Green PArty a terrorist group?

Factual Questions
1

This artice was in the Green Party Newsletter. Is this just propaganda or have the Feds really kept people from flying just because they are in the Green Party? It seems that if the Green party was being harassed they would have a filed a major lawsuit and got alot of main stream press. BTW I know about the incident in Bangor Maine from last year and know that there are two sided to it. This incident seems more detailed and less defendable.

November 8, 2002

HARASSMENT OF GREENS AND OTHER ACTIVISTS AT AIRPORTS ACCELERATE
Doug Stuber, North Carolina Greens
I was at the airport trying to make an important trip to Prague to gather artists for Henry James Art in Raleigh, NC, USA when I was told (ticket in hand) that I was not allowed to fly out that day. Curiously, I asked “why not” and the answer at Raleigh Durham Airport (RDU) was that, because of the DC sniper attacks, no Greens were allowed to fly overseas on THAT DAY.
Naturally, I went back the next morning, and instead of paying $670 round trip was forced into a $2,600 “same day” air fare. I was mad enough about the money, but what happened in the next 24 hours was mind-boggling.
So, it was 6 am and my first flight wasn’t due out until 11:45, so I had plenty of time to kill. At exactly 10:52 am, just before boarding was to begin, I was approached by Officer Stanley (the same policeman I was ushered out of the airport the day before), and he said he “wanted to talk to me.” I went with him, but reminded him that no one had said I could not fly, and that my flight was about to leave. The officer took me into a room and questioned me for one hour. By noon Stanley introduced me to two gentlemen I will refer to as Secret Service A and Secret Service B.
SS-A and SS-B took full eye-open pictures of me with a digital camera. They then asked me all the details about my family, where I lived, who I ever knew, what the Greens are up to, etc., etc. At one point I asked if they really believed the Greens were equal to Al Qaeda. They showed me a document from the Justice department (Ashcroft and friends) that actually DOES state that greens are likely terrorists. I wish I had had a camera to be able to copy THAT document!
We got out of there at about 12:45 – enough time to catch the later flight. They walked me to the Delta counter and asked that I be given
tickets for the flight so I could make my connections. The woman (she is a tall blonde with short hair and works for Delta at RDU) quickly printed out tickets so that I could make the flight, and I was relieved that the SS hadn’t stopped me from flying. I was wrong again. Just as I was about to board the plane, officer Stanley ONCE AGAIN ushered me out the door.
To be fair, he told me this: “Just go to Greensboro, where they don’t know you, and be totally quiet about politics, and you can make it to Europe that way.” I felt like I was being set up, but I went to Greensboro anyway. In Greensboro, NC I showed my passport and was told flat out that I could not fly anywhere. Are Greens throughout the US being barred from flying? (Our former national Co-Chair, Nancy Oden, had already been denied a flight from Maine to Chicago eight months ago.)
Not to be denied, I then traveled to Charlotte. This is another hour and a half away, so I’d been up for 40 hours, with a 1.5 hour drive ahead. I stocked up on Dr. Pepper and decided I would not be denied. Of course, at Charlotte the same thing: get this terrorist out of here was the mode the cops were in. I then drove three hours home (43 hours trying to catch a flight) and crashed hard in bed. It appears that greens, who have ten key values that include nonviolence, social justice, etc., are considered terrorists by the Ashcroft-led Justice Department. I had always speculated that capitalism had gone too far. Now I know for sure.

2

According to Snopes, her political affiliation had nothing to do with it.

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/oden.htm

3

That link refers to the Bangor Maine incident over a year ago. I am wondering if anyone has heard of this more recent event that was written about on November 8th. Doug Stuber claims to have gone through several levels of security over a 48 hour period. He was told point blank it was because he was a Green party member and was even shown a document from the Justice Dept. that “DOES state that greens are likely terrorists.” (Please read the above article).

4

Not her, you git. The MAN who wrote this article references the time frame of the D.C. sniper attacks, a full year after the Oden incident. If his account is true, he was indeed treated shamefully. Doug Stuber is (or was) an officer of the N.C. Green Party and an activist at Duke University. His name is quite well known, and if there is a Justice Department finding that the Green Party is a terrorist organization (unlikely, but possible), Mr. Stuber is a prime candidate for this sort of action. However, he could just be lying, or this could be a complete scam. While he’s all over the internet, I can’t find a single reference to this incident anywhere. Besides, two incidents can hardly be called “accelerating.”

5

The “git” part doesn’t mean you, pjcnyc.

6

Color me skeptical. If they “didn’t know him” in Greensboro, how would they know that he’s a Green to deny him boarding? I also can’t believe he wouldn’t make a stink to the airline about the $2000 fare increase due to circumstances beyond his control. Even if the airline had been unwilling to take responsibility for that, most will at least meet you partway. Bad customer relations to do otherwise.

7

The key fact that’s being missed is that the party being referred to here is something called “Green Party U.S.A.”. It’s a hard-line environmentalist group, I believe. There is no affiliation with Ralph Nader’s Green Party.

Just so nobody gets confused, because I think this is one reason this story keeps passing around.

8

So who, precisely, were you calling a “git” in GQ?

Yes, I expect an answer. And an apology.

9

Are you sure? I ask, because if you go to the Green Party website, it calls itself “the Green Party/Green Party U.S.A”

http://www.greenparty.org/

10

Err…that’s “The Greens/Green Party U.S.A”

11

Yes, and if you look at http://www.greenpartyus.org/ you see the Green Party that Nader ran in. I’m awfully suspicious about what the Green Party USA is up to because he doesn’t make it clear that that is the group in question in the article; he just keeps says ‘greens’. “Greens” implies to me something like ‘all people in the political party known as the green party’, ‘all people who sympathise with the green party’, or ‘all people who believe in environmentalism’, not members of one specific organization (especially one with a name that is so easy to confuse with the Green Party).

12

To lay the Green Party issue to rest: This “article” was in the Green Party Newsletter a friend of mine gets. My friend and her husband are not radical environmentalists, but they do support the Green Party (the Husband might even be a member). This newsletter is from the political party. A web search on Doug Stuber shows him to be the treasurer of the North Carolina Green Party, which has links to Ralph Nader. I didn’t see any overt radical environmentalism at the site. If Doug Stuber is also an environmental terrorist, I saw no mention of it.

13

The whole story seems far fetched to me.

Who the devil is Doug Stuber? How would these airports know he was connected to the Green Party and what in the world would that have to do with the sniper story? Isn’t Raliegh quite a long ways from DC or even the southern most sniper incident?

I watched and listened to many of the talking heads during the height of the sniper story. 99.8% of it was completely wrong but never once did I hear even one remark that even remotely might connect the Green Party to it.

If there was one iota of truth to it, he won’t have been allowed just walked away the first day and we would have heard a stink about it in the media.

Sure he might have been denied boarding. Like not having a photo ID, his check bounced or the plane was full. That’s about all I can believe might be true.

14

Here in the DC area, AFAIK no mention was made of the Green Party during the whole sniper escapade. And no mention was made of any sort of restrictions on air travel due to the sniper(s).

Local news went out of their way to say that the authroities thought the sniper was not affiliated with any terrorist group, domestic or international.

So it sounds like BS to me.

15

Here are some other problems with Mr. Stuber’s story:

  1. It hardly would make sense for the Bush administration to launch a systematic campaign to persecute Greens. Were it not for the Greens, Bush wouldn’t be president.

  2. The Secret Service isn’t responsible for airport security. This is a transparent attempt by Mr. Stuber to inflate his importance. It sounds more dramatic, and more political, to say “I was harassed by Secret Service agents” than to say "I was harassed by airport security personnel.

  3. Mr. Stuber says that he was told to go to Greensboro and “be totally quiet about politics”. This is odd advice. Does one normally discuss politics with gate personnel when boarding an aircraft? Apparently Mr. Stuber does, which may give some insight as to why he was singled out for extra scrutiny.

There have been many instances in American history of mindless government harassment of wartime dissidents. Given the Greens’ history of telling “stretchers” (as documented in the Snopes article) and the many holes in Mr. Stuber’s story, however, this doesn’t appear to be one of them.