AR-News: (CA/US) America's home-grown dissidents

[Animalconcerns]

[opinion from Toronto Star]

I got a call from Aaron Jackson last week. He's down in Los Angeles and
just wanted to let me know the FBI and local police have been harassing
animal rights activists again — trailing them, arresting some on minor
charges (such as not wearing a seat belt). That kind of thing.

I'd met Jackson a few months earlier here in Toronto. At 24, the
fair-haired, clean-cut California native looks and acts like a poster boy
for George Bush's America.

In reality, however, Jackson and those like him are Bush's nightmare.
They're America's home-grown dissidents. They can't be dismissed as part
of some vague and undefined foreign threat because they are so obviously
not foreign.
...
Jackson belongs to a group called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, or
SHAC-USA. It's aimed at a firm called Huntingdon Life Sciences, a contract
research organization that, among other things, does laboratory tests on
animals for drug companies and agro-business.

Huntingdon says it does perfectly legal scientific work for "research into
human illness and well-being." Its critics say that it tortures animals,
pointing to a series of gruesome videotapes from the 1990s that document
what went on in some of Huntingdon's British labs.

In the United Kingdom, the animal rights campaign against Huntingdon was
so successful that the company faltered financially. Its saviour arrived
in the form of a U.S. firm called Life Sciences Research Inc. that took
over Huntingdon more than two years ago.

But as Huntingdon extended across the Atlantic, so did its tormentors.
Which is how SHAC-USA got set up in Princeton, N.J. just a few miles from
Huntingdon's main American lab.
...
In the U.S., authorities have used provisions of the so-called Patriot
Act, enacted after Sept. 11 2001, to target animal rights organizations.
In particular, the act allows grand juries (secret bodies charged with
deciding whether criminal charges should be laid) to share information
with one another. At last count, there were an unprecedented eight grand
jury investigations across the U.S. looking into animal rights
organizations as well as four aimed directly at SHAC.

full story:
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1085396464893&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795

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