Over the past couple of months,
documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act clearly show that TransCanada, builder of the much-contested Keystone XL pipeline, is engaged in more than a mere public relations campaign to discredit opponents of the tar sands conduit. The company has worked closely with both local police and with the Department of Homeland Security through its
"fusion centers"—regional intelligence-gathering operations that come in for considerable criticism for wasteful spending, incompetence and violating civil liberties—to build dossiers on leading protesters and, in at least one documented instance, infiltrate organizers of a peaceful action against the pipeline. In Oklahoma, this led protesters to call off one action.
Government spying on dissidents, infiltrating their organizations and sometimes working as agents provocateurs to spur peaceful groups into violent acts in order to discredit them have all been long-time mainstays of efforts to defeat reform in America. But doing so specifically to benefit a corporation is a new wrinkle.
To be sure, state militias and National Guardsmen have in the past been called upon to put down strikes, sometimes brutally. But the overuse of modern methods of surveillance, the militarization of local police forces, the merging of bureaucracies into the DHS and the promiscuous assignment of the term "terrorist" to an array of peaceful dissident groups creates opportunities for law enforcement to behave the way the operators of the notorious and sometimes murderous CoIntelPro did from 1956 to 1971. We're not there yet, but without checks against abuse we could get there.
One set of documents acquired a few months ago via the FOIA by the anti-Keystone group Bold Nebraska found that TransCanada was spying on people walking on their own property and regularly presenting a PowerPoint slide show to law enforcement officials that included suggestions on possible charges that could be brought against protesters. Many of these amounted to simple harassment, the kind of things that can tie dissidents up in the courts for months and weaken their resolve to continue protesting because of legal fees:
“During construction, we have encountered a number of confrontations and trespasses on the company’s right-of-way (employees/contractors being grabbed, threats of serious physical harm and violence) that have required our company to take additional security precautions,” TransCanada spokesperson Shawn Howard told E&E News.
That’s certainly not how activists, including Tar Sands Blockade spokesperson Ron Seifert, see it. “Although the rhetoric of the ‘corporate state’ gets thrown around frequently, it is quite alarming to see unequivocal evidence that both federal and local law enforcement are taking their cues from a multinational corporation instead of the local families and communities directly impacted by the potential destruction of their homes and the threats to their water and air,” he said.
Please drop below the fold to read more:
This makes revelations reported in the David Brower-founded environmental publication Earth Island Journal worrisome.
After a week of careful planning, environmentalists attending a tar sands resistance action camp in Oklahoma thought they had the element of surprise — but they would soon learn that their moves were being closely watched by law enforcement officials and TransCanada, the very company they were targeting.
On the morning of March 22 activists had planned to block the gates at the company’s strategic oil reserves in Cushing, Oklahoma, as part of the larger protest movement against TransCanada’s tar sands pipeline. But when they showed up in the early morning hours and began unloading equipment from their vehicles they were confronted by police officers. Stefan Warner, an organizer with Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance, says some of the vehicles en route to the protest site were pulled over even before they had reached Cushing. He estimates that roughly 50 people would have participated— either risking arrest or providing support. The act of nonviolent civil disobedience, weeks in the planning, was called off. [...]
At least two law enforcement officers infiltrated the training camp and drafted a detailed report about the upcoming protest, internal strategy, and the character of the protesters themselves. [...]
The undercover agent’s report was obtained by Douglas Parr, an Oklahoma attorney who represented three activists (all lifelong Oklahomans) who were arrested in mid April for blockading a tar sands pipeline construction site. “During the discovery in the Bryan county cases we received material indicating that there had been infiltration of the Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance camp by police agents,” Parr says. At least one of the undercover investigators attended an “action planning” meeting during which everyone was asked to put their cell phones or other electronic devices into a green bucket for security reasons. The investigator goes on to explain that he was able to obtain sensitive information regarding the location of the upcoming Cushing protest, which would mark the culmination of the week of training. “This investigator was able to obtain an approximate location based off a question that he asked to the person in charge of media,” he wrote. He then wryly notes that, “It did not appear…that our phones had been tampered with.”
What exactly TransCanada learned from or told to law enforcement at the Oklahoma Information Fusion Center is uncertain. A company spokesman did not reply directly to a question in that regard and the center did not return a reporter's phone call. But it is known that company officials met with agents at the center just days before the Cushing action.
TransCanada isn't the only company engaged in this public-private cooperative approach to managing opposition to fossil-fuel projects. Such corporations are hiring law enforcement agents to join their private security teams. Like its counterpart in the military-industrial complex, generals and admirals on weapons-makers' boards meeting with their old colleagues at the Pentagon, this cozy corporate-government arrangement pays big dividends to the participants, though not to the general population:
One of the individuals providing information to the Texas Department of Homeland Security’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division is currently the Security Manager at Anadarko Petroleum, one of the world’s largest independent oil and natural gas exploration and production companies. In 2011, at a natural gas industry stakeholder relations conference, a spokesperson for Anadarko compared the anti-drilling movement to an 'insurgency' and suggested that attendees download the US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual.
That's the document co-written by General David Petraeus with Afghanistan in mind. Treating peaceful dissidents like terrorists has benefits. But not to democracy.