Henry Read

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Fifth Estate</em> contributor Marie Mason was sentenced to nearly 22 years in prison on February 5 in a Lansing, Michigan federal courtroom, after pleading guilty to two acts of eco-sabotage.

(See also Summer and Fall 2008 Fifth Estate.) Mason is now serving the longest sentence of any environmental activist in the US; an appeal is currently underway. Her sentence was one of the latest in a string of recent arrests and convictions of environmental and animal liberation activists, which has been dubbed the Green Scare. Throughout the Green Scare, environmental and animal liberation activists have been charged with inflated sentences (often Life in prison), and have been publicly and legally labeled “terrorists”--though no one has been hurt in their acts of economic sabotage. The term Green Scare is an allusion to the Red Scare of the ’50s, when Communists were persecuted on the basis of new laws targeting them for their beliefs and not their actions, and creating a climate of panic and hysteria in an attempt to intimidate supporters and sympathizers.

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The ludicrous charges against the federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act Four (AETA4) show the absolute depths to which the Green Scare has plummeted. According to the Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC), the four animal liberation activists are charged with “terrorism” under the AETA for (and, we kid you not, because I could not make up something so ridiculous if I wanted to) “protesting, chalking the sidewalk, chanting and leafleting--and the alleged use of ‘the Internet to find information on bio-medical researchers.’”

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