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Pain Compliance Torture Is The Fossil Fuel Industry’s Latest Police Tactic Against Activists [1]
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Date: 2023-11-13
Vilification of protesters, pain compliance torture, anti-protest legislation, and abusive lawsuits: these are some of the insidious tactics that the fossil fuel industry is using in its full-court press against climate activists.
Confronted with strong support for climate action and organized protests against fossil fuel projects, the fossil fuel industry has resorted to using a series of despicable tactics to suppress dissent in the US: 1) characterizing activists as extremists, 2) funding police violence, 3) lobbying for harsh legal penalties for protesting, and 4) filing abusive, resource-sapping lawsuits.
Those tactics were revealed in a new report from Greenpeace , covered by The Guardian last month, which analyzes the industry’s responses to opposition to five fossil fuel projects (the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Diamond Pipeline, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, and Line 3) between 2014 and 2023.
Using astroturf groups and other public relations strategies, the report explains, the fossil fuel industry has worked to frame protesters and activists as terrorists and violent extremists, helping set the stage for aggressive law enforcement action.
The fossil fuel industry and law enforcement are deeply intertwined, with the relationship involving “extensive intelligence sharing, often without regard for First Amendment-protected activity; joint planning; hiring off-duty police for private security; and financial support in the form of donations and reimbursements.”
“The nature of these relationships opens the door to potential abuses of law enforcement authority and raises the possibility that law enforcement are serving private interests above the public,” the report states.
In an effort to suppress pipeline protests, law enforcement officials, sometimes working alongside fossil fuel companies’ private security forces, have used anti-protest techniques such as water cannons, rubber bullets, buffer zones blocking food deliveries to protesters, and pain compliance torture involving “applying pressure to the face and jaw area that resulted in jaw dislocation and nerve damage causing face paralysis.” This police violence even resulted in Bell’s palsy for some activists.
“As somebody who has given birth, the level of pain was beyond that,” one Line 3 protester stated about the torture.
The report demands an “end [to] the use of sweeping intelligence-gathering practices that target activism and dissent under the cover of domestic terrorism prevention” and advocates for bans on “the use of injury-prone tactics such as pain compliance, chemical agents, blunt-force weapons, and kettling against peaceful protesters.”
In addition to its role in inflicting abhorrent violence against climate protesters, the fossil fuel industry is also lobbying policymakers at the state level to further criminalize activism and using its resources to sue organizations into silence. Read tomorrow’s Climate Denier Roundup to learn more.
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