Video provided by the United
States Humane Society shows a Chino, Calif., slaughterhouse worker
prodding a downer cow with a forklift, an act that helped spur an
overhaul of the state's animal welfare laws. Animal rights groups are
under attack for using such images as part of their investigations into
alleged animal abuse. New documents suggest that some such
investigations may violate animal enterprise terrorism laws.
(AP/Humane Society of the United States)
LA Times
The
FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force has recommended for many years that
animal activists who carry out undercover investigations on farms could
be prosecuted as domestic terrorists.
New documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by
activist Ryan Shapiro show the FBI advising that activists – including
Shapiro – who walked onto a farm, videotaped animals there and “rescued”
an animal had violated terrorism statutes.
The documents ... were
issued by the Joint Terrorism Task Force in 2003 in response to an
article in an animal rights publication in which Shapiro and two other
activists (whose names were redacted from the document), openly claimed
responsibility for shooting video and taking animals from a farm. The
FBI notes discuss the videotaping, illegal entry and the removal of
animals, then concludes with “there is a reasonable indication that
[Subject 1] and other members of the [redacted] have violated the Animal
Enterprise Terrorism Act, 18 USC Section 43 (a).”
The penalties for
such a conviction can include terrorism enhancements which can add
decades to a sentence. “It’s simply outrageous to consider civil
disobedience as terrorism,” Shapiro [said]. “Civil disobedience is not
terrorism. It has a long and proud place in our nation’s history, from
Martin Luther King to Occupy Wall Street, and the [Animal Enterprise
Terrorism Act] takes that kind of advocacy that we celebrate from the
civil rights movement and turns it into a terrorist event.”
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