Crying Wolf: The Campaign to Brand all Animal Rights Activists as 'Terrorists'
Press Action
Sunday, July 01, 2007
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/brienza07012007/
Let there be no mistake: the federal prosecution of the SHAC7 is an attack on everyone who militates for the ideals of democracy, rights, freedom, and justice. As such, all those fighting for progressive causes of any kind should come now to SHAC’s defense. - Steven Best
How many people has the group Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty killed? How many people has SHAC tortured? How many people has SHAC bombed? How many people has SHAC kidnapped? How many people has SHAC imprisoned?
None.
And yet Gigi Brienza, in an op-ed in the July 1 Washington Post, lets out a big sigh of relief because most of SHAC’s “leaders are in federal prison, convicted of employing terror tactics and harassment in its animal rights campaign.”
Brienza breathlessly chronicles how SHAC found her name in election donation records and noticed that she worked for Bristol-Myers Squibb, a huge pharmaceutical company that had contracted with Huntington Life Sciences, a animal testing laboratory. Her name and address, Brienza says, “appeared on a list of ‘targets’ issued by” SHAC.
In the op-ed, Brienza notes that in 2005 the FBI named SHAC “as one of the most serious domestic terrorism threats.” She closes her piece by saying she’ll limit her contributions in the future so her name and address don’t show up on federal election donor records. That’s “the cost of security in an age of domestic terrorism,” she concludes.
What happened to Brienza as a result of her name allegedly appearing on this SHAC list of “targets”? Was she killed or tortured? Was she maimed in a bombing? Was she kidnapped or imprisoned as a result of her work for a company that did business with a company that tortured animals?
No.
It appears that she wasn’t even contacted by someone, who may have found her name and address on SHAC’s Web site, urging her to do whatever she could to get Bristol-Myers Squibb to end its relationship with Huntington Life Sciences.
“Luckily, SHAC’s members didn’t find me and I stayed safe,” Brienza writes.
I don’t know the circumstances behind Brienza’s op-ed appearing in the Washington Post. Did she send the piece to the Post unsolicited? Is someone on the Post’s staff a friend of hers? It seems very strange that the Post would run an op-ed about the risks involved in donating more than $200 to political candidates when nothing happened to the author as a result of giving money to John Edwards and Ralph Nader during the 2004 presidential election cycle.
The Post’s decision to publish Brienza’s op-ed is one more example of how the major media is a pack of hypocrites who love to beat the drum for expanded police powers at all levels of our government. Let’s see if the Post provides equal time to the SHAC7. They’re the activists currently in federal prison for an aggregate of 23 years for engaging in a nonviolent campaign to shut down Huntington Life Sciences.
University professor and animal rights activist Steven Best writes:
”When the U.S. government actually protects and underwrites animal exploiters and demonizes animal activists like SHAC as ‘terrorists,’ it places an added responsibility on all activists to speak truth to power: the true criminals are corporations that needlessly torment animals unto their deaths, and a government that defends those corporate interests while systematically violating its own Constitution and the right to free speech.”
Best also notes that SHAC “reports on violent actions taken by individuals in groups such as the ALF or Revolutionary Cells and it posts home addresses and personal information of HLS employees or affiliates. But SHAC does not advocate violence against anyone, certainly not in any manner that incites immediate and imminent criminal actions.”