"Domestic Terrorism" as Legal Terror

On the Protests and Killing at Cop City

Six days ago, Atlanta police shot and killed Manuel “Tortuguita” Paez Terán, a climate justice activist and protestor who was defending the Weelaunee Forest from being destroyed for the development of Cop City. Cop City is planned to be the largest police training facility in the U.S. No Georgia politician, Democrat or Republican, has acknowledged the killing as worthy of inquiry because they have closed ranks around the decision to designate the Cop City protestors as domestic terrorists. Incidentally, in the days following Tortuguita’s killing, there have been at least three horrific, widely reported on mass shootings committed by actual domestic terrorists.

The Guardian reports that protests against Cop City began in late 2021, after the then Atlanta mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, announced plans for the 85-acre police training facility to be built. Plans to preserve the forest and make it a historic public amenity were adopted in 2017 as part of Atlanta’s city charter. The Weelaunee Forest had been named in city plans as a key part of efforts to maintain Atlanta’s renowned tree canopy as a buffer against global warming, and to create what would have been the metro area’s largest park. Most of the residents in neighborhoods around the forest are Black, and municipal planning has neglected the area for decades. Shortly after the George Floyd uprisings of 2020, the Atlanta City Council changed course and, instead, approved a $90 million training center, replete with a shooting range and mock village for practicing various urban warfare tactics. This approval came after 17 hours of public comment from over 1,100 residents, 70% of whom opposed the project. The movement to “Stop Cop City” began in response.

Last December, a half-dozen Forest Defenders who moved into the forest or spend days in the forest camping out as an act of civil disobedience, were arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism” under Georgia law. Kamau Franklin, an attorney and part of the coalition trying to stop the construction of Cop City, described the arrests to Democracy Now:

And so, while these folks were just in part of their encampment, they were raided by the police, again, by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Folks were sitting, literally sitting in tree huts, where they were — all of their camp equipment was destroyed. Rubber bullets were used. Guns were pointing at their head. They were involved at that particular time in no activity whatsoever, except for the act of being in the forest. And they all were taken in and then charged in this sort of RICO or conspiracy idea that the act of protest, the act of civil disobedience, direct action, is something that’s now being criminalized, in a statute that really doesn’t get used in Georgia, but it’s been on the books for a number of years. And so, these folks were doing absolutely nothing but being in the forest as Forest Defenders at the time of their arrest.

Of course, this is not the version of events proffered by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation:

Several people threw rocks at police cars and attacked EMT’s outside the neighboring fire stations with rocks and bottles.

After police cleared the area of concern, which included makeshift treehouses, they found explosive devices, gasoline, and road flairs.

During the raid that killed Tortuguita, seven more protestors were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. The Georgia Department of Public Safety has said that it will not release the name of the state trooper who shot Tortuguita because “disclosure would compromise security against criminal or terroristic acts due to retaliation.”

In moments like these, the law is doing more than functioning as a purportedly neutral artbiter of justice and injustice. It’s doing the work of epistemology. It’s conditioning the public to develop certain beliefs around truth and justification. It’s training the public to develop a particular kind of knowing whereby protestors disrupting the development of a police training facility are domestic terrorists, but the police and city government officials who are forcefully developing that facility over the tireless opposition of local residents being made more vulnerable by its development are not.

Domestic terrorism is a felony. It is a legal designation establishing that a person had the intent to intimidate the public or coerce the government while causing significant harm. And it is this legal designation that allows the police to kill legitimately and justifiably. It gives politicians cover so that they don’t have to say anything about it at all. Through this maneuver of legal designation, forest defenders are morphed into violent enemies of the state. Arresting them for civil disobedience or disturbing the peace or criminal trespass would only make them seem like righteous martyrs. In order for the state to retain legitimacy, these protestors have to be cast beyond the zone of civil society into a zero sum realm. To be clear, the only lawful form of protest was the futile kind, whereby residents voiced opposition in the appropriate public forum and the appropriate public servants moved forward with the plans that they had already agreed to and paid for behind closed doors. Like reasonable suspicion, the charge of domestic terrorism is the legal mechanism allowing the state to kill with impunity. It is a category through which to mark dissidents for death at will.

This demonstrates that, while policing is marketed as a community service, it is fundamentally a service to the government. It is the apparatus by which the government protects itself and carries out its plans. Sovereign immunity - the legal doctrine that the state cannot commit a legal wrong - exists so that the state can justify its actions with its own equivalent to self-defense. Colin Dayan explains that the state’s commitment to offering protection and curbing gratuitous acts easily becomes a guarantee of tyranny and terror. Masters hide behind the law under the guise of care. Through technical legalisms, the objective of “protection” sanctions violence. And, in the case of Cop City, the designation of protestors as domestic terrorists that may have to be killed is legal terrorism under the guise of protecting and serving.

Read the Atlanta Solidarity Fund’s Statement on the Repression of the Stop Cop City Movement here.