Accusés d'incitation au terrorisme

[Animal 0]

Parce qu'il dénonce sur son site Internet les tortures infligées aux animaux dans des laboratoires, un jeune homme et 5 autres activistes accusés d'incitation au terrorisme.
David serait sûrement intéressé par cet article
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Mon Mar 13, 2006
Subject: U.S. terror hunt targets animal activists woofeywalkers


Toronto Star
THOMAS WALKOM

Kevin Kjonaas set up a website with details about businesses that use animals
for research information, and now he and five other activists have been
convicted of inciting terrorism

TRENTON, N.J.—Kevin Kjonaas is an unlikely casualty of George W. Bush's war
against terror.

No one, including the U.S. government attorneys who just finished prosecuting
him for so-called animal enterprise terrorism, says that the 28-year-old
Minnesota native killed anyone — or even hurt anyone.

He's never planted a bomb or sent anthrax through the mail.

The government doesn't claim Kjonaas damaged property — or knowingly provided
material assistance to anyone who did.

"I've been an ass," Kjonaas acknowledged days before a Trenton jury found him
guilty of inciting terrorism. "Some of the things I've done have been just rude,
and I wouldn't do them again. But am I legally responsible (for the crimes the
government accused him of)? No."

However, earlier this month, Kjonaas and five others ranging in age from 27 to
31 became the first people convicted under a 1992 U.S. law — significantly
beefed up after 9/11 — that defines as terrorists those who damage firms
involved in the animal business.

Along with another case in Oregon, this one involving radical environmentalists,
the New Jersey trial marks a significant step forward in the Bush
administration's decision to bring the war on terror home for use against those
it views as its new domestic enemies.

"This is just the starting gun," says David Martosko, research director of the
Center for Consumer Freedom, an organization funded by the U.S. restaurant
industry and a fierce opponent of animal rights.

He says the government should move against more mainstream organizations like
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals or the Humane Society of the United
States, which he calls "the farm teams for the eco-terror problem."

Curiously, for a case with such serious implications, none of those convicted in
Trenton is alleged to have carried out any of the substantive crimes laid out in
the indictment — from property damage to intimidation.

Prosecutors didn't provide evidence they knew the perpetrators or had ever
communicated directly with them. Rather, the six were convicted of running an
Internet site that allowed others access to information that could be used in
crimes.

They call themselves the SHAC Six, after the acronym of their animal rights
group — Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty.

They could be called the Internet Six.

Animals arouse strong and contradictory passions. We fuss over pet dogs and weep
when, as happened in Toronto recently, a police horse is hit by a car.

Yet we support laws that legalize, and in some cases require, the killing of
animals.

In both the U.S. and Canada, federal laws demand that virtually all new
pharmaceuticals be tested on animals.

The active ingredients of household products, such as cleansers or cosmetics,
are also routinely tested on animals, although in Canada at least there are no
statutory requirements.

Usually, the animals are killed afterwards so that autopsies can be performed.

It's a big business. George Goodno, spokesman for the Washington-based
Foundation for Medical Research — an organization set up to promote the
virtues of animal testing — estimates the U.S. industry alone is worth
hundreds of millions of dollars. "One (genetically modified) mouse can cost
$10,000," he says.

And that's just on the testing side. The animal business also includes farmers,
slaughterhouses, restaurants, furriers and ranchers.

All of which helps to explain the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, an otherwise
inexplicable U.S. law that singles out property crimes against businesses that
use animals and treats them more seriously than similar offences against other
organizations.

Passed in 1992, the law was initially viewed as one of those quirky American
statutes that make for good politics but difficult jurisprudence.

But then two things happened.

First, radical animal rights protestors changed their tactics. No longer content
to liberate animals held in labs and mink farms, they mounted sophisticated
public campaigns against firms involved in animal testing.

To the alarm of the animal industry, some of these campaigns were successful.

The second was 9/11. After September 2001, anything labelled terrorism was
anathema in America.

In mid-2002, under industry pressure, Congress quietly strengthened the animal
enterprise protection act. Without formally changing its name, legislators also
began to refer to it routinely as the "animal enterprise terrorism act."

In 2004, a senior FBI official told a congressional subcommittee that animal
rights and environmental militants had become "the most active criminal
extremist elements in the United States."

Like much of the militant animal rights movement, SHAC started in England.
Founded in 1999, it was aimed at Britain's biggest animal research firm,
Huntingdon Life Sciences.

A video aired on television that showed some Huntingdon employees deliberately
abusing test animals gave the campaign particular piquancy. By 2001, protestors
had driven the firm almost to bankruptcy.

Not all of the militants' tactics were peaceful. In one celebrated instance, two
men beat Huntingdon's managing director with baseball bats.

While SHAC denounced the attack, this beating — as well as instances of
threats, vandalism and firebombing — added a disturbing aura of thuggery to
its protest.

Far more damaging to Huntingdon, however, were SHAC's successful attempts to
persuade other companies not to do business with the firm. Tactics ranged from
boycott threats to protests staged outside the homes of employees.

By 2001, after losing its major bank lender, its broker and many of its
customers, Huntingdon fled across the Atlantic.

SHAC followed too.

Kjonaas, already an animal activist, had come across the SHAC campaign while
visiting England. On returning home, he and a few others set up SHAC-USA Inc.
which, like its English parent, was remarkably successful in convincing firms
and financiers not to do business with Huntingdon.

The protestors' biggest coup occurred last year when, at the last minute and
without explanation, the New York Stock Exchange refused to list Huntingdon on
its big board.

"It's become almost impossible to trade our shares," Mike Caulfield, general
manager of Huntingdon's U.S. operations told the Star.

At the Trenton trial, witnesses testified that SHAC-USA neither organized nor
controlled the anti-Huntingdon demonstrations. Rather it acted as an information
clearing house.

Details of anti-Huntingdon protests were usually e-mailed to SHAC-USA which
would put them on its website. Similarly, home addresses for corporate officers
and other employees of target companies would be posted. Gleaned from public
sources such as annual reports and phone books, they would include a disclaimer
saying SHAC-USA advocated only legal protest.

Still, there were problems.

A legal home protest might involve a vanload of demonstrators arriving outside
an employee's residence to scream insults and pass out leaflets accusing the
target of killing puppies.

In some cases, the strategy involved targeting people with only the most
roundabout relationship to animal testing.

Amy Hessler, a patent agent for a company that did business with Huntingdon,
testified that until her home was picketed she had never heard of the firm.

"I was scared for my life," she said. At times, demonstrators would pound on her
door and shout obscenities or phone her anonymously to ask why she abused
animals.

And that was the second big problem for SHAC. Regardless of its website
disclaimer, some people — never identified — did engage in acts that were
clearly illegal. Most notable was the bombing in 2003 of a California drug firm
that did business with Huntingdon. While it caused no injuries, there was
considerable property damage.

To the Trenton jury, other examples raised in court may have been even more
disturbing.

Insurance executive Sally Dillenback testified she received an anonymous email
asking how she'd feel if her 7-year-old son were treated like a Huntington lab
animal and had his stomach slit open to be filled with poison.

Eventually, Dillenback's company, Marsh USA, dropped Huntingdon as a client.

In person, Kevin Kjonaas seems quite unlike the fire-breathing radical described
by prosecutors. Slight and soft-spoken, he remains unfailingly polite as a
reporter quizzes him, over dinner, on the animal movement's tactics and his role
in them.

"I still think residential picketing is a good idea," he says. "It's been done
for ages. Look at Cindy Sheehan (the U.S. peace activist who held a vigil
outside of Bush's ranch). But not all of it is appropriate right now and not all
of it is savoury."

Recalling Dillenback's testimony, he sighs.

"If I had to do it over again, I'd censor more of those Web postings and be less
aggressive and confrontational, so that no one could perceive us as a threat,
only as an embarrassment.

"We want to put pressure on those people (involved in animal testing) but we
don't want them to think their children are going to be abducted. That's
ridiculous... The tone and tenor need to change, not just from a PR perspective
but because we represent a noble cause...

"The American public supports violence at times," he goes on, picking at his
vegetarian curry. "But the animal rights movement is not at the stage now where
violence or the rhetoric of violence is appropriate... It's not even close."

Perhaps what is most puzzling about both this case and another getting underway
in Oregon is the sheer amount of government energy expended.

True, animal and environmental radicals have claimed responsibility for actions
that destroyed property worth tens of thousands of dollars.

The Foundation for Biomedical Research calculates illegal acts by animal and
environmental extremists have increased 1,000 per cent over the past decade. But
even so, the absolute numbers (82 incidents in 2005) remain miniscule.

FBI spokeswoman Cathy Milhoan says there have never been any deaths or injuries
in the U.S. attributable to animal rights or environmental terrorism.

By comparison, radical right-wingers killed 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City
bombing. Since then, according to a Southern Poverty Law Center report, police
have uncovered 60 more right-wing plots, including plans to assassinate judges,
bomb synagogues and destroy mosques.

In 2000, the head of Pittsburgh's tiny Free Market Party killed five and
critically wounded a sixth. Three years later, a neo-Nazi videotaped himself
firebombing a synagogue.

Yet in spite of this, as the Alabama-based law centre points out, the U.S.
government has decided the radical right presents little or no threat.

And the FBI says illegal activities of the extreme right have been eclipsed by
the "special interest terrorism" of the animal rights and environmental
movements.

Meanwhile, Kjonaas and his fellow defendants await sentencing. The SHAC-USA
websites have been shut down. A proposed law would make it easier for the FBI to
electronically eavesdrop on animal and environmental groups, and more difficult
for groups to mount campaigns against companies.

It's not clear what difference any of this makes.

Another organization, Win Animal Rights has taken over the anti-Huntingdon
protests. "The train has left the station," says Pamelyn Ferdin, a Los Angeles
animal rights activist recruited to formally run SHAC after Kjonaas was
indicted.

"When activists see above ground people getting put in jail, they're just going
to get mad."

[animo-aequoanimo 0]

Un article qui m'avait échappé. Je vais le transmettre à David. Je venais justement de lui transmettre celui sur les vessies.

[hop 0]

Tuesday, June 14, 2006

Yesterday, the SHAC 7 appeared in court in Trenton, New Jersey, for their
motions for a new trial to be heard and to discuss a sentencing date.

Their motions were denied, and a new sentencing date has been set. Sentencing will be September 12, at the federal courthouse in Trenton, New Jersey.

Each of the defendants are looking at several years (some up to 11 years!) in prison.


http://shac7.com/defense.htm