{"id":971776,"date":"2023-01-27T11:00:27","date_gmt":"2023-01-27T11:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=420312"},"modified":"2023-01-27T11:00:27","modified_gmt":"2023-01-27T11:00:27","slug":"the-crackdown-on-cop-city-protesters-is-so-brutal-because-of-the-movements-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/01\/27\/the-crackdown-on-cop-city-protesters-is-so-brutal-because-of-the-movements-success\/","title":{"rendered":"The Crackdown on Cop City Protesters Is So Brutal Because of the Movement’s Success"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\"ATLANTA,\n

Firefighters work to extinguish a fire after an Atlanta police vehicle was set on fire during a Stop Cop City protest in Atlanta, Ga., on Jan.\u00a021, 2023.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: Benjamin Hendren\/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

The movement to<\/u> stop the construction of a $90 million police training center atop vast acres of Atlanta forest has been extraordinarily successful over the last year. With little national fanfare, Defend the Atlanta Forest\/Stop Cop City activists nimbly deployed a range of tactics<\/a>:\u00a0encampments, tree-sits, peaceful protest marches, carefully targeted property damage, local community events, investigative research, and, at times, direct confrontation with police forces attempting to evict protesters from the forest. The proposed militarized training compound known as Cop City has thus far been held at bay.<\/p>\n

The Atlanta-based movement should be seen as an example of rare staying power, thoughtful strategizing, and the crucial articulation of environmentalist politics situated in anti-racist, Indigenous, and abolitionist struggle. Unsurprisingly, however, significant national attention has only been drawn to the forest defenders in the last week thanks to the extreme law enforcement repression they are now facing.<\/p>\n

A forest defender was killed by police last Wednesday, and a total of 19 protesters now face capricious and ungrounded domestic terror charges for their involvement in the movement \u2014 a rare deployment of a state domestic terror statute<\/a>, threatening to exhaust and crush a resilient and developing movement.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

On Thursday, Georgia\u2019s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp announced<\/a> a \u201cstate of emergency\u201d in response to the protests in downtown Atlanta in the week following the killing of the protester. The executive order grants the governor\u2019s office extensive and preemptive repressive powers, including the ability to call on as many as 1,000 National Guard troops to quell protests at any moment.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt this point the police seem to be charging every protester they arrest with \u2018domestic terrorism\u2019 regardless of the circumstances.”<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThis is an unprecedented level of repression,\u201d said Marlon Kautz, 38, an Atlanta-based organizer with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund<\/a>, which provides bail funds and legal support to protesters who are targeted for involvement in social movements, including against Cop City.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt this point the police seem to be charging every protester they arrest with \u2018domestic terrorism\u2019 regardless of the circumstances,\u201d he said. \u201cThe other pattern we’ve noticed is they are charging everyone arrested on a given day with all crimes which happened that day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kautz told me, by way of example, that during a protest in which a police car was burned, all arrestees from the day now face arson charges. \u201cNeedless to say, the law doesn’t work this way, so we interpret this as a strategy of blatant malicious prosecution.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Defend the Atlanta Forest movement endeavors to combine the tactics of, and to learn from, previous struggles \u2014 including the 2016 encampments at Standing Rock and the 2020 George Floyd uprisings \u2014 while experimenting with novel resistance compositions<\/a>. The escalatory response from police and prosecutors, on the other hand, reveals a new and troubling combination of counterinsurgent strategies.<\/p>\n

The forest defenders have already faced months of aggressive policing and intimidation, which escalated into deadly violence during a multiagency raid last Wednesday. Police shot and killed 26-year-old Manuel \u201cTortuguita\u201d Ter\u00e1n. The authorities claim that Tortuiguita shot at them first, wounding an officer \u2014 a narrative fiercely challenged<\/a> by fellow activists and family members.<\/p>\n

Protests and vigils sprung up nationwide<\/a> demanding \u201cjustice for Tort,\u201d while mainstream environmental organizations, including Greenpeace<\/a> and the Sierra Club<\/a>, alongside left-wing Reps. Cori Bush, D-Mo., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., condemned<\/a> the police\u2019s violence and called for an independent investigation into the activist\u2019s killing. Up until this point, they had said little about the year-plus long struggle against Cop City.<\/p>\n

As forest defenders<\/u> mourn and seek justice for their fallen friend, the movement must also fight a barrage of excessive criminal charges, most notably state domestic terrorism charges carrying a possible<\/a> 35 years in prison.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cSince December, the police have repeatedly stormed the forest with military-grade weapons, pointed assault rifles at protesters, fired chemical weapons at tree sitters, and used chainsaws in an attempt to dismantle treehouses with tree sitters still in them,\u201d said Elias, a 24-year-old Atlanta-based student in the movement, who asked to withhold his full name for fear of police harassment. \u201cTheir decision to create a dangerous, volatile, chaotic situation now has led to the murder of our friend Tortuguita.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elias told me \u201cthe police are trying to justify their negligence by charging people with domestic terrorism. However, nothing these protesters have done even remotely resembles domestic terrorism. The police are trying to redefine terrorism to mean \u2018sitting in a treehouse\u2019 or \u2018breaking windows.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The terror charges, all handed down within the last two months, were not from nowhere. Political and business interests behind Cop City have been pushing related rhetoric for well over a year. Communications<\/a> records uncovered by activists between Cop City supporters \u2014 local self-identifying \u201cstakeholders,\u201d business owners, council members, and Atlanta law enforcement officials \u2014 show that these parties have been calling the protesters \u201ceco-terrorists\u201d since at least last April.<\/p>\n

Though no one has yet been convicted on these bogus terror charges, Kemp, the governor, has readily<\/a> used the term \u201cdomestic terrorists\u201d to describe the arrestees. Kemp has also invoked the tired trope of \u201coutside agitators\u201d to delegitimize an Atlanta-based movement, which has made a point to invite activists to join from out of state. Notably, in recognition that the land on which Atlanta stands was stolen in the 1800s from the Muscogee (Creek) people, the forest protest encampment has been host to dozens of visitors from around the country who descended from the displaced Indigenous community.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

The recent wave of arrests are part and parcel of a \u201cgreen scare,\u201d which began in the 1990s and has seen numerous environmental and animal rights activists labeled<\/a> and charged<\/a> as terrorists on a federal level consistently for no more than minor property destruction. Yet the Atlanta cases mark the first use of a state domestic terrorism statute against either an environmental or anti-racist movement.<\/p>\n

The 19 protesters are being charged under a Georgia law passed in 2017, which, according<\/a> to the Republican state senator\u00a0who\u00a0introduced the bill, was intended to combat cases like the Boston Marathon bombing, Dylann Roof\u2019s massacre of nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring legislative debate over this law, the concern was raised that as written, the law was so broad that it could be used to prosecute Black Lives Matter activists blocking the highway as terrorists. The response was simply that prosecutors wouldn’t do that,\u201d Kautz told me. \u201cThere are similar laws passed in many other states, and we believe that the existence of these laws on the books is a threat to democracy and the right to protest.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Georgia law is exceedingly broad. Domestic terrorism under the statute includes the destruction or disabling of ill-defined \u201ccritical infrastructure,\u201d which can be publicly or privately owned, or \u201ca state or government facility\u201d with the intention to \u201calter, change, or coerce the policy of the government\u201d or \u201caffect the conduct of the government\u201d by use of \u201cdestructive devices.\u201d What counts as critical infrastructure here? A bank branch window? A police vehicle? Bulldozers deployed to raze the forest? What is a destructive device? A rock? A firework? And is not a huge swathe of activism the attempt to coerce a government to change policies?<\/p>\n

Police affidavits<\/a> on the arrest warrants of forest defenders facing domestic terror charges include the following as alleged examples of terrorist activity: \u201ccriminally trespassing on posted land,\u201d \u201csleeping in the forest,\u201d \u201csleeping in a hammock with another defendant,\u201d being \u201cknown members\u201d of \u201ca prison abolitionist movement,\u201d and aligning themselves with Defend the Atlanta Forest by \u201coccupying a tree house while wearing a gas mask and camouflage clothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is for<\/u> good reason that leftists, myself included, have challenged the expansion of anti-terror laws in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riots or other<\/a> white supremacist attacks. Terrorism laws operate to name the state and capital\u2019s ideological enemies; they will be reliably used against anti-capitalists, leftists, and Black liberationists more readily than white supremacist extremists with deep ties to law enforcement and the Republican right.<\/p>\n

Since its\u00a0passage in 2017, the Georgia domestic terrorism law has not resulted in a single conviction. As such, there has been no occasion to challenge the law\u2019s questionable constitutionality. Chris Bruce, policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, told<\/a> the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that \u201cthe statute establishes overly broad, far-reaching limitations that restrict public dissent of the government and criminalizes violators with severe and excessive penalties.\u201d He said of the forest defender terror charges that they are \u201cwholly inapposite at worst and flimsy at best.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe state is attempting to innovate new repressive prosecution, and I think ultimately that will fail for them,\u201d Sara, a 32-year-old service worker who lives by the imperiled forest and has been part of Stop Cop City since the movement began, told me.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we are seeing bears some resemblance to the J20 case, where prosecutors attempted to put blanket charges on people in the vicinity of a protest,\u201d said Sara, who also asked to withhold her surname for fear of police harassment. She described the strategy as \u201can expensive and dangerous prosecutorial endeavor.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s evident the Atlanta area law enforcement, including prosecutors, believe heavy charges will crush dissent.\u201d<\/blockquote>\n

The J20 prosecutions<\/a> didn\u2019t involve terror charges but rested on infirm claims of collective culpability, which flew in the face of the legal standard requiring individual probable cause for arrest. Those prosecutions fell apart, but not before traumatizing and exhausting<\/a> the resources of the 200-plus people charged and their communities.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe authorities’ legal strategy seems to be to load protesters up with extreme charges with no intention of actually making them stick, simply to discourage continued protest,\u201d Kautz, of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, told me.<\/p>\n

At present, seven of the 19 forest defenders facing terror charges are being held either with bond denied or set unaffordably high. Supporters are working to raise<\/a> funds to ensure their freedom and cover legal fees, while refusing to abandon the forest defense.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s evident the Atlanta-area law enforcement, including prosecutors, believe heavy charges will crush dissent. Instead, the movement seems to have only grown with every attack from the police,\u201d said Sara.<\/p>\n

She noted that the violent raid and Tortuguita\u2019s killing has been \u201cespecially devastating and heart-wrenching\u201d but that \u201cmany people are newly moved to action.\u201d In the last week, as many as 50 acts<\/a> of solidarity\u00a0\u2014 from vigils to banner drops to protests\u00a0\u2014 have taken place across the country to honor Tortuguita and to express support for those in Atlanta defending the forest against Cop City and the violence it represents.<\/p>\n

The post The Crackdown on Cop City Protesters Is So Brutal Because of the Movement’s Success<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on The Intercept<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One protester was killed by police, 20 were charged under a \u201cdomestic terror\u201d law, and Georgia\u2019s governor gave himself broad \u201cemergency\u201d powers.<\/p>\n

The post The Crackdown on Cop City Protesters Is So Brutal Because of the Movement\u2019s Success<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1764,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[393,118,6145],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971776"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1764"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=971776"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":971777,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971776\/revisions\/971777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=971776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=971776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=971776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}