Letters to the Editor
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Intentions and civil disobedience--an opportunity
I've posted several letters here noting the unconstitutionality of using environmental intention by the government as a (direct or indirect) sentence enhancer or as an excuse for spy techniques.
But the government is handing a new tactic to people interested in real and effective civil disobedience.
Civil disobedience is an appeal to a higher law (like the constitution) or authority (like religious or other moral system) by breaking a lower law. That law may either in itself be a contradiction to the higher law or be a valid law (eg against trespass) that in turn supports the targeted activity. Effective civil disobedience can't really be covert--it depends on people going to jail as a way to pit their consciences against the powers enforcing the targeted law. Skillful civil disobedience puts its people in jail for the smallest offenses that maximally illustrate its cause.
This arson was ineffective in two ways: It didn't really stop the targeted activity. It didn't really focus on attention on the activity. And it required a large offense (arson of an expensive facility) with a moderately small ethical statement.
The government, by stressing the environmental intentions of the arsonists, is in fact doing much of the work they should have done themselves. It is stressing that they were not out for personal gain, but risking their freedom for what they thought was good for society.
But the arsonists are dumb because they never had to burn the building down at all nor serve sentences for arson per se. If INTENTION is itself a crime, then they need only make feeble real efforts to burn the building down. Or, to block its use. They needed to publicize their intentions, make it clear their environmental motivations, provoke the authorities into jailing them for those environmental intentions, and then use the trials and jail sentences as their platforms.
The government, by using language like "ecoterrorism" and unconstitutional methods in pursuing and prosecuting environmentalists is handing those same environmentalists a huge tool. If they only knew how to use it. The model should actually be the tree-sitting protests that worked, not the Weather Underground covert violence that doesn't.
And maybe that's why the feds are targeting Briana Waters for special treatment. They are more afraid of her association with tree-sitters than with arsonists.