Amy Goodman, Annie Leonard, Tara Houska, and Antonia Juhasz / Democracy Now! – 2017-09-03 20:49:50
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/9/1/greenpeace_indigenous_water_protectors_respond_to
Greenpeace & Indigenous Water Protectors
Respond to Lawsuit Accusing DAPL Activists of Eco-Terrorism
Democracy Now!
(SEPTEMBER 1, 2017) — We examine the corporate crackdown on environmental activists challenging the fossil fuel industry and human-driven climate change. The company that owns the Dakota Access pipeline — Energy Transfer Partners — has sued Greenpeace International and other environmental groups, accusing them of inciting “eco-terrorism.”
We speak to Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA, and Tara Houska, national campaigns director for Honor the Earth. She is Ojibwe from Couchiching First Nation.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: As the unprecedented flooding exacerbated by climate change continues in Houston, Texas, we end today’s show by looking at the corporate crackdown on environmental activists trying to stop the fossil fuel industry and human-driven climate change — at least challenge the industry.
The company that owns the Dakota Access pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, has sued Greenpeace International, Earth First! and other environmental groups, accusing them of inciting “eco-terrorism” against the pipeline’s construction.
The pipeline’s construction was delayed for months last year after thousands of Native Americans, led by the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota, and their non-Native allies launched a nonviolent encampment to stop the pipeline from crossing the Missouri River, saying a spill could contaminate the drinking source for millions.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration green-lighted both the Dakota Access pipeline and the Keystone XL pipeline. Dakota Access pipeline goes taking oil from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota through South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois, then hooking up with a pipeline to the Gulf of Mexico.
For more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA, and Tara Houska, national campaigns director for Honor the Earth. She is Ojibwe from the Couchiching First Nation.
Annie Leonard, you are named both personally and as executive director of Greenpeace USA in this lawsuit brought by Energy Transfer Partners. Can you respond?
ANNIE LEONARD: Yeah, actually, I brought the lawsuit here. For those on the radio, you can see I’m holding up a four-inch stack of papers. We were just served yesterday with this lawsuit. This lawsuit is a SLAPP suit. “SLAPP” means strategic lawsuit against public participation. And that’s what it is. It is an attempt to criminalize and silence protest, at the exact time that this country needs people rising up more than ever.
AMY GOODMAN: So, explain what it is that this suit alleges that you’ve been involved with, using terms like “eco-terrorism.”
ANNIE LEONARD: Right. Well, the term “eco-terrorism” was used, really, just to taint constitutionally protected, science-based free speech advocacy. They’re trying to criminalize healthy, righteous protest. The suit alleges two specific charges. One is defamation, which is sort of lawyerspeak for lying. They’re saying that we lied to exaggerate the environmental and human rights impacts of the pipeline.
The second one, that is really ludicrous, on so many levels, is that they’re claiming that Greenpeace was the head of a criminal enterprise that orchestrated all of this protest. And that’s the RICO part of this lawsuit.
But again, it’s not really about the facts. It’s not really about the law. If you read this massive document, the allegations are absolutely ludicrous. What it’s about is trying to intimidate, silence and chill protest.
Right now, our government has stepped back from offering any kinds of protection for human rights and public health. And the fossil fuel industry thinks that they have just absolute free rein to go for it. The one thing in the way is public opposition. It’s civil society. It’s activism. And so they’re trying to squelch that, not — to punish us for Standing Rock, but also to squelch it moving forward. And that’s just simply not going to happen. We are not going away. We will not be intimidated. We will not be silenced.
AMY GOODMAN: The law firm that is representing Energy Transfer Partners is President Trump’s — well, his former White House lawyer, is that right?
ANNIE LEONARD: Right. It’s President Trump’s go-to law firm. And this is actually the second lawsuit that this firm, Kasowitz firm, has filed against Greenpeace in the last year. Last year, they filed a lawsuit on behalf of a large Canadian logging company called Resolute.
It was a very similar lawsuit, accusing us of racketeering and all sorts of criminal activity. That lawsuit, we have a motion to dismiss that lawsuit. It’s going to be heard October 10th in San Francisco. So if all goes well, that case will be dismissed. But then we still have this one to face.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Tara Houska into the conversation, with Honor the Earth. The Red Warrior Camp is also named in this lawsuit. Can you respond to the owner of the Dakota Access pipeline suing the environmentalists who have been protesting for a year?
TARA HOUSKA: I mean, you’re basically seeing a corporate head that is seeking all of the allies and support mechanisms that were in place for the indigenous-led movement that happened at Standing Rock. You know, this was people showing up and deciding to give up their — potentially their freedoms and put themselves on the line to stop a pipeline that was going through the drinking water of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and all of the people living along the Missouri River.
You know, to say that this is somehow some type of criminal operation, you know, orchestrated by Greenpeace and all these folks who really didn’t have a very large presence there — this was indigenous-led. These people were supporting what we were doing, not leading and, you know, trying to manipulate us. I thought it was particularly disparaging and paternalistic that they basically characterized these organizations as misleading the tribe somehow and misleading the indigenous people.
AMY GOODMAN: You are not named?
TARA HOUSKA: No, I am not personally named. I thought it was actually very careful of them not to name any particular indigenous organization, even though the indigenous organizations were out in front of this. You know, instead, they labeled Red Warrior Camp, which is interesting again, because Energy Transfer Partners is the one who hired TigerSwan and all of these counterintelligence operations and private security, whose main mission was to go in and infiltrate and cause division within the indigenous organizations and indigenous peoples there.
You know, this has come out now in several TigerSwan reports that have been issued by Intercept. And so, you know, you’re seeing them trying to, again, demonize and divide indigenous movement organizing.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk more about that, turning to those reports by TigerSwan, the private military contractor hired by Energy Transfer Partners to carry out extensive military-style counterterrorism efforts targeting the indigenous-led movement at Standing Rock.
In one report, TigerSwan discussing how to use its knowledge of internal camp dynamics, writing, quote, “Exploitation of ongoing native versus non-native rifts, and tribal rifts between peaceful and violent elements is critical in our effort to delegitimize the anti-DAPL movement,” unquote. In the documents, TigerSwan also repeatedly calls the water protectors “insurgents” and the movement an “ideologically driven insurgency.” Tara, you are also a lawyer.
TARA HOUSKA: Yeah, no, I mean, and they refer to us as “jihadists” and, you know, try to characterize us as somehow these radical people, who are instead nonviolently, peacefully trying to stop the construction of a pipeline. This is people walking in front of machines, people peacefully resisting, sitting down in the middle of the road.
Yet somehow, you know, we were — had snipers trained on us around the clock, had helicopters overhead, attack dogs — that you were there for — attack dogs being unleashed on men, women and children trying to stop the destruction of a sacred site. This is like — you know, you look at this, and you think, “OK, so you’re the company that behaved very, very badly, and you were caught.
You were exposed to a large, large audience that typically a Big Oil would not be exposed to, and you are also exposed to a lot of banks now looking at this and saying, ‘We don’t want any part of this,’ and a movement that’s now focusing on divestment and looking at these banks and saying, ‘OK, pull your money out of this project,’ and they are.”
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, we were there on Labor Day weekend a year ago. We filmed the dogs that were unleashed on the water protectors. And I should say that we also, while not named defendants in this case, are mentioned in the lawsuit. Now, Annie Leonard, this is a racketeering lawsuit. Very quickly, if you can talk about what that means?
ANNIE LEONARD: Right, that’s the RICO lawsuit approach, that this is a SLAPP suit it’s taking. Realize it is a SLAPP suit. The RICO, racketeering, is just a type of SLAPP suit, but it is still a lawsuit designed to squelch public advocacy.
The racketeering is the part about us being the head of a criminal enterprise, where they say that Greenpeace orchestrated this entire criminal enterprise. If found correct, we could then potentially be liable for anything that anyone did on Standing Rock, because the theory is that we orchestrated it.
The response is, is number one, nothing that was done was criminal. It was nonviolent. It was science-based. It was by values-led. It was peaceful. And the second thing, as my sister here said, is that this movement was indigenous-led. Greenpeace was very proud to stand up and support in solidarity, but this was an indigenous-led movement. And it is false and really offensive to say that Greenpeace orchestrated this. We were not the leaders here. We were a strong ally, and we don’t regret a bit of showing up there.
AMY GOODMAN: Tara Houska, we just have a minute, but I wanted to ask you, of Honor the Earth — we’re having this conversation in the midst of what could be the greatest catastrophe this country has seen, in the greater Houston area, the epicenter of the fossil fuel industry. Can you respond to the hurricane, now a tropical depression, and the massive devastation we’re seeing on the Gulf Coast?
TARA HOUSKA: We’re seeing something that’s — you know, people have to acknowledge and step back and have a real conversation about climate change and our contribution to it. You know, this is what happens — severe storms, increased pressure towards our very existence.
You know, these are coastal states, where we are at an — this is an epicenter of fossil fuel extraction and refining and all of that that’s happening down in that area, and now people have toxic water sitting in their front yards. We need to have a frank and open discussion about climate change and acknowledge the fact that we cannot engineer our way out of this.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us, Annie Leonard, who is the executive director of Greenpeace USA, who is named both personally and as executive director of Greenpeace in this lawsuit brought by Energy Transfer Partners, that owns the Dakota Access pipeline, and Tara Houska, Honor the Earth. In the last 10 seconds, Annie, how is this affecting your work?
ANNIE LEONARD: You know, they’re trying to silence and intimidate us. It is a burden, absolutely. We are putting our top staff on this. But it is absolutely not going to silence us. And, in fact, it is emboldening us. And we are going to be stronger and more unified with other environmental groups and indigenous groups moving forward. So we’re stronger than ever.
AMY GOODMAN: Thanks so much to both of you.
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Part 2: Private Security Firm TigerSwan Targets Pipeline Protesters in COINTELPRO-Like Operation
Democracy Now!
In Part 2 of our conversation, Antonia Juhasz dives deep into how the private military contractor TigerSwan targeted protests against the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline. The pipeline had faced widespread resistance from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, hundreds of other indigenous nations from across the Americas, as well as their non-Native allies. Published by the news outlets Grist and Reveal, her report is headlined “Paramilitary security tracked and targeted #noDAPL activists as ‘jihadists,’ docs show.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn to Part 2 of our conversation with Antonia Juhasz, oil and energy journalist. Her latest piece is headlined “Paramilitary security tracked and targeted #noDAPL activists as ‘jihadists,’ docs show.” It appears in the news outlets Grist and Reveal. Antonia Juhasz is author of Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill and The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry — and What We Must Do to Stop It.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: TigerSwan was founded around 2007 — that date isn’t entirely clear — by a just-retired Delta Force 25-year Army veteran, James Reese. Reese has ties with Blackwater. For example, we know that in 2008 he worked for Blackwater. There’s a State Department contract demonstrating that he had worked for Blackwater at that time. He has said that he advised Blackwater, as well.
And then Blackwater financed the first training facility that TigerSwan set up in North Carolina to train military, law enforcement and some civilians in tactics that it had developed working as a private military government contractor, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, on a multitude of contracts for years with State Department, DOD, Homeland Security, in theater providing security in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Then Reese also started working in 2007 in turning TigerSwan’s attention — starting, I’m sorry, more like in 2011, to domestic private security for corporations and came on to be hired by Energy Transfer Partners to oversee all security on the Dakota Access pipeline, starting last year in September, and taking over after the use of dogs by private security against water protectors.
And what we know is that TigerSwan set up this sophisticated counterintelligence program, including surveillance, infiltration and manipulation, intentional manipulation, of protesters, and that those operations encompassed all four states of the Dakota Access pipeline — North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois — as well as Texas, where Energy Transfer Partners is based, but that these activities are ongoing, so also in Pennsylvania, at new — at a new pipeline camp, also in South Dakota at a new pipeline resistance camp.
And also the reach of TigerSwan’s activities revealed in the daily situation reports that we were leaked, that Grist was leaked, included their monitoring, for example, a protest in Ohio that had been posted by the Unitarian Universalist Church and that involved a bunch — I interviewed the woman who’s named in the report, who also happens to be a reading tutor, and it was people walking around on the street, you know, with signs in Akron, Ohio, and that ended up in TigerSwan’s, you know, surveillance web.
Also in the documents, in addition to focusing what are really likely — what would be very illegal — are likely illegal activities if they were conducted by law enforcement, so unconstitutional activities, were they to be committed by law enforcement. We also see TigerSwan using, in its own words, surveillance and other operations on those “loosely affiliated” with the protests.
So these are activists in Chicago protesting against, quote, “the election of Donald Trump.” It was a very, very broad net, ongoing net, that this paramilitary force was employed by Energy Transfer Partners to oversee in opposition — you know, to stop opposition to an oil pipeline.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what about the issue of legality? You say in your piece, “US laws regarding surveillance and other counterintelligence tactics don’t appear to specifically govern TigerSwan.” Why?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: This raised a number of, you know, serious concerns with legal scholars I spoke with, as well as the ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, who’s representing water protectors in the 800 people who were arrested over the course of this resistance movement.
So, basically, we did have a period of time where our laws focused on private security forces working for corporations. This was the era of the Pinkertons, when we had corporations using thugs to beat up unionizing, basically. Well, that — the country’s memory went pretty far afield after that, and now we basically don’t have laws for private security.
The way we think about private security companies in the United States is if you think about the mall cop, you know, like the security guy at Wal-Mart who doesn’t have a gun and, you know, is just there. That’s what our laws think about when we think about private security, which means we basically have very few. They vary dramatically by state. The enforcement is — you know, can be almost nil, and there’s no federal — almost no federal restrictions.
So this is an area that you now have a private paramilitary security force, used to operating in war zones. That’s what those laws are. So that’s who’s operating here. And they’re doing things that, again, if law enforcement did them, they would be unconstitutional, against the right to freedom of association, free speech, religious affiliation.
TigerSwan very clearly focused on, you know, Palestinians, people it described as “Islamicists,” who were there, Black Lives Matter. I have a very telling story — sorry, black people, and Black Lives Matter is specifically named, and, of course, the Native American community.
And there’s one very telling story, however, of a young woman who was doing what she described to me as self-defense classes for women and fem folk at the camps, very small groups of people. And by looking at the dates and the descriptions, she’s sure about a story that then got reported by TigerSwan that reported, quote, “Unidentified member of the Black Panther Party is conducting hand-to-hand combat training in the camp.”
And she said to me, “I’m sure that’s me, based on what else was going on at the camp, and, you know, that I might look — I do work with communities of color in Chicago” — and she’s from Chicago, where they also — TigerSwan spent a lot of time paying attention to activities in Chicago. And she said, “I’m sure that’s me. That’s not what I was doing.” But that’s what TigerSwan reported.
And again, that helped facilitate their desire — and there was a comment in a TigerSwan report that said, “Law enforcement isn’t acting hard enough. The fines aren’t high enough on arrestees, and they’re not arresting enough people.” And so, what’s possible is that these reports were an attempt to get law enforcement to act more aggressively, which, of course, it did, in dramatic fashion, with many charges of excessive force, with, again, a very militarized response, you know, in the fields of North Dakota. And, you know, it’s important to look at what, if any, role TigerSwan had in that.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the footage you got of TigerSwan training video, showing soldiers how to do what’s called clearing a room, the company’s co-founder and chair, retired Lieutenant Colonel Jim Reese a veteran of the Army’s elite Delta Force, the Delta Force best known for tracking bin Laden?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: There’s a lot of footage of training that TigerSwan does at its facility — again, the facility that was financed by Blackwater in North Carolina. And this is a training facility for military, law enforcement and also civilians. And that footage is, you know, a theoretical home, probably in Iraq, and we see the soldiers zooming in and immediately killing everybody, or what would likely — what seems to be the likely outcome would be, you know, you go in, and everybody’s dead. And this is the type of training that TigerSwan performs. And this is their mindset.
And one of the things I quote in my story is actually a Harvard University study that pulled together a number of chiefs of police to look at scenarios involving private security. And one of the scenarios that they were given was: What if you’ve got a group of former Afghan military veterans, elite forces, who want to set up a hostage-saving force in your city and want you to contract them to do that? And the police chiefs resoundly said: “That would be a really bad idea, because they have an entirely different set of ideas about keeping the peace than does a domestic police force, and that the profit motivation would also be deeply problematic, if you’re looking at domestic operations.” And I think that that footage really helps crystallize the idea that these were just, you know, the wrong guys for the job.
AMY GOODMAN: In an article for the Washington Examiner and posted on TigerSwan’s own website, conservative columnist Tom Rogan advocated for the TigerSwan CEO, Jim Reese, to head the FBI. Rogan writes, quote, “Reese would also innovate. Like any big organization, the FBI is ripe for reform.
Establishing a successful global company after leaving the military, Reese would bring a blend of public and private sector thinking to bear. . . . The bureau might do well to transfer more lower-level counter-terrorism duties away from agents and towards local police-dominated Joint Terrorism Task Forces. Regardless, Reese despises static thinking.” Your thoughts on this, Antonia?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yeah, renowned civil rights attorney Jeffrey Haas, who is perhaps best known for leading the legal team that exposed the COINTELPRO program of the FBI over 13 years of litigation, is one of the lawyers who’s representing the water protectors through the National Lawyers Guild. And I interviewed him at length about TigerSwan and the leaked documents.
And one of the biggest concerns that he raised was that what it appeared most disturbingly was that what TigerSwan was doing was implementing a program of counterintelligence, surveillance, infiltration, that reminded him quite extensively of the COINTELPROprogram, which was of course found to be illegal, but that this is a private company doing what now the FBI and law enforcement cannot do.
And the irony that now, you know, James Reese apparently now wants to be the head of the FBI, and bringing, you know, these tactics back to the FBI would be laughable if it wasn’t actually unfolding right here.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Antonia, explain exactly what you understand TigerSwan did in North Dakota as it took on the anti-Dakota Access pipeline water protectors.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: We know that they conducted extensive observation and infiltration, and that activity took place potentially through online hacking. They discuss getting into private Facebook pages and to use the information gained there to essentially gain information that protesters would not like to have brought out, and that that has — is potentially illegal under cyberhacking laws.
We also know that they did on-the-ground collecting of information through source reporting and informants. And I shouldn’t keep saying this in the past tense; this is ongoing activities that we know that they’re still doing at ongoing camps. We know that they at least tried to use that information and those informants to develop rifts between water protectors, particularly looking at Native versus non-Native, in their words, and violent versus nonviolent.
We know that they worked closely with law enforcement, and that’s another deep potential problem here from a legal perspective. There are regular reports within TigerSwan’s reporting of meeting with law enforcement officers across the state, but also federal agents, as well, and that this level of sharing is deeply concerning because TigerSwan also stated in the documents released that it was trying to provide information that would be used towards prosecution.
And so, Jeffrey Haas, the lawyer Jeffrey Haas, had said that, you know, these are basically tactics that law enforcement would not have been able to gain access to this information. It would be unconstitutional. Yet the private security company is gaining access to the information, providing it to law enforcement, and then that could potentially use towards prosecuting water protectors, again, in these, you know, some 800 cases that were brought against water protectors against the Dakota Access pipeline.
And what would be even more problematic — and we don’t know the answer to this because there — as I said, there was this extensive relationship between TigerSwan, local, state and even federal law enforcement — was if the information flow was going the other way. So if law enforcement was asking TigerSwan to do things that law enforcement can’t do, that would be — that would certainly be illegal, and that would be particularly problematic.
The documents provide a lot of information, but they mostly sort of open the door to more questions that need to be answered from a legal perspective. And one of the attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told us, you know, she thinks that subpoenas should be issued looking at least at this issue of the potential hacking of private Facebook pages, and that, you know, I think there is potentially a number of legal — legal cases that could be brought, or at least more information that needs to be gained on exactly what Energy Transfer Partners was using TigerSwan for, and potentially, like I said, what law enforcement was using TigerSwan for, and what, you know, constitutional rights were being broken.
As I said, the potential threats are, you know, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion. We had people being surveilled by TigerSwan and potentially infiltrated in Chicago, far away from the pipeline. So, the pipeline passes through Illinois. It doesn’t pass through Chicago. But TigerSwan had these intense programs of observation, of trying to link.
They talk about linking Black Lives Matter participants who had been at Standing Rock or just people who are part of Black Lives Matter in Chicago to four universities in the Chicago area and making links between persons of interest in different institutions and collating and gathering all this information. And all people were doing was exercising their First Amendment right to free speech and freedom of association. So, you know, these are all deeply troubling.
I will say, it was very important. I did a lot of interviews with people named in the documents or people who were at Standing Rock or involved in these protests. And I would say, to the one, they said, “You know, we knew that this — we knew that there was surveillance happening. We certainly knew that there was a possibility of infiltration. But this does not make us — you know, this doesn’t scare us.
This may make us feel creeped out, and it certainly is problematic, but we’re going to keep organizing. And we think it’s really important, as well, that the public hears that, as well. We want people to be involved in these resistance movements, and we’re not going to be cowered by TigerSwan’s activities,” because, you know, one of the pieces of information that came out in exposing COINTELPRO was that one of the key objectives of COINTELPRO was to create fear and distrust within government opposition movements or within the Black Panther Party and other groups, that would undermine those activities, and that just that that fear that some — that there’s a, you know, FBI agent or a TigerSwan agent behind every corner could stop people from wanting to participate and to trust each other and work together, and that everyone I interviewed wanted to — wanted me to know that that wasn’t going to be their response to this information coming out.
AMY GOODMAN: Antonia, tell us what Kelly Hayes was accused of doing, hand-to-hand combat training, and also Joye Braun.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: So, Kelly Hayes is a pretty amazing story. She — I had found in the documents that TigerSwan had reported in one of the documents that a unidentified member of the Black Panther Party from Chicago was conducting hand-to-hand combat operations in the Standing Rock camps, probably at Oceti Sakowin, the largest camp. And I started interviewing people in Chicago, you know, not even necessarily expecting that I was going to find this person.
I was doing an interview with Kelly Hayes, and I read her the date, and I read her the description. And she said, you know, “That’s got to be me. I’m sure that’s me. But I was conducting self-defense classes for small groups of women and fem folk. And I’m sure that that’s what they were talking about,” she said, “because there was nothing else even remotely similar taking place in the camp,” and that, she said, disturbingly, you know, it’s not like those — that those small groups of women and fem folk had been advertised on social media or even advertised in the camp. She said the only way that someone would know that those trainings were happening was if they were there on the ground.
She said, then, what also makes it troubling is that — the way, of course, it was reported, and that that raises the implication that TigerSwan was intentionally trying to make activities in the camp seem more dangerous, and, as it was doing throughout, focusing in on people of color and people who followed religions that they seemed to not, you know, find settling, to focus in on the potential threat of those people.
And, you know, Hayes certainly found it disturbing to have this information reported on her, but, you know, she said a very powerful quote in response, which was, “You know, I think if they’re spending all this time, all this money, all this energy on trying to figure out who we are and what we’re doing, that that’s a sign of our power and that they’re afraid of us.”
AMY GOODMAN: And Joye Braun?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: So, Joye Braun, a member of the Lakota Tribe and a representative of Indigenous Environmental Network, was credited with the very first idea of setting up a resistance camp to Dakota Access pipeline in Standing Rock and outside of the reservation. And she was one of the first in and one of the very last out.
She’s also set up or is a participant in a new resistance camp that’s in South Dakota, and it is to keep going with the energy against the Dakota Access pipeline, because there’s ongoing lawsuits there against it, and to begin resistance to the Keystone XL expansion put forward by Trump.
And so, I had a long conversation with her about TigerSwan and about the surveillance. And she said, “You know, first of all, we knew that we were being surveilled, of course, and potentially infiltrated. But we had no idea it was a paramilitary contractor like TigerSwan.” And that was deeply troubling.
What was even more troubling, though, is that the final report that we had access to, from April 11th, said that they are monitoring the South Dakota camp, as well, and that they have an informant within that camp. And again, what she said was, “You know, we sat around a campfire in the very beginning of the camp, you know, in the very early days back in April, a year ago, of the first camp” —
AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: — “saying, you know, ‘What would happen if they started treating us like they treat people in Afghanistan or people in Iraq?'” And what she said was, “We will survive. We’ve survived before. We’ll survive again. We’ll survive TigerSwan.” And in one of her final statements to me, she said, “You know, TigerSwan said in its report that we’ll — that we are really organized. Well, they’re right. We are really organized.”
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