Activists - Beware Double Agents

People may think this is a paranoid idea, but within the radical and progressive movements working for peaceful change, undercover FBI agents and other trouble makers DO sometimes play the role of 'agents provocateur,' luring people into doing illegal acts in the guise of radical purity, then getting them arrested for it.

If you check back a couple of years, you'll find evidence of Earth First! founder David Foreman getting arrested for supposed participation in, or approval, of an illegal plan to sabotage power lines in the Southwest. It turned out that Foreman was talked into [alleged] participation by some supposed radical who was a double agent.

Foreman wasn't the first: undercover agents got a lot of people arrested during the protest years in the 1960s in the same way.

When you see people soliciting opinions on the Internet as to the 'best way to kill George Bush,' then - STAY AWAY FROM THEM. You can get harrassed by the Secret Service for even discussing the idea of assassinating an American president, and if you take it very far at all, you could get jailed.

Assassinating politicians happens to be a morally bankrupt act that effectively undermines democracy - no matter how much you may feel that Bush stole the 2000 election, you would be screwing up American politics for everyone if you were to do anything violent against the guy. What's more, you would help to discredit every political ideal that you believe in.

KEEP IT LEGAL, then. KEEP IT CLEAN! George Bush is enough of a fool and a liar that his presidency appears to be self-destructing anyway - and if it doesn't, you can't change history in any good direction by plotting against the guy. If you succeed, you will only make him a martyr

you are paranoid, and likely an elf member. enjoy your cuban vacation

Buckethead, you call me paranoid and a likely ELF member. I'm NOT an ELF member and I DON'T do terrorism - partly because I don't wanna, and partly because no less a radical than Lenin thought it was politically a really bad idea. It usually doesn't work.

When I was going to college in the 1960s, members of the 'Radical Weather Underground' decided that the only way to achieve fundamental change in the US was to start a terrorist bombing campaign, and all they did was discredit the radical student movement and destroy the democratic left. Ten years after they launched their great underground 'war' against the US government, Ronald Reagan was elected president and the radical left of the 1960s was only a memory.

As for paranoia - yeah, I plead somewhat guilty. In every period of fundamental political and social change, embattled governments dispatch double agents to infiltrate the dissident groups and try to discredit them

'May'?

Doug, go on the Internet or visit the library and get acquainted with the history of the FBI's 'Cointelpro' program to infiltrate the New Left, the Black Power movement and the antiwar movement in the US during the 1960s. Look up the history of 'agents provocateur' more generally.

See if you think it's truly 'paranoid' to worry about activists being tricked by police infiltrators. I think you'll find that 'even paranoids can have real enemies,' as boring old lefties of my generation used to say.

Obviously, of course, it's both paranoid and stupid to let the threat of police double agents paralyse the Green movement.

Environmental activists and others working for change can't afford to stop everything we're doing, for fear that 'Big Brother' may be watching us. Big Brother probably is watching, but you have to stay active anyway, or you defeat yourselves.

What we can do, though, is fight and work for change in a legal fashion, or at least a nonviolent and open fashion, that will keep good people from getting caught in some obvious traps.

One such trap is getting tricked by someone 'super radical' person you barely know [or an apparently radical person you THINK you know], into some plan to do something both illegal and violent, or illegal and highly unpopular. Such as seriously planning the bombing of a public place, the shooting of police officers, or the assassination of a president.

If you get caught up in a group of people planning to do things like this, sometimes you find in the end that the nice 'super radical' who led you into the plot is actually a police spy. And it may well be that the spy has set you up to be arrested, discredited in the press and public opinion, and sent to prison where you're not going to be any political threat to the powers that be any more.

I'm not very brave myself, and I stay away from illegal actions just for personal reasons, and if you're really brave and really radical you may think I'm making excuses for inaction. If so, you can despise me; that's okay.

But all I'm saying is that if you're brave and want to do something radical and effective

I think it's paranoid for the Greens to worry about government infiltration. It wouldn't be paranoid for Earth First! to worry about it though. It's wholly appropriate for the government to try to infiltrate terrorist organisations.