I posted this in the coffee shop in the thread passin thru posted entitled "Our President". I want to make sure that dis and the assorted libs on the political bull session also have a chance to read this and hopefully respond.
Bruce Vincent has long been one of my heros. Our group invited Bruce to speak to us several years ago and we were very impressed with him.
I'm going to post some testimony he gave on ecoterrorism several years ago. This will give you an idea of where he is coming from:
Testimony of Bruce Vincent
President
Alliance for America
Subcommittee on Crime
Hearing on Ecoterrorism
June 9,1998
Dear Committee Members,
Thank you for the opportunity to comment to you on the issue of eco-terrorism.
My name is Bruce Vincent. I am from Libby, Montana, a small timber and mining town. I am currently the President of Alliance for America, an umbrella group for several hundred farming, ranching, mining, logging, fishing and private property grassroots groups throughout America. My day job is business manager for our small family company that is involved in the practical application of academic forest management theory, Vincent Logging.
For the past ten years I have been thoroughly involved in local, regional and national attempts to make sense of the laws governing the management of the public forest resource that I live in, work in, play in and love. I volunteer as executive director of Communities for a Great Northwest - a group that has, for ten years, provided input on forest resource management in our area and has made a decade long commitment to good faith efforts at working in a productive relationship with the forest service. I help coordinate the Kootenai Forest Congress - a local group of resource managers, conservationists, and community leaders that has developed and is working hard at moving toward a vision of the future for our forest that includes healthy ecosystems and healthy social and economic systems. I am a ten year member of our Grizzly Bear Community Involvement Team - a broad based group that attempts to work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in recovering the grizzly bear in our ecosystem.
I am from an area that does not expect easy solutions to our forest management problems - and is ready, willing, and able to work hard on the difficult choices we feel can and must be made if we are to achieve our vision. I am here today to share with you one of the tragic consequences of this involvement that is as painful as anything I have had to deal with in my life.
I have been, my family has been, subjected to eco-terrorism.
When I first started speaking out about my personal belief that the existing environmental legislative and regulatory regime was in need of reform I was completely unaware of the dark side of the debate I naively thought of as based upon simple disagreement of fact. At first, the consequences were fairly innocuous. I began receiving letters and phone calls from unknown individuals that were extremely upset with my views.
The calls, at first, were nothing more than irrational ramblings of persons who would not give their names but with whom my views disagreed. A few unsigned letters with vicious statements of disapproval were sent that echoed the sentiments of the phone callers. No threats were made - just statements of disagreements with requests for me to "shut up." During the summer of 1989, however, the nature of the calls began to change. The dialogue of the perpetrators began to get more and more vicious and the disagreements and request to have me "shut up" began to be coupled with threats about "getting me" if I didn't "shut up."
In the summer of 1989 the threats became more than just "idle." While working on a job in the Kootenai National Forest our companies equipment was sabotaged. Dirt was put into the engine of one of our dozers. When the dozer engine failed my father was, thankfully, operating the dozer on flat ground. Since the hydraulics on this particular 100,000 pound machine are directly connected to the engine and since the hydraulics make the brakes of this machine work, had the failure occurred on the steep ground my father would have been the jockey of an out of control, 50 ton, deadly, projectile. Further, the brake lines on one of our dump trucks were cut and the hydraulic lines on one of our excavators were cut. Since laborers worked under the excavator boom and the boom was controlled by its hydraulic system, we were fortunate to discover the imminent failure of the boom before anyone was physically injured. During this same time period, other local logging contractors had equipment sabotaged but, unfortunately, no one was ever caught.
While the approach to the equipment sabotage was exactly as outlined in Dave Foreman's Earth First! book "Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkey Wrenching," the terrorists did not leave a calling card and slipped away. Although no one ever stepped forward to take credit for the actions against our company and other companies attacked that summer, it is worth noting that the newsletter "Wild Rockies Review" issued a call to actions in the inland northwest two summers later. The advertisement for eco-terrorists included a drawing of a burning dozer situated on a map of northwestern Montana with the caption of "Burn That Dozer." Posted on campuses throughout the area, the advertisement's plea went to students looking for summer work and promised room and board for those wanting to spend the summer terrorizing resource workers and managers.
Shortly after our equipment was sabotaged, the phone calls and the viciousness of those calls escalated. I phoned the authorities and asked for help. I was told that unless I could prove that I had been harmed, there was nothing that could be done.
During this same period, a group of extremists in Missoula, Montana, developed a short skit in which I was portrayed as a hunter of animals along with then U.S. Representative Ron Marlenee. At the end of the skit, as performed and videotaped on the steps of the federal building in Missoula, I was shot and killed to protect the animals. The fear that this caused within myself and my family was understandable.
In the fall of 1989 the CBS news magazine, "60 Minutes," called and asked if I would be available for an interview on eco-terrorism. I participated in the show and it aired in the spring of 1990. Shortly after the "60 Minutes" show aired, the producer of the news magazine called to tell me that the CBS studio had received an inordinate number of phone calls from persons who were asking for the address of Earth First!. The producer was concerned that by airing the show CBS may have inadvertently focused unwanted attention on me and my family since the callers seemed to be happy to learn that there was an avenue for expressing the hatred that they felt. The producer's warning proved prophetic.
Soon, the threatening phone calls turned from focusing on harm to be done to myself to harm to be done to my children. Callers threatened, in graphic detail, to do acts of sexual and physical torture to my children before killing them. I was told that I would be forced to watch. One caller played a recorded version of a song written about my children, another was a recording of children screaming in pain and terror for their mother to "help me, help me, help me." Finally, my local sheriff installed phone traps on my phone line - but because of the antiquated system of phones in our area, the trapping was not effective if the call originated outside the lata, or area, of our local phone company. No one was ever trapped or caught.
With the aid of Senator Conrad Burns office, the FBI and state authorities were called in to the situation and again informed me that until something happened there was little that they could do. It was suggested that I carry a concealed weapon and that I teach my wife and children how to handle and fire a gun. What type of investigation was attempted of those who could be a threat to me and my family was never made clear. I was alerted on occasions where it was thought that I should "be careful" when giving speeches. For a "Cowboy/Logger Day Celebration" in Missoula, Montana, Rep. Marlenee and I were both told that there was reason to be concerned for our safety. Authorities in Sweet Home, Oregon, fitted me with a bullet proof vest for a speech in Oregon and my family was given protection on a tightly secured visit to the area.
Lincoln County, Montana, and other local authorities and the schools worked out a system of removal of my children from schools or home to safe houses when a threat was made. Our home, located in a sparsely populated area twelve miles south of our small town, was given additional security by the local state patrolmen. We purchased a large dog. We put security systems on our home. We went for periods of time where our children were not allowed to answer the phone for fear of them getting a direct link to the lunacy.
The impact of these acts upon my family have been marked. When the threats started my four children were aged three through twelve. We held numerous family meetings to determine whether or not we should continue our involvement in the debate over our future. We sought and got family and pediatric therapy to deal with the stress. The decision of my family has been consistent - faced with either shutting up as requested or speaking out so loudly that we make a highly visible and therefore, hopefully, poor target - we chose to speak out.
My family is not the only family in America feeling this terror. Although there are many who elect to "shut up" (and I will never judge or disagree with that decision), there are some who are speaking. Cathi Peterson, a skidder operator in the Sierra Nevada has been a victim. Dean Bryant of Blue Ridge, Georgia, has had threats and equipment sabotage enter into his family business of logging. Candy Boak of Willow Creek, California, has given up her pro-timber activities for fear of her life and that of her family. John Campbell, a timber industry executive from Scotia, California, has had his home firebombed.
My family speaks openly and candidly with each other about our situation. We were assured by the authorities with experience that most terrorist threats were just that - threats - and that the odds of anyone actually carrying out one of the threats was minute.
Thankfully, the calls and threats have subsided. I wish I could say the same about the feelings of terror in my family. I believe, I desperately want to believe, that the authorities are right and that the hate-mongers feel satisfied by making simple and idle threats. But, what if some self anointed rambo of the eco-terror mind-set acts upon a threat and attacks more than just my logging equipment. It is in this one small word - but - that the power of terrorism is real and palpable in my life. "But" and "what if" are horrifying thoughts to have when you are hundreds or thousands of miles away from home.
As the father of four children I will go to my grave wondering if I have made the right decisions. Should I have let the terrorists win and gone quietly about the business of letting them run roughshod over my civil liberties? That seems unthinkable...but I question the wisdom of standing behind my six year old daughter, weeping quietly as I took the advice of the authorities and taught her and her siblings how to shoot. I wonder if I have made the right decision in speaking at this hearing. I am supposed to protect my children and exercising my first amendment right, speaking out on the environment - has exposed them to terrorists.
In a free country, those who perpetrate the acts that generate terror should be punishable by law. Please help make that possible.
I ask you today to consider legislatively amending the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1993 to include the natural resource workers and industries of logging, fishing, mining, energy and ranching. That Act federalized crimes of property damage over $10,000, and or resulting in any dismemberment or any death to a human being as a result of criminal syndicalism but is currently narrower in the scope of protected sectors of our public than it should be.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify.