Reference and Exploration

60 Terrorist Plots Since 9/11: Continued Lessons In Domestic Counterterrorism

 

http://www.eurasiareview.com/30072013-60-terrorist-plots-since-911-continued-lessons-in-domestic-counterterrorism/

Appendix: Rave Party

Society | Updated May 21, 2012 at 11:46am IST

What is a rave party?

Source: IBNLive.com

New Delhi: The Mumbai Police busted an alleged rave party at a hotel in Juhu on Sunday night. At least 100 people including 38 women, mostly foreign nationals, were detained. The police have also arrested the party organiser, Vishesh Vijay Handa, under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act. Two international cricketers, Rahul Sharma of India and Wayne Parnell of South Africa, who play in the IPL for Pune Warriors India were also detained and questioned.

The Acid connection

Rave parties, apart from the electronica-trance music and unbriddled dancing, are typically associated with Acid House parties where the revellers consume a semi-synthetic psychedelic drug called Lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly referred to as Acid. Rave revellers are typically known to have a halucinatory and delusory trip. But in India, the use of LSD is pretty limited and instead people cocaine, speed (Ecstasy) or cheaper derivatives which usually do not provide their users a ‘rave on’ trip as Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton of The Yardbirds, a popular British band of the 60s, would have defined the rave experience.

But in India, parties where men and women drink, consume marijuana or hashish, pop tranquilisers and dance to any kind of music is often referred to by the authorities and the press as ‘rave’ parties.

Origin of raves

 

The exact origin of raves is disputed. Some say the wild Bohemian parties in the late 1950s London used the term “rave” loosely to describe the events of Soho. According to a public document on the website of the US Justice Department, raves evolved from 1980s dance parties, aided by the emergence of European techno music and American house music.

Raves were exclusive parties organised by European clubs in the 1980s – secretive, after-hours and private – to ensure minimum interference from law officers. Attendance was restricted to invitees only. The venue of rave parties was a closely guarded secret that only the invitees and friends of invitees were told at the night of the party to keep out unwanted visitors. The document states that the secrecy surrounding the party gave the rave culture an “underground” status.

Mass marketing of raves

By the mid-1980s, rave parties overseas had developed such a following among youths that by 1987 London raves had outgrown most dance clubs. It then became common to hold all-night raves – which drew thousands of people – in large, open fields on the outskirts of the city. As the movement continued to grow in the late 1980s, the first rave parties emerged in US cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles.

A new rave culture emerges as teenagers took over the traditional young adult ravers. The events became highly promoted and heavily commercialised and as a result less cloak-and-dagger. Many rave promoters were career criminals who profited from organising events tailored for teens. According to the document, capitalising on the growing popularity of raves, specialized industries were developed to market clothes, toys, drugs, and music.

Today’s raves are characterised by high entrance fees, extensive drug use, exorbitantly priced bottled water, very dark and often dangerously overcrowded dance floors, and “chill rooms,” where teenage ravers go to cool down and often engage in open sexual activity. Many club owners and promoters appear to promote the use of drugs – especially MDMA. They provide bottled water and sports drinks to manage hyperthermia and dehydration; pacifiers to prevent involuntary teeth clenching; and menthol nasal inhalers, chemical lights, and neon glow sticks to enhance the effects of MDMA.

Electric Daisy Carnival

The Electric Daisy Carnival is one of the world’s largest electronic music festivals, with a weekend of outdoor music and dancing in Las Vegas with 26 carnival rides, kaleidoscope sculptures, pyrotechnic displays, a pulsating soundtrack and a reputation for heavy drug use that it hoped to live down.

The increasing notoriety of raves has caused the rave culture to spread from major metropolitan areas to more rural or conservative locations. The genres of electronic dance music played at raves include house, trance, psytrance, techno, house, jungle and jungle techno.

The parties have also spread to Asian countries such as India and Malaysia. In India, St Mary’s Island, Udupi, on the Malpe coast often play host to hundreds of foreigners and tourists who had come from Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Goa and other parts of India to participate in a three-day Rave Party called ‘Spring Zouk’ – the Island Festival. Over 600 couples participated in the festival.

Flashy lights, crowded beaches, loud rock music, round the clock acid house party packed with high levels of energy marked the festival.

Sale of liquor in the Island, nude and half nude appearances by the party animals, smoking of banned substances like ganja in a party were introduced for the first time in the Udupi region. Over 300 tents are installed every year at the Island for the tourists. The Udupi District Administration in association with 3W Concepts had organised the event as a tourism promotion tool. Locak folk forms like Dollu Kunita, Kangeelu, Yakshagana, Suggi Kunitha by the Halakki tribes are also staged before the tourists.

(For updates you can share with your friends, follow IBNLive on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest)

Primer I.7 EcoTerrorism: The Green Scare

GREEN SCARE HOTLINE NLG Green Scare Hotline Lawyers Needed for NLG Green Scare Hotline1-888-NLG-ECOL The Guild’s toll-free “Green Scare” hotline, for environmental and animal rights activists, has been operational for one year. The calls are still coming in, and we seek Guild attorneys around the country to be on a list that we can refer callers to. Please let us know if we can add your name to our referral panel. We especially need lawyers with experience counseling individuals who have been visited by the FBI. If you can be available to handle a few calls a year, please email Heidi Boghosian at director at nlg.org Socially responsible activists have told us how much they appreciate this service–the Guild’s hotline is the only one that we know about! THE GREEN SCARE   Will Potter* INTRODUCTION Everyone is “going green.” Green light bulbs. Green cars. Green cleaning products. Green counter tops, green engagement rings, green eggs. A 2007 poll of moderate to conservative voters found that 7 out of 10 people considered global warming a serious problem and 73% wanted immediate action. In a Harris poll, about 60% of all adults described themselves as sympathetic to environmental concerns. There is no doubt that, especially since Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, going green has gone mainstream in the United States. And at the same time, there has been growing public concern for animal-welfare issues, leading to significant legislative and legal victories. In California, for instance, voters are considering a plan that, just a few years ago, many animal activists would have seen as inconceivable. It would reform the most egregious abuses of farmed animals, eliminating the confinement of pregnant pigs or calves raised for veal in a way that prohibits them from extending their limbs, and eliminating battery cages that keep egg-laying hens jammed in cages smaller than a sheet of paper. The “going green” phenomenon has been a hot topic in the media. But the mainstreaming of environmentalism has been paralleled by another, virtually unnoticed trend: a methodical, expanding government crackdown against animal-rights and environmental activists. Corporations and politicians have successfully campaigned to label activists as “eco- terrorists,” and make people afraid to use their First Amendment rights. At the same time as the general public and the press have labeled global warming and environmental issues as their top concerns, the U.S. government has labeled animal-rights and environmental activists the “number one domestic terrorism threat.” The animal-rights and environmental movements, like all other social movements throughout history, have both legal and illegal elements. There are people who leaflet, write letters, and lobby, groups like the Humane Society of the United States and Sierra Club. Somewhere in the middle, in terms of the spectrum of tactics employed by these movements, are people who protest and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience, groups like People   * Will Potter is an award-winning independent journalist who focuses on how lawmakers and corporations have labeled animal-rights and environmental activists as “eco-terrorists.” Will has written for publications including The Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, and Legal Affairs. He has testified before the U.S. Congress about his reporting. He is the creator of GreenIsTheNewRed.com, where he blogs about the Green Scare and history repeating itself.   Page 2   672 Vermont Law Review [Vol. 33:671 for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Greenpeace. Then there are people, like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, who go out at night with black masks and break windows, burn SUVs, and release animals from fur farms. Some recent communiqués by these underground, anonymous activists have used increasingly aggressive and threatening rhetoric, claiming that physical violence against human beings might occur if the targets do not cease harming animals and the environment. To date, though, no Animal Liberation Front or Earth Liberation Front action in the United States has harmed a single human being. The groups have, however, committed more than 1100 criminal acts causing more than $100 million in damage, according to the FBI.1 Animal-rights and environmental activists have not flown planes into buildings or taken hostages. Some right-wing groups, however, have gone much further, bombing the Oklahoma City federal building, murdering doctors, and mailing letters laced with anthrax. In 2003, for example, a Texas man admitted to possessing a weapon of mass destruction.2 He had ties to white supremacist groups. None of these right-wing groups, though, are listed on a roster of national security threats maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. I. DEFINING THE GREEN SCARE This disproportionate, heavy-handed government crackdown on the animal-rights and environmental movements, and the reckless use of the word “terrorism,” is the result of a carefully coordinated political campaign by corporations and the politicians who represent them. Through my reporting, I have documented an increasingly disturbing trend of “terrorist” rhetoric, sweeping legislation, grand-jury witch hunts, blacklists, and FBI harassment reminiscent of tactics used against Americans during the communist Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s. Ostensibly, these heavy- handed tactics are employed to go after illegal, underground groups like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front. These saboteurs are clearly breaking the law, and the government says they must be stopped. In practice, however, corporations and the government are campaigning not only to label these saboteurs as “terrorists,” but also to label anyone who supports them, or believes in their cause, as “terrorists” as well. Much like   1. Fed. Bureau of Investigation, Eco-Terror Indictments, Jan. 20, 2006, http://www.fbi.gov/ page2/jan06/elf012006.htm. 2. Justin Rood, Animal Rights Groups and Ecology Militants Make DHS Terror List, Right-Wing Vigilantes Omitted, CONG. Q., Mar. 25, 2005, http://www.cq.com/public/ 20050325_homeland.html.   Page 3   2009] The Green Scare 673 the Red Scare and communist witch hunts, this “Green Scare” is using one word—this time, it’s “terrorist”—to push a political agenda, instill fear, and chill dissent. Before explaining how, and why, animal-rights and environmental activists became the top terrorism threat, it is important to briefly examine the types of tactics that have been employed against these movements. Like the Red Scare, this Green Scare is operating on three basic levels: legal, legislative, and what I call extra-legal, or scare-mongering. A. Legal The Bush administration, prodded by corporations and industry groups, has used the legal system to push conventional boundaries of what constitutes “terrorism” and to hit nonviolent activists with disproportionate sentenc Source: THE GREEN SCARE File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – View as HTML by W Potter – Related articles – All 9 versions May 7, 2009 … where he blogs about the Green Scare and history repeating itself. … the Red Scare, this Green Scare is operating on three basic levels: … http://lawreview.vermontlaw.edu/…/15%20Potter%20Book%204,%20Vol%2033.pd

Internet and the Structure of Terrorism: The Underground Librarian Appendix

Eco-Terrorism and Environmental Literacy

Sunday, December 6, 2009   written by Meghan Wallace

Kahn, Richard, et al., “New Media and Internet Activism: From the Battle of Seattle to Blogging”

In this article Kahn asserts that the internet has become steadily politicized in recent times and as a result, have made reconfiguring politics and culture more accessible. It’s interconnecting networks provide the basics for new politics of alliance and solidarity in overcoming previous limitations. However, I would like to take this argument, as I previously did with Kingsley’s, and apply to climate change. 

Kahn believes these developments do not necessarily lead to social benefit and have given a home to hacker culture and terrorism. Backing up this statement are several documented cases of hacking and environmental terrorist groups that have assimilated online. 

Examples:

• “Hackers steal electronic data from top climate research center” – Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/20/AR2009112004093.html 

• A hacker broke into the Climatic Research Unit in England’s computer system and dispersed more than 1,000 e-mails online. Pieces of those messages were rapidly sent around the globe, pushed by those who said they exposed evidence that scientists were trying to cover up discrepancies in weather data, trick the public into accepting fabrications and bar independent thinkers from getting published in research journals.http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2009/dec/06/climate-change-skeptics-just-getting-warmed/

• Since 1989 terrorism by environmental terrorists has expanded, including a demonstration by Earth First! in July of 1994, against the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant in Tennessee, that resulted in $480,142 in sabotage and down time at the facility. Since that time there have been tens of millions of dollars in sabotage against timber, mining and ranching interests throughout our country. https://uprkermittfrog.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/primer-i-3-environmental-terrorism/ 

 

Kahn’s Critical Argument (thanks to my annotative bibliography): New media developments in technoculture have made it possible to reconfigure politics and culture. However, these developments do not necessarily lead to social benefit. Consequently, educating our youth on the cultural and subcultural literacies that will enable them to participate in the public debate, is vital. 

Adapted Critical Argument: New media developments in technoculture have made it possible to reconfigure our pattern of climate change. However, these developments do not always benefit the planet. Consequently, educating our youth on environmental and cultural literacies that will enable them to participate in the public debate, is vital. 

Aiding in this process are websites like:  http://www.enviroliteracy.org/ 

Dr. Werbin – I stumbled across this page when I was researching this post. I couldn’t use it but you may want to check it out … I think it’s up your alley.

• “The Impact of Web 2.0 on Social Activism” by Brett Rolfe – University of NSW, Australia http://digitalstrategist.typepad.com/articles/paper_web2activism.pdf