Re-posted from: http://artvoice.com/issues/v12n20/see_you_there

Burning Books, which has quickly become a vital focus for progressives and radicals alike, has brought in plenty of controversial speakers since it opened its doors in 2011. But none of them are as polarizing as Ward Churchill, whose 2001 essay in response to the 9/11 attacks, “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” argued that Americans had reaped what US government policy had sown. In 2007, the University of Colorado fired Churchill for academic misconduct, but his defenders continue to argue he was fired because of the outrage his ideas provoked. Whatever the case, Churchill’s scholarly work on the FBI, COINTELPRO, and the oppression of indigenous peoples are highly regarded. Love him or hate him, or both, Churchill’s talk is not to be missed. His appearance at Burning Books is made possible in part by noted First Amendment attorney Joseph M. Finnerty.

- geoff kelly

7pm Burning Books, 420 Connecticut Street (burningbooksbuffalo.com) free

The Buffalo chapter of the Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee presents this excellent, out-of-circulation documentary on the life of American Indian Movement martyr, Annie Mae Pictou Aquash

7pm, Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Burning Books

420 Connecticut Street, Buffalo

7pm, Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Burning Books

420 Connecticut Street, Buffalo

Made possible in part by Joseph M. Finnerty

7pm, Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Burning Books

420 Connecticut Street, Buffalo

by Geoff Kelly

Re-posted from: http://artvoice.com/issues/v12n14/week_in_review/usa_vs_pickering

Last August, Leslie James Pickering received unsettling news from an old acquaintance he’d known in Portland, Oregon, where both had lived in the 1990s. Pickering’s friend, now living in the Southwest, had received a phone call from two men who identified themselves as agents in the FBI’s Buffalo field office.

The agents asked Pickering’s friend about his character—what she thought of him as a person. Was he capable of influencing or even manipulating people? They asked her about Pickering’s activities in Portland, where Pickering and a partner, Craig Rosebraugh, were founders of the North American Earth Liberation Front Press Office. NAELFPO received and disseminated to the media anonymously delivered communiques from Earth Liberation Front, or ELF, a radical environmentalist group that was, at the time, waging a campaign of property destruction against corporations they considered to be exploiting and destroying the planet’s ecosystems. Though he was never a member of ELF, Pickering was a sympathizer and had been a participant in demonstrations against the same kind of activities and institutions that ELF targeted.

The FBI agents asked Pickering’s friend if he might have been involved in purported ELF activities in Pennsylvania in the late 1990s and early 2000s. By that time, Pickering had resigned from NAELFPO and returned to Western New York, where he was raised.

The agents asked her to steer them toward others who knew Pickering and maybe didn’t like him very much. Is he a loner? An extremist? It seemed, she told Pickering, as if they were creating a personality profile, and trying to figure out what he might be up to today.

What Pickering is up to today is not a mystery. Currently, Pickering is co-owner of Burning Books, a shop on Connecticut Street in Buffalo, where the shelves are filled with histories of radical movements in the US and elsewhere, and stocked with periodicals tracking ongoing human and animal rights campaigns. The store has become a popular stop for activists and authors on lecture tours of the country, and frequently hosts screenings of social justice documentaries and workshops for aspiring activists. (Upcoming events, for example, include a talk by Scott Crow, a founder of the Common Ground Collective, which provided relief to victims of Hurrican Katrina, and himself the target of a decade-long federal investigation, as well as a talk by Rachel Wolkenstein, attorney for Mumia Abu Jamal.) Pickering also writes books: He wrote a biography of Vietnam-era revolutionary Sam Melville, who died in the 1971 Attica uprising, as well as a history of ELF’s activities in the Pacific Northwest; he is the editor of an account of the RNC 8, activists charged as terrorists for planning to protest the 2008 Republican National Convention. He gives talks about his books and about his experience as a press liaison for ELF. He is rasing a family on Buffalo’s West Side.

When Pickering learned of the FBI’s phone call to his old friend, he contacted Artvoice and asked what we thought he should do. We, in turn, called the FBI’s Buffalo field office to ascertain if the men were indeed FBI agents. None of the four messages we left were returned. This seemed unusual to me: In my experience with the field offices in Buffalo and Pittsburgh, FBI press officers have been quick and even cheerful about returning my calls, perhaps because the FBI’s policy is not to comment on much of anything: They will not comment on ongoing investigations, and will not acknowledge whether an investigation even exists. What harm in fielding questions if the response is almost always “no comment”?

So, in collaboration with Pickering and his attorney, Michael Kuzma, we prepared to file a request under Freedom of Information Act for all materials the US Department of Justice had related to Leslie James Pickering, to see if some current investigation was underway.

As we were preparing the request, Pickering discovered a curious piece of paper in his mailbox: a handwritten note indicating that, between August 16 and September 14, 2012, the outsides of all first-class letters and parcels sent to his address were to be held and copied before they were delivered. This is called a “mail cover”; it’s a method for federal investigators to track who is corresponding with the subject of an investigation.

Pickering wasn’t sure if the note had been left accidentally or on purpose; if on purpose, he couldn’t decide if someone was giving him a heads-up or deliberately making him feel nervous.

So we decided to send a FOIA request to the US Postal Service, too, asking for the same thing: all records on file related to Leslie James Pickering.

Both these FOIA requests were filed in mid-September. Six months later, neither has been satisfied. After acknowledging receipt of the requests, both the DOJ and the USPS have been silent. Appeals of their failure to respond have been ignored so far, too.

Pickering is accustomed to paying a price for his association with radical activities, particularly his affiliation with ELF, several members of which eventually went to jail. (Pickering was interviewed for the 2011 Oscar-nominated film about ELF, If a Tree Falls, which describes the rise and dissolution of the group.) He and his family cannot cross the border to Canada, for example, because his name is on a federal watch list.

The call to his former acquaintance and the mail cover seemed different—a renewed and heightened interest in his current activities that borders on harassment. Last month, Pickering took his family to California for vacation. On the flights there and back, he was taken aside by airport security for additional questioning and inspection.

But wait, there’s more.

Kuzma, who is preparing to file a lawsuit to compel the DOJ and the USPS to respond to the FOIA requests, recently learned the the Western District office of the US Attorney, based in Buffalo, has issued at least one subpoena for records related to Pickering.

What gives? Is Pickering being investigated? How many associates has the FBI interviewed? How many subpoena has the US Attorney issued? And why? It has been 11 years since Pickering stopped relaying communiques for ELF, and the federal government has never disproved what he has always maintained: that he was ELF’s press liaison, not a participant in its campaigns.

“The power structure doesn’t like the fact that Burning Books is educating people and getting them to think critically. They have a vested interest in keeping the masses uninformed and disengaged,” says Kuzma, who will offer an account of Pickering’s ordeal at a benefit event scheduled for Wednesday, April 10, 6-8pm, at the First Amendment Club, 93 Bridgeman Street. The event will raise money to play the filing fees for the lawsuit challenging DOJ and USPS.

A more appropriately named venue could not have been chosen for this fundraiser, Kuzma says.

“The activities of Burning Books are fully protected by the First Amendment as well as Article One, Section Eight of the New York State Constitution,” says Kuzma. “Under the Privacy Act of 1974, federal agencies are prohibited from maintaining records describing how any individual exercises rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.”

Re-posted from Artvoice – http://blogs.artvoice.com/exitmusic/2013/02/27/revolution-before-its-too-late-josh-harper-the-shac-campaign/

The “Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act” was constructed by the US government to strike fear into the hearts of organizations like the Animal Liberation Front and SHAC (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty). The reason: In the early 2000’s SHAC—which began as an international animal rights campaign to shut down Huntingdon Life Sciences, a research organization based in England infamously known for testing harmful medical and non-medial substances on tens of thousands of animals each year—used what the government considered to be terrorist tactics to accomplish their goals. As a result of the behavior of organizations like SHAC, the government enacted The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which was put in place in essence to protect organizations, like Huntingdon, from activist organizations who wished to interfere with what they perceived as cruelty to animals, labeling said activists as terrorists. One of the first people convicted under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act was Josh Harper an organizer and spokesman of SHAC USA and member of various other animal rights groups. Harper spent three years in a federal prison for his role in SHAC, an organization that for years has taken on and often defeated some of the world’s most powerful corporations. Now Harper is making his way across the country from his home in Oregon to tell his story, which he will do this Thursday (Feb 28) at Burning Bookson Connecticut Street. Harper’s speech, as he puts it, will “examine how people of conscience can resist the power of the state and its corporate sponsors and the urgency to do so, while we still can.” 
—cory perla

7pm. Burning Books, 420 Connecticut St. 
(881-0791/burningbooksbuffalo.com)

Re-posted from http://theveganpolice.com/main/?p=1738

We’ve followed, and been fans of Leslie’s writing on this site and I was excited recently to head over to Leslie’s radical book store – Burning Books – in Buffalo, NY to give a talk. The place is full of books I’d love to take home, but I made it a priority to pick up Leslie’s latest – a zine detailing the history of EMETIC or the Evan Mecham Eco Terrorist International Conspiracy.

I cracked the zine open the next night hoping to read a bit and fall asleep as we had big march planned for the next day. I ended up blowing through the 59 pages in one go – trading sleep for inspiration.

The zine is well researched, and presented with a focus only possible for folks who have been on the front lines like Leslie has – Leslie served as a co-founder for the Earth Liberation Front Press Office from 1999-2002. The first half of the text is a history of EMETIC and the second half is an interview with EMETIC defendant Peg Millett. In each section the focus really pushes the text as a how-to; how to organize on a coalition basis, how to survive prison, how to watch for signs of infiltration and repression, etc. Aside from this, the text also does a great job of linking EMETIC, a radical break away group of Earth First!ers in the late 80’s who were doing large scale property destruction and “ecotage,” to what would be the development of the Earth Liberation Front in the late 90’s.

Leslie recounts the motivation for the zine as countering a mythology and romanticism that surrounded histories of the Earth Liberation Front and attempting to create a movement history that is grounded in realistic narratives (human flaws and all) alongside information meant to be inspiration and applicable. As someone who worked on a project with a similar focus – the Conflict Gypsy archive – I fundamentally believe in this vision and know the exact issues with what Leslie is countering – where movement romanticism becomes a priority above action.

This is a must for folks interested in radical history, especially for those who are interested in the roots of the modern earth liberation movements. The intersectional focus of the EMETIC crowd – who organized in solidarity with Navajo and Hopi Nations and took on mining, development and the nuclear industry – is also something that many in the earth and animal liberation movements should brush up on. Our movements started from a broad base and only through co-option (non profit and otherwise) have their focuses narrowed and become isolated.

This is also a timely text as large non-profits like 350.org and the Sierra Club are using mass civil disobedience to oppose pipelines and environmental destruction – but with unknown long term results. The text is vital to understanding how the non profit world has consistently denounced property destruction and facilitated capitalism – but we now stand on the verge of large scale projects that are unlikely to be swayed any other way.

The highlight of the zine – and the reason it was so easy to read in one sitting – is the fact that this serious focus is matched with the absurd humor that EMETIC employed, as well as, the frankness of Peg Millett. The history behind their acronym, and communiques like, “The use of this mountain to entertain rich white people by allowing them to slide down without bother of walking up is inappropriate” make it easy to identify with folks who knew they were taking a very serious step – but who also knew that macho bravado or rhetoric wasn’t the spirit of what drove their actions.

The zine is cheap – $4/$5 – and I’d highly suggest picking up a copy. This is the type of movement history you will not find anywhere else (which is a theme with Leslie as his biography of “Mad Bomber Melville” is a similar must.) If you can – also make it out to Burning Books in Buffalo and support what they are doing with their radical space/bookstore. Leslie’s got a bunch of stories still not on paper and it’s vital that those stories – and histories – keep getting passed on.