Letters to the Editor
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Why isn't Salon writing about innocent poor Americans who are suffering?
Given the horrible economy, with working poor, long term un and under employed American citizens facing homelessness, and experiencing it given their jobs being outsourced, and others are being displaced. They and their children facing real hunger, deprivation. Citizens diagnosed with more cases of malnutrition than during the great depression. Citizens dying because they are denied much needed health care, it seems obscene for Salon to treat Briana Waters as some kind of victim, or poster child of those treated unjustly.
She is affluent (you can't live in Berkeley unless you are), has had every opportunity.. given the real suffering that exists among her fellow Americans, there were options for activism based on need, rather than extremist ideology. While Waters and those like her fiddle with ELF and Earth First, poor citizens suffer demeaning and immoral deprivations. Their human and civil rights are violated and ignored.. but clearly some, like Briana Waters stands out as more worthy a candidate for discussion?
Frankly, I don't care if she's tossed away for 20 years. There are working poor Americans who worked hard, struggled to provide a roof over their childrens heads, food on the table, for an opportunity for their children to have things a little better than they did, to go to college, yet so called "progressive" elites can't be bothered to care about the humanity of the poor in their own backyard.. who are slipping through the cracks, forced to be the ones to continuously pay for the caprice of clueless leftists who could care less. Perhaps because they are more concerned with their investments, and that forthcoming third world junket they have planned?
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Given the definition...
Yes. She's using violence to try to "persuade". Yes, this isn't "9/11 comparable"; but violence and threats of violence to attempt to force a populace to enact certain actions against their will = terrorism.
If you disagree, then maybe being beaten until you change your mind would help? Or having your possessions destroyed one by one until you change your mind?
Oh, that'd be wrong, it'd be like blackmail, using violence like that to attempt to force an opinion change. Not persuading people of the right/wrongness of an action, but persuading them that changing is easier than living with the repercussions (and violent acts) that disagreeing would bring.
Using and threatening violence, and encouraging and increasing the violent acts to attempt to forcibly sway a populace without debate into caving in to demands. I dunno, maybe it's just arson, reckless endangerment, and blackmail (of the general populace rather than an individual).
Well, that's terrorism in a nutshell. And a stupid persuasion methodology to boot. People generally don't feel the need to agree with violent thugs...
"There's a question of whether burning property is really the equivalent of flying a plane into a building and killing humans."
So either 9/11 is the low end of "terrorism" and anything must be as bad or worse to deserve the label; or this is a pointless semantic argument. Is there also a question of whether using violent acts to attempt to blackmail a populace is a crime?
Seriously, can we at least agree on that one?
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Blowback From the War on Drugs
While the Feds could no doubt have come up with some snazzy variations on the terrorist statutes after 9/11, much of the idea of prosecuting conspiracies and getting people to roll on each other is a direct result of all the practice they get conducting the Drug War.
The Feds (and now state prosecutors) have honed this style of prosecution to a science. Without it, they would never have been able to successfully convict the millions imprisoned for drug offenses.
Prosecutions at all levels have become a gotcha numbers game with greater emphasis on the size of the score than on justice.
For the most part, "terrorist" statutes are dangerous, with many unintended consequences still to come. Arson is a crime. Blowing up buildings is a crime. Crashing airplanes into buildings is a crime. Killing people is a crime. They should be prosecuted as such, with due diligence and seriousness, not an eye toward publicity and ambition.
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Yes...
she is a terrorist...even for "just" being a lookout. Much in the same way that a man who finances a group of relatives/countrymen who live in the US and attend flight school is a terrorist when those nice clean-cut young men decide to use them as over-sized weapons. Oh, I'm sorry, I thought we were still talking in hyperbole. No? Okay. To act those Briana Waters is a victim of over-zealous, post-9/11 fury only further trivializes the agrument made by some for are (admittedly) eroding civil liberties. Let's discuss the issues where truly innocent people are being subjected to less than pleasant (if not illegal) treatment. Leave the pity for someone worthy.
What if the building had been occupied? What if the professor's research would have allowed us to repopulate the devastated rain forest with indigenous plant life? Your story's victim is no victim at all. It's like the ELF members who burn housing development or vandalize construction sites with spray paint. How exactly are you saving the environment? Surely not from the hydrofluorocarbons released into the atmosphere with that spray paint, not to mention the additional toxic fumes released in the fires. Those people are more twisted than the Edwards advocating the plight of the impoverished. Hyporcites living happily in denial. And Tracy Tullis should be ashamed for espousing if not advancing the same strategic principles she despises in the same article, using fear to accomplish your goals. There is no more a big brother out your window, than there is a terrorist next door. And thank God that if the latter is true, hopefully so is the former, protecting you.
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2 years ago we saw a house
15,000 sqft, 3 kitchens, 6 car garage. If anything was worthy of being torched, fully occupied, that was.
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Briana Waters Innocence Or Guilt...
...does not change the fact that law enforcement in this country is completely out of control. From street cops to prison guards, from prosecutors to judges, the whole system is rotting. It has become a playground for morally and materially corrupt miscreants who themselves, in too many cases, belong behind bars.
But this is an older story than you might think. William Kunstler said a year a two before his death in '95 that he was gravely concerned about justice in America. "Prosecutors have become arrogant and corrupt," he said. "It's a serious problem, and I know for a fact it's going to get much worse." Both the Philadelphia Enquirer and the Chicago Tribune featured massive, multi-part, front-page series investigating prosecutorial and judicial misconduct in the 90s, not only in their respective regions but in the country as a whole. What their journalists discovered Should raise the hair on the back of any decent person's head, and those reports were published more than a decade ago. Since then almost nothing has been done, so the problem is vastly worse.
A few years back Salon published an essay by a man who taught creative writing to a class of prison inmates in Illinois. When the program was threatened by budget cuts, he told his class he'd fight for them. They warned him not to, matter-of-factly telling him that a couple of kilos of cocaine would suddenly appear in his bedroom closet and he'd end up right alongside them in prison. That is chilling, to put it mildly.
The Augean Stables of law enforcement need to be cleaned, and the sooner the better. If you doubt me, just go to YouTube and run a search on "police abuse." And prepare to be horrified.