Subject: Call to Action: Galapagos Needs Your Help!!!!
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 19:19:05 -0700
From: seashepherd@seashepherd.org
Urgent Message from Captain Paul Watson!!
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is calling for a tourist boycott in
the Galapagos Islands until Galapagos National Park Director Edwin Nuala is
reinstated.
The president of Ecuador, Lucio Gutierrez, has removed Director Nuala, a
professional biologist and dedicated defender of the park, and replaced him
with a pro-fishing, pro-development, anti-conservationist named Fausto
Cepeda.
This move will bring to an end the dedicated work by the National Park to
protect the Galapagos National Park Marine Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage
Site, from illegal fishing activities. In short, the marine life of the
Galapagos will be devastated if this appointment stands.
Edwin Nuala must be reinstated. The president of Ecuador is bowing to
political pressure from fishermen, many of whom have just recently moved to
the Galapagos after the crash of the fishing industry on the mainland.
The tourist industry actually brings far more money into the Galapagos
economy than fishing. The tourist industry has been very silent about what
is happening in the Park. The government of Ecuador must be aware that they
can't kill the goose that lays the golden egg and that the fishermen will be
the decline of tourism in the future.
The impact of the decline in tourism must be felt and appreciated now before
it is too late. Therefore, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is urging
people around the world not to visit the Galapagos until Director Edwin
Nuala is reinstated.
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is also urging people to write, fax,
call or email the president of Ecuador with a strong message of support for
the Galapagos National Park Director Edwin Nuala. He must be reinstated and
the fight to protect the Galapagos from corruption, illegal exploitation and
mob violence by fisherman must continue.
National Park Rangers are now on strike in support of Edwin Nuala. All of
us who care about the preservation of these profoundly unique islands must
support the rangers and Director Edwin Nuala.
Since 2000, the SSCS, working with the National Park, has intercepted and
arrested dozens of illegal fishing vessels and seized thousand of shark fins
in illegal catches.
The appointment of this pro-fishing anti-conservation director will put an
end to our program of cooperation and our fast patrol vessel will be unable
to support conservation efforts in the Galapagos in the future.
The Galapagos National Park has seen crisis after crisis - each more violent
and threatening than the last. This present crisis is the most serious to
date. It will mark the first time that the political appointment of a
National Park Director has been authorized and the first time that the
President of Ecuador has directly intervened to shut down conservation in
the National Park.
Sea Shepherd urges you to contact these officials and express your support
of Edwin Nuala:
Presidente Lucio Gutiérrez
Palacio de Gobierno
Garcia Moreno 1043
Quito, Ecuador
Fax: (593 2) 580-735
Email: monica.iza@presidencia.gov.ec
Fabián Valdivieso Eguiguren
Minister of the Environment
Avenue Eloy Alfaro and Amazon
Quito, Ecuador
Telephone(s): (593 2) 2563429 or 2563430
Email: mma@ambiente.gov.ec
Gladys Eljuri De Alvarez
Minister of Tourism of Ecuador
Eloy Alfaro N32-300 Carlos Tobar
Quito, Ecuador
Telephone(s): (593 2) 2507559 or 2507560 or 2228304 or 2228305
Fax: (593 2) 2229330
Email: ministra@turismo.gov.ec
***********************************************
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society welcomes your support.
To learn how to support our conservation work,
please visit us at www.seashepherd.org/donate.shtml
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
P.O. Box 2616
Friday Harbor, WA 98250 (USA)
Tel: 360-370-5650 Fax: 360-370-5651
Subject: Update on Allison Watson
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 17:43:58 -0700
From: seashepherd@seashepherd.org
Update on Allison Watson
The perjury charges against me have been dismissed.
I would like to thank all those
people who have supported me in my legal battles
with the Federal Prosecutor's office in Seattle.
Although I was never myself a target for
investigation for any crime, I was being
prosecuted for exercising my rights under the 1st
Amendment of freedom of association. You see,
people that I know were targets of an
investigation where there was so little evidence
that the prosecutors had not laid any charges but
were fishing for information.
I don't trust my government and there
is valid historical reason for not trusting my
government. I remember the lessons of the
Hollywood black lists and how careers and lives
were destroyed because people were intimidated
into giving information on their friends and
family. Today answering that someone is a vegan,
a member of an animal rights or environmental
organization means that you could be providing
information that would cause problems for other
people. Questions like; are you now or ever been
a member of an animal rights organization or an
environmental group. The House of UnAmerican
Activities demonstrated very vividly just how
un-American such questioning is.
I would never and will never answer
any question of any Grand Jury without my
constitutional right of legal representation, a
right that was denied to me by the federal
prosecutors in Seattle. This is not about
cooperation in the interest of society. This is
about cooperating with a system that is working
overtime to deprive all Americans of the rights
guaranteed to us by that most noble of
proclamations - the Constitution of the United
States of America. I would rather die or be
imprisoned than to diminish the rights
established in that document and defended by
brave patriots for over two hundred years.
The bottom line is this; the
government of the United States of America has no
right to intimidate, harass, persecute and
harangue its citizens to provide information that
will lead to the deprivation of rights to other
citizens or oneself for political reasons. The
fact is that the present administration of the
United States has declared war on both the
environmental and animal rights movements. There
is a political and career enhancing motivation by
federal prosecutors to bring animal rights and
environmental activists to trial. The
administration wants heads and the federal
prosecutors are striving to collect those heads.
For more than two years, the U.S.
Department of Justice has been harassing me. They
did not bother to explain their reasons to me.
Big Brother apparently does not need reasons. I
was first called in to be finger-printed. I was
not arrested but subpoenaed. I was brought in
again to give hand-writing samples. I was brought
in again to give fingerprints a second time. I
was called into the Grand Jury only to be told to
come back again at another time. Two years of
being subpoenaed and called in and appointments
cancelled, and then subpoenaed again, without a
reason given. The idea of course is to make
someone believe he or she is being investigated
for a crime without telling them that they are or
are not, without being specific. Always vague,
always demanding, and always intimidating.
When I was compelled to appear before
the grand jury, I was told that I would have no
right to a lawyer to counsel me during
questioning. I pleaded the Fifth Amendment. In
response I was ordered before a Judge who told me
I could not invoke the Fifth Amendment, after
all, my name is not Oliver North. I was than
brought before the Grand Jury where I promptly
pleaded the First Amendment specifically
concerned with the clause; nor shall be compelled
in any criminal case to be a witness against
himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or
property, without due process of law. Being
denied counsel is a denial of due process. I
pleaded the 1st amendment citing that the
government had no right to question me about my
freedom of association with other persons. Again
the Judge ordered me to answer the questions of
the Grand Jury and stated that the 1st Amendment
was not valid to protect me against questions
aimed at chilling my right to be an activist. I
answered questions, but, as the transcript of my
hearing reveals, the prosecutors bullied,
intimidated and tricked me in a way that they
believed they could bring perjury charges against
me. Ultimately, the government dropped the
charges because we intended to prove how unfairly
they treated me. Also, critical evidence to
demonstrate the unfairness of the process and the
prosecutors' questioning of me had been destroyed.
According to the Seattle Post Intelligencer:
The government dropped the perjury charge
Thursday after failing to produce transcripts of
conversations within the Grand Jury room before
and after Watson testified
.
"It happened by accident - totally inadvertent."
Said Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Bartlett who
explained that the documents were thrown out as
the office was getting ready to move to the new
federal courthouse.
Bartlett said that an employee threw out roughly
ten years of paper tapes containing transcripts
of grand jury proceedings in which witnesses were
not present in the belief that there were
electronic discs containing the same information.
The Post Intelligencer also reported:
Seattle attorney Angelo Calfo sought to defend
his client by showing that the prosecutor,
Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Friedman, had
constructed a "perjury trap," by tricking her
into committing perjury. To further his argument,
Calfo successfully sought an order from U.S.
District Judge Marsha Pechman requiring the U.S.
Attorney's office to produce transcripts of
conversations in the grand-jury chambers made
before and after Watson testified.
This could not be done because the transcripts had been destroyed.
Thursday, prosecutors dropped the perjury charges
against Watson, which if she had been found
guilty, could have brought her five years in
prison and a $250,000 fine.
This was in fact a precedent set because the
Judge ordered the Federal Prosecutor's office to
provide depositions from the principles in
attendance at the Grand Jury. The Federal
Attorney's office chose not to provide these
depositions and instead dismissed the charges.
The Post Intelligencer went on to report:
Calfo said Watson was ordered back before the
Grand Jury last Thursday, but refused to answer
questions.
Said Calfo: "Her position was: "I was called
before the Grand Jury and falsely accused of
perjury in a situation where I felt I was
tricked. I don't feel it's fair to require me to
continue to cooperate under these circumstances."
I was then charged with contempt and plead guilty
to the charge on the understanding that it would
be a misdemeanor conviction and not a felony and
I will not have a probationary period. I could go
to jail for a maximum of 6 months. I was ordered
to appear for sentencing on November 17, 2004.
Having failed to prosecute me for perjury and
having failed to intimidate me into cooperation
with their Grand Jury, the Federal Prosecutor's
office turned their attention on animal right
activist and my best friend Gina Lynn. Gina Lynn
is a very outspoken animal rights activist but
she is not a criminal.
Thus the witch hunt continues by the Federal
government to hunt down people suspected of
defending the environment and protecting the
lives of animals from cruelty and violence.
This is a strange nation indeed where terrorism
is daily practiced on defenseless creatures,
where eco-systems are plundered and turned into
wastelands, where killing and destruction is
defended in the name of profits and where
compassionate people are the object of
persecution for the crime of association with a
movement that is attempting to stop the killing,
the injuries, the tortures and the damage to
wetlands, forests, lakes, rivers and the oceans.
I will be working to try and get my sentence
minimized. The maximum is six months for contempt
but I could receive a lighter sentence by the
sentencing judge. It is worrying for me because I
have an elderly mother that, as the only child, I
am taking care of and I have obligations to my
dogs, cats and to the work of the Sea Shepherd
Conservation Society.
Letters of support would be very helpful. I would
like to request that people who have supported me
write a letter appealing to the Judge to consider
my need to take care of my mother and to continue
my work for the environment and for animals.
And finally, thank you all who donated to my
defense fund. Without your support, I would have
been railroaded by the prosecutors into being
convicted of an unjust perjury charge which may
have seen me incarcerated for up to five years.
In this respect, we have won. The federal
prosecutors failed to send me to prison for
perjury, failed to convict me of a felony, and
failed to intimidate me into cooperation with
their witch hunt.
For that I thank you very, very much.
Allison Lance Watson
Please send letters to:
The Honorable Monica Benton
c/o Angelo J. Calfo
Yarmuth Wilsdon Calfo
2500 IDX Tower
Seattle, WA 98104
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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