Department of Homeland Security, the Manufactured “EcoTerrorist” Panic, and Cop City

Amy: [00:00:00] Just a note before we start that this episode contains depictions of police violence. Please take care while you listen.

In 2017, developers announced plans to build on an 85 acre wild space in the middle of Atlanta. The plans included a massive 90 million police training facility that Atlanta residents started to refer to as Cop City. The forest, which people refer to either as the Atlanta Forest or Walani Forest, was full of trees that helped to clean Atlanta's air and water and provide green space for the surrounding neighborhoods, which are predominantly Black and Brown communities. Activists also argue that reducing the city's tree canopy makes it hotter, and that construction of the Copp City Trading Center is polluting local waterways, and the reduction of green space there will hurt nearby property [00:01:00] values.

That's all before we get into the concerns about building a massive police training center in the middle of a majority Black and Brown community. Since the plan was announced, Atlanta residents have been pretty outspoken in their opposition to it. But despite overwhelming public disapproval of the plan, the city went ahead with it.

By this point in the season, this pattern is probably starting to sound pretty familiar. Concerned citizens avail themselves of all the legal options they have to oppose a polluting project. They attend meetings, they write to politicians, they vote, they hold rallies and marches. When none of it works, some people go home, and some people build camps.

In Atlanta, opponents of Cop City began to organize under the slogan Defend the Atlanta Forest. Some of the activists involved started to camp out in the woods. Others brought food to the campers or supported in other ways. [00:02:00] Eventually, some protesters escalated things a bit, damaging construction equipment, breaking windows, and gumming up the ATMs of the banks financing the project.

The response by local and state police surprised everyone. Beginning in December 2022, authorities began aggressively cracking down on Cop City protests. They ultimately charged 40 forest defenders, protesters, and organizers with domestic terrorism. In September 2023, the Georgia Attorney General charged 61 cop city opponents with criminal racketeering.

It was so over the top that almost every media outlet covered it, and when they did, most were more critical of the police. than they were of the protesters. Here's a bit from NPR reporter Odette Youssef's story, for example.

NPR Archival: Alex Popali traveled to Atlanta in March. He says he just wanted to learn first [00:03:00] hand about the movement that has come to be known as Stop Cop City.

He never expected to end up in jail for three weeks and ultimately charged in a massive racketeering case. It's absurd. Papali is one of more than 20 people arrested after attending an outdoor protest concert. He says he doesn't know most of the others who were detained that night or the dozens of others who've been indicted along with him.

You know, I can say with certainty that I'm not involved in any conspiracy of this kind. But in its indictment, the state of Georgia claims that the defendants were all part of a well organized conspiracy. As the indictment asserts, members of Defend the Atlanta Forest Subscribe to a philosophy of anarchy.

Amy: That was Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr, you heard at the end there, talking at a press conference about the RICO charges. And that language he uses, describing Defend the Atlanta Forest as quote unquote, [00:04:00] having a philosophy of anarchy, that didn't just come from nowhere. Our senior editor, Alleen Brown, has been reporting on the criminalization of activism in the U. S. for about a decade. When she started to see some of this type of language and certain tactics show up in the Cop City crackdown, she wondered if and how federal agencies were playing a role. So she submitted some public records requests, and what she got in response was pretty eye opening.

For months leading up to the arrests of cop city protesters, the Department of Homeland Security was regularly sending out reports warning Georgia and Atlanta authorities about Defend the Atlanta Forest and their anarchist and extremist tendencies. Alleen has written a couple of stories for us on this and on those documents, including one we co published with The Guardian, so we'll link to that in the show notes.

But today I asked her to come [00:05:00] on to walk us through the history that the Cop City crackdown is kind of the culmination of and to share some of her interviews with the folks caught up in all of it. I'm Amy Westervelt and this is Drilled, the Real Free Speech Threat. After the break, Alleen Brown brings us the story of Cop City.

Alleen: I'm Alleen Brown. I'm a senior editor for Drilled and I'm an investigative reporter.

Amy: So, for you, as someone who has looked into the crackdown on protest for a long time, what did you first think when you started to see the crackdown on Cop City protesters and what did it connect to for you in terms of stuff that you'd seen before?

Alleen: Yeah, when I first saw that so many [00:06:00] opponents of Cop City were being charged with domestic terrorism in Georgia, I mean, for one, I was really surprised because we've seen lots of cases where prosecutors are using various kinds of terrorism frameworks to go after protesters such as terrorism enhancements, which are, uh, federal phenomenon, which enhance, like make sentences longer if they're considered to be associated with terrorism. You know, we've seen the spread of critical infrastructure laws, which enhance penalties for people trespassing on the property of a. site where polluting infrastructure is being built, for example.

And then, you know, we've seen lots of counterterrorism funding going toward monitoring people involved in property destruction related to their objection to environmental harms. I'm not aware of other cases where [00:07:00] so many people have been charged explicitly with domestic terrorism, um, using a state law like this, the way we have with Cop City.

So, you know, I think it is distinct in a lot of ways, but it's also an extension of this longer history. And so one thing that I thought of immediately was what's known as the Green Scare. So in the early 2000s, after 9 11, there was this flood of counterterrorism funding, you know, authorized by, by Congress, all kinds of new agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, all kinds of groups formed that were all focused on countering terrorism. The FBI's focus also really shifted to counterterrorism, and that meant a lot of new focus on people who were engaged in sabotage in the name of protecting the environment. Throughout the 90s, radical [00:08:00] groups like the Earth Liberation Front, Animal Liberation Front, had carried out acts of sabotage that never harmed any people, but did damage property and caused a lot of concern for animal product industries, for example. And these industries kind of got together and were really pushing for the FBI and the federal government to approach these cases of sabotage as terrorism. So that kind of came to fruition after 9 11.

And the Green Scare was one of the results of that. The FBI eventually declared that ecoterrorism was its number one domestic terrorism threat. Ecoterrorism as well as, I believe, animal enterprise terrorism, which, you know, targets businesses that harm animals. So all of these resources were going into confronting that.

There were a few high profile cases where a large swath of [00:09:00] activists were arrested at once. One of these big cases was known as Operation Backfire, you know, and people faced really draconian sentences for engaging in property damage. And again, a lot of the resources that led to these prosecutions were framed as counterterrorism resources.

So now, flashing to today, I think one of the things that has brought us to this moment in Atlanta is backlash to the movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. It's also backlash against protests in the wake of George Floyd's killing by police in Minneapolis. I think we increasingly see both industry and government erring toward framing property damage related to political demands as terrorism.

Amy: You spoke with [00:10:00] several of the Cop City protesters who got kind of caught up in this big roundup. Can you talk a little bit just about what kinds of things they were being charged with?

Alleen: Yeah, more than 40 people have been charged with domestic terrorism in Atlanta related to their opposition to Cop City.

A number of the people facing those charges are accused of little more than misdemeanor trespassing, or that's what's in their arrest affidavits anyway. We haven't seen formal indictments for a lot of these terrorism charges. There's no cases where people are accused of seriously injuring anyone. A lot of this is kind of alleged property crime, so, you know, the domestic terrorism charges are not associated with mass murder, for example, or, or severe injuries.

A lot of it's It's related to property, street protests, [00:11:00] people who were camping in the forest to prevent construction of this project. And the arrest affidavits say very little about what they are alleged to have done that amounts to terrorism. Although a number of them say that the Department of Homeland Security classified the movement Defend the Atlanta Forest as a domestic violent extremist group.

You know, DHS has denied that they made that classification, although we've reviewed all kinds of documents that suggest they were finding many ways to tell Georgia that they were facing domestic violent extremists. So there's a lot of confusion about what DHS meant. In addition to these domestic terrorism charges, 61 people have been charged under Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO.

This is a law that is designed to go after organized crime, but here we have 61 activists. facing [00:12:00] these charges.

Vienna: If you've ever been in the forest, organization is not the word I'd use for it.

Amy: Vienna Forest is one of those activists. She spent about three months camping out in the woods in Atlanta, trying to stop the construction of Cop City. At first, she describes it as a really joyous time.

Vienna: I think in a lot of ways, action camps often have this, like, magnetic pull to them, mainly just because it's your everyday, you're living out our ideals.

We're taking care of each other. We're practicing community building and building each other's capacity, taking care of each other, having communal meals, and just being in a space where, you know, we all, we share all the same values is just really powerful, and not to mention just being outdoors, especially in such a beautiful forest.

There's a certain energy to [00:13:00] Ohlone that. Like, if you've ever been in that forest, you can just, it's, it's thick. You can almost feel the history of that place and all the trauma, but all the joy as well that is in that place.

Amy: Forrest spent most of her time working as a medic, keeping everyone fed, and hanging out with her partner, Manuel Paez Terán, who went by Tortuguita.

Vienna: Tortuguita had this way about them. There's this one song. That is really underplayed by Matt Rivers, So Grows the Flame, a ballad of Tortuguita, and there's one line that just really sums it up in such a beautiful way. The forest is freedom, Tortuguita would say, with a heart full of fire, and a face full of play.

A heart full of fire, and a face full of play. They were a true radical, true revolutionary in the sense of, they literally [00:14:00] lived out All their beliefs and they were so well read and had so much passion to them, but they never let the world get them down. They were always so joyous and Loved sharing with their community their joy, and I think that's what really sold me on them My first interaction with police on the parkside when I was there was in September like when I first got back And they didn't enter the forest though, they were just escorting some utility workers.

It wasn't until my arrest, to my knowledge, that, uh, the police were actually in the forest on the park side, so. I didn't have too many interactions with them until I got arrested. Most of the interactions I had, they were just outside of the forest and I just had to stay in the tree line and I'd be fine.

Alleen: When was the first time domestic terrorism or eco terrorism applied to, um, You know, this, this forest [00:15:00] defense work.

Vienna: The first time I heard of it was from, uh, someone else. Actually, it was, uh, another forest defender was talking about how they heard them calling us terrorists. That just seemed like, uh, a joke to us at that time.

It wasn't, I never really considered the possibility of getting charged in that, in the way I have until my arrest and I was in holding and they handed me a piece of paper. Uh, that said, terroristic acts, no bond, and gave me my first appearance date. At that point I think I still thought it was a joke, kind of hysterically, trying to like laugh at the darkness, but I didn't really know what to expect.

I didn't know what they were accusing me of that, at that time. I didn't know what they thought I did until I heard the warrants read out to me by a public defender.[00:16:00]

Amy: Forest was released with bond conditions that said she wouldn't use social media to contact members of Defend the Atlanta Forest. She couldn't go into the forest either.

Vienna: Tortuguita stepped in to make sure I wasn't feeling left behind. Because so many other people in the movement just didn't want to talk to me, really, for fear of the bond conditions.

And, um, so Tortuguita would just, like, pop by the house at random times. I remember being out and doing errands and coming back and just seeing Tortuguita sitting at the kitchen counter. Oh, hi! Uh, the last time I saw Tortuguita, we, they took me and two friends to get Vietnamese and Mexican food and just like, uh, getting really full, lots of good food in us as we went to this drive in movie theater and watched a really shitty, uh, horror movie.

We watched [00:17:00] that, The Starlight Drive In, which was Tortuguita's first time going to the starlight. Um, which meant a lot to me, because one thing I didn't mention is Tortuguita never really liked leaving the forest. They, um, loved that place so much, and they didn't want to leave it, but they left it for me.

And I will always thank them for that, because they knew I couldn't go there, so they came to me. But yeah, that Starlight Drive, um, date was the last time I saw them, and that was Monday, and they were murdered on Wednesday.

Amy: When police raided the forest in January 2023, they shot Tortuguita, who was just 26 years old, and killed them. Police claimed that Tortuguita fired first, although neither body cam footage nor physical evidence from the autopsy ever backed [00:18:00] up that claim. The autopsy did confirm, however, that Tortuguita was shot 57 times.

It's impossible to know exactly what constellation of factors drove police to such extremes. But getting regular reports on how these people in the forest were anarchists and violent domestic terrorists could certainly have set them on edge. Here's Alleen again.

Alleen: So when I started to review the results of this public records request I did, there was kind of this mystery in my mind, like DHS claims that they just didn't designate any group domestic violent extremist.

And yet we have these Georgia officials claiming that they did. So what did DHS actually say? You know, two of the most interesting documents to me were these open source intelligence reports from the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis. These were sent in [00:19:00] the summer of 2022.

So several months before we started seeing these domestic terrorism charges and we see Department of Homeland Security characterizing acts of basically property damage– there was some tree spiking where, you know, Cop City opponents put spikes into trees to make them difficult to cut down, and I believe a construction vehicle was set on fire.

Those two actions were framed as consistent with anarchist violent extremism and environmental violent extremism, which are the categories that DHS uses to describe what maybe would more commonly be considered eco terrorism or, or domestic terror, or terrorism. These reports were sent to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

That's the same agency that was putting together these arrest [00:20:00] affidavits that described defend the Atlanta forest as a domestic violent extremist group. So, you know, it, it looked like a clear line between these reports and what Georgia law enforcement eventually used to justify domestic terrorism charges.

I think we'd already seen some reports after those domestic terror arrests began where DHS was using that language to reference Cop City, but this was, you know, a DHS officer sending this information directly to Georgia and saying, here's how you should think about these guys. One other thing that was really on my mind as I was going through this material was the police killing of Manuel Paez Teran, Tortuguita, who, you know, was killed as they were occupying the forest where the project is to be built.

They were in a tent when law enforcement came in to evict [00:21:00] the people occupying the forest, and law enforcement shot and killed them. They claimed that Tehran fired first, but there was no one to witness what happened. We only have police accounts. So you know, there had been some reporting indicating that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had briefed officers that they would be facing domestic violent extremists or domestic terrorists.

And I was really curious to know how DHS, how the federal government was fueling that kind of terrifying framework. Another thing that was really interesting in this trove of documents was that Atlanta police officers We're kind of receiving this steady stream of material sort of debating and talking about what the environmental violent extremist threat looked like, what ecoterrorism looked like [00:22:00] today.

One of the most interesting reports there was actually a school paper that a homeland security officer for the Atlanta fire department had written where His research question was, should Defend the Atlanta Forest be designated the next domestic terrorist group? His school program, as well as a lot of the agencies that were generating these reports from academic institutions to federal agencies, We're all ones that were created in the wake of 9 11.

So you know, we see when there's this big push to look at everything as terrorism, suddenly everything looks like terrorism. When that money is there, it sort of shifts the way that folks from academia to federal government to local law enforcement think about these things.[00:23:00]

The last thing I'll mention is civil liberties organizations recently sent a letter to congress members urging them to investigate this DHS agency that was creating the open source intelligence reports. You know, the civil liberties organizations flagged two additional reports, including one that claimed that Animal rights slash environmental violent extremists and anarchist violent extremists were inspiring criminal acts around the U.

1. This intelligence report even includes a map of all of the alleged extremism inspired, uh, actions around the U. S. The Brennan Center for Justice took a close look at these, this list of cases and found that, um, the ones that they could identify were vandalism. So, you know, we have one chart tracking these incidents where the agency used the symbol of a [00:24:00] bomb to label sabotage that appears to involve activists damaging ATM card readers with superglue.

So, you know, I think that symbol really kind of illustrates the discrepancy that is raising a lot of concerns associating superglue on ATM card readers. With a bomb, you know, environmental sabotage with terrorism, which a lot of people associate with 9 11 or mass shootings. So the civil liberties organizations have really pushed for DHS to rein in this kind of communication because they say that it has led to inappropriate law enforcement actions against political activists.

I think you mentioned in one of the conversations we had about, like, one of the people that was just, like, walking in the forest. Yes, just looking at one of these arrest affidavits, I'll just read it because I think it, it kind of [00:25:00] illustrates just, just how little there is here. It says, The accused affirmed their cooperation with Defend the Atlanta Forest by criminally trespassing on posted land.

Okay, criminal trespass, sure. During a standoff with another defendant who's occupying an elevated treehouse. Said accused then fled upon, upon being in contact with law enforcement, the defendant was wearing camouflage clothing and carrying a backpack with a climbing harness and rope. So you know, we have alleged criminal trespass.

Apparently there's someone there in a tree treehouse, and the person's fleeing law enforcement allegedly. They're wearing camouflage clothing and carrying a backpack with rope. This is what Georgia is, was using to arrest people as domestic terrorists. So I think about nine of the arrest affidavits [00:26:00] from December 2022 and January 2023 were alleged to have committed no specific illegal actions beyond misdemeanor trespassing.

So, a lot of these charges are not even linked to serious property damage according to these arrest affidavits. In many cases, people swept up in the forest raids seemed to legitimately think there had been some sort of mistake. That's how little they were doing. One person Elaine spoke with, who goes by Lucky, had never even participated in a protest before in his life.

In the beginning, I wasn't sure what was happening, but I was like, okay, honest mistake, you guys, you guys can just like, let me go. But they did not let Lucky go. Instead, they held him in jail for three months and denied him bond four times. This is how he talks about it now. So I was involved in a dragnet arrest during a stop cop city week of action in the [00:27:00] Weelani forest in Atlanta last March.

I was unconstitutionally Arrested, denied bond four times, and incarcerated a total of three months on what I consider, and many consider, bogus domestic terrorism allegations in that original warrant. And I was recently wrongfully indicted on RICO charges in Fulton County, Georgia. There isn't a warrant out for my arrest.

for that, but that's coming out. Lucky initially went to Atlanta to help with mutual aid efforts in the forest. Not so much to protest. I heard that people were sleeping in tents and they felt like they needed to do that, or I don't remember. I wasn't going to sleep in a tent. Um, but I just wanted to go help and I served on a mutual aid basis.

And unfortunately that ended up changing my life. I did not know what I was walking into. I didn't know that there was [00:28:00] this risk to be arrested. It was mostly just a really nice, like it was the biggest garden party I've ever been to. Lucky was surprised to see something that he'd experienced as being so beautiful and innocent, criminalized.

Even somebody who, who might have shown up that day out of curiosity, um, or someone like me who saw a week of action as an opportunity to volunteer, um, those people's curiosity has been Made illegal, um, in practice. I don't think anyone anticipated that they would end up facing these really severe charges.

And some of them doing jail time on, on charges that still haven't even been linked with a formal indictment. Lucky really had not participated in a protest before. He was sort of there to see what was going on and, you know, [00:29:00] in another case, a legal observer was charged with domestic terrorism. Hannah Kass is a researcher who went to see what was happening in Georgia with the movement to stop Cop City and ended up leaving with terrorizing charges.

To be clear, Hannah wasn't charged with domestic terrorism like some of the others. Her charge was making terroristic threats. She spent a little bit of time in jail and just ended up kind of experiencing a lot of unexpected backlash related to that arrest. At one point, Hannah's university called her in for a disciplinary hearing because they'd received complaints related to these charges.

She also learned that this think tank that's part of the Atlas Network, which we have discussed here in the past, had filed a [00:30:00] records request related to Hannah and her work at the university because she's a student at a public university. These are just some examples of the creeping impacts that a charge like this can have on someone's life.

Even if the charges are ultimately dismissed. I mean, she, of course, was among the 61 people caught up in this Rico case. So, you know, her life continues to be sort of in this offended place along with all of the other people involved in that case. If this case were to be successful, like everyone is in danger.

This is, this is fascism. And I just hope, I guess my greatest hope is that people understand what the stakes are. You also spoke with attorney Lauren Regan, who's defending several of the cop city defendants. And I know I spoke with her as well about, you know, just how novel this type [00:31:00] of RICO charge is.

I've been defending activists for over 25 years now. And I know of only one other criminal RICO prosecution that was in the. In Indiana, there were two activists that were part of a campaign to fight a highway expansion for the I 69 Highway, and they were charged with criminal Rico among other things, but ultimately a plea bargain was reached in those cases prior to trial and.

The RICO charges were neither litigated nor were there any convictions. So, this is certainly the largest and broadest attempt at using criminal RICO against movement participants. To my knowledge, I don't know of [00:32:00] any activists, certainly environmental or climate activists, that have ever been convicted of criminal RICO.

Yeah. You know, I've spoken to Lauren Reagan a number of times in the years of reporting that I've done on criminalization of land and water defenders. She's someone who's been doing this kind of work since the Green Scare. So she also really underlined that the framework of eco terrorism, it's a political framework, something to use to sort of slander political opponents as, as criminals, as dangerous.

You know, she and others really question whether Ecoterrorism is a useful term at all for anything. Well, I mean, to me, ecoterrorism is extractive industries and corporations that are destroying the environment and the planet and thus basically threatening all life on the planet. You know, that I believe is the true [00:33:00] definition of an ecoterrorist.

You know, someone that is causing widespread devastating harm to humans and nonhumans alike for Private profit. However, in this context, far right extremists and their water carriers have used that phrase for just an incredibly wide swath of anything that they don't like, really any kind of activism, whether it is political Very traditional civil disobedience, or whether it engages in economic sabotage where property is damaged, but there is no harm to human life, you know, is all being dumped into this label called eco terrorist, which is basically just meant to attempt to discredit and malign political opponents when they cannot win the argument based on fact, Um, [00:34:00] reality and public opinion.

They attempt to undercut that by using the media and public forum to create a false inflammatory narrative. According to DHS for something to be quote unquote domestic terrorism, which they usually call domestic violent extremism or environmental violent extremism. If it has to do with environmental stuff.

For something to be domestic terrorism, the DHS definition says that it needs to be one, dangerous to human life, or two, potentially destructive of critical infrastructure or key resources. So that is quite broad to begin with. An action also has to be politically motivated or has to advance an ideological cause.

But, you know, where it comes to environmental issues, that term critical infrastructure is a part of what's so dangerous. [00:35:00] In the U. S., a pipeline, for example, an oil pipeline, energy infrastructure, is often framed as critical infrastructure. And that becomes a problem when there's a growing movement that seeks to halt the construction of this same type of infrastructure that is also pushing us faster and faster toward a cliff that leads to climate chaos, that leads to mass suffering and death.

So I think there's a lot of question about what should be considered critical infrastructure. And, you know, like in some of these documents I've reviewed, we see all kinds of things being called critical infrastructure, like financial institutions, energy infrastructure. It just seems to be a label that can be applied to all kinds of things.

And now it, it appears that DHS is also looking for things that might be inspired by domestic violent [00:36:00] extremism. So that just broadens that already broad definition even further and leaves a lot of people vulnerable to be, to being framed as in cahoots with Domestic terrorists. If you'll gather round, people, I'll sing you a song about brave Tortuguita in the wheel on e dong.

Drilled is an original Critical Frequency production. This episode was reported by me, Alleen Brown. I'm also the senior editor for this series. Our senior producer is Martin Zaltz Ostwick. Sound design and scoring also by Martin Zaltz Ostwick, who composed much of the music in this episode. Mixing and mastering by Peter Duff.

Thanks to Matt Rivers, who wrote the song So Grows the Flame, The Ballad of Tortuguita. Tortuguita would stay with a heart full of fire and a face full of blame. You can find more of his music at mattrivers. bandcamp. com. [00:37:00] Our theme song is Bird in the Hand by Four Known. Our artwork is by Matt Fleming. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton.

This show was created by Amy Westerveld. Check out my print stories on Cop City and access all of the DHS documents mentioned in this episode on our website at drill. media. You can also subscribe to our newsletter there. It comes out once a week and includes a little bit of analysis on what's happening in climate plus a roundup of the top five stories or studies to check out each week.

It's never more than a 10 minute read, and people tell us it helps them stay on top of all things climate. If you want to support our work, you can also leave us a rating or review. It genuinely helps us find new listeners. And finally, if you would like to fund more climate accountability reporting, You can sign up for a paid subscription to either the newsletter or the podcast.

For access to ad free early release episodes and bonus content. Every dollar you [00:38:00] contribute goes toward more reporting and more stories. Thank you for that support. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week. Thanks to brave Tortuguita, now the whole damn world knows, for every tree that's fell, there's a cop that's gone to

hell.