The Terrorization of Dissent ─ Corporate Repression, Legal Corruption and the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act

The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is a recent US law targeted against animal rights activists who oppose meat and fur processors; it sets a broad precedent for defining civil dissent as terrorism. For this reason, this book will be of interest to two groups of readers: those sympathetic to the animal rights movement, and those concerned about the recent trend toward criminalizing Constitutionally protected forms of speech and protest that may be inconvenient to private corporations. The book's contributors reflect this spread of interests; they are a mix of animal rights activists and scholars of law, sociology, and rhetoric and communication. The preface points out that while Congressional representatives promised AETA would only target violence and property destruction, the first arrests under the Act had to be thrown out of court because they federally prosecuted people as terrorists without accusing them of doing anything illegal. Some contributors compare the animal rights movement to such historical movements as worker safety, and argue that since the US lacks the basic health and humane laws for the treatment of live animals that it has for the treatment of animal carcasses, organized protest is the only way to change inhumane and unsafe practices. Most focus on rhetorical or legal issues in the AETA's definition of protest as terrorism, and document the AETA in practice as a “moral panic” comparable to racial panics and the Red Scare. They argue everyone in a democratic society has a strong interest in repealing such acts, which threaten democracy and the Constitution. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)