Constitution." But what Butler meant to say was, "The right of the trustee to devote its land to any legitimate use is properly within the protection of the Constitution."

Liptak notes that although a correction was made, the typo wouldn't go away.

"The wrong version of the statement has appeared in at least 14 court decisions, the most recent of which was issued last year; in at least 11 appellate briefs; in a Supreme Court argument; and in books and articles." Liptak observes.

Butler, who was born in Minnesota in 1866, was a Democrat but was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by a Republican, President Warren G. Harding, in 1922 — the year before Harding died of a heart attack in office and Vice President Calvin Coolidge was sworn as president. Butler remained on the High Court until his death in 1939 at the age of 73.

Michael Allen Wolf, a University of Florida law professor, discussed the possible results of the 1928 typo with the Times.

According to Wolf, "It is a real word. It makes sense in context. And it changes the meaning."

Wolf said that it is impossible to know whether or not the typo affected the outcome of any cases.

Wolf told the Times, "We'll never know the answer to that, though if we have judges who favor the private property owner at the expense of the government, I think it could be more than just icing on the cake."

Liptak points out that the typo promoted "one view of property rights."

Wolf told the Times, "It gave an additional argument to the private property rights movement, and they have been very successful almost every time in pushing new theories. And this is a big one, because it supports the almost commonly held notion that you have a right to do on your property what is reasonable. That's not the way it works. The way it works is that the government has the right to place reasonable restrictions on your use of property. I know it's subtle, but that's a big difference."


https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/pope-calls-on-global-community-to-confront-destructive-effects-of-empire-of-money/

no lnx

Pope calls on global community to confront 'destructive effects of empire of money'

Julia Conley and Common Dreams October 05, 2020

In his third encyclical Sunday morning, Pope Francis denounced free market capitalism and the "magic" theory of trickle-down economics, saying the coronavirus pandemic has once and for all disproven the notion that economic policies that are aimed at benefiting the already-rich will benefit low-income people through job creation and investments.

The 45,000 word document, titled "Fratelli Tutti" meaning "Brothers All" or "Brothers and Sisters All," indicated the pope's belief that the pandemic has shown that a major overhaul of global economic systems is needed, as the crisis has disproportionately affected the poor in countries including the U.S., Brazil, and the U.K.; revealed thedivide between low-income workers all over the world who have had limited access to government aid and professionals who are able to work from home; and caused the "most unequal" recession in modern U.S. history.

"Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality," Pope Francis said.

"Thefragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom," the encyclical continued.

The document implicitly rebuked conservative and neo-liberal views in the U.S. and other wealthy nations. In the U.S., the pandemic has so far eliminated low-paying jobs at eight times the rate of high-wage jobs, and Republican leaders in the Senate have scoffed at Democrats' proposal to continue the $600-per-week unemployment benefit introduced in March, despite evidence that it had a measurable positive impact on poverty levels in the United States for several months this year. Instead, the GOP has prioritized protecting corporations from liability should their employees contract the coronavirus after returning to work.

Previous economic crises, such as the recession in 2008 and 2009, have ultimately "increased freedom for the truly powerful, who always find a way to escape unscathed," Pope Francis remarked. Now, he said, society must confront "the destructive effects of the empire of money."

Those with economic power must "administer it for the good of all" rather than hoarding wealth, he said, suggesting that this applies both to individual countries like theU.S.—where a recent analysis by the People's Policy Project showed that nearly 80% of wealth is currently owned by millionaires and billionaires, who make up just 12% of the population—and to the global community, where leaders of developing countries recently asked if their populations will be "left to die" after the U.S., Russia, and Brazil refused to commit to a global effort to make a Covid-19 vaccine available to all.

Private property cannot be considered a right if a select few in a society live in luxury while others have nothing, the pope added.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, a spiritual writer and leader of the Poor People's Campaign in the U.S., interpreted Pope Francis's words as a call for an "international Poor People's Campaign."

"There seems to be no place for popular movements that unite the unemployed, temporary and informal workers, and many others who do not easily find a place in existing structures," said the Pope.

Rev. Dr. William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, thanked the popefor "calling the church to stand with poor people's movements around the world" in the midst of the pandemic and beyond.

==


https://theintercept.com/2020/08/24/fbi-fusion-center-environmental-wind/

fEDERAL AND STATE law enforcement officers gathered in the Midwest in February 2019 to practice their responses to a fictional threat: wind farm sabotage. 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.

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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.

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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 2019reference 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 Securitydocument, “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, wasassociated with the movement Deep Green Resistancebefore 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.

Protesters gather in front of San Francisco City Hall during a protest in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline on March 10, 2017.

Photo: Joel Angel Juarez/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

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, AntifaMovement (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 Strategiesto 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.”

Related
How a Movement That Never Killed Anyone Became the FBI’s No. 1 Domestic Terrorism Threat

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 theFoundation 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.

State and local law enforcement monitor an anti-pipeline protest site to make sure that no attempts are made to give protesters food or water. The pipeline opponents are occupying trees high above the ground outside Roanoke, Va., to protest the Mountain Valley Pipeline Project on April 2, 2018.

Photo: Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images

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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aha: pvt property sacred unless a pipeline and/or esp both native american rez

https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/07/21/three-percenters-militia-bakken-oil-oneok-domestic-terrorism

no lnx pix twt quite long

Whose Allegiance? Three Percenters Militia Working in Bakken Oil Patch Raises Concerns of Domestic Terrorism Risk

By Justin Nobel • Tuesday, July 21, 2020

The Three Percenters, a loosely organized group of far-right militants, appear to have established a significant presence in North Dakota’s Bakken oilfield, one of the most productive oilfields in the nation. “There is a lot of membership in the oil and gas industry up there,” says Matt Marshall, a Three Percenter running for state legislature in Washington. “The fact that you have a lot of Three Percenters working in the oilfields of North Dakota is not surprising.”

The Three Percenters are so named for the dubious historical claim that only three percent of American colonists took up arms in the Revolutionary War. Their adherents have frequently been involved with incidents of ?armed protests, hate speech, and ?threatening behavior across the U.S., and the group’s members have shown up prominently at recent protests related to both pandemic response measures and police brutality.

In April, Marshall, wearing a colonial tricorn hat with bullets strapped to the side, and a Hawaiian shirt, helped lead a coronavirus stay-home order protest at his state’s capitol in Olympia, Washington. Hawaiian shirts are described by the Anti-Defamation League as a coded reference to coming civil war, although Marshall denies the link.

He says he is aware of Three Percenters who are working in oilfields in Colorado, Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Alaska. And also according to Marshall, top officials with two North Dakota chapters, the North Dakota United Patriots Three Percenters and North Dakota Three Percenter Originals, work in the oil and gas industry.

“We are mostly blue-collar workers who want to put in a hard day’s labor, support our family, pay a limited amount of taxes to get the services we require and at the end of the day be left alone,” says Marshall. “I don’t think there is any concern about having a bunch of threepersworking in that industry,” referring to an alternate name for the group.

But points of significant concern emerged in a multi-month DeSmog investigation that involved interviews with former Department of Homeland Security and FBI officials, and local residents of North Dakota, who live in a state still pumping out more than a million barrels of oil a day.

According to a whistleblower who contacted DeSmog, Three Percenters have established a prominent presence at a Bakken oil and gas facility regarded as critical infrastructure by the Department of Homeland Security. Militia-related patches, flags, and artwork have popped up across the Bakken oil patch, and a thriving gun culture among its workers has led to a Mad Max-mentality of chaos plaguing residents of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.

While federal security agencies and their partners have prioritized focus on the energy industry and produced a raft of reports in the past two decades on other risks to the nation’s critical infrastructure, such as cyber security, natural disasters, and environmental activism, right-wing militia groups appear to be escaping close scrutiny.

“It certainly seems like a security vacuum,” Michael German, a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice, told DeSmog when informed about our reporting. German is a former FBI special agent who specialized in domestic terrorism and covert operations. “The FBI characterizes itself as a domestic terrorism agency and has been outspoken about prioritizing ecoterrorism as a threat, which is ridiculous because there are no deaths with any of the environmental threats,” he said. “Yet somehow there does not appear to be an attempt to find out what the infiltration is of anti-government militia groups, and that is problematic.”

At the same time, state legislators across the country, backed by the notoriously ultra-conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, have been devising laws to target environmental activists as terrorists.

“The FBI’s approach of de-emphasizing investigations of white supremacist and right-wing militia violence while targeting resources at social justice movements and calling that extremism has existed for some time,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Security Project.

“What militias like this do is conduct surveillance and find facilities they will either need to take over or attack when ‘shit hits the fan.’”

It’s an approach that continues to play out at this very moment. In the midst of protests against the police killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans, President Trump has fanned the flames with tweets about “shooting” looters, calling MAGA supporters into action, and saying he intends to designate the amorphous leftwing anti-fascism movement Antifa as a terrorist organization.

Meanwhile, reports of right-wing militia members bringing weapons to protests allegedly in order to transform this moment into civil war have surfaced online. On May 31, Marshall’s group sent perhaps a dozen members to a small town north of Seattle in response to rumors of an Antifa threat that never materialized. And neo-Nazis, through online networks, have suggested to followers that with police forces spread thin, the present moment would be an ideal one to strike energy infrastructure targets.

DeSmog’s investigation indicates a culture of guns and paranoia has worked its way deep into the heart of America’s third richest oilfield.

Domestic Terrorism Experts Troubled by Militia’s Oilfield Presence

Paul Lehto is a 54-year-old former plant operator at the Lonesome Creek Gas Processing Plant, outside Watford City, North Dakota. During his tenure there in 2016, he says coworkers would “talk about automatic weapons all the time,” gather in common spaces to watch social media videos that featured demonstrations of people firing sub-automatic machine guns, leave articles of clothing with Three Percenter insignia lying around the workplace, and regularly wear the militia’s notorious patches, which typically contain the Roman numeral III, sometimes placed over a darkened American flag. During one conversation, he says a coworker spoke about hijacking a commercial jet.

Although Lehto says the comment may well have been in jest, it conveyed a “habit of thinking” that was worrisome and was part of his decision to eventually leave his job at the natural gas processing plant. “The constellation of issues around being a Three Percenter was probably the number one topic of conversation at work,” says Lehto. “These guys are basically supportive of the idea of some sort of eventual civil war in the United States of America.”

Paul Lehto

Paul Lehto, a ONEOK gas plant employee from 2015 to 2016, shown in 2019. Credit: DeSmog]

Daryl Johnson, an expert on right-wing militia groups who from 2004 to 2010 served as the Department of Homeland Security’s senior domestic terrorism analyst, told DeSmog that this was the first information he has received of right-wing militia presence in the oil and gas industry. He was deeply alarmed.

“These are operationally minded people with a paranoid worldview that believe at some point there is going to be a societal collapse,” said Johnson, who authored the 2012 book, Right-Wing Resurgence: How A Domestic Terrorist Threat Is Being Ignored. “What militias like this do is conduct surveillance and find facilities they will either need to take over or attack when ‘shit hits the fan.’ When they are working, they are also thinking about what else they would need to do to bring the plant to its knees. They may follow the order of their commander or act on a lone wolf instinct, and their allegiance lies not with their employer but with the militia, although they might think they are doing something righteous and good for the country.”

Lehto says that during the day shift, more than half of the 20 to 25 workers stationed at Lonesome Creek would either be wearing Three Percenter regalia and openly supportive of the militia, or be workers that he considered to be sympathizers. Three Percenters came to work there from North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Texas, says Lehto.

“I heard one Three Percenter expressing frustration and astonishment that HR did not hire his recommendation for a fellow Three Percenter, saying, ‘He is qualified, he has a great resume, and he is a Three Percenter, I just don’t understand why they turned him down,’” says Lehto. “Implied was that he had prior success with this.”

On the night shift Lehto managed the $600 million plant with just two other workers, one of whom was an active Three Percenter, the other a sympathizer. “I was just being constantly reminded of the Three Percenter presence,” says Lehto.

Protester at a confederate memorial in Louisiana waves a Three Percenter flag]

New Orleans, August 19, 2017. A man waves a Three Percenter flag as counter-protesters and protesters clash at the conclusion of the march organized by Take ‘Em Down NOLA,” an event held in solidarity with Charlottesville, days after the deadly Unite the Right rally. Credit: ©2020 Julie Dermanksy]

“I find it concerning that it is not just one, or two, or three, it is more like half the plant that are Three Percenters or supporting them rhetorically,” says Johnson. “There is a threat capability calculation we use in intelligence —capability plus intent equals threat,”he continued. “The Three Percenters definitely have capability, and they definitely have made their intent known, and the fact that they have access is even more concerning. Having the insider knowledge of how that plant operates, where that gas comes from and where it is going is all information an adversary can use for maximum threat and maximum damage. They can sabotage the plant or pipelines running from it, which may not cause a lot of deaths but can disrupt the energy supply.”

Furthermore, added Johnson, “There is also a counterintelligence threat. They have intel on critical infrastructure that, shall the need arise, they can share with people who don’t need to know.”

A 2008 Department of Homeland Security report on insider threats to critical infrastructure says insider motivations can come from, “some combination of: revenge for a perceived wrong; radicalization for advancement of religious or ideological objectives; or simple illicit financial gain.” Companies who run infrastructure like energy pipelines may misunderstand insider risks and have a financial incentive to downplay them. “Insider incidents can cause lost credibility with shareholders, employees, and customers, and negatively effect to [sic] shareholder values,” the report states. “It appears corporate leadership neither completely appreciates the risk nor realizes the potential consequences.”

The Lonesome Creek plant is operated by the Oklahoma-based oil and gas service company, ONEOK, and came online in 2015 to process the growing surge of natural gas and natural gas liquids being pumped from the booming Bakken oilfields. The plant, like all gas processing plants, is considered “critical infrastructure” by the Department of Homeland Security.

This designation goes back to the Patriot Act of 2001, which defines the term as “systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters.”

ONEOK headquarters in Tulsa, OK

ONEOK is headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Credit: Joseph Wingenfeld, CC BY 2.0]

A risk assessment of the Lonesome Creek Plant by ONEOK says a “worst-case scenario” would involve “a release of 368,536 pounds of flammable mixture” from a large storage tank and generate a wave of destruction more than a half-mile in radius.

While the risk assessment states that ONEOK has “numerous controls to prevent such releases and to manage their consequences,” they are not described in the document. Silverio Caggiano, an Ohio Fire Chief who works regularly with the oil and gas industry and has more than two decades of experience related to Hazardous Materials and Weapons of Mass Destruction, laid out reasons for continued concern. “You would need to have a pretty good background in chemistry to do something specific with a certain gas based on its properties, but if you’ve got a bunch of guys there that are all in cahoots and they decide they want to take shit out, they can pretty much do anything they want,” said Caggiano. “A person working within the system knows how the system runs.”

“From a security standpoint the Three Percenters are probably among the most worrisome groups … it is not whether there will be a right-wing attack, it is when.”

In replies to specific questions by DeSmog, ONEOK did not describe what the “numerous controls” were at the Lonesome Creek facility intended to prevent a “worst-case scenario,” nor did the company respond to requests to speak with present workers at the plant. “ONEOK expects all of our employees to know and abide by our company policies and to embrace the company’s core values of Ethics, Quality, Diversity, Value and Service,” the company explained, in a statement to DeSmog. “ONEOK’s Violence-Free Workplace Policy prohibits violence, violent acts, and threats of violence. ONEOK has implemented numerous safety and security practices to safeguard our facilities and to comply with applicable law. Clearly, the scope and nature of many of these practices and safeguards must remain confidential. We support, cooperate, and frequently coordinate with federal, state, and local law enforcement to anticipate and plan for potential security events. Furthermore, ONEOK has worked with several state legislatures to enact legislation to protect energy infrastructure from hostile actions.”

But Michael German, the Brennan Center for Justice fellow and former FBI special agent, pointed out that this legislation is typically enacted with environmentalist protest groups in mind, not militia-minded employees.

The American Legislative Exchange Council has crafted a “model” bill based on Oklahoma’s HB 1123, which calls for citizens to receive a felony sentencing, $100,000 fine, and/or 10 years in prison if their actions “willfully damage, destroy, vandalize, deface, or tamper with equipment in a critical infrastructure facility.” The bill has been replicated across the country including in Ohio, Alabama, Kentucky, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Iowa, where reporting by DeSmog in 2018 revealed that corporate backers included Koch Industries, the American Petroleum Institute, and many other oil and gas and pipeline companies.

People opposing the Dakota Access pipeline gather at Standing Rock in North Dakota, December 4, 2016.

Opponents of the Dakota Access pipeline gather at Standing Rock in North Dakota, December 4, 2016. Credit: Joe Brusky, CC BY-NC 2.0]

The FBI told DeSmog that the agency meets frequently with members of the private sector to make them aware of potential threats and to provide information on how to enhance their security.

“We have no comment on threats to specific industries or any groups,” said an FBI spokesperson. “Our focus is not on membership in particular groups but on individuals who commit violence and criminal activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security. The FBI can never initiate an investigation based solely on an individual’s race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or the exercise of First Amendment rights.” 

However such statements go against research done by the ACLU, which unearthed records indicating that in the early 2000s the FBI targeted environmental groups, animal rights groups, and anti-war groups in a way that violated their First Amendment rights. A review of these episodes, published in 2010 by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General, concluded that while the FBI did not target groups for investigation based on First Amendment activities, the basis for opening some of the investigations for certain individuals was “factually weak,” the FBI “extended the duration of investigations involving advocacy groups or their members without adequate basis,” and “in a few instances the FBI improperly retained information.”...

The government’s apparent lack of attention on the issue is of concern to other watchdogs. “The U.S. government increasingly acts like a tool of fossil fuel companies and oligarchs,” Basav Sen, Director of the Climate Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive Washington, D.C. think tank, wrote last October. He added, “the slide into extractivist authoritarianism in the U.S. is part of a worldwide trend.”

Sen pointed to a number of issues that promoted a linkup between the fossil fuels industry and the far right. Each group favors a hands-off approach to government meddling and regulation. And in a trend that has become more pronounced under the Trump administration, with its constant mention of the nation’s newfound fracking-led oil and gas dominance, support of the fossil fuels industry has been promoted as patriotic duty. Oil and gas industry workers are made to feel they are part of a great mission, says Sen, and those who critique them, such as pipeline protesters or climate marchers, are sworn enemies, or even terrorists. This enables the federal government to place individuals on watchlists and, as seen with Indigenous-led protests at Standing Rock and elsewhere has helped to encourage a dangerous operating environment in which federal law enforcement has relied on outside groups, including actual militia members, to help with security work and law enforcement.

“As we head toward a renewable world and fossil fuels become less competitive, it makes perfect sense that the global elite and fossil fuels industry will turn to the far right, whether indirectly or directly, for protection,” says Sen. “The fossil fuels industry is going to need escalating levels of subsidies to survive, and one form of subsidy is this massive tax-funded private security force.”

Perhaps nowhere has the use of mercenary-like private security forces been more heavily employed than against Indigenous communities in the United States.

“If you throw a Three Percenter patch on you can stand in a government building with an assault rifle all damn day and nobody will bother you.”

Michael German, the former FBI agent and security expert, says this is already occurring.

“What we saw in North Dakota during Standing Rock is groups organized as professional companies doing security work for law enforcement agencies,” says German. “This is quite troubling. Furthermore, there have been situations, such as happened at a rally in 2017 in Portland, where militia members have actually been caught on film helping Department of Homeland Security officials arresting counter protesters.”

Tensions with Oilfield Workers at the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation...


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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/1151617/

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) authorized domestic surveillance to identify threats against monuments and statues in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting vandalism against federal memorials, according to a department memo obtained by Lawfare.

The document, issued by the DHS Office of Intelligence & Analysis, described “Activities in Furtherance of Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, Statues and Combatting Recent Criminal Violence.”

The document says DHS personnel are “collecting and reporting on various activities in the context of elevated threats targeting monuments, memorials and statues.” It also provides legal guidance on the “expanded intelligence activities necessary to mitigate the significant threat to homeland security” posed by threats to statues.

Senior DHS official Ken Cuccinelli appeared to refer to intelligence gathering on protests during a Monday interview with CNN.

“We got intelligence about planned attacks on federal facilities,” he said in response to questions about the administration’s controversial deployment of federal authorities to Portland. “If we get the same kind of intelligence in other places about threats to other facilities or officers, we would respond the same way.”

But the memo “makes clear that the authorized intelligence activity covers significantly more than just planned attacks on federal personnel or facilities,” wrote Benjamin Wittes, a Lawfare editor, and Steve Vladeck, a national security law expert at the University of Texas School of Law. “It appears to also include planned vandalism of Confederate (and other historical) monuments and statues, whether federally owned or not.”

The document provides legal guidance to personnel detailing what kind of intelligence collection is appropriate. The document was issued after Trump signed an executive order on June 26 reasserting that the federal government would prosecute “any person or any entity that destroys, damages, vandalizes or desecrates a monument, memorial or statue within the United States or otherwise vandalizes government property.”

The order directed Attorney General William Barr to work with local law enforcement to pursue investigations and prosecutions of alleged monument and statue vandals “regardless of whether such structures are situated on federal property.”

Though the order was “widely mocked for not doing anything” since a 2003 statute already made it a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison to damage any “any structure, plaque, statue or other monument on public property commemorating the service of any person or persons in the armed forces of the United States,”Wittes and Vladeck wrote, the DHS appears to be “interpreting the June executive order as defining a new homeland security priority — one that actually justifies intelligence collection.”

The document says the legal guidance is “specific to expanded intelligence activities necessary to mitigate the significant threat to homeland security articulated in the president’s executive order of June 26, 2020.”

It specifically authorizes personnel to “engage in physical surveillance, the use of mail covers and the use of monitoring devices only to the extent permitted by and consistent with [rules limiting their use to counterintelligence investigations].”

“I&A personnel are not permitted to engage in electronic surveillance or unconsented physical searches,” it adds. “Use of these techniques within the United States will be coordinated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

This means, Wittes and Vladeck wrote, that protesters can “reasonably expect that there will be ongoing DHS collection and analysis of public source information” and likely the social media posts of demonstrators.

The document states that this intelligence collection is authorized in response to threats of violence and threats to damage government facilities. But it also adds that it can be used in response to “threats to damage or destroy any public monument, memorial or statue (MMS).”

The memo clarifies that the surveillance cannot be used “for the sole purpose of monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment or the lawful exercise of other constitutional or legal rights, or for the purpose of suppressing or burdening criticism or dissent.” Officials must “establish reasonable belief” that the intelligence collection supports one of the stated missions.

“You may collect information about (i) threats to MMS; (ii) individuals or groups that pose such threats, or their tactics, techniques or procedures (TTPs); and (iii) information that otherwise informs an overall assessment that threats to MMS will materialize,” the memo says, adding that “persons merely engaging in non-violent protest activities near MMS or making hyperbolic statements about MMS likely do not constitute a threat to MMS.”

A “‘threat to MMS’ means the infliction of any damage sufficient to impede the purpose or function of the MMS,” the memo continues.

The document goes on to add that any information collected which does not relate to one of the stated missions must be purged within 180 days. Information retained by the agency can be disseminated to other federal, state and local law enforcement in advance of any of the stated missions.

The memo drew concerns from legal experts.

“It is unpersuasive, because it should be obvious that vandalism and other damage to monuments, even federal monuments, does not threaten the security of the homeland to any greater extent than most property crimes,” Wittes and Vladeck wrote. “The premise is alarming, because it uses the cover of minor property damage, whether to federal property or otherwise, to justify intelligence gathering against ordinary Americans — most of whom have nothing to do with the underlying property damage, and many of whom are engaged in the most American of activities: peacefully protesting their government.”