Internal documents reviewed by The Intercept describe how Enbridge launched an initiative known as Opposition Driven Operational Threats, or ODOT, to focus the company’s attention on Indigenous opposition to Line 3 and Line 5, two controversial pipelines that transport carbon-intensive tar sands oil between Canada and the United States.

The documents provide a rare window into how fossil fuel companies counteract political opposition. In Enbridge’s case, its ODOT initiative goes so far as to track community gatherings of pipeline opponents and label tribal lands as areas where the company faces threats.

“To the rest of us, ‘threat’ means actual threats to life and liberty, but to them this is all about how much money they can extract while carrying out an operation that is environmentally devastating,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s Center for Protest Law and Litigation and an attorney representing opponents of Line 3. “You begin to have this perversion of concepts of what actually are true threats.”

“To the rest of us, ‘threat’ means actual threats to life and liberty, but to them this is all about how much money they can extract.”

Information about how the internal system works is limited, but Verheyden-Hilliard said that there could be civil rights implications depending on whether any state or local agencies are involved in the collection of data for ODOT and how Enbridge uses the information the initiative produces. The existence of the tracking system, she said, was especially troubling considering Enbridge’s payments to law enforcement agencies for policing pipeline opposition. Gatherings of pipeline opponents are protected by the First Amendment. In communities in which tribal governments have invoked their treaty rights to challenge pipeline paths, the tool could potentially be used to develop divisive campaigns aimed at pressuring tribes to back down.

“As part of Enbridge’s risk assessment process, we work to better understand the communities in which we operate, views about energy infrastructure and various perspectives regarding our projects and operations,” Enbridge spokesperson Juli Kellner said in a statement to The Intercept. “Doing so enables us to actively address issues through engagement and dialogue. We take seriously our role in delivering the energy people count on every day and ensuring safe, uninterrupted and reliable operations.”

Enbridge designed ODOT as a sweeping system to identify emerging outside threats to the company’s business. The program has been managed by a team of Enbridge employees, representing various areas of expertise across the company, who planned to coordinate with various departments within the liquids pipeline division.

Enbridge’s definition of a threat includes virtually anything that could negatively impact the company. ODOT was meant to protect against not only property damage but also reputational harm to the company. A list describing categories of threats included activities that involved trespassing or disruptive protests as well as “awareness events,” which appeared to reference gatherings for pipeline opponents to get their message out. A tribe considering rejecting an Enbridge easement, often by invoking its treaty rights, could also qualify as a threat.

The ODOT initiative includes a system that assigns a risk score to geographical areas. One of the factors used to tally the score is “Indigenous Opposition.” Enbridge has used the scores to generate color-coded maps that often identify areas covered by treaty rights as places where the company faces a threat.

On the maps, lands of the Red Lake Nation, the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, and the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa — all Upper Midwest tribes that have opposed Enbridge pipelines in court — have been marked in red to indicate a threat area.

“Enbridge does not and has never viewed Indigenous communities or Tribal Nations as threats,” said Kellner, who did not directly address the maps. “We listen to and engage with tribes and communities to advance matters of mutual interest.”

Through ODOT, the company also tracks individual pipeline opposition groups. To facilitate the monitoring, Enbridge has used a system to count the number and types of “threats” to Enbridge projects carried out by particular “threat actors” over time. In 2021, the counts focused particularly on Line 3 and Line 5, tracking more than a dozen threat actors, including Indigenous-led pipeline resistance groups such as Camp Migizi and the Giniw Collective.

A source who had access to information about the ODOT system, who asked for anonymity, said they shared the material with The Intercept out of concern that Ojibwe pipeline opponent Winona LaDuke had been named as a threat, alongside the nonprofit she founded, Honor the Earth.

The documents about ODOT reviewed by The Intercept don’t show how the system was used, but groups named in the documents, like LaDuke’s, often had run-ins with the company during the fight over Line 3.

Enbridge, for example, bought land near the headquarters of an Honor the Earth project — miles away from the company’s pipeline. After the purchase, Honor the Earth employees repeatedly spotted drones around the property, which LaDuke suspected were for keeping an eye on the group. “The drones were significant, the surveillance was very significant on our staff,” said LaDuke. After Line 3 was completed this past fall, LaDuke said Enbridge agreed to sell her the land. “The amount of trauma they have caused in our communities is significant,” she said.

How the company gathered intelligence to make its risk assessments is unclear. Public records obtained by The Intercept show that law enforcement shared intelligence on anti-pipeline organizing with Enbridge security, though no link has been established between the police intelligence and ODOT.

Enbridge did not respond to questions about the land purchase, use of drones, or use of law enforcement intelligence. “While we always respect the rights of people to peacefully protest, some actions taken by protestors have put people, communities, and the environment at risk,” said Kellner, the Enbridge spokesperson. “It’s our obligation to protect our workers as well as the communities we operate in and the environment, which means understanding and managing those risks in a manner consistent with our values, and state and federal law.”

To Alexander Dunlap, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, ODOT is a tool of what he and other academics have called corporate counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgencies, often associated with the military, involve convincing communities to take on a key role in quelling resistance, and corporate counterinsurgencies frequently seek to stymie opposition to megaprojects such as Line 3 and Line 5.

The Minnesota permit that granted permission for the Line 3 pipeline barred Enbridge from utilizing “counterinsurgency tactics.” The Intercept previously reported on criticisms that Enbridge was conducting a corporate counterinsurgency in Minnesota.

Dunlap said the documents provide additional evidence that such tactics were used. He said, “It’s most certainly counterinsurgency.”

The post Pipeline Giant Enbridge Uses Scoring System to Track Indigenous Opposition appeared first on The Intercept.

Defense attorneys for the water protectors, as the members of the Indigenous-led anti-pipeline movement are known, said many of the charges are overly aggressive and should be dismissed. Defense attorneys pointed to examples like felony theft charges for protesters who chained themselves to equipment and felony aiding attempted suicide for those who crawled into sections of nonfunctional pipe.

“These felony theft charges started coming out during the summer and it’s very clearly an abuse of the prosecutorial charging function.”

“These felony theft charges started coming out during the summer and it’s very clearly an abuse of the prosecutorial charging function,” said Joshua Preston, a lawyer for the water protectors. “It’s meant to send a message saying, ‘If you come to this property and chain yourself to something, we’re going to throw the book at you.’”

One of the county attorneys pursuing felony theft charges said the indictments were appropriate. “Criminal felony theft meets the elements of the offense,” Hubbard County, Minnesota, Attorney Jonathan Frieden told the Intercept.

The criminal trials are the coda to a yearslong fight over the pipeline in Minnesota between water protectors, on the one hand, and the pipeline company and police on the other. Tensions flared, with Minnesota community members pitted against each other — partly owing to what pipeline opponents said was a “corporate counterinsurgency” against their movement, a set of military-style tactics barred by the oil company’s permit.

In addition to the aggressive legal tactics, new questions are being raised this week about the relationship between prosecutors in Minnesota, where the opposition was concentrated, and the pipeline company. Documents published this week by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s Center for Protest Law and Litigation, which is representing pipeline opponents, show that Frieden sought reimbursement from an Enbridge-funded state escrow account to pursue charges against the corporation’s opponents. The requests were denied.

According to the documents, Frieden attempted to bill $12,207.14 to a special account set up by the state of Minnesota to allow Enbridge to pay for law enforcement and public safety expenses affiliated with pipeline construction. Frieden was asking Enbridge to pay for the labor of Assistant County Attorney Anna Emmerling and three support staff for processing approximately 400 cases associated with construction of the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline.

“Hours are due to multiple arrests/citations/complaints and prosecution for public safety related costs for maintaining the peace in and around the construction site,” the county attorney stated in his invoice.

He also asked the Minnesota state official hired to approve or deny Enbridge account invoices if he would extend the period of time covered by the account. “I would like to speak with you over the phone regarding the 180 day time limit following completion of the project,” Frieden wrote in an email that the Center for Protest Law and Litigation obtained through a public records request. “I’m wondering if that might be changed in the future given the significant amount of resources my office will be expending over the next 6 months in the prosecution of criminal acts associated with Line 3.”

Rick Hart, the account manager for the Enbridge-funded escrow account, wrote back, “Prosecution expenses are not an allowable reimbursable expense for the Line 3 Public Safety Escrow Account.”

Frieden appeared to respond with frustration. “I look forward to hearing why the multiple late nights and overtime hours by my staff to charge the individuals endangering the public don’t qualify under public safety. I assume the cost to arrest them is covered, just not to prosecute them? How does that make sense under the language you provided below?”

Despite the denial, the requests for reimbursement themselves suggest that a county attorney in charge of prosecuting hundreds of protest-related cases assumed Enbridge would be covering its costs — a fact that defense attorneys said could have legal significance.

“The fact that the prosecutor brought these charges believing the prosecutions were going to be funded by the Enbridge corporation and oil money raises real issues as to the due process rights of defendants,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, director of the Center for Protest Law and Litigation and an attorney representing opponents of the pipeline.

Frieden denied any bias against pipeline opponents. “The idea that we as a prosecution or a county prosecuted criminal law because we thought we would just not ever have to pay money is not accurate. We attempted to return some taxpayer money,” he said. When the request was denied, the county moved forward with the felony theft cases, he added: “We are still prosecuting all the cases so any idea that we were prosecuting based on getting paid by Enbridge is not true.”

An Enbridge spokesperson said the company leaves policing and prosecutions up to local officials. “Community police and sheriff deputies are responsible for public safety. Officers decide when protestors are breaking the law — or putting themselves and others in danger,” said Juli Kellner. “We support efforts to hold protesters accountable for their actions.”

The dates covered by the invoice coincide with a period of aggressive law enforcement responses to protests against the pipeline. On June 7, more than 100 people were arrested in Hubbard County while attempting to halt pipeline construction through civil disobedience. During the protest, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection helicopter kicked up a cloud of debris as it swooped low in an apparent attempt to disperse protesters. Among the indictments brought by prosecutors was trespass on a critical public service facility, a charge defense attorneys said should not apply since the pipeline was not operating.

Preston, the lawyer for the water protectors, called Hubbard County “ground zero” for arrests and prosecutions — with more than 300 cases still pending. Preston said the prosecutorial strategy was to send a message: “You get a few people who get felony theft charges and they have five to ten years hanging over their head potentially, that’s going to deter other people.”

Later in June, Hubbard County sheriffs blocked access to a small strip of county land between a public road and the driveway leading to land owned and occupied by pipeline opponents, claiming it was county property. Prosecutors filed dozens of misdemeanor charges against people who entered the driveway for driving on what they labeled a trail.

And on July 2, three women were charged with felony theft after locking themselves to the gate at a pipeline site in Hubbard County.

The Hubbard County attorney ultimately dropped the driveway cases, while some of the felony theft charges have been dismissed. “In Hubbard County, at least, there have already been two instances where the judge has dismissed, for lack of probable cause, two felony theft cases,” said Preston. “The rationale being it’s effectively a misapplication of the statute, it doesn’t constitute a ‘taking.’”

Activists have been petitioning Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison to drop all the charges. Ellison signaled a reluctance to intervene in these cases. “My office has not brought any charges against Line 3 protesters,” he tweeted. “Only the county or city attorneys who have brought criminal charges have the power to drop them.” Anti-pipeline organizers argue that Ellison could file an amicus brief in favor of lesser charges or outright dismissal without intervening directly. The petition now has over 78,000 signatures.

Defense lawyers are eager to see some kind of intervention. As Preston put it, “If the state can get away with this overcharging without repercussions, they’re going to do it elsewhere.”

Tara Houska, an Ojibwe water protector, is among those facing charges in Hubbard County. “I’m facing multiple gross misdemeanor trespass charges, which as an Ojibwe person in Ojibwe territory is appalling,” she said. “We are protecting the drinking water of millions of people. We are not criminals.”

The post Prosecutors Hit Anti-Pipeline Protesters With Felony Charges to Send a Message, Defense Says appeared first on The Intercept.

Now, at Enbridge, Troy Kirby oversees efforts to combat a protest movement aimed at stopping construction of the company’s Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota. Enbridge’s security operation has drawn criticism for its efforts to influence the police response to the Indigenous-led movement, whose members are known as water protectors.

“These are the people that specialize in the dark arts. Maybe it’s a bit more banal than we might imagine, but these are the spooks.”

Enbridge’s response to the water protectors is part of a pattern of megacorporations working to quell resistance to their environmentally harmful activities. Enbridge’s close cooperation with police, including payments and intelligence sharing, has been deemed by academics and water protector critics as emblematic of corporate counterinsurgency — a suite of tactics, ranging from public relations campaigns to surveillance and support for armed force, designed to win over communities to controversial profit-making projects.

“You have companies that have entire departments dedicated to making sure you stay in your place, that you don’t resist, that you don’t talk about it, and you most certainly don’t act on it,” said Alexander Dunlap, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, who has written extensively about how corporations utilize counterinsurgency tactics to quell movements against environmental degradation. “These are the people that specialize in the dark arts. Maybe it’s a bit more banal than we might imagine, but these are the spooks.”

An Enbridge spokesperson said the company supports the rights of individuals to protest lawfully and peacefully. “Security teams use a ‘people first’ concept to ensure public safety — their mission is to observe, respond, and report safety issues,” said Juli Kellner, a communications specialist for the company. Kellner did not make Kirby available for an interview.

As this story was being reported, Kirby’s Amazon job description was deleted from his LinkedIn page.

As sophisticated corporate security efforts have burgeoned, lucrative positions lure specialists from company to company, linking together the practices of megacorporations. Kirby, for his part, started at Enbridge in 2019 after a three-year stint as Amazon’s head of corporate security throughout the Americas, according to LinkedIn. Part of his role included overseeing the online giant’s Global Security Operations Center. Internal Amazon documents dated to the year Kirby left, obtained by Vice, provide clues. According to the report, security personnel with the center used Facebook and Instagram to monitor environmental groups as well as union organizers.

In Poland, operatives working for the private security company Pinkerton were sent to an Amazon warehouse to investigate reports of employee misconduct, Vice reported. Pinkerton got its start in the late 19th century, using undercover operatives and agents provocateurs to bust unions. The firm is now a subsidiary of the private security giant Securitas — one of the companies providing security for Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota.

Before Amazon, Kirby spent 16 years doing security work for Exxon Mobil. For at least four years, he worked for Exxon in Nigeria — where there is a history of energy company complicity in human rights abuses. During his time in Nigeria, Kirby was an adviser on “strategic security countermeasures,” which involved managing so-called crises, including pirate attacks and kidnapping, as well as “community protests,” according to a section of his LinkedIn page that has since been deleted.

As in Minnesota, the work in Nigeria included collaborating closely with public agencies. Kirby’s LinkedIn page said he “Established a Nigerian based security network with private and public sector security leaders” and was involved in “Oversight of host government security forces.”

The Exxon Mobil security operation was heavily militarized and focused in part on Exxon’s offshore oil operations. Kirby described designing a “Security Maritime Operations center including a fleet of 17 military-grade security vessels.”

For critics of corporate counterinsurgency, Kirby stands as just one example of corporate officials steeped in highly militarized security efforts abroad bringing those practices back home.

“To corporate entities like Energy Transfer and Enbridge, water protectors and land defenders are perceived as ‘security threats’ endangering shareholders’ profits.”

“It’s telling, but not at all surprising, that the head of security for Enbridge has trained in the so-called Third World to deal with high-stakes security issues impacting corporations in Africa and the Americas,” said Natali Segovia, an attorney and the legal director for the Water Protector Legal Collective. The collective is representing opponents of Energy Transfer’s Dakota Access pipeline, who argue that aggressive law enforcement tactics used near the Standing Rock reservation were influenced by the contract security firm TigerSwan, run by special operations military veterans. “To corporate entities like Energy Transfer and Enbridge, water protectors and land defenders are perceived as ‘security threats’ endangering shareholders’ profits,” Segovia said.

Kirby appears to have put some of the lessons he learned with Exxon Mobil in Nigeria into practice on Enbridge‘s project in Minnesota. Under Kirby’s watch, Enbridge pays law enforcement for pipeline-related police activity. The company’s security team members have set up trainings for local law enforcement and have been invited to attend public safety officials’ intelligence sharing meetings, where information on individual pipeline opponents has been discussed.

In advance of Line 3 pipeline construction, Kirby planned meetings with local law enforcement officers to discuss Enbridge’s approach to responding to opposition. When a local sheriff expressed concern over whether law enforcement agencies would be reimbursed for pipeline-related expenses, Kirby reassured him that the security head had influence over the appointment of the public official who would approve reimbursement requests, according to the sheriff. As the sheriff recalled in an email, Kirby told him “he would be involved to ensure we are taken care of, one way or another.”

It’s Kirby’s colleague Brian Aldrich, Enbridge’s Line 3 security lead, who has worked more routinely on the ground in Minnesota. Aldrich, according to an email sent to state officials, served with the Marines before working for large security firms including Control Risks and Gavin DeBecker and Associates. He also has an Amazon connection — providing personal security for the corporate giant’s founder and executive chair, Jeff Bezos himself.

The post Oil Company Official Overseeing Crackdown on Pipeline Resistance Cut Teeth at Amazon and Exxon appeared first on The Intercept.

More than 45 dead after remnants of Hurricane Ida slammed the Northeast. In Louisiana, where the hurricane hit days before, hundreds of thousands remain without electricity. Meanwhile, massive fires in the West have burned for weeks. Amid all this catastrophe, we continue building new infrastructure to prop up a fossil fuel industry, barreling us toward one climate disaster after another. The most egregious example at the moment is energy company Enbridge’s Line 3 project. Intercept reporter Alleen Brown and attorney and founder of the Giniw Collective Tara Houska join Ryan Grim to discuss Line 3. It’s a massive pipeline that snakes across the Canadian border, through Minnesota wetlands, and under the Mississippi River, all so it can transport tar sands oil — the dirtiest of the dirtiest energy — to be refined and, for much of it, exported.

[Musical interlude.]

Ryan Grim: We have just gone through one hell of a brutal week. This is Deconstructed.

Newscaster: President Biden will go to Louisiana on Friday to survey the damage left behind by Hurricane Ida. At least four people were killed and a million left without power when the Category 4 storm swept through New Orleans on Sunday.

Newscaster: Hundreds of thousands remain without electricity, air conditioning, or tap water for the third straight day.

Newscaster: Officials are scrambling to supply water and food as a heat warning is in effect.

Newscaster: New images of an apparent tornado ripping through Annapolis, Maryland.

Newscaster: Tornado watch was issued in New York City —

Newscaster: Flood warnings, they’re in place from New York City all the way into Maine —

Newscaster: Death and destruction in Tennessee. There’s over 400 millimeters of rainfall in just 24 hours. A new state record.

Newscaster: High risk alert for flash flooding in much of the Northeast tonight —

Newscaster: The National Weather Service issued a flash-flood emergency for the first time ever in New York City.

Newscaster: Over in Brooklyn, cars were submerged under water —

Newscaster: Rescue crews work to save drivers trapped in the floods.

Newscaster: From the Nevada side of that fire, you can see the skies are gray with all of that smoke in the air. The fire has been burning for 19 days now in El Dorado County and Amador County.

Newscaster: Now to the latest on the Dixie Fire. This is still burning. It’s the second largest fire in state history. It’s been burning for seven weeks now.

RG: None of this is sustainable. Something has to give. And, so far, what’s giving way is the predictable climate we’ve depended on for centuries.

Now for decades, the leading argument against doing anything to confront climate change was that it would be too expensive and cost too many jobs. That was always dubious on its face. But now, even on its own merits, the argument is drowning.

Nothing could be worse for our economy and our standard of living than a world engulfed in flames, floodwaters, and tornadoes.

Yet the Democratic response this week has been almost worse than meaningless.

On Thursday, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin took to the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal to argue for a “strategic pause” on the party’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, which is heavy on climate investments: “Ignoring the fiscal consequences of our policy choices will create a disastrous future for the next generation of Americans,” wrote Manchin.

That he wrote that line without irony, while California was on fire, Louisiana molding and plunged into darkness, and parts of the Northeast literally underwater is truly extraordinary. How can he seriously talk about a disastrous future for the next generation while this very generation is living through one disaster after another?

He goes on: “For those who will dismiss my unwillingness to support a $3.5 trillion bill as political posturing, I hope they heed the powerful words of Adm. Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who called debt the biggest threat to national security.”

Now debt, to be clear, is not a national security threat. In fact, our ability to carry the debt and sell it to foreign countries and foreign investors is actually a source of our imperial power. But Manchin is not being serious. He knows that isn’t a national security threat — otherwise, he wouldn’t have voted for trillions of dollars for war and wouldn’t vote for ever-increasing military budgets. The actual threat that debt represents for somebody like Manchin has to do with taxes. Because he and other debt hawks have spent decades demanding all government spending be “paid for.” Now that Democrats plan to spend trillions of dollars, they also plan to tax the rich and raise corporate tax rates to do so. Believe it or not, that’s not terribly popular with the rich.

Manchin has expressed a real openness about raising taxes on corporations and on the rich, partly because he’s bitter about how Mitch McConnell rammed through his tax cut in 2017 without including Manchin’s amendments. But his enthusiasm for those tax hikes only goes so far, and it doesn’t reach $3.5 trillion.

There’s something else going on too, as Daniel Boguslaw reported for The Intercept on Friday in a story I’d encourage you to read: Manchin’s company brokers coal. He made his fortune in the coal industry and continues to earn income of some $500,000 dollars a year from his coal empire, which is officially run by his son Joe Manchin IV. In other words, the bulk of Joe Manchin’s current income is tied to the very industry at risk of shutting down as we transition to clean energy.

And nobody wants to give that up — amid all of this catastrophe, we continue building new infrastructure to prop up the fossil fuel industry, with the most egregious example being the energy company Enridge’s project called Line 3, a massive pipeline that sneaks across the Canadian border, through Minnesota wetlands, and under the Mississippi River. Also it can transport tar sands oil, the dirtiest of the dirtiest energy, to be refined and — for much of it — exported. It is, quite literally, pouring gasoline on the fire.

This weekend, members of the Squad will be traveling to the construction site to join the protests, which will surely bring in some more attention. Rep. Ilhan Omar from Minnesota will be joined by Rep. Ayanna Presley, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and Rep. Cori Bush. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will appear remotely because her district is underwater.

Today, we’ll be joined in a moment by Tara Houska, an attorney and an activist who has been on the ground in Minnesota for years fighting the project.

But first, we talked with Intercept reporter Alleen Brown, who herself has been on the pipeline beat for years, from Keystone XL to Dakota Access, and now to Line 3.

Alleen, welcome to Deconstructed.

Alleen Brown: Thank you so much for having me.

RG: So, first of all, can you talk a little bit about where this project is being constructed?

AB: Sure. So Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline is being constructed through northern Minnesota. And it links the tar sands oil fields of Alberta, Canada, to this kind of transport hub in Wisconsin that’s right on the other side of the border from Minnesota. So the bulk of this project is Minnesota.

RG: And so when they call it Line 3, they talk about it as a replacement for a previous Line 3. Is it that simple? Is it an old corroded pipe that they’re just swapping in a new one? Or is something else going on here?

AB: There’s a lot more to it than that.

I mean, the biggest thing to understand about that replacement framework is that much of the pipeline that’s being put in is going through new land. That’s in part because the Leech Lake Reservation, the tribe there, the Ojibwe tribe, did not want the pipeline to go through that reservation. So Enbridge is rerouting the line through new land, through many new waterways, and it is a significant expansion. I think capacity will double.

RG: And so what other treaty lands is this going through? And could that complicate Enbridge’s strategy?

AB: Yes. I mean, it already is complicating Enbridge’s strategy. There is one additional reservation through which the pipeline passes, that’s the Fond du Lac Reservation. That tribe initially fighting the pipeline was against it. But after a lot of negotiation with the company, Fond du Lac ended up getting on board. We don’t know the details of that agreement, but it seems to involve a lot of money.

There is a big chunk of land in northern Minnesota that is not reservation land, but that Ojibwe tribes have treaty rights to. This land is land where they have rights to hunt, and fish, and gather, and travel. And the U.S. government does have an obligation to consult with those tribes before it allows any company to put a pipeline through it. Multiple tribes that have rights to that land have been fighting the pipeline in court, have been fighting the U.S. government in court, attempting to get this permit revoked — have essentially argued that they were not properly consulted, and that they do not consent to this pipeline.

RG: So a previous version of this Line 3 pipeline famously produced, what is, I believe, the largest inland oil spill in U.S. history, back in 1991. Was that in Minnesota? Can you tell us a little bit about that 1991 spill and how that plays into the fight over the reconstruction of a new pipeline?

AB: Yeah, that was in Minnesota. And, at the time, I don’t think it got the same kind of publicity that it would today. You know, the oil spilled into wetlands, and it was a major spill.

And this isn’t the only major spill that Enbridge has been responsible for. The company also famously spilled a lot of oil into the Kalamazoo River. I’d have to look to see what year that was.

RG: I think it was 2010 —

AB: Yeah, in 2010.

RG: About 10 years ago. Yeah.

AB: Yep. Yep. Yep. So the company has this history of really catastrophic oil spills. In Kalamazoo, this tar sands oil kind of sunk to the bottom, was really a disaster to clean up. And so it carries that reputation as it drills under rivers and waterways in Minnesota right now.

RG: And so, you heavily covered the protests out at Standing Rock; you’ve been covering the protests here. What are the similarities and differences between these two fights?

AB: I would say that both sides have learned a lot from Standing Rock as the Line 3 project is built in Minnesota. And to really understand the way law enforcement and Enbridge are responding to Line 3 opponents, you have to look back at Standing Rock, because all of their tactics are kind of adjusted to avoid some of the things that happened there. Whether or not that’s working, I’m not so sure.

RG: And what do they think they did wrong in Standing Rock? Because they effectively lost that fight to the pipeline protesters.

AB: Right. What they appear to be most concerned about is: A. the amount of money law enforcement and public agencies spent responding to Standing Rock, and B. the reputational blow that some of the tactics that were used caused.

I got a copy of this Standing Rock after-action report that North Dakota agencies put together. And it was striking to me because there was not a lot of reflection, actually, around the use of tactics like water hoses in below-freezing weather. There was more reflection on how to better utilize drone footage, or how to win information battles.

So I don’t know that the lessons learned were that violent tactics need to be avoided. But it was more like: How do we look better? And: How do we avoid spending so much money?

And as the Line 3 permit was going through, both those questions came into play, and were put into the permit.

RG: How so? So how do those twin goals play out in Line 3?

AB: So as these hearings were being conducted to form the most important permit that would advance the project, members of the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission referred back to what they called counterinsurgency tactics a couple of times. They seemed particularly concerned about the activities of the private security firm TigerSwan, including infiltration, so they had people going into protester groups and posing as pipeline opponents in order to gather information.

It’s clear that at least one Utilities Commission member was worried about that [and] said he wanted to protect First Amendment rights. So this line was placed in the permit that says the permittee, the permittee’s contractors and assigns will not participate in counterinsurgency tactics or misinformation campaigns to interfere with the rights of the public to legally exercise their constitutional rights.

A lot of people have argued that another element of this permit conflicts with that item.

RG: How so?

AB: So, in order to avoid the millions of dollars spent in North Dakota, this special account was set up. So this escrow account was created so that Enbridge could pay for policing expenses and for other kinds of public safety expenses. And the way it works is that a law enforcement agency doing additional work that it wouldn’t normally be doing related to the pipeline can submit a reimbursement request to this account; a public official hired specifically for the job looks at that request, approves or denies it, and then Enbridge pays for it.

RG: So Enbridge has hired the police in Minnesota.

AB: Yeah. I mean, that’s how many, many people see it. Enbridge is directly paying for many of the activities that law enforcement are conducting to quell resistance against this pipeline.

RG: And so what’s the loophole that people think is created by that that would allow counterinsurgency-type tactics?

AB: I think one of the important things about this permit is that counterinsurgency tactics, that term, is never defined. But if you look at what counterinsurgency really means, if you look at the U.S. government’s definitions of counterinsurgency, if you look at scholarly definitions of counterinsurgency, it’s not just about infiltration and human intelligence; it’s not about armed force; it’s about winning the loyalty of local institutions against opposing forces and getting those local institutions to do your work.

RG: Hearts and minds.

AB: Exactly. Exactly. It’s how, if you look at the way counterinsurgency advisors to the U.S. during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the way they talk about counterinsurgency, they talk about roadbuilding, they talk about supporting the development of a police force, supporting neighborhood watch groups, offering people jobs, and so paying directly for the police, many argue, kind of fits into that umbrella of counterinsurgency tactics and is just one of many things that could be called counterinsurgency tactics that Enbridge is engaging in.

RG: So on that front, you have a new story about even deeper collaboration between Enbridge and the Minnesota police. What did you find?

AB: So I found that not only was Enbridge providing a fair amount of training to law enforcement in the months leading up to the start of construction, but a pretty close coordination was developed between police and the pipeline company. So one document I received via a public information request showed a public safety official inviting Enbridge’s Line 3 security chief to regular intelligence-sharing meetings. In the email, he says: We missed you at our 9 A.M. intel meetings. Is there another time that would work better for you? This guy is saying that he will rearrange this intelligence sharing space so that an Enbridge official can participate.

The day after that email, you have the same official forwarding a list of attendees to a Line 3 organizing a meeting of pipeline opponents to a group of officials that includes this Line 3 security boss. So essentially public safety officials in Minnesota are sharing intelligence including the names of people attending anti-Line 3 meetings directly to Enbridge, which is these people’s political opponent.

RG: So what are the police up to? I’ve been hearing some scattered reports of heightened tension and amped up militarization of the police there. Are we starting to see more violence coming from the Enbridge Pinkertons who are the Minnesota police?

AB: Yeah, so I think that the level of violence and pressure has definitely increased as the months of construction have gone on. Aerial surveillance has been conducted for many months. It’s something that pipeline opponents, known as water protectors, have noticed going back months. There’s also been a lot of attempts to pull people over for low-level infractions, which some have described as an attempt to gather identity information. And more recently, there’s been use of quote-unquote less lethal weapons, such as rubber bullets, to halt water protector activity this summer. A Department of Homeland Security helicopter flew really low over a direct action against the pipeline, kind of sending clouds of dust scattering over the water protectors.

And there’s also been some attempts at some kind of territorial control. There’s actually a number of pipeline resistance camps. There’s one that has been particularly involved in direct action. And one of the sheriff’s offices moved to block the camp’s driveway, claiming that this little bit of land that the driveway passed through was actually county land, and they didn’t have a right to use it. So they’re like: Oh, yeah, you can access your land, you just have to figure out somewhere to park and walk there. So there’s been a range of pressures that law enforcement has put on water protectors.

RG: So that this is Minnesota. And so I imagine it is going to be tough for them to continue construction all winter. What is Enbridge’s plan in the coming months?

AB: I mean, they say they are very close to completing construction. Recently they claimed that they could have that thing running next month. So these are really the late stages of this resistance and this project. And people are really saying that if there’s a moment to stop it, it’s now. Or the thing will be pumping oil very soon to the detriment of the climate and the health of the lands and waters of Minnesota and elsewhere.

RG: Is there any indication that the Biden administration is engaged on this?

AB: I believe that water protectors have engaged with the Biden administration throughout construction. But, so far, they have not given strong signals that they will be standing against this.

In some of the legal efforts that tribes have made to stop the pipeline, the U.S. government has supported the permits that were handed out, I believe, during the Trump administration. So, so far there’s no signal from Biden that he will be stepping in here.

RG: A number of members of the Squad are headed up this weekend. Is this coordinated with any kind of bigger action or is this just a handful of progressive members of Congress going there?

AB: I mean, I guess I would say that there are just constant actions happening in Minnesota right now and people are using a range of tactics. In the past week, people were holding protests and sit-ins in Minnesota’s capital of St. Paul, as well as, I believe, in Washington D.C. There’s constant lockdowns and road blockages, and attempts to stop construction in northern Minnesota.

So I guess I would be surprised if there’s no action happening up there this weekend. But I’m not sure if there’s something specifically centered on the Squad.

RG: Are you in New York right now?

AB: I am in New York, yes.

RG: How’s your neighborhood? From what whipped through there?

AB: So the block surrounding my apartment is fine. There hasn’t been too much flooding. But just looking at videos of communities a few blocks away, the streets look like rivers. Friends, just a 10-minute walk away, had water pouring into their home. We’ve really been hit hard here.

RG: And how are the subways?

AB: I don’t believe they are functioning much right now. Most of the people I know who would normally be commuting are not. And yeah, all through last night water was pouring in. So yeah, it’s pretty hard to travel right now.

RG: Well, it’s good that we have a pandemic in the midst of this biblical flooding so that there were fewer people on the subways as it filled up.

AB: Yeah, I guess that’s some kind of silver lining. [Laughs.]

RG: Alleen, thank you for joining us.

AB: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

RG: That was Alleen Brown.

[Musical interlude.]

RG: Tara Houska, a member of the Ojibwe people was the Native American adviser to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign and has been protesting Line 3 for years now in northern Minnesota. Tara’s out in the woods, and we had a couple of connection issues, but mostly got through it fine. Tara, welcome to Deconstructed.

Tara Houska: Thank you so much for the invitation.

RG: Yeah, so where are we talking to you from?

TH: Namewag camp which is held by Giniw Collective. We’re about 200 yards off the proposed Line 3 route.

RG: So can you describe for us what exactly is going on? What kind of shovels, what kind of equipment is in the ground as we speak?

TH: Actually, most of Line 3 has been either put into the ground or is the process of being put into the ground. There are still excavators all over the place. A lot of equipment that’s working on pump stations to electrify the lines, because tar sands is a sludge that requires an enormous amount of electricity to send it through a pipe. There are security trucks everywhere, out-of-state workers everywhere, and a ton of cops.

RG: This project has been going on for an awful long time. How did you eventually get involved with opposition to it?

TH: Yeah, I’ve actually been involved in this campaign against Line 3 for 7 years at this point. Started out when it was the portion that is the transnational crossing from Canada into the United States, to then the Sandpiper project, which ended up being suspended, and then Enbridge put its money towards the Dakota Access Pipeline, was involved in that struggle very heavily and, in the meantime, knowing that Line 3 was kind of always on the back burner and making its way through the regulatory process and being rebooted into what it is now.

RG: What is it now? The company says: Hey, we’re just replacing an old pipeline. Nothing really to see here. But what do you see there?

TH: I mean, what I see is the old Line 3 has an enormous amount of damage that it’s caused over the years of its operation, leaks all over the place, integrity digs that Enbridge did before it began constructing Line 3 with tar sands right underneath the surface of the soil and huge plumes that were underneath all of the land that it was passing through, which the company tried to spin into: oh, well, that’s why we need to replace it! But it’s not really a replacement. What it is is a brand new project. It’s in a brand new location; a brand new route. It’s through untouched ecosystems — 800 wetlands, 200 bodies of water, 22 rivers, the headwaters of the Mississippi River is included in that. It wants to build a new corridor — a new pipeline corridor.

RG: So about two weeks ago, there was a pretty significant demonstration that saw the police there kind of ramping up the violence against protesters. What happened there? What led up to that?

TH: As far as police brutality goes, the police brutality has been much more significant on the actual line itself. We are out of sight, out of mind and that’s kind of the idea behind putting a lot of these projects through indigenous treaty territories is we’re not at all factored into, I guess, it’s fine for our homes, fine for our people but not other places — similar to Dakota Access Pipeline where it wasn’t OK to send it through Bismarck, it was okay to send it through right next to the reservation. So about a month ago, myself and several others, a large group of us were fired at with less lethal ammunition that was paid for by Enbridge, wielded by a police officer up in 1863 Treaty territory. That was followed by sheriffs engaging in use of pain compliance, which is essentially torture, on water protectors. That has been an ongoing tactic over the last few weeks.

RG: What do they mean by that euphemism, “use of pain compliance”?

TH: I mean a dislocated someone’s jaw. So that’s happened.

RG: But “use of pain”? Like they’re saying that they’re going to extract compliance by causing pain?

TH: People are immobilized, chained to a machine or whatever it happens to be, and rather than going through the extraction teams, which has been the case with hundreds of non-violent blockades up to this point, some sheriffs have taken it upon themselves to instead immediately engage in use of pain and trying to get people to unclip, telling one person, “I will stop hurting your friend if you unclip.” And they can hear their friend screaming on the other side of them because a sheriff is hurting them. That’s what’s been happening up on the line.

RG: You were hospitalized recently, as a result of police violence. Can you tell me a little bit about what led up to that and what happened there?

TH: I was shot up by police officers with rubber bullets and mace who were firing at us at point-blank range. They split open someone’s head right in front of me, shot another person directly in the heart, I was shot several times. My injuries were such that when I made it to the jail, when I was brought to Pennington County, the police officers and the EMTs ended up bringing me to the hospital to get checked out. And I was told by the physician that my injuries were consistent with the injuries inflicted upon me, and sent to jail, and ended up being in solitary, in a jail cell by myself for four days without medical care after that.

RG: How are you now?

TH: I mean, I haven’t been hurt as much as some other people have been hurt. Some of the folks that experienced pain compliance have what might be permanent facial paralysis and damage, something they’re calling Bell’s [alsy or whatever. And I have some scar tissue and one of the hits was pretty intense, but these harms that are being enacted on people’s bodies that are engaged in nonviolent resistance are disgusting and appalling — gross violations of human rights.

RG: How much time do you think you have to stop this pipeline?

TH: It’s to the point now of the construction of the line being almost complete, there has been a very intense resistance on the ground that has finally garnered more national attention and has resulted in some pressure points from legislators and celebrities and that sort of attention on this particular project.

The realities of the situation, I think, are starting to really catch up to people and hit them in a place that they really feel and realize the gravity and intensity and the urgency of the climate crisis. So I do think there is opportunity to intervene and to make a different decision that was made in Dakota Access, which was: We’ll let oil flow and years later, the tribes will win in court because we should have considered their tribal cultural resources, and we should have considered climate crisis, and we should have ordered an environmental impact statement. That’s exactly the same things that are being asked for here in the Line 3 fight: an environmental impact statement and consideration of tribal cultural resources and environmental impacts.

RG: You said something that I didn’t realize, that it takes a lot of energy to push tar sands oil through the pipeline. I think, I assumed, probably like most people who don’t know and don’t have any idea what they’re talking about, that it just uses gravity and it just flows downhill. But that’s not the case. So what is the process that pushes tar sands oil through this pipeline?

TH: Yeah, tar sands is a sludge. So it’s not like crude oil — sweet crude as I guess the industry would call it — or like fracked gas or some of those other fossil fuels. Tar sands is actually a sludge. It’s processed. It’s it’s ripped out of the ground in the form of bitumen and clay and processed with chemicals to make it into not quite fully viscous, but at least a substance that can be moved through a pipe, which is then electrified, and there’s these massive, massive pumping stations that are pushing and causing huge pressure to the line. So it’s a highly pressurized line.

RG: Is that what makes them less stable, and more likely to spill?

TH: There’s all kinds of different pieces of that. I mean, there’s the reality that pipes corrode faster when they’re underneath power lines. And Line 3 requires the energy that is the equivalent of all the nuclear energy currently in the state of Minnesota.

RG: Jesus.

TH: That’s how much energy we’re talking about. It is the most energy intensive form of so-called energy in the world. It’s called the dirtiest fossil fuel in the world for a reason. It’s incredibly carbon intensive.

Line 3 is the emissions equivalent of building 50 brand-new coal fired plants. That’s what we’ve been saying. There’s no way that this would pass any climate test in any semblance of a review. And that just hasn’t been considered here, because it’s been a state-level environmental impact statement. And they’ve considered it in like the little chunk that it is. And there’s still been incredible division, even among the state. So, Minnesota’s Department of Commerce actually sued Minnesota’s Public Utility Commission saying that Enbridge didn’t prove its need for the line. They couldn’t justify the oil forecast to build it through the wetlands.

RG: What has your interaction with the White House been on this? Are they taking this seriously?

TH: It has been a situation in which there have been doors open due to the enormous amount of pressure from people on the ground, and from this growing understanding in North America of just how deep we are in the climate crisis.

I’ve been on several calls with Gina McCarthy and with the Army Corps of Engineers and the Council on Environmental Quality, the EPA, you name it. They’ve been at least pressured into having a conversation. And the Army Corps of Engineers actually physically have been out here twice in Minnesota. They are deeply concerned about civil unrest; they are deeply concerned about smearing Biden’s climate presidency, I think. But it seems to me that because there are so many other issues also occurring that there’s been a political calculation of: We’ll cancel Keystone XL, we’ll let Line 3 through, and ignoring indigenous sovereignty all the way along, ignoring the treaty rights of my people and the cultural genocide that would take place if wild rice is wiped out of this portion of the territory. I mean, this is part of who we are as people.

RG: Can you talk about those two things? In particular, it does seem like there’s — finally — from the courts at least some willingness to take treaty rights seriously in a way that there wasn’t even in the recent past? Is that a potentially fruitful lane?

TH: Yeah. And I think that’s been like the response in other struggles similar to this one, like Dakota Access, where you’ve got a court that says: Yeah, the tribes were right and these pieces should have been considered, and they weren’t. And now, what are we supposed to do? What’s the reparation for the harm that was caused?

RG: Do you know the background to how that legal shift evolved in the second part of the 20th century, people would say: Well, yeah, it’s cute that there were treaties. But we have abrogated those, and that’s a real shame, and we’re very sorry for that. But that’s history. We can teach it in third grade, and we can all move on to a place where people are like: No, no, no, actually, this is this is written down, the United States government agreed to this, this is just as binding a law as a law that was passed by Congress in 1872, or 1888, or 1842. So how did that kind of legal evolution take place?

TH: I mean, a couple of things. I would say like the tendency to discard law as ancient and old when regularly citing the First Amendment, the Second Amendment from the Constitution is a pretty —

RG: Right. Rather selective there.

TH: The Second Amendment is like on the back of bumper stickers on people’s vehicles, and like, it’s something that everyone in this country understands, but yet you bring up treaties that were assigned to create this country, and the land sessions that did create this country, and everyone’s like: Oh, well, that was a long time ago.

RG: [Laughs.] Mhmm.

TH: I would say like what I’ve observed over time of studying federal Indian law, and practicing, and now being a advocate for a number of different issues, involving native people, the ripples and effects of the murder of George Floyd and the culmination of racial justice, like those ripples are still reaching out. Right after that time was when we saw a Supreme Court say words along the lines of: Just because we’ve broken treaties for a long time doesn’t mean we should continue to do it. So I think there’s a lot of pressure that’s being realized and actualized into the readings of the law because federal Indian law, in particular, has been really really frenetic and precedent doesn’t really seem to be something that is absolute in this particular area of law either. Every other place, there’s like at least some sort of precedent, something that you follow. In federal Indian law it’s: You never know what you’re gonna get.

RG: And so if the treaties actually are followed in the path of this pipeline, what are the legal implications of that?

TH: If these treaties were followed in this, the Ojibwe people have a right to not only usufructuary rights like hunting and gathering, there’s also a specific right to wild rice. This pipeline, just on its construction alone, has harmed and affected the water quality.

Water quality is so critical when it comes to the survival and life of wild rice. It’s also been a situation in which the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, their DNR, approved Enbridge to take 5 billion gallons out of the watershed — 5 billion gallons of water. That is an insane amount of water, during a drought. An extreme drought. A lot of the wild rice beds are empty. The lakes are empty. It’s really hard to put into words what it’s like to see an empty lake that’s now a field. And I’ve witnessed that in several different places at this point, to see wild rice where people are portaging way, way, way out to the middle to even be able to float in a canoe. The harm is there.

And that’s before any sort of spill. They’ve been spilling chemicals, there’s been 28 spills of chemicals already during construction of this line and I can only imagine what it’s going to look like when tar sands starts leaking into the watershed, which is what these pipelines do, they leak.

RG: And so it feels kind of open and shut in a sense that it’s specifically listed there in the treaty, that it specifically abrogates it, quite obviously, quite plainly. The United States legal system is now paying some actual attention to treaty rights. Has that argument carried any weight? Or are you only getting people’s attention when you talk about climate change and broader environmental destruction?

TH: The issue with the judiciary route is that it takes a really long time. So there’s the state-level arguments, which don’t include a lot of those pieces. And then there’s the federal district court, which does include those pieces, right? Because then you’re involving federal defendants and federal obligations. And so a lot of those issues have not been considered.

Again, I would turn to Dakota Access, which is a much more prominent struggle, I guess, in a lot of environmental circles. The Standing Rock Sioux people didn’t get their rights heard until years after the flow of oil through the Dakota Access Pipeline.

It’s only been during this Biden administration that there’s been a finality, which is yeah, the tribes were right. But the judiciary decided it doesn’t have the authority to shut the oil flow down and it’s on the Army Corps of Engineers, Biden’s Army Corps of Engineers, to shut it down. Biden’s Army Corps of Engineers declined to intervene. And so the pipeline is operating illegally. And everyone’s pointing at everyone else saying: Well, it’s not my obligation to enforce the ruling. Whose is it, at that point?

RG: What is the thing that needs to happen at this point to stop this project? Like, what’s the thing if you woke up and heard on the news: x happened? Is it Biden stepping all the way in? Is it at that level at this point?

TH: Well, as I said, Jamie Pinkham at the Army Corps of Engineers, he’s the Assistant Secretary who has been out here twice. He’s also a tribal member. He just got called on by the Red Lake tribal chairman through an op-ed. He can suspend the project tomorrow, if he wants to. He could suspend the project today by suspending the water crossing permits, and ordering a review. That could happen right now.

President Biden could intervene easily. [He] could say: Here’s the executive order, and the authority. It already exists to order an environmental impact statement. That’s exactly what Obama did when the Dakota Access Pipeline was so fiercely resisted.

Gov. Walz could weigh in at any point; he has not said a thing during the course of this, was out at the Minnesota State Fair judging the butter-sculpting contest while hundreds of police officers and troopers were surrounding teepees on the Mall in front of the Capitol and water protectors that were in front of his mansion. I mean, there’s things that can be done by these decision makers, but they have to be brave to do it. And so far, we’ve seen absolutely nothing in that arena.

RG: So with the Squad coming out this weekend, do you think that will bring in enough attention? O where are you on the optimism-pessimism spectrum?

TH: I think it’s every single lever, every single avenue, and these are folks who are very progressive and are possessing of large platforms of people that will bring attention inevitably to this project and to the ongoing struggle that’s been in place. And there are hundreds of nonviolent direct actions that have occurred, thousands of hours of regulatory review and educational materials and all the things. So there’s a wealth of resources there for people to learn about this. And hopefully Biden feels that pressure, and Jamie Pinkham feels that pressure, and Gina McCarthy feels that pressure and they realize we’re not going away. And we haven’t this entire time.

RG: Well, Tara, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it.

TH: Yeah. Thank you so much, you guys.

[Credits music.]

RG: That was Tara Houska. And that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. Laura Flynn is our supervising producer. The show was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.

And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief of The Intercept. If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give — your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please do leave us a rating or review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much!

See you soon.

The post Line 3 and a Week of Climate Catastrophe appeared first on The Intercept.

By the time construction on Line 3, a tar sands oil pipeline, began last December, a working relationship had been established between Enbridge and police officers. A public safety official even invited the company’s Line 3 security chief to regular intelligence sharing meetings. In one case, the official passed along intelligence to Enbridge’s security chief for Line 3: a list of people who attended an anti-pipeline organizing meeting.

Line 3 opponents have long raised concerns about payments made to law enforcement by Enbridge to cover pipeline-related policing. A special account set up by the state of Minnesota has distributed $2.3 million in Enbridge funds to public safety agencies so far. The records shed new light on the level of close coordination between law enforcement agencies and the Canadian oil company to police the Indigenous-led movement to stop Line 3.

“Local law enforcement has become the brutal arm of a Canadian corporation.”

“Local law enforcement has become the brutal arm of a Canadian corporation,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s Center for Protest Law and Litigation and an attorney representing opponents of the pipeline. “It’s highly inappropriate for law enforcement to target people based on First Amendment activity, collect identity information and then deliver that information to their political opponents.”

The effort to halt the Line 3 pipeline is the latest flashpoint in the movement to end development of new fossil fuel infrastructure amid a growing climate crisis. In Minnesota, members of the Indigenous-led resistance, known as water protectors, have turned to tactics that directly disrupt construction, sometimes trespassing on private property, blocking roads, or locking down to pipeline company equipment.

“Community police and sheriff deputies are responsible for public safety,” Enbridge spokesperson Juli Kellner told The Intercept. “Our security call the police when a disturbance occurs. Officers decide when an individual is breaking the law — or putting themselves or others in danger.”

How law enforcement responds to the protest movement is a matter of training and discretion. The documents obtained by The Intercept suggest that Enbridge has stepped in to influence officers’ choices.

Water protectors point to the close working relationship between Enbridge and law enforcement to explain escalating police tactics, with rubber bullets and other “less-lethal” weapons deployed in recent weeks.

Plans to Coordinate

Emails between Enbridge and members of the Northern Lights Task Force — a group consisting of sheriffs and public safety officials coordinating plans for expected protests against Line 3 — describe several joint training exercises and other coordination meetings set up by the energy firm. The largest of the trainings was in Bemidji, Minnesota.

In October 2020, according to emails, Enbridge organized an all-day training at the company’s Bemidji Emergency Operations Center. According to an email sent a day before the event, dozens of Enbridge employees, public safety officials, including local sheriffs along the pipeline route, and an FBI agent were invited to attend. A primary goal for the event: “Coordination between Line 3 project team and L.P.” — an acronym that typically refers to “local police.”

The email sent out ahead of the training included a series of “Incident Briefing Maps” laying out scenarios where Enbridge and law enforcement might need to coordinate a response. The various scenarios had something in common: They all involved protests.

The list of scenarios — which were drawn up by the Response Group, a controversial crisis management firm that works for the energy industry — laid out four possible events: demonstrators blocking traffic, the breach of a construction site, “swarming” of a pipeline hub while streaming on social media, and project opponents locking themselves to the gate of an Enbridge office.

Training participants would be asked to come up with a plan to respond to each of the scenarios, as well as to develop an “Information and Communication Strategy” to keep government agencies, the public, and the media informed of what was happening, according to a list of exercise objectives. Enbridge planned to discuss providing local law enforcement with a project radio, according to an email describing the exercise.

It wasn’t the first conversation of its kind. In advance of a smaller version of the exercise, back in April, members of the Northern Lights Task Force filled out a questionnaire for Enbridge. The public safety officials noted that it was a “priority” for law enforcement to obtain access to Enbridge security camera feeds. It also referenced the possibility of placing an Enbridge liaison inside the two law enforcement emergency operations centers, as well as a law enforcement liaison in Enbridge’s emergency operations center.

The Northern Lights Task Force’s communications team did not answer a detailed list of questions. Aitkin County Sheriff Dan Guida, a member of the task force, said his office never received a project radio nor saw other agencies with one. Guida said that the scenarios served to show law enforcement how Enbridge runs its emergency operations center. “It was for Enbridge to learn. We didn’t get trained by Enbridge,” he said, adding that law enforcement might carry out a similar exercise with a bank. “We assisted them and told them this is how we do it, you do your own thing.”

It’s not clear how many officers attended the trainings offered by Enbridge. Clearwater County Sheriff Darin Halverson was copied on the invite and RSVP’d that he would attend an additional Enbridge security exercise as well as a “sensitive security information” meeting. He told The Intercept that he did not attend any of the gatherings.

Sharing Intelligence

By the time construction on Line 3 began, a comfortable working relationship appeared to have been established between Enbridge and some of the public safety agencies invited to the company’s meetings. Public officials repeatedly expressed interest in exchanging information on pipeline opposition with Enbridge.

In December 2020, a St. Louis County sheriff’s deputy distributed language to be used by officers issuing dispersal orders during protests against Line 3 and also sent a list of potential charges that could be applied to pipeline protesters. Another officer responded, noting that it would be legal to arrest water protectors even if they trespassed without a law enforcement officer present. “Hopefully Enbridge security would be videotaping when able,” the officer said. Other documents affirmed that Enbridge security would be wearing body cameras.

The Northern Lights Task Force, the group of public safety officials, occasionally suggested that Enbridge should be excluded from planning, the documents show. In November 2020, Guida, the Aitkin County sheriff, copied Enbridge public information officers on an email about the task force’s public messaging strategy. Another sheriff advised that the corporate representatives did not belong in the group: “It is not a good idea to have Enbridge employees in our group, but they would certainly be good contacts to have to know what info is being put out,” wrote Carlton County Sheriff Kelly Lake. (Guida told The Intercept he copied Enbridge on the email so that law enforcement and the company could avoid mixed or duplicate messages.)

In other cases, public safety officials actively sought out Enbridge security to assist with law enforcement officers’ efforts, inviting an Enbridge representative to share space and attend meetings. St. Louis County Emergency Management Coordinator Duane Johnson copied Enbridge’s security lead for the Line 3 project on an email inviting first responders to work out of the law enforcement emergency operations center as they monitored intelligence on a potential direct action the next day. “There is considerable intel on something brewing tomorrow. Let me know if you’d like to come over and work out of the EOC tomorrow just in case something pops,” the official wrote, referring to the emergency operations center.

In another email, Johnson requested that Enbridge’s Line 3 security lead attend regular intelligence meetings. “We have missed you on our 0900 intel meetings. Is there another time that would work better for you?” asked the emergency management coordinator in a January 2021 email. “It would be nice to have someone from your company on.”

The Enbridge security officer was kept in the loop. The next day, Johnson copied him on another email, forwarding a list of names of water protectors who had attended a “Line 3 Organizing Meeting” the night before.

“It was all I really got from last night,” Bruce Blacketter, emergency management director for the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, wrote to Johnson in the forwarded email. “Well, this and a slight ‘back of the head’ headache from the musical performances and guided breathing/stretching exercises.”

St. Louis County did not respond to a request for comment, and the Fond du Lac Band declined to comment.

The post Minnesota Law Enforcement Shared Intelligence on Protest Organizers With Pipeline Company appeared first on The Intercept.

The Minnesota Fusion Center, a police intelligence-sharing partnership affiliated with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is sidestepping the state’s freedom of information law by citing security concerns, though it had in the past released records related to its policing of pipeline opponents. The fusion center is refusing to release any public records pertaining to activities, including surveillance, against opponents of the energy firm Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline until after it is constructed, according to one of the documents.

“It is a little unprecedented for a police agency to refuse to disclose records concerning its activities like this with respect to one specific construction project.”

The unusual policy came after The Intercept and other media outlets published stories documenting law enforcement surveillance and coordination with private security during protests against Line 3, part of a trend in which aggressive policing against pipeline opponents across the U.S. was reported by media. Many of the news stories concerning Minnesota police activities were based on records provided under the Minnesota Data Practices Act and reporting on anti-pipeline struggles in other states has relied on similar public transparency laws.

“It is a little unprecedented for a police agency to refuse to disclose records concerning its activities like this with respect to one specific construction project,” said Freddy Martinez, a transparency law expert and policy analyst for the group Open the Government. “I’ve never seen something quite like this.”

Big Wind, a Northern Arapaho tribal member opposing the pipeline said police are attempting to cover up their activities because freedom of information requests have exposed damaging and embarrassing information about them that has helped further the struggle against the pipeline.

“Freedom of information requests are how lots of things came to light about the police working with private mercenaries during Standing Rock, and also about how Enbridge is paying the police here in Minnesota,” said Big Wind, who is affiliated with the anti-pipeline Namewag Camp. “We know there is still a lot of information about what Enbridge and the police are doing to us here that they don’t want to be revealed.”

The policy enacted by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which oversees the fusion center, asserts that it is withholding Line 3-related records to prevent “terrorists,” “criminals,” and “those who would create public safety hazards” from having access to them, according to a document obtained by The Intercept through a public records request.

The bureau did not respond to requests for comment about whether previous public records disclosures had led to any security concerns or incidents. Bureau spokesperson Jill Oliveira provided only a brief comment by email: “The security declaration is made in accordance with Minnesota state law,” she wrote.

The policy, which was first reported by the media group Unicorn Riot, designates certain records as being related to “security” issues, including “[d]ata captured during surveillance operations in support of Line 3 Replacement Project-related security operations,” as well as information concerning the operations of private security entities employed by Enbridge as well as information provided by other external entities.

The policy, enacted through a “security declaration” signed by Minnesota Department of Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington, the “public safety liaison” for the Line 3 project, simultaneously greenlighted the sharing of surveillance data with other law enforcement agencies and the military as well as with private entities involved in Line 3’s construction. News reports have relied on public records to establish the kind of public-private surveillance dragnet that has seen police work closely with pipeline builder Enbridge.

“It’s outrageous to think that we don’t have access to any of the information police are collecting about us,” said Big Wind, the pipeline opponent, “but that a private corporation that is causing so much harm to our communities does.”

As the Indigenous-led movement — whose members call themselves water protectors — to halt the pipeline has sought to block Line 3’s construction through northern Minnesota this year, members have faced an escalating police response. Law enforcement agencies have monitored water protectors using drones and flyovers. Hundreds of activists have been arrested and charged with crimes, including dozens on felony charges for nonviolent actions that include locking themselves to construction equipment.

On July 29, police used pepper spray, mace, and rubber bullets on water protectors attempting to prevent the pipeline from being drilled under a delicate water ecosystem on the Red Lake River in north-central Minnesota — the most violent law enforcement response so far in the Line 3 struggle.

At the same time, significant aspects of the police operation — including the ways in which Enbridge and police are gathering, collecting, and storing intelligence on water protectors — remain shielded from public view.

Established after the September 11 attacks to share intelligence among federal agencies, local police departments, and the private sector — ostensibly for the purpose of so-called counterterrorism — fusion centers have been coming under increasing scrutiny for their expanded role in routine police work. Last year, the release of a trove of data hacked from fusion centers around the country, known as BlueLeaks, shined a critical light on fusion center activities.

In January 2019, The Intercept reported that the Minnesota Fusion Center was receiving information on Line 3 opponents from numerous police entities across three states, as well as private security firms hired by Enbridge. One sheriff’s analyst described the fusion center as “the keepers of information for the Enbridge protests.” Much of the reporting for the Intercept story was based on documents obtained through a Minnesota Government Data Practices Act request to the fusion center.

Fusion centers in other states have previously engaged in intrusive monitoring of Indigenous-led struggles against pipelines. In North Dakota, the state’s fusion center helped orchestrate surveillance of Dakota Access pipeline opponents in 2016 and 2017. In Oregon, a fusion center helped set up a multi-agency police task force to monitor opponents of the Jordan Cove Energy Project, a proposed pipeline and liquid natural gas export project that has since been canceled in response to grassroots organizing.

Fusion center officers have also shared information on pipeline opponents across state lines. A North Dakota fusion center officer who developed files on individual Dakota Access pipeline opponents and attempted to analyze links between them later offered to share those files with Minnesota police officials who are responding to Line 3 protests, public records acquired by Unicorn Riot showed.

“This form of increasing secrecy around energy infrastructure is troubling, particularly given the government’s history of treating environmental protests as domestic terrorists.”

Martinez, from Open the Government, said that the Minnesota Fusion Center’s Line 3 policy reflects a growing tendency for governments to restrict the release of information about “critical infrastructure,” including fossil fuel installations, on national security grounds. Public agencies may then use these policies as a justification for withholding records related to political opposition to fossil fuel infrastructure.

For example, the Senate’s new draft infrastructure bill requires all states to adopt an “energy security plan” to guard against vulnerabilities to that state’s energy supply, and it would also forbid federal and state entities from releasing records related to the “security” of such infrastructure — including pipelines.

“This form of increasing secrecy around energy infrastructure is troubling, particularly given the government’s history of treating environmental protests as domestic terrorists,” Martinez said. “It’s a trend that’s happening everywhere, but it’s very troubling to see it happening as explicitly as it is in Minnesota.”

The post Minnesota Law Enforcement Agency Blocks Release of Public Records About Surveilling Pipeline Opponents appeared first on The Intercept.

“Our budget took a hit last week, so that’s all we will be ordering for now,” the deputy said in a November 2020 email about his purchase. “I’m hoping the pipeline will give us an extra boost to next year’s budget, which should make it easy for me to propose an upgrade/trade to your rifles rather than a rebuild of our 8 Bushmasters” — a reference to another make of assault rifles.

The email suggests that at least some law enforcement officers anticipate new policing resources if the pipeline, Enbridge’s Line 3, is completed. The document, obtained through a public records request, provides an elegant example of how everyday oil and gas investments make it all the harder for local economies to transition away from the fossil fuel industry. The deputy appeared to be describing a banal but lucrative benefit aligning local police interests with the oil pipeline: property taxes.

“They clearly have a belief or awareness that there is a pot of gold should they succeed in stopping the water protectors from being able to stop Line 3,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s Center for Protest Law and Litigation and an attorney representing water protectors. “This deputy is obviously looking to line the county sheriff’s armory with this money.”

Enbridge spokesperson Juli Kellner said, “The project has been providing significant economic benefits in Minnesota for counties, small businesses, Native American communities, and union members – including creating thousands of family-sustaining construction jobs, and millions of dollars in local spending and tax revenues.” She added that police were responsible for criminal investigations and public safety. Aitkin County Sheriff Dan Guida said, “We’re not on Enbridge’s side, and we’re not on the other side.”

The Line 3 project replaces, expands, and reroutes an old, corroding pipeline, doubling its capacity to carry carbon-intensive tar sands oil and running it through miles of new lands and waterways. The pipeline has provoked an Indigenous-led direct action movement whose members, called water protectors, have at times broken property laws, locking themselves to equipment or blocking access to construction sites.

The water protectors say the project’s construction breaks treaties with Indigenous nations, threatens to contaminate waterways, and stands to deepen the climate crisis. They argue that private money fuels the public police response to their protests, creating a bias toward the corporation. Though police frequently claim to be neutral arbiters of public safety, law enforcement agencies anticipated protests by forming a multi-agency task force whose members have coordinated frequently with Enbridge. Water protectors see their attempts to stop the nonviolent direct actions as a corporate counterinsurgency.

Shanai Matteson, who is from Aitkin County and currently lives at a pipeline resistance camp in the area, said that she’s seen police officers escorting Enbridge trucks and machinery as well as sitting with pipeline security at construction sites. “How can we pretend this is a neutral response?” she said. “They are expecting some kind of benefit longterm from the pipeline. To me that says a lot about their motivations for protecting Enbridge and protecting their worksites.”

The rerouted Line 3 places a significant section of pipeline in Aitkin County, meaning that the new line will likely provide a big boost in revenue for the rural county of some 16,000 people. Aitkin County Auditor Kirk Peysar told The Intercept that Enbridge contributed $68,581 in property taxes to the county budget for 2021. If the project enters operation, he estimates Enbridge will pay Aitkin County $2.4 million annually, including local, school, and state property taxes.

The Aitkin County sheriff, Guida, who is among a handful of police leading the law enforcement response to the Line 3 protests, said he is not expecting much of that money to come to his agency. The county, he said, typically returns tax influxes to landowners as property tax cuts. “Based on what I’ve seen, speculation of a budget bump would be wishful thinking,” he said. “I’m sure we’d see something, but not enough to buy new cars and new weapons.”

Guida said the rifle purchase last year was made as part of an effort to standardize equipment for safety reasons. He shrugged off Cook’s comments in the email to the gun seller — “Deputies talk a lot,” he said — but that talk suggests that some officers believe that Enbridge will soon be paying their bills.

Enbridge has forged numerous pathways to funnel money to the communities and public agencies whose support it requires in order to build Line 3. The corporation has offered millions to convince tribes to support the pipeline, created jobs for Native community members, encouraged workers to frequent locally owned businesses, donated money to emergency responders and local environmental entities, and, notably, agreed to cover the costs of policing pipeline protests.

For some individuals and public institutions, all that money has made opposing a tar sands oil pipeline in the middle of a pandemic difficult, despite the increasingly obvious costs of the climate crisis that tar sands oil deepens. Ultimately, the pipeline money helps leave project opponents more isolated in their fight to protect the water and the climate.

“In many ways, Enbridge is putting a new definition on the old phrase of a ‘company town.’”

Although Minnesota is not commonly considered an oil state, a significant portion of county budgets in the deeply rural northern part of the state comes from Enbridge’s network of pipelines and related infrastructure. In Pennington County, for example, which is located north of Aitkin County on the Line 3 route, Enbridge is the largest taxpayer, forking over about $2.7 million annually in 2020 and 2021.

“In many ways, Enbridge is putting a new definition on the old phrase of a ‘company town,’” said Verheyden-Hilliard, the lawyer representing water protectors. “This foreign corporation is buying up, in essence, huge swaths of northern Minnesota, funding the police departments, and having them do their bidding to shut down environmental activists and Indigenous water protectors who are trying to save the water and the land from the damage they are causing and will cause.”

Some counties expect Enbridge’s contributions to local coffers to increase significantly when Line 3 enters operation, but the economic impact of the tar sands oil pipeline is complicated by the company’s own activities.

This spring, Enbridge won a lawsuit against the state of Minnesota claiming that it had overvalued the company’s property, leading to an overpayment of taxes. A judge ordered counties and the state to pay back millions of dollars. With Enbridge property now being revalued at a lower rate, the company will pay less on existing parcels than it had before.

Enbridge paid 5 percent of Cass County’s total property taxes in 2021. County Administrator Josh Stevenson said that with the revalued Enbridge parcels, he believes the county will be lucky if the new Line 3 covers the lost tax revenue.

In Cass County, Enbridge is among the highest single property taxpayers. However, the largest pool of county property taxpayers, Stevenson said, is owners of lake homes and cabins. They come to the area seasonally to fish, hunt, and enjoy a landscape that will be dramatically changed in coming years by the climate crisis. How much so will depend on how long tar sands oil and other fossil fuels continue to be extracted and burned.

Tania Aubid, a water protector and member of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, who is from the tribe’s land base in Aitkin County, is skeptical of any promise of financial benefits from the pipeline company. “I think it’s a bait-and-switch scam from Enbridge,” she said, of the expected tax boost. Since European settlers first arrived in Minnesota, profiteers have repeatedly broken promises to Indigenous people, she said. “We’ve seen it before, as Anishinaabe people.”

The post Minnesota Police Expected Pipeline Budget Boost to Fund New Weapons appeared first on The Intercept.

Water protectors are traveling in growing numbers to stand with the Anishinaabe-led movement to stop the construction of Line 3, a tar sands oil pipeline. This week on Intercepted: Intercept reporter Alleen Brown takes us to northern Minnesota, a flashpoint in the fight to halt the expansion of the fossil fuel industry as the climate crisis deepens. Direct actions and other protests against Line 3 are just heating up and more than 500 people have already been arrested or issued citations. Opponents of the Line 3 pipeline are urging the Biden administration to intervene to stop construction, but his administration recently moved to defend the pipeline. Water protectors are being greeted by an intensifying police response and what scholars are calling a corporate counterinsurgency campaign led by the pipeline company, Enbridge.

[Musical introduction.]

Ali Gharib: I’m Ali Gharib and I’m a senior editor with The Intercept.

Big Wind: Anybody leaving this property, they get pulled over.

Tara Houska: They’re watching our every move.

Sarah LittleRedFeather: They’ve already invaded our space, then when you come to our private home, you know, taking a bath, taking a shower.

Ali Gharib: Today we’re bringing you a story where the stakes could not be higher. It’s about the climate crisis, about the people fighting against global disaster — and how fossil fuel companies are fighting back.

This is a story about corporate counterinsurgency, but it’s about so much more. This fight is unfolding in northern Minnesota right now. An Indigenous-led movement, whose members call themselves water protectors, are trying to preserve not only their people’s rights but also our whole planet. The water protectors are fighting against Enbridge, a Canadian oil company, which is seeking to lay a pipeline called Line 3 through Minnesota.

The path cuts through lands where a handful of local tribes have treaty rights, and it cuts across natural resources like rivers and waterways — raising fears about spills and environmental damage.

This spring, we sent our reporter Alleen Brown to Minnesota to investigate the struggle over the pipeline. She’s got years of experience doing investigative work about pipeline fights, about the climate crisis, and about corporate efforts to fight back against protest movements.

When Alleen got to Minnesota things were just heating up — literally: with the waterways and ground thawing, Enbrige would soon be able to start construction on the pipeline. Water protectors were beginning to gather in earnest too.

Things recently began to come to a head. Water protectors hoped the Biden administration would stop Line 3 construction, but instead the administration went to court and argued against the Red Lake Nation to defend the pipeline’s federal permit.

Now water protectors are increasingly turning to protests and direct action — hoping to build their own groundswell to get the authorities and the oil company to reverse course on the pipeline. But they’re fighting an uphill battle. Local police are coordinating regularly with Enbridge to address the pipeline resistance.

The spring escalation has already led to hundreds of arrests of people involved in protest actions. More recently, authorities have sought to evict one protest encampment and barricade another’s driveway.

Alleen reported on how the tactics being undertaken by Enbridge and the police resembled a corporate counterinsurgency — an analog to the multi-faceted wartime approach taken to overcome an enemy. In Minnesota, it’s not just an academic question: the state’s permit for Line 3 barred the company from engaging in a counterinsurgency.

Here’s Alleen’s reporting from on the ground in the north country

Big Wind and the sheriff

[Water protectors chanting.]

Alleen Brown: The morning sun is still low on a dirt road in northern Minnesota as a small crowd faces Aitkin County sheriff’s deputies. The crowd drums and chants messages of support for the seven people on the other side of the police line, who sit linked together from one side of the road to the other, locked to concrete-filled barrels.

The chained demonstrators are stopping construction personnel from entering a pump station for Enbridge’s Line 3, a tar sands oil pipeline that has become the latest flashpoint in the fight to halt the expansion of the fossil fuel industry as the climate crisis deepens.

Big Wind: Hey, I just want to introduce myself—

Alleen Brown: Big Wind is a Northern Arapaho 28-year-old from the Wind River reservation in Wyoming. They greet me from behind a mask.

Big Wind: My name is Big Wind. I use they/them pronouns. And I am the communications coordinator for Giniw.

I was at Namewag yesterday and there was a Department of Homeland Security helicopter that flew really, really, really, really low, like just right above the tree, right above the treeline.

Alleen Brown: Big Wind describes what members of the Indigenous-led anti-pipeline movement, also known as water protectors, have recently encountered from police along that route.

Big Wind: At first you could hear it. It was like choppers and you could feel it in the ground. And it was circling camp. It circled camp twice. And you could tell it was, it was intentional and it was to intimidate us and to surveil us.

Alleen Brown: Big Wind says it was a Department of Homeland Security helicopter, just as a masked police officer approaches us.

Big Wind: And this is consistent with the continuation. We see the police taking on a more escalated response to the actions that have been happening here.

Sheriff Dan Guida: Can you describe that escalated response? Because I’m the police. Yeah, and I, I, I argue with you that we haven’t taken an escalated response. We’ve had a very even keeled response.

Alleen Brown: That’s Sheriff Dan Guida, of Aitkin County. Sheriff Guida is here in response to Enbridge’s complaints about the road blockade. He’s waiting for a trailer full of equipment that officers will use to remove the locked-down demonstrators.

Big Wind: OK. I’m not going to sit here and argue with you because —

Sheriff Guida: I’m asking you what’s the, what’s the escalated response. Did you see?

Big Wind: They’re asking me a question. We’re in an interview and you just interrupted that. That’s what I’m saying.

Sheriff Guida: This is a public space.

Big Wind: I was, I was literally talking about how there was a helicopter flying over — a DHS helicopter — and you just interrupted my conversation.

Sheriff Guida: We have no helicopters. We haven’t been in any helicopters.

Big Wind: OK.

Sheriff Guida: The stories you tell need to be true.

Big Wind: [Scoffs.] We have, we have footage that shows that there was a Department of Homeland Security helicopter flying over —

Sheriff Guida: I thought you didn’t want to argue. I thought you didn’t want to argue.

Big Wind: Well now— what you’re doing to me.

Sheriff Guida: Take a look at badges around here and find me from the Department of Homeland Security. They’re not here. There’s nobody here from the Department of Homeland Security. That’s federal. We don’t do that.

Alleen Brown: Sheriff Guida is proud of his recent record: Despite an influx of activists as the winter cold eased, his deputies had avoided making any arrests the prior week.

Sheriff Guida: I don’t call that an escalated response. I call it exceptional public safety. Don’t tell lies about cops.

Alleen Brown: The sheriff and I step aside to talk further. I ask him about the special Enbridge-funded account that the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission set up to reimburse law enforcement expenses.

For water protectors, the funding from Enbridge positions the police as biased toward the company — or at worst privatized operatives for Enbridge. Sheriff Guida assures me there is nothing wrong with the pipeline company’s payments for police services.

Alleen Brown [in interview]: There’s been a lot of criticism around this escrow account that’s been set up.

Sheriff Guida: Yeah, you know and some people were saying that today, you know, take your cops. Enbridge doesn’t pay for us. It’s a reimbursement for expenses that are related to this line that we wouldn’t normally have.

Alleen Brown: He points toward a government appointed account manager who approves every Enbridge transaction.

Alleen Brown [in interview]: Enbridge is reimbursing a lot of stuff but I know—

Sheriff Guida: Enbridge is not reimbursing. Don’t get confused. That PUC account is all  managed by the state of Minnesota.

Alleen Brown: He adds:

Sheriff Guida: I don’t think that we have any connections with Enbridge but there’s a good separation.

Alleen Brown: A few days latter, the sheriff left me a voicemail:

Sheriff Guida: [VOICEMAIL] Hi Alleen, this is Dan Guida. Hey, I was in a meeting this morning and I asked specifically about helicopters and I found out that a county in the western side of the state did have a helicopter coming from, I don’t know if it was immigration or who, but they had helicopter come in and buzz the camp over there. It was not in our county, as I said. But I do have to apologize, because there was a helicopter that buzzed the camp.

Alleen Brown: Big Wind’s camp, Namewag, is in a neighboring county, and turns out Guida was unaware that another sheriff did call in Customs and Border Protection. In short, Big Wind wasn’t lying, and Guida’s understanding of what was happening in the battle between the pipeline company and the water protectors was incomplete.

For water protectors, the escalating Enbridge-funded policing and the denials to press are part of a pattern: law enforcement working hand-in-hand with pipeline companies to police their opposition — then refuting that a collaboration exists. From Standing Rock to Jordan Cove, private and public resources are put in service of what water protectors say amount to a counterinsurgency against their efforts to save the planet from the fossil fuel industry.

Counterinsurgency typically refers to a strategy used by the military to defeat armed resistance. It involves not just threats of violence but also psychological, political, economic, and intelligence tactics.

In Minnesota, the label is more than just semantic. The state permit for the Line 3 pipeline includes an unusual condition: “The Permittee, the permittee’s contractors and assigns will not participate in counterinsurgency tactics or misinformation campaigns to interfere with the rights of the public to legally exercise their Constitutional rights.”

Tara Houska: They were told not to do what is a counter-insurgency — so exact term they’ve they’ve used. I don’t understand how surveilling, harassing, and targeting people on a daily basis is not counterinsurgency. You are specifically targeting Indigenous people, people of color, anyone that’s associated with like, are you a water protector? You know what I mean? Like those things have happened multiple times. And this  spans back years.

Alleen Brown: Tara Houska is a 37-year-old Anishinaabe water protector from Minnesota and a veteran of the fight at Standing Rock.

Tara Houska: I’ve seen a lot of drone activity over the last few years, and it’s been more and more recently.

Alleen Brown: Water protectors say Enbridge has violated its permit conditions. They point to the escrow account created for Enbridge to pay law enforcement for pipeline policing, intensifying surveillance, and a years-long divide-and-conquer effort by the company aimed at local communities. I interviewed dozens of people, reviewed thousands of pages of public records and academic literature — all suggesting Enbridge and the police’s efforts bear hallmarks of corporate counterinsurgency.

Minnesota Pipeline Fight

Alleen Brown: The fight against the Enbridge pipeline is part of a larger struggle with enormous stakes. The Mayor of Thief River Falls, Brian Holmer,  says the pipeline has boosted his business, Micheal’s Meats. The mayor has repeatedly spoken publicly about the benefits of the project, through the group Minnesotans for Line 3.

Mayor Brian Holmer: Over the past about three months has increased our sales probably about 30 percent overall. And just this last week when the pipeliners shut down due to the road restrictions and some of the environmental impacts and stuff it dramatically decreased.

So we’re kind of back to normalcy now a little bit. But Line 3 has been really, really good for the community. Some of the brighter points we’ve heard and I hear it on a daily basis, and I hear it on a daily basis, and  I’ve never heard myself be called sir so much because of the politeness of, uh, the pipeliners around. They’re fun to be around, very friendly. I think the community up here overall really embraced them.

Alleen Brown: Enbridge, a Canadian energy firm, is expanding and rerouting its old, corroded Line 3. Branded a “replacement” project, the new pipeline would double the old Line 3’s capacity to carry tar sands oil from the Canadian province of Alberta to a hub in Wisconsin. From there, it would be transported on to refineries from the Gulf Coast to eastern Canada.

The processes to transform sticky Alberta sludge into usable fuel make tar sands oil one of the most intensive fossil fuels in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. The risks are compounded when tar sands travel. Oil pipeline spills are endemic, and Enbridge has a particularly nasty record.

Most of the U.S. portion of the route, approximately 338 miles, is in Minnesota. There, the conflict over Line 3 centers on both the larger climate considerations and local concerns, particularly of the Anishinaabe peoples. Though the struggle against Line 3 has lasted the better part of a decade, the efforts were invigorated by a mounting Indigenous-led resistance to pipelines that bisect treaty lands across North America.

NPR: A fight over the route of a new pipeline is gaining momentum while it plays out in court—

PBS: —a protest in North Dakota against a major oil pipeline continues to grow. Over one hundred Native American tribes have joined the fight against the project.

DN!: It’s slated to carry half a million barrels of crude a day from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota through South Dakota, Iowa, and into Illinois.

Alleen Brown: Opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota gave rise to what became known as the water protector movement in 2016 and was promptly met with a private-public crackdown at the edge of the Standing Rock Reservation.

The firm behind the Dakota Access Pipeline hired private security contractors who, in leaked documents we obtained, characterized the Standing Rock movement as “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component.” They also said water protectors “generally followed the jihadist insurgency model.”

The security firm, Tigerswan, ran a counterinsurgency modeled on what the U.S. military did in Iraq and Afghanistan that is infiltrating the anti-pipeline movement, conducting surveillance, and spreading propaganda, while also routinely coordinating with local law enforcement.

When Enbridge brought the pipeline fight to Indigenous lands in Minnesota, the public officials responsible for issuing a permit knew what had just happened next door in North Dakota. Three years ago, Minnesota Public Utilities Commissioner John Tuma, a Republican, spoke at a public hearing during the permitting process for Line 3.

John Tuma: We’re saying to them — make it very clear — we are not to get involved in trying to interfere with the rights of people legally, legally exercising their rights under Minnesota constitution and that all their contracts and assigns shall not interfere by entering into what I would consider counterinsurgency tactics or misinformation campaigns, similar to what occurred in North Dakota.

Alleen Brown: He added.

John Tuma:  What’s critical for me to know as we go forward: that kind of activities — this insurgency type stuff, the Pinkerton style type stuff — doesn’t happen here in Minnesota. This is, this is the United States of America. Our citizens of Minnesota have a right to protest.

Alleen Brown: The anti-counterinsurgency language was inserted into the permit but with no definitions to accompany it. This vagueness has meant less accountability.

Tuma declined a request for comment, but the Public Utilities Commission’s executive secretary Will Seuffert confirmed that the commission never defined the term counterinsurgency.

As for accountability, he says the state’s designated Public Safety Liaison for the pipeline monitors for such tactics and raises concerns if they occur. The Department of Public Safety has not replied to my request for comment.

By Any Other Name

To better understand these methods, scholars are examining U.S. counterinsurgency strategies abroad and resistance to extractive industries around the globe.

Simon Granovsky-Larsen: I think it’s important to start with an understanding that counterinsurgency, whether it’s state-led or facilitated by a private company, is essentially about social control over a given territory or area.

Alleen Brown: Simon Granovsky-Larsen, of the University of Regina in Canada, recently co-wrote a paper offering a rubric for identifying corporate counterinsurgencies around the world.

Simon Granovsky-Larsen: Often we think of counterinsurgency as particularly a form of warfare or a form of military campaign and it is, but there’s more to it than the security side. Counterinsurgency is about controlling a population so that they don’t oppose the implementation of the objectives that those carrying out the counter-insurgency have.

In the hands of private companies, the purpose of it is a little bit more narrow because here we’re talking about private companies that are trying to get control over a territory for, for the sole purpose of implementing an economic project that they have in mind, whether this is a natural resource extraction or, or something else.

Alleen Brown: Minnesota’s multi-agency coalition managing pipeline resistance, known as the Northern Lights Task Force, doesn’t seem to be making a big effort to avoid counterinsurgency strategies. Instead, Minnesota public safety officials have, in private, embraced the approach taken at Standing Rock.

MPR News: More than 4,000 workers are expected in northern Minnesota over the next couple of weeks to help build the contentious Line 3 oil pipeline replacement. At the same time activists are escalating their efforts to block it while law enforcement officials are trying to keep the peace.

Alleen Brown: In December 2020, shortly after Minnesota approved the Line 3 construction permit, Nicholas Radke, the intelligence coordinator for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety distributed a Standing Rock After-Action Report from the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services.  Through a public records request we obtained an email Radke wrote to a handful of local officials along the pipeline route and to Enbridge’s security lead for Line 3. He writes, “The AAR is the best document I’ve read in 10 years of working for the state. I’d recommend reading it word for word.”

Radke hasn’t responded to a request for comment.

In the document, many of the indelible public images of the Standing Rock movement — dogs being sicced on demonstrators or water hoses blasting people in sub-freezing temperatures — are relegated to a timeline in the appendices. The main body of the report characterized the police response to Standing Rock as an “extraordinary” demonstration of “professionalism, restraint, and courage,” celebrating that no one had died. The report praised law enforcement’s aerial and social media surveillance efforts but lamented that, unlike the security company, police hadn’t done better at developing their own informants, in part, because  “Non-Native Americans were often excluded from sources of information.”

Public-Private Collaboration

[Music from a portable speaker plays.]

Every Tuesday, members of the Stop Line 3 movement gather in front of Enbridge’s Park Rapids, Minnesota, headquarters. On one Tuesday this spring, music plays over a portable speaker while one of the group’s leaders, Winona LaDuke, a one time vice presidential candidate, trys out salsa moves.

Enbridge hasn’t used the building much since construction began, but the firm left its signs up to keep water protectors there. And water protectors don’t mind. The event drums up support, measured in cars that pass and honk.

Across the street, the attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard waits to pick up dinner at a Mexican restaurant before meeting up with the actor and activist Jane Fonda. Fonda is here to draw media attention to the anti-pipeline movement. Verheyden-Hilliard has represented Fonda in cases related to her other activism. She came along to gather information for a potential lawsuit.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: We’re looking at Enbridge, we’re looking at the sheriff’s offices, and we’re looking at the public safety escrow trust because we believe that these three things have created a really extraordinary mechanism that fully financially incentivizes a level of repression to silence and shut down the organizing here and the water protectors activities.

Alleen Brown: Examples of police cooperation with the energy firm weren’t hard to find. The escrow account is the most obvious form of collaboration. In North Dakota, public agencies spent millions of dollars responding to pipeline protests. The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission created the Enbridge-funded account so that, this time, the pipeline company would foot the bill.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: There’s been set up a structure where the sheriff’s offices are being financially incentivized to repress and target peaceful water protectors with constant harassment, with baseless pullovers, with targeting operations, with 24 seven surveillance, because they are billing the public safety escrow trust, which is a limitless funds account paid for by Enbridge.

Alleen Brown: There is a publicly appointed account manager who occasionally rejects sheriff’s office invoices that overreach, but so far Enbridge has reimbursed more than $1 million in expenses, for things like crowd control training, overtime pay, and so-called “personal protective equipment,” like riot suits and tear gas masks.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: And what that’s doing is essentially privatizing the public police forces to work in service to the pecuniary interests of the private corporation. And, more specifically, it means that the corporation gets to use the public police forces to crack down on their political opponents.

Alleen Brown: Police and Enbridge officials were communicating regularly in the year leading up to the final construction permit’s approval. As construction got underway, officials began “meeting daily with Enbridge,” at the Northern Lights Task Force’s Duluth, Minnesota, operation center. In at least one county, the corporate-police meetings happened “several times daily,” according to public records.

By the time Verheyden-Hilliard arrived in Minnesota, the fruits of all that preparation were apparent.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: I had been talking to people for the past week who were relaying these stories of these constant baseless pullovers for things where the police were saying that your license plates are dusty.

Alleen Brown: And even earlier that day, as she drove in front of Fonda’s vehicle toward a press conference, a state patrol officer turned on her lights.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: And I got pulled over by the police in a classic baseless harassing stop.

[Footage of Verheyden-Hilliard getting pulled over.]

Officer: The reason I pulled you over today is in Minnesota, I don’t know if you’re aware, but before you make a corner you have to blinker a good 100 feet before you go. You can’t just like turn your blinker on and go. So I just wanted to make sure you’re aware of that rule. I saw that you have California plates, so. Do you have your driver’s license with you?

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard [in recording]: Yes, ma’am, but you were following us when we left the park area.

Officer: Yeah.

Alleen Brown: After issuing a warning for not flashing a signal within 100 feet of a turn, the state patrol officer followed Verheyden-Hilliard’s car for 12 miles. The warning isn’t what the attorney worries about.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard: Again and again, what they’re doing is they’re not generally issuing citations — they’re seizing the identity information. So we believe that this is an illegal surveillance operation to try and target and collect identity on people.

Alleen Brown: When I ask Guida, the Aitkin County sheriff, about the stops, he says that his officers only pull people over when they’re breaking the law. But when I press him about whether the stops are being used to collect identity information, he acknowledges that’s standard procedure.

Sheriff Guida: Absolutely, there’s intelligence that comes from every traffic stop. Everything is documented in the state of Minnesota. The county every time we stop a car the driver gets documented, the license plate gets documented. You know, that’s data that we collect. We’ve collected that forever and that’s what we do.

Surveillance

Big Wind: We’re here in Namewag. This camp was created by indigenous matriarchs in the summer of 2018.

Alleen Brown: Namewag, located in Hubbard County, Minnesota, is one of a handful anti-pipeline camps strung along the oil superhighway’s route. Run by the anti-pipeline Giniw Collective. Big Wind says Namewag focuses on direct actions, like locking down to equipment or holding sit-ins at construction sites.

Big Wind: We believe, you know, you know, that land defense and food sovereignty and treaty rights are all working in tandem with each other and so we’re rooted in those things.

Tara Houska: This place is about life and balance, and that means building community with the land and building community with each other.

Alleen Brown: That’s Tara Houska again, the water protector from Minnesota.

Tara Houska: And we do a lot of direct action in this space.

Alleen Brown: Direct actions and other protests against Line 3 have seen more than 500 people arrested or issued citations.

When I arrived this spring, members of the camp were tense. Another water protector had just been pulled over right outside of camp for having expired tags.

Big Wind: So right before you guys were coming here one of our camp members got pulled over right out here, as they were leaving the property. And it was like an hour stoppage.

Alleen Brown: Big Wind again.

Big Wind: Usually that’s like a ticket, right? But they went to jail, they arrested them. And now they’re being held in Hubbard County Jail.

Alleen Brown: Since nonviolent direct action can run afoul of the law, the camp became a target for surveillance. The police stops ramped up with the spring temperatures.

Big Wind: I honestly don’t think that there’s a car here that hasn’t been pulled over. We’ve all been pulled over.

Alleen Brown: The stops have left people on edge, which they figure is part of the point.

Big Wind: When you’re in that constant state of flux, when you’re in that constant state of crisis, I think they don’t want you to be making the right decisions. They want to figure out, “oh, you didn’t turn your, you know, your lights on” or “you didn’t blinker a hundred feet ahead of the stop sign,” you know. They’re trying to figure out all these situations. They want to catch you off your guard.

Alleen Brown: In 2019, Enbridge purchased a plot of land right next to Namewag. Since then, drones have regularly appeared over the protest camp. Reporters at Gizmodo were able to confirm that some of the drones spotted along the Line 3 route, including above water protectors’ homes belong to Customs and Border Protection, but others remain unidentified. Drones also appeared above the solar energy business, 8th Fire Solar, which was co-founded by the activist LaDuke. Sarah LittleRedFeather, who used to live on the property, says surveillance has escalated since July of last year.

Sarah LittleRed Feather: We counted six in one night. And I actually got one on video where it came under 400 feet and went over the 8th Fire’s Solar garage and at the level of my place and flew over. And I have them on video doing that. And just, you know, hovering around our, our land, you know, just hovering and just standing still and just doing that. And I’m like, what are you guys doing? What do you want?

Alleen Brown: Around that time, as Enbridge had done at Namewag, the company quietly purchased the strip of land next door to the solar business.

Co-Opting Communities

Minnesotans for Line 3 Ad: Line 3 is making a positive impact in Minnesota. It’s creating thousands of jobs, boosting the economy and increasing safety. Minnesotans strongly support Line 3 and with construction over half way complete, it’s time to finish strong.

Alleen Brown: Across from 8th Fire Solar, the neighbor had posted a sign in their yard, reading “Minnesotans for Line 3.” The blue signs, which dot the pipeline’s path, are the physical manifestation of another aspect of Enbridge’s campaign: Its work to recruit the support of local communities. The online presence of “Minnesotans for Line 3” is as robust as its yard signs. The group spent around $20,000 on Facebook ads in March and April alone, circulating testimony from motel, restaurant, and construction supply store owners about how friendly pipeline workers are and how much they’ve boosted business.

Dale in Minnesotans for Line 3 ad: Hi I’m Dale Thompson [in audible]. I’m a big supporter of Line 3. The pipeline needs to be taken care of. It’s far safer and I support it tremendously.

James in Minnesotans for Line 3 ad: My name is James Bianci. I live in Hermantown, Minnesota. I’m a teacher, a high school teacher. I believe that Line 3 should go through because I think that it’s good for the community. I think it’s good for jobs all around northern Minnesota.

Alleen Brown: Minnesotans for Line 3 describes itself as a “grassroots organization of people who understand how important it is to have reliable energy to power our economy,” but a disclosure form unearthed by DeSmog lists Enbridge as a sponsor of a Minnesotans for Line 3 TV ad. The Minnesotans for Line 3 website makes no direct reference to a relationship between Enbridge and the group. Pipeline opponents say that the group is an astroturf organization, a grassroots group hiding the fact that it is sponsored by a corporation to advance the corporation’s agenda.

Another record lists Minnesotans for Line 3’s ad buyer as Velocity Public Affairs, a PR firm that used to openly promote its work for Enbridge on its web site. In 2019, Velocity trademarked the name “Respect Minnesota.” Water protectors view Respect Minnesota as another astroturf effort.

Respect Minnesota’s outreach coordinator, Kathy Ross, told me the organization is union-driven, and added that they’ve publicly stated that Enbridge as well as some of its subcontractors support Respect Minnesota.

And Enbridge spokesperson Juli Kellner added, “Enbridge is just one of the businesses, unions, community organizations, and thousands of individuals from around the state who have taken the Respect Minnesota pledge.” She told me that questions about Minnesotans for Line 3 should be directed to that group, but the organization did not answer my questions about its connections to Enbridge.

Shanai Matteson understands the attractiveness for locals of a vague appeal like “respect” and support for the pipeline.

Shanai Matteson: Aitken County is a small rural county and jobs in industries of extraction are very attractive to many of the people who live here because there isn’t a lot of other economic opportunity.

Alleen Brown: Matteson moved to Honor the Earth’s Welcome Water Protectors camp in Aitkin County last summer, but she’s also from the area. The nearby land where Matteson’s grandmother was born is now part of the pipeline route.

Shanai Matteson: That was the spot where my grandmother was born. That was where their settlement was. And so my grandmother and I are both opposed to the pipeline. They’re obviously OK with it.

Alleen Brown: Matteson is referring to her cousin’s family, who now own the land.

Shanai Matteson: That story about our way of life as extraction is so deep.

Alleen Brown: Matteson’s grandfather worked as a miner and her cousin is a retired member of a construction union. Matteson thinks Enbridge has used Minnesota’s historic economic dependence on extractive industries and its conflict-avoidant culture to advance the pipeline project.

Buying Indigenous Support

Alleen Brown: An Enbridge proposal leaked to Minnesota’s Star Tribune newspaper demonstrates how much tribal buy-in is worth to the pipeline. The company proposed a package worth more than $25 million to the Red Lake Nation to drop its lawsuit and publicly communicate its opposition to “unlawful protesting.”

When I visited the Red Lake pipeline resistance camp, the Red Lake River was still frozen. The camp was a handful of cold-weather tents, including a donated Mongolian style yurt, on a hill overlooking the spot where the pipeline’s easement intersects with the river. It’s outside of the reservation, next to a highway on treaty land.

Enbridge attempted to win them over, Tribal Secretary Sam Strong:

Sam Strong: The letter was just disregarded.

Alleen Brown: Enbridge continued to push, hiring Red Lake tribal members to promote the pipeline and trying to buy local support. Strong again:

Sam Strong: That divide and conquer strategy is the same strategy that the federal government used to terminate Native people.

Alleen Brown: Red Lake wasn’t the only tribe approached by Enbridge — and other efforts were more successful. The Fond du Lac band, whose reservation is bisected by Line 3, opposed the pipeline before accepting its own version of the proposal made to Red Lake. The details of the deal have not been made public but a letter sent to tribal members in January, shared with Indian Country Today, indicates that the $400 monthly payments all tribal members receive from tribal enterprises are now coming from Enbridge.

On the cusp of summer, Enbridge began preparing to drill under more than 20 rivers and waterways. Water protectors are urging the Biden administration to intervene. In the meantime, they are traveling in growing numbers to stand with the Anishinaabe-led movement — and being greeted by an intensifying police response.

So far, Enbridge and law enforcement have only shown flashes of the kinds of spectacular displays of repression seen at Standing Rock. In June, water protectors gathered for the largest yet direct action against Line 3 at a pipeline pump station.

[Helicopter sound]

Again, a Customs and Border Protection helicopter showed up, sending a cloud of dust and debris flying over the protest. Authorities denied it was intentional. But the helicopter’s low flight path, in an area where water protectors were locked to construction equipment, appeared to violate Federal Aviation Administration rules.

CBP says the agency can’t comment on the flight, which is under investigation, but that a key mission of the agency’s Air and Marine Operations is to support law enforcement partners.

The pipeline fights in the upper Midwest represent only one point in a global spectrum of corporate efforts to suppress water and land defense movements. In places like Guatemala, the confrontations can grow much more deadly, says Granovsky-Larsen, the corporate counterinsurgency scholar.

I ask him and his co-author Larissa Santos, of the University of São Paulo in Brazil, whether they think Enbridge’s response to the Stop Line 3 movement fits the definition of corporate counterinsurgency.

Larissa Santos: It aligns very much with what we understand as corporate counterinsurgency.

Alleen Brown: She’s less convinced, though, that the actions of Enbridge and the Northern Lights Task Force violate the spirit of the Public Utilities Commission permit. She proposes an idea I hadn’t considered — that the permit language itself is part of the strategy, sending a message meant to pre-empt concerns that counterinsurgency tactics will be used..

Larissa Santos: It won’t be the same that happened to Standing Rock. We want to have an agreement. We went to have dialogue with the population to avoid the use of, of confrontation, you know. So, I see these also as an information strategy from, from above to pacify resistance.

Alleen Brown: Enbridge, for its part, avoided my questions about whether it was in the midst of a counterinsurgency. Spokesperson Kellner underlined that it was the Public Utilities Commission that set up the escrow account and that local law enforcement is in charge of public safety. She touted the corporation’s relationship with tribes, pointing out that Fond du Lac had led a cultural resources survey along the entire Line 3 route. Kellner said, “We understand there are differing opinions about the energy we all use. As a company, we recognize the rights of individuals and groups to express their views legally and peacefully.”

I pose one last question to Granovsky-Larsen that had been nagging at me as I reported the story.

Alleen Brown [in interview]: Is it possible to build a tar sands oil pipeline in an era of climate crisis without counterinsurgency tactics? And if we reject counterinsurgency tactics are we rejecting projects like this?

Simon Granovsky-Larsen: I don’t see any scenario where tar sands extraction and  transport could gain the necessary legitimacy where a company wouldn’t feel the need to either implement counter-insurgent tactics or, or a harsher form of repression.

Alleen Brown: We’re facing a climate crisis that threatens everything we know. There are very serious consequences to whether or not these extractive industries are successful in advancing their agendas as they use public resources. I think looking at the way that taxpayer funded resources are used by these companies to advance these kinds of things is kind of a central way that we can consider where the pressure points are, you know the police don’t have to accept money from Enbridge, and if they didn’t what would this all look like?

Ali Gharib: And that does it for this episode of Intercepted. What a story. This episode was reported by Alleen Brown and edited by me, Ali Gharib. It was produced by Laura Flynn. Special thanks to W. Paul Smith and Akil Harris for their research support and Holly DeMuth. Find Alleen’s full story and all of her reporting about climate change, pipelines, and resistance at The Intercept.

You can follow us on Twitter @Intercepted and on Instagram @InterceptedPodcast. Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our lead producer is Jack D’Isidoro. Betsy Reed is the editor in chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed our show. As always, our theme music was composed by DJ Spooky.

Correction: July 13, 2021, 6:45 p.m. ET
A previous version of this episode misstated that Mara Verheyden-Hilliard was waiting to pick up Jane Fonda’s dinner.

The post Corporate Counterinsurgency Against Line 3 Pipeline Resistance appeared first on The Intercept.

Big Wind, a Northern Arapaho 28-year-old from the Wind River reservation in Wyoming, greeted me from behind a mask. They described what water protectors, members of the Indigenous-led anti-pipeline movement, had recently encountered along Line 3’s route: an intensifying law enforcement presence including aerial surveillance at a pipeline resistance camp.

“It was actually really crazy — a DHS helicopter flew over camp yesterday,” Big Wind told me, referring to the Department of Homeland Security. They heard it before seeing it circle twice just above the tree canopy. “You could tell it was intentional and it was to intimidate us and to surveil us.”

As Big Wind described the low-flying DHS helicopter, a masked police officer approached us. Big Wind went on, “We see the police taking a more escalated response to the actions that have been happening here.”

“Can you describe that escalated response?” Aitkin County Sheriff Dan Guida cut in. “’Cause I’m the police, and I argue with you that we haven’t taken an escalated response. We’ve had a very even-keeled response.” Big Wind knew Guida well and was irritated by the interjection.

“A DHS helicopter flew over camp yesterday. You could tell it was intentional and it was to intimidate us and to surveil us.”

“I was literally talking about how there was a helicopter flying over,” Big Wind said, “a DHS helicopter — and you just interrupted my conversation.”

“We have no helicopters,” Guida replied. “We haven’t been in any helicopters. The stories you tell — they need to be true.” Big Wind retorted that the water protectors had video of the helicopter.

“Thought you didn’t want to argue,” Guida snapped back. “Take a look at the badges around here and find me the Department of Homeland Security. There’s none here.” Guida was proud of his recent record: Despite an influx of activists as the winter cold eased, his deputies had avoided making any arrests the prior week. “I don’t call that an escalated response. I call it exceptional public safety,” he told Big Wind. “Don’t tell lies about cops.”

The sheriff and I stepped aside to talk further. I asked him about the special Enbridge-funded account that the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission had set up to reimburse law enforcement for pipeline-related expenses. For water protectors, the funding from Enbridge positions the police as biased toward the company — or at worst privatized operatives for Enbridge.

Guida assured me there was nothing wrong with the pipeline company’s payments to police. “Enbridge doesn’t pay for us,” he said. “It’s a reimbursement for expenses that are related to this line that we wouldn’t normally have.” Guida said the arrangement was better than taxpayers footing the bill, adding that a government-appointed account manager needed to approve every Enbridge payment. Guida said, “I don’t think that we have any connections with Enbridge — there’s a good separation.”

A few days later, Guida left me a voicemail to acknowledge a mistake: “I do have to apologize, because there was a helicopter that buzzed the camp,” he said. Big Wind had been right.

Big Wind’s camp is in a neighboring county, and Guida was unaware that another sheriff had called in Customs and Border Protection. Guida’s understanding of what was happening in the battle between the pipeline company and the water protectors was incomplete — a symptom of the sprawling, multiagency response to pipeline resistance.

For water protectors, the law enforcement denials and the escalating Enbridge-funded policing are part of a pattern of law enforcement working hand in hand with pipeline companies to police their opposition — and then refuting that a collaboration exists. From Standing Rock to Jordan Cove, private and public resources, sometimes intermingled, are put in service of what water protectors say amounts to a corporate counterinsurgency against their efforts to save the planet from the fossil fuel industry.

In Minnesota, the label is more than just semantic. The state permit for the Line 3 pipeline includes an unusual condition: “The Permittee, the permittee’s contractors and assigns will not participate in counterinsurgency tactics or misinformation campaigns to interfere with the rights of the public to legally exercise their Constitutional rights.”

Water protectors say Enbridge has violated its permit conditions. They point to the escrow account created for Enbridge to pay for pipeline policing, an intensification of surveillance, and a yearslong divide-and-conquer effort by the pipeline company aimed at local communities. Though questions remain surrounding what exactly the state of Minnesota meant by the permit provision, Enbridge and the police’s efforts seem to bear the hallmarks of corporate counterinsurgency. An Intercept investigation involving dozens of interviews, thousands of pages of public records, and reviews of academic literature suggests the pipeline opponents have a strong case to make.

“They were told not to do — what is it? — ‘counterinsurgency’ is the exact term they’ve used,” said Tara Houska, a 37-year-old Anishinaabe water protector from Minnesota and a veteran of the fight at Standing Rock. “I don’t understand how surveilling, harassing and targeting people on a daily basis is not counterinsurgency.”

Enbridge’s pipeline is just one battleground in a larger struggle with enormous stakes. Enbridge, a Canadian energy firm, is expanding and rerouting its old, corroded Line 3. Branded as a  “replacement” project, the new pipeline would double the old Line 3’s capacity to carry tar sands oil from the Canadian province of Alberta to a hub in Wisconsin, where it can be more easily transported to refineries from the Gulf Coast to eastern Canada.

Rapidly ending the extraction of this particular fossil fuel is imperative to the climate crisis due to the nature of the oil: The processes required to transform sticky Alberta sludge into usable fuel make tar sands oil one of the most intensive fossil fuels in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. The risks are compounded when tar sands travel: Oil pipeline spills are endemic, and Enbridge has a particularly nasty record.

Most of the U.S. portion of the route, more than 330 miles, is in Minnesota. There, the conflict over Line 3 centers on both the larger climate considerations and local concerns, particularly of Anishinaabe people. Though the struggle against Line 3 has lasted the better part of a decade, the efforts were invigorated by mounting Indigenous-led resistance to pipelines that bisect treaty lands across North America. Opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota gave rise to what became known as the water protector movement in 2016 and was promptly met with a private-public crackdown at the edge of the Standing Rock Reservation.

The vagueness in the permit ‘s anti-counterinsurgency language has meant accountability is hard to come by.

As The Intercept reported in an investigative series beginning in 2017, Energy Transfer, the firm behind the Dakota Access pipeline, hired private security contractors who saw the Standing Rock movement as “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component” — going so far as say that water protectors “generally followed the jihadist insurgency model.” The security firm, TigerSwan, ran a counterinsurgency modeled on what the U.S. military did in Iraq and Afghanistan, infiltrating the anti-pipeline movement, conducting surveillance and spreading propaganda, while routinely coordinating with local law enforcement.

When Enbridge brought the pipeline fight to Indigenous lands in Minnesota, the public officials responsible for issuing a permit were well aware of what had just happened next door in North Dakota. Three years ago, Minnesota Public Utilities Commissioner John Tuma, a Republican, spoke at a public hearing during the permitting process for Line 3. “I was not impressed with what happened out there,” Tuma said, of North Dakota. “This is the United States of America. Citizens of Minnesota have a right to protest.”

Tuma was in favor of explicitly prohibiting counterinsurgency in the construction permit. “I think what’s critical for me to know as we go forward is that those kind of activities, this insurgency-type stuff, the Pinkerton-style-type stuff doesn’t happen here in Minnesota,” he said. The anti-counterinsurgency language was inserted into the permit — but with no definitions to accompany it. The vagueness has meant accountability to the terms of the permit’s anti-counterinsurgency clause is hard to come by.

Tuma declined to comment for this story, but the Public Utilities Commission’s Executive Secretary Will Seuffert confirmed that the commission never defined the term “counterinsurgency.” As for accountability, Seuffert said the state’s designated public safety liaison for the pipeline, Department of Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington, would be the one to monitor for such tactics and raise concerns if they occur. The Department of Public Safety did not reply to a request for comment.

The U.S. government’s 2009 Counterinsurgency Guide begins with a foundational idea: that defeating so-called insurgencies is not about armed force. “American counterinsurgency practice rests on a number of assumptions: that the decisive effort is rarely military (although security is the essential prerequisite for success); that our efforts must be directed to the creation of local and national governmental structures that will serve their populations,” the manual says, and “in particular, understanding of the ‘human terrain’ is essential.”

Scholars in the burgeoning field of corporate counterinsurgency research say that companies follow a similar model. By examining U.S. counterinsurgency strategies abroad, the police and private security response at Standing Rock, and resistance to extractive industries around the globe, researchers have cobbled together a set of corporate counterinsurgency symptoms that communities can watch out for.

The goal for corporations is to control territory in order to advance an economic project. In a recent paper, Alexander Dunlap, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, says companies do so by using “hard” and “soft tactics.” Corporate counterinsurgency often involves private security, vigilante or police violence, Dunlap says, but just as important are propaganda efforts. Corporate forces construct countermovements as well as community development projects. Military-style surveillance is not just a means to harvest intelligence but also to seed paranoia among adversaries. As other scholars have pointed out, corporate counterinsurgents develop “persons of interest” lists to track individuals considered threatening and stigmatize activists as eco-terrorists, paid protesters, or members of criminal groups.

In the absence of definitions in the directive from the Public Utilities Commission, Minnesota’s multiagency coalition managing pipeline resistance, known as the Northern Lights Task Force, doesn’t seem to be making a big effort to avoid the strategies of counterinsurgency laid out by Dunlap and others. Instead, Minnesota public safety officials have, in private, embraced the approach taken at Standing Rock.

Related

Minnesota Police Ready for Pipeline Resistance as Enbridge Seeks to Drill Under Rivers

In December 2020, shortly after Minnesota approved the Line 3 construction permit, Nicholas Radke, the intelligence coordinator for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, distributed a Standing Rock After-Action Report from the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services. “The AAR is the best document I’ve read in 10 years of working for the state!” he wrote in an email, obtained by a public records request, to a handful of local officials along the pipeline route, as well as to Enbridge’s security lead for Line 3. “I’d recommend reading it word for word.”

In the document, many of the indelible public images of the Standing Rock movement — dogs being sicced on demonstrators or water hoses blasting water protectors in sub-freezing temperatures — are relegated to a timeline in the appendices. The main body of the report characterizes the police response to Standing Rock as an “extraordinary” demonstration of “professionalism, restraint, and courage,” celebrating that no one had died. The report praised law enforcement’s aerial and social media surveillance efforts but lamented that, unlike the security company, police hadn’t done better at developing its own informants, in part, apparently, because the movement was so Indigenous.

“While there was some human intelligence coming from sources in the camps, the very nature of the protest was a limiting factor,” the document says. “Non-Native Americans were often excluded from sources of information.”

Music played over a portable speaker as Winona LaDuke, a onetime vice-presidential candidate, tried out salsa moves in front of Enbridge’s Park Rapids, Minnesota, headquarters. LaDuke, a leader of the Stop Line 3 movement, and other water protectors do this every Tuesday, though Enbridge hasn’t used the building much since construction began. “The Park Rapids Enbridge building will sit vacant during the pipeline build-out, but Enbridge energy signage will remain to reroute protestors from other sites,” a Northern Lights Task Force planning document notes. The water protectors don’t mind: Salsa Tuesdays drum up support. Passing cars honked as the water protectors danced.

Across the street, the attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard was waiting to pick up dinner at a Mexican restaurant before meeting up with the actor and activist Jane Fonda. Fonda was visiting to draw media attention to the anti-pipeline movement. Verheyden-Hilliard, director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s Center for Protest Law and Litigation, who has represented Fonda in cases related to her other activism, had come along to gather information for a potential lawsuit.

“We’re looking at Enbridge, we’re looking at the sheriff’s offices, and we’re looking at the public safety escrow trust,” Verheyden-Hilliard explained, “because we believe that these three things have created a really extraordinary mechanism that fully financially incentivizes a level of repression to silence and shut down the organizing here.” The attorney didn’t need to look far for examples of how the police and Enbridge are working together.

The escrow account is the most obvious form of collaboration. In North Dakota, public agencies spent millions of dollars responding to pipeline protests. The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission created the Enbridge- funded account so that, this time, the pipeline company would foot the bill. A publicly appointed account manager occasionally rejects sheriff’s office invoices that overreach, but so far Enbridge has reimbursed more than $1 million in expenses, for things like crowd control training, overtime pay, and so-called personal protective equipment, like riot suits and tear gas masks.

“The corporation gets to use the public police forces to crack down on their political opponents.”

“What that’s doing is essentially privatizing the public police forces to work in service to the pecuniary interests of the private corporation,” Verheyden-Hilliard said. “And, more specifically, it means that the corporation gets to use the public police forces to crack down on their political opponents.”

It also fits within the framework of counterinsurgency. Whether fighting in foreign wars or for corporate interest, winning the loyalty of local institutions against opposing forces is an imperative. “Police primacy is highly desirable as it reinforces the perception of insurgents as ‘criminals’ rather than ‘freedom fighters,’” the U.S. Government’s Counterinsurgency Guide says.

With promises of reimbursement on the table, police and Enbridge officials were communicating regularly in the year leading up to the final construction permit’s approval. Meanwhile, the interagency Northern Lights Task Force was pouring “countless hours” into building an elaborate infrastructure for quelling pipeline opposition. More than a dozen Northern Lights subcommittees met monthly or weekly. An agenda for a January 2020 task force meeting included a discussion of “Phone/car tracking possibilities to consider.” The group also planned to discuss potentially backgrounding organizers for links to terrorism and whether to launch a “public information campaign on who they are and what they have done in the past.” Multiple planning documents described law enforcement drone assets.

The Northern Lights Task Force didn’t respond to a request for comment. Guida, the Aitkin County sheriff, said his county isn’t tracking anyone’s phones or cars and the conversation might have been about tracking law enforcement vehicles. He added that he typically learns about what water protectors are doing by simply looking at Facebook. “So many people think this Northern Lights Task Force is like a group of ninja people wearing black suits,” he said.

As construction got underway, officials began “meeting daily with Enbridge” at the Northern Lights Task Force’s Duluth operation center. In Cass County, the corporate-police meetings happened “several times daily,” according to a reimbursement request submitted to the escrow account. The local sheriff, Tom Burch, told The Intercept that he believes that was an overstatement but acknowledged that the office does communicate with an Enbridge liaison nearly every day about pipeline activity.

By the time Verheyden-Hilliard arrived in Minnesota, the fruits of law enforcement’s preparations were apparent. Among the testimony she’d collected was story after story of law enforcement pulling over pipeline opponents for minor infractions. Earlier that day, as she drove in front of Fonda’s vehicle toward a press conference, a state patrol officer turned on her lights behind the attorney. After issuing a warning for not flashing a signal within 100 feet of a turn, the state patrol officer followed Verheyden-Hilliard’s car for 12 miles.

The warning wasn’t what the attorney was worried about. “Again and again, what they’re doing is they’re not generally issuing citations — they’re seizing the identity information,” she said. “We believe that this is an illegal surveillance operation to try and target and collect the identities of people.”

When I asked Guida about the stops, he said that his officers only pull people over when they’re breaking the law. When I pressed him about whether traffic stops were being used to collect identity information, he acknowledged that that’s standard procedure. He said, “Absolutely, there’s intelligence that comes from every traffic stop.”

Namewag, located in Hubbard County, Minnesota, is one of a handful of anti-pipeline camps strung along the oil superhighway’s route. “We also took lessons from Standing Rock,” explained Tara Houska, the water protector from Minnesota, when I visited this spring. “You can’t just be in one place.”

Houska and other members of the camp, including Big Wind, were tense. Another water protector had just been pulled over right outside of camp for having expired tags. Run by the anti-pipeline Giniw Collective, Namewag is focused on direct actions like locking down to equipment or holding sit-ins at construction sites. Direct actions and other protests against Line 3 have seen more than 500 people arrested or issued citations.

Collective members assert that, at this late stage of development, there is little other recourse — and that the tactic gets results. “If it were not for the hundreds of people that have been arrested fighting Line 3 so far, there’s no way — we wouldn’t have national news outlets out here covering this story,” Houska told me.

Since nonviolent direct action can run afoul of the law, the camp became a target for surveillance. The police stops had ramped up with the spring temperatures, leaving people on edge, which they figured was part of the point. “I honestly don’t think that there’s a car here that hasn’t been pulled over,” said Big Wind. “When you’re in that constant state of crisis, I think they don’t want you to be making the right decisions.” (The Hubbard County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to a request for comment about the stops.)

“When you’re in that constant state of crisis, I think they don’t want you to be making the right decisions.”

The Aitkin County Sheriff’s Office, which is near the Namewag camp, had called in reinforcements for a week in March when Extinction Rebellion, a climate group known for its splashy direct-action protests, had declared it would be in the area. The police coordinated with Enbridge security personnel, documents show, and patrolled the pipeline route. It ended up being a relatively quiet week for demonstrations, but in a single day, Big Wind said, police pulled over seven water protectors in the area.

The lines between the activities of the tar sands company, law enforcement, and pro-pipeline community members tend to blur and overlap, but wide-ranging efforts at surveillance have been clear. In one case, an unidentified bearded man with an earpiece regularly walked his dog by Namewag. The water protectors followed the man one day and spotted him in a silver truck — with the dog but without the beard. “Should we all, as a camp, get like the glasses with the nose and the mustache and start wearing those?” Houska said, making light of the creepy situation.

It wasn’t the only example of apparent subterfuge. In the winter, water protectors climbed into a section of pipeline to slow construction. Once there, the water protectors told Big Wind, a person who looked Indigenous crawled in to talk to them. “They said, ‘Hey, I’m with Giniw. Umm, it’s not safe here. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here,’” Big Wind recalled. The water protectors, who have formed tight-knit communities, had no idea who the person was.

Enbridge has also taken control of land adjacent to nexuses of the resistance. In October 2019, the company purchased a plot of land right next to Namewag and, since then, drones have regularly appeared over the protest camp. Reporters at Gizmodo were able to confirm that some of the drones spotted along the Line 3 route, including above water protectors’ homes, belong to Customs and Border Protection, but others remain unidentified. Drones also appeared above the solar energy business, 8th Fire Solar, which is a project of Honor the Earth, a nonprofit headed up by the activist LaDuke that is heavily involved in the anti-pipeline movement. As Enbridge had done at Namewag, in July 2020, the company quietly purchased the strip of land next door to the solar business.

Across the street from 8th Fire Solar, the neighbor had posted a sign in their yard, reading “Minnesotans for Line 3.” The blue signs, which dot the pipeline’s path, are the physical manifestation of another aspect of Enbridge’s campaign: its work to recruit local communities’ support. The online presence of Minnesotans for Line 3 is as robust as its yard signs. The group spent around $20,000 on Facebook ads in March and April alone, circulating testimony from motel, restaurant, and construction supply store owners about how friendly pipeline workers are and how much they’ve boosted business.

Minnesotans for Line 3 describes itself as a “grassroots organization of people who understand how important it is to have reliable energy to power our economy,” but a disclosure form unearthed by DeSmog lists Enbridge as a sponsor of a Minnesotans for Line 3 TV ad. Pipeline opponents say that the group is an astroturf organization, a grassroots group hiding the fact that it is sponsored by a corporation to advance the corporation’s agenda.

Another record lists Minnesotans for Line 3’s ad buyer as Velocity Public Affairs, a PR firm that used to openly promote its work for Enbridge on its website. In 2019, Velocity trademarked the name “Respect Minnesota.”

The Respect Minnesota campaign, which water protectors view as an astroturf effort, centers around a neutral-sounding pledge that community members can sign, promising to abide by what Houska called “passive-aggressive ‘Minnesota Nice,’” including by obeying the law. The initiative is described on its website as being led by the Local 49 Operating Engineers, which represents pipeline workers, with other signatories including related unions, local community leaders, chambers of commerce, and Enbridge subcontractors Michels and Precision.

Enbridge spokesperson Juli Kellner told The Intercept that questions about Minnesotans for Line 3 should be directed to the group itself. Minnesotans for Line 3 did not address its relationship to Enbridge but said, “Minnesotans for Line 3 represents thousands of people in every county across Minnesota who support replacing our energy infrastructure with something that is newer, and better to protect the environment and support the economy.”

In a statement, Respect Minnesota pointed to its union organizers and said, “We’ve publicly stated that Respect Minnesota is supported by those unions as well as Enbridge, Michels and Precision because they see the value in promoting respect and a safe environment for everyone.” Kellner said, “Enbridge is just one of the businesses, unions, community organizations, and thousands of individuals from around the state who have taken the Respect Minnesota pledge.”

Matteson thinks Enbridge has used Minnesota’s historic economic dependence on extractive industries and its conflict-avoidant culture to draw support from descendants of European settlers.

Shanai Matteson understands the attractiveness for locals of a vague appeal like “respect.” She moved to Honor the Earth’s Welcome Water Protectors camp in Aitkin County last summer, but she’s also from the area. The nearby land where Matteson’s grandmother was born is now part of the pipeline route.

Matteson sees Enbridge’s efforts to rally support from the local community as soft counterinsurgency tactics. Donations to fire departments and other local services, even environmental causes, are part of it, though she understands that local acquiescence to the pipeline as about more than money.

After settlers invaded Indigenous land in Minnesota, mining became a key means for European descendants to support themselves. “That story about our way of life as extraction is so deep,” she said. Matteson’s grandfather worked as a miner and her uncle is a retired member of the same union that claims the Respect Minnesota campaign. Matteson thinks Enbridge has used Minnesota’s historic economic dependence on extractive industries and its conflict-avoidant culture to draw support from a wide range of descendants of European settlers in her community.

She pointed toward Bob Marcum, who sits on the board of the nearby Long Lake Conservation Center’s foundation. An environmentalist and active member of the Democratic Party, Marcum testified at a Public Utilities Commission hearing that Native people were not being adequately consulted on Line 3. Yet when Matteson asked her dad to see if Marcum would sign an anti-pipeline petition, she was told that he would not. Enbridge has given money to the center and Paul Eberth, who long acted as the Line 3 project manager, sits alongside Marcum on the foundation board.

I met with Marcum in the conservation center’s enormous student dining room. Marcum, who is 68, was nervous about our conversation and agreed to talk only as a private citizen, not as a representative of the foundation. The conservation center, which is run by Aitkin County, is his family legacy — his father founded it as one of the first environmental education centers in the U.S.

When I asked if he thought Enbridge’s involvement with the Long Lake Conservation Center was a type of “green-washing” — a way for major contributors to the climate crisis to present an environmentally friendly appearance — Marcum was clear: “I kind of made a gentleman’s agreement when we started working together that that’s not something we do.”

Marcum acknowledged that Enbridge has contributed at least $40,000 to the center over the years — a relatively small portion of the its $750,000 annual budget. Marcum’s shrinking eagerness to openly criticize Enbridge, though, seemed more related to his growing friendship with pipeline boss Paul Elberth. “It turns out Paul brings his kids out here, and he wants the very best for his kids. When you find him away from his desk, and he’s taking a few days off, he’s up in the Boundary Waters,” Marcum explained, referring to the popular wilderness canoeing destination on the border with Canada. “He’s just a very nice man.”

Not long ago, Paul Eberth took on the position of tribal engagement lead for Enbridge, not just for Line 3, but also the controversial Line 5 pipeline in Michigan. It’s a sign of how crucial demonstrating Indigenous support has become for one of the largest global oil transport corporations. And Eberth’s job isn’t easy.

Besides the protest movement’s Indigenous leadership, three tribes — the Red Lake Nation, the White Earth Nation, and the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe — have been behind the most significant legal challenges to Line 3’s construction. The pipeline route does not pass through their reservations, but it does pass through lands to which the tribes retain treaty rights. They argue, among other things, that they were not properly consulted. Meanwhile, the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe rejected Enbridge route alternatives that would have expanded the portion of the old pipeline that passes through their reservation. The corporation found a new route.

An Enbridge proposal provided to Minnesota’s Star Tribune newspaper demonstrates how much tribal buy-in is worth to the pipeline. The company proposed a package worth more than $25 million to the Red Lake Nation to drop its lawsuit and publicly communicate its opposition to “unlawful protesting.” They offered $1.25 million in community investments, including toward powwow facilities, on top of another $25 million for a solar energy project that would power Line 3.

The Red Lake Nation rejected the offer. “The letter was just disregarded,” Tribal Secretary Sam Strong told me at a pipeline resistance camp set up through a tribal council resolution. The camp, which is on treaty land, overlooks the intersection of the pipeline easement and the Red Lake River, still frozen during my visit this spring. Enbridge continued to push, hiring Red Lake tribal members to promote the pipeline and trying to buy local support. Strong told me, “That divide-and-conquer strategy is the same strategy that the federal government used to terminate Native people.”

Red Lake wasn’t the only tribe approached by Enbridge — and other efforts were more successful. The Fond du Lac band, whose reservation is bisected by Line 3, opposed the pipeline before accepting its own version of the proposal made to Red Lake. The details of the Fond du Lac deal have not been made public, but a letter sent to tribal members in January, shared with Indian Country Today, indicates that the $400 monthly payments all tribal members receive from tribal enterprises are now coming from Enbridge.

There is still dissent among tribal members. Taysha Martineau, a 28-year-old Fond du Lac water protector, crowdfunded the cash to buy a strip of land next to the pipeline easement on the reservation and established the Migizi camp. Setting up the camp was not an easy decision for Martineau. Given Enbridge’s success at winning the tribe’s support, continuing to resist the pipeline risked damaging important relationships. Of all the resistance camps along the route, Migizi is the most controversial because it lacks the support of Martineau’s tribe. And perhaps more than anyone I met, Martineau has been subject to the full range of Enbridge and law enforcement tactics.

Martineau was singled out by law enforcement even before the camp’s establishment. In December, the Carlton County Sheriff’s Office emailed around photos of Martineau and labeled their partner, who is also a pipeline opponent, a “professional protester.” Given how small the community is, the recipients were not anonymous officials: One was a tribal officer Martineau had turned to during a tough period of her youth. The same officer arrested Martineau later that winter. “Those are the choices that we made as individuals, you know,” said Martineau. “But that’s also part of the division that this company is presenting here in our community.”

The rifts only deepened. Early this spring, pipeline opponents from outside the reservation tossed an electronic device into a construction site. Police responded swiftly — bomb squads, phone alerts, and evacuations. Though the device turned out to be harmless, community members, rattled by law enforcement’s reaction, were upset with the demonstrators.

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Fond du Lac residents, including the tribal chair and Martineau’s family members, went to the camp to confront the water protector. They demanded that people from outside Fond du Lac leave, but the greatest ire was reserved for Martineau. “I believe it was, you know, law enforcement-induced mass hysteria to turn the community against the opposition,” said Martineau. “And I think it was effective.” (A Fond du Lac representative declined to comment on what happened at the Migizi camp.)

Carlton County Sheriff Kelly Lake defended the law enforcement response in an email to the Intercept. “I think that is an unfair and completely inaccurate description,” she said. “If we ignored a call like that and people got injured or killed, I wouldn’t want to be explaining why we ignored it.” She added that distributing images of lawbreakers to other jurisdictions is a common practice among police.

The divisions will not be easily repaired. “I love my community unconditionally, but my mother’s never going forget or forgive the way they treated me,” Martineau said. “And I worry about my children.”

On the cusp of summer, Enbridge began preparing to drill under more than 20 rivers and waterways. With time running short, water protectors are traveling in growing numbers to stand with the Anishinaabe-led movement — and being greeted by an intensifying police response.

So far, Enbridge and law enforcement have only shown flashes of the kinds of spectacular displays of repression that defined Standing Rock. In early June, water protectors gathered for the largest direct action yet against Line 3 at a pipeline pump station. A Customs and Border Protection helicopter sent a cloud of dust and debris over the protest. It was identical to the one that Guida, the Aitkin County sheriff, denied and later conceded had buzzed the resistance camp in March. Though authorities denied that they intended to use rotor wash to disperse the crowd — a combat tactic — the helicopter’s low flight path in an area where water protectors were locked to construction equipment appeared to violate Federal Aviation Administration rules.

In the aftermath of the protest, Enbridge stressed to the media that a Native-owned business’s contract work was disrupted. Meanwhile, members of the Northern Lights Task Force, who were in town to assist during the weekend of action, used the Long Lake Conservation Center as a staging area. Customs and Border Protection Public affairs officer Kris Grogan told The Intercept that the agency couldn’t comment on the June 7 flight, which is under investigation, but that a key mission of the agency’s Air and Marine Operations is to support law enforcement partners.

Pipeline opponents are urging the Biden administration to intervene to stop construction — and he still could. On June 23, though, the administration defended the U.S. Army Corps’s decision to issue a federal permit for Line 3, arguing in a court filing that Red Lake’s legal challenge should be thrown out. That same day, tribal members were defending themselves from an attempt by the Minnesota Department of Transportation to evict the Red Lake Treaty Camp from the side of the highway. In the following days, the Hubbard County Sheriff’s Office moved to barricade the entrance to the Namewag camp.

The pipeline fights in the upper Midwest represent only one point in a global spectrum of corporate efforts to suppress water and land defense movements. In places like Guatemala, the confrontations can grow much more deadly, say Simon Granovsky-Larsen of the University of Regina in Canada, and Larissa Santos of the University of São Paulo in Brazil, who recently wrote a paper offering their own rubric for identifying corporate counterinsurgencies.

I asked Granovsky-Larsen and Santos whether they thought Enbridge’s response to the Stop Line 3 movement fits the definition. “It aligns very much with what we understand as corporate counterinsurgency,” Santos said.

She was less convinced, though, that the actions of Enbridge and the Northern Lights Task Force violate the spirit of the Public Utilities Commission permit. Instead, she proposed that the permit language was itself part of the strategy, sending a message meant to preempt concerns that counterinsurgency tactics would be used. Santos suggested that the commission seemed to be saying, “It won’t be the same that happened to Standing Rock. We have an agreement.” She said, “I see this as an information strategy from above to pacify resistance.”

Enbridge, for its part, did not respond to The Intercept’s specific questions about whether a counterinsurgency was underway. Kellner, the spokesperson, said public agencies were responsible for both the escrow account as well as security. “We understand there are differing opinions about the energy we all use,” Kellner said. “As a company, we recognize the rights of individuals and groups to express their views legally and peacefully.”

I asked the researchers whether it’s even possible to build a tar sands oil pipeline in an era of climate crisis without counterinsurgency tactics.

“Absolutely not,” Granovsky-Larsen replied. “I don’t see any scenario across Turtle Island” — a common name used by Indigenous people for North America — “where tar sands extraction and transport could gain the necessary legitimacy where a company wouldn’t feel the need to either implement counterinsurgent tactics — or a harsher form of repression.”

The post Indigenous Water Protectors Face Off With an Oil Company and Police Over a Minnesota Pipeline appeared first on The Intercept.

In a notice delivered at 6 a.m. to pipeline opponents, who own the property, the Hubbard County Sheriff’s Office stated that it would no longer be allowing vehicular traffic on the small strip of county-owned land between the driveway and the road. Sheriff’s deputies arrived with trucks carrying building materials, a witness said.

“I was handed a notice that states the sheriff will be installing a physical barricade across the driveway to our private property,” said Tara Houska, an Anishinaabe co-founder of the anti-pipeline Giniw Collective, which organized the camp. “He’s saying that we have no right of access to our private property by vehicle.”

The pipeline opponents, also known as water protectors, plan to take legal action.

“This is quite simply nothing less than an overt political blockade,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, an attorney for the pipeline opponents and director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s Center for Protest Law and Litigation. “This is an outrageous and unlawful effort to blockade people who are engaged in protected First Amendment activity and to punish them for their opposition to the Enbridge pipeline, where Enbridge is serving as the paymaster for Hubbard County sheriff.”

Verheyden-Hilliard was referring to an Enbridge-funded escrow account set up by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to reimburse public safety agencies for activity related to Line 3. So far Enbridge has reimbursed Hubbard County $2,660 for riot helmet face shields and chest protectors as well as equipment related to removing pipeline opponents locked to construction infrastructure.

The Hubbard County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.

Water protectors have been using the trail unencumbered by restrictions for around three years, since the camp opened. The barricade was raised only after Line 3 construction ramped up and protest actions increased.

Water protectors see the road blockade as another example of local sheriff’s offices working to protect the interests of Enbridge, the Canadian tar sands pipeline company.

The Namewag camp has been used as a jumping-off point for water protectors conducting direct-action protests, sometimes involving demonstrators locking themselves to pipeline construction equipment or obstructing access to construction sites.

The water protectors oppose the tar sands oil pipeline based on its potential climate and environmental impacts, including the potential harm of a pipeline spill. They say the placement of the pipeline violates treaties signed between Ojibwe people and the U.S. government, because the route cuts through lands to which Ojibwe people have guaranteed access for hunting and gathering.

The Namewag property is bound on one side by county land and on another by land that Enbridge purchased the year after the camp was set up. Drones and helicopters regularly fly over the camp, and water protectors say the sheriff’s office has for months carefully monitored the comings and goings of cars. At one point, sheriff’s deputies even turned away a truck full of gravel they had purchased to manage the driveway’s spring mud.

The first 150 feet of the driveway leading to the Namewag camp are owned by the county. The notice states that the sheriff’s office is blocking the county trail “due to no easement for the current landowner.” It adds, “Vehicles driving on this county owned trail are in violation of the Hubbard County Land Ordinance and enforcement action will be taken.”

Although rules around property access can be complicated, the law favors allowing landowners entry to landlocked property. Blocking a property owner’s driveway with only a few hours notice is highly unusual.

“The state of Minnesota has already demonstrated a clear lack of understanding when it comes to the rights of Indigenous peoples,” Houska said, “and it appears there’s a loose grasp on the basics of U.S. property law as well.”

The post Minnesota Sheriff Barricades Pipeline Resistance Camp’s Driveway appeared first on The Intercept.

“I couldn’t see because it got in my eyes,” said Big Wind, a 28-year-old Northern Arapaho organizer with the anti-pipeline Giniw Collective, who was there when the helicopter swooped over the civil disobedience action. “After it pulled up there were a lot of people who were ducking, who were in the fetal position, just because they didn’t know what was going to happen and were trying to protect themselves from the sand.”

The low-flying federal helicopter is an early signal of how law enforcement in Minnesota will deploy more than a year’s worth of training and preparations against what pipeline opponents have promised will be a summer of resistance. The tactic — which was criticized because of the extremely low flyover — suggests that the multiagency law enforcement coalition overseeing the police response is willing to bend safety standards in order to break up demonstrations.

“I perceive this to be a tactic they utilized to deter people from arriving in large masses. That’s not safe.”

Pipeline opponents, who identify as water protectors, say the point of the helicopter’s activity seemed to be to use the dust to intimidate and scatter the crowd. Big Wind said they heard no dispersal order coming from the helicopter. “I perceive this to be a tactic they utilized to deter people from arriving in large masses,” they said. “That’s not safe.”

Authorities later claimed that the helicopter was being used to make an announcement for demonstrators to disperse, but the announcement was inaudible to many demonstration participants. “There were rumors that it was saying something, but I couldn’t hear anything,” said Kate Sugarman, a 60-year-old pipeline opponent who was standing on the public road when the helicopter arrived. “To those of us on the ground it felt like a scary encounter, and it was not a way to easily send a message.”

Hours later, police, according to witnesses, used a sound amplification device called a Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, at the site to make announcements — raising questions about why the helicopter was necessary at all.

“After the helicopter attempt proved not to be feasible for repeat messaging, the LRAD was brought in,” said John Elder, a spokesperson for the Northern Lights Task Force, which was set up to coordinate law enforcement’s response to the anti-pipeline movement “The LRAD was used to provide dispersal orders as well as post arrest directions.”

Authorities arrested more than 100 people present at the direct action protest.

DHS/Border Patrol is using helicopter rotor wash to try to clear out activists out from an occupied #Line3 pump station north of Park Rapids. More than 24 activists are locked down to equipment inside. @MPRnews pic.twitter.com/ArTN6FAqwC

— Evan Frost (@efrostee) June 7, 2021

Failed Announcement

The anti-pipeline protests are in response to plans from the Canadian energy firm Enbridge to ramp up construction as a springtime hiatus lifts. Enbridge is preparing to drill under northern Minnesota rivers that are central to the lifeways of local Ojibwe people — and are protected by treaties between tribes and the federal government. Pipeline opponents have for weeks asserted that this weekend’s Treaty People Gathering would draw more than 1,000 people to northern Minnesota to fight the tar sands pipeline.

On Monday morning, according to a press release, more than 500 people occupied a pipeline pump station, north of Park Rapids, Minnesota, blocking the entrance to the site and locking down equipment. At another site, more than 1,000 people held a ceremony where the new pipeline will cross the Mississippi River, near its headwaters. Local and state law enforcement, coordinating under the aegis of the Northern Lights Task Force, spent last fall and winter preparing for protests around the river-crossing areas.

The Northern Lights Task Force provided a justification for the low flight on its Facebook page. “A helicopter from U.S. Customs and Border Protection was brought in today to issue a dispersal order to a large group of people in the area of Two Inlets Pump Station by Park Rapids, MN. The idea was to provide the order in a manner that everyone would be able to hear.”

The approach did not work. According to video captured by reporters and water protectors on the ground, the messages the helicopter sent were unintelligible, drowned out by the sound of the aircraft’s blades.

The task force said the debris was unintentional. “Unforeseen to local law enforcement and due to the extremely dry conditions, dust kicked up in the area,” the task force said on Facebook. “As soon as helicopter staff saw what was happening, they immediately left the area to ensure no further issues would be caused. This was not an intentional act to cause discomfort or intended as a dispersal mechanism.”

Helicopters Against Dissent

Buzzing civilian protesters engaged in First Amendment protected activity with helicopters is widely considered to be a dangerous tactic — and may stand in contravention of federal regulations on both civil and public flights.

The Code of Federal Regulations mandates that “except when necessary for takeoff or landing” aircraft must fly high enough so that if a power unit failed, the aircraft could perform an emergency landing “without undue hazard to persons or property on the surface.” In this case, the helicopter was not only flying above a group of people locked to equipment, but also the property and equipment itself, which are considered “critical infrastructure” by the Department of Homeland Security.

Footage shows the Homeland Security helicopter was flying around 20 feet above the ground.

“U.S. Customs and Border Protection responded to a local law enforcement request for assistance to address a gathering of people who were reported to have trespassed on private property,” a spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, said. “CBP’s headquarters is investigating the facts to determine precisely what occurred and whether the actions taken were justified. All appropriate actions will be taken based on the facts that are learned, including with respect to the incident itself as well as the agency’s applicable policies and procedures.”

In recent years, the apparently proliferating tactic of buzzing protesters with dangerously low-flying helicopters has garnered criticism in the U.S. — especially following an incident in Washington, D.C., almost exactly a year ago. During a protest against police brutality after George Floyd was killed by police officers in Minnesota, Army UH-72 Lakota helicopters were used to intimidate demonstrators in the nation’s capital by hovering just above street level.

Helicopter parked over a crowd at 5/E St Nw #WashingtonDCProtest trying to force ppl away with noise and wind pic.twitter.com/x0AcC3ob0S

— Daniella Cheslow (@DaniellaCheslow) June 2, 2020

News reports and widespread concern over the aggressive tactic prompted reviews by the Pentagon, which later concluded it was a misuse of military aircraft. The soldiers involved in the incident were disciplined.

The helicopters in Washington were flying further above the crowds than the Homeland Security helicopter that buzzed anti-pipeline protesters in Minnesota.

The helicopter hovering above the Line 3 demonstration has also previously been used against Black Lives Matter activists. The same aircraft, which frequently operates under the call sign Omaha49, was documented circling the site where Floyd was killed after the area was nonviolently occupied by activists and dubbed George Floyd Square.

When protests erupted in April following the police killing of Daunte Wright in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center, the same helicopter was among a group of Homeland Security aircraft that circled on a near daily basis over protests and unrest across the Twin Cities.

A Homeland Security helicopter was also used earlier this year in a flyover of a protest encampment against the Line 3 pipeline, according to witnesses. (Elder, the Northern Lights Task Force spokesperson, said he was unaware of the helicopter’s previous use.)

In George Floyd Square and other Twin Cities unrest, the Homeland Security helicopter was flying at many thousands of feet higher than the height it was observed at and filmed over the protest Monday afternoon.

Reimbursed Megaphones

The Northern Lights Task Force was set up in many ways to avoid the pitfalls of the movement to stop the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock, in North Dakota, which was marked by high-profile incidents of law enforcement and private security repression. Videos and images of authorities using dog attacks and water hoses in freezing temperatures stoked outrage across the country.

The task force carried out extensive preparations for helicopter and drone operations in the year leading up to construction via a subcommittee dedicated specifically to air operations, according to records obtained by The Intercept through public information requests. A key concern was how and where drone surveillance footage would be streamed.

Law enforcement was coordinating with federal officials on air operations long before construction began. Notes from a January 29, 2020, meeting of the Northern Lights Task Force appear to indicate a federal agent designated as point person for requests for air assistance. The bullet point is labeled “FBI Border Patrol,” followed by the name of an agent and the description “drone flyover requests and capabilities.”

A Northern Lights Task Force’s Concept of Operations document, previously published by The Intercept, contains detailed dispersal order scripts, but never suggests that such orders might be given from an aircraft.

Police certainly had other options. As of the end of May, Enbridge reimbursed $1,086,361 to agencies and organizations responding to public safety issues related to the pipeline, through a special escrow account created by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission. Most of the money has gone to sheriffs’ offices responding to pipeline resistance. The Beltrami County Sheriff’s Office, which was among the agencies responding to the protests Monday, was reimbursed by Enbridge this year for a megaphone, a tool designed specifically for communicating with a crowd.

“I don’t think that it’s going to stop. People are going to continue to put their bodies on the line, are going to continue to risk their freedom to protect this land.”

“Megaphones are a great tool when you have a smaller crowd and a smaller area of cover in which you convey a message,” said Elder, the Northern Lights Task Force spokesperson. “With a crowd this size and an area this impacted, we had to elevate the ability to deliver the message.”

By Tuesday morning, a few water protectors remained locked to infrastructure. Meanwhile, the demonstration at the Mississippi River had quietly transformed into an occupation. Along a boardwalk Enbridge workers set up through the wetlands, connecting the highway to a riverside construction site, water protectors set up an estimated 100 tents, along with food stations and places to use the bathroom.

“I don’t think that it’s going to stop,” said Big Wind. “People are going to continue to put their bodies on the line, are going to continue to risk their freedom to protect this land.”

Update: June 8, 2021, 7:10 p.m.
This story has been updated to include a statement from an Enbridge spokesperson.

The post Low-Flying DHS Helicopter Showers Anti-Pipeline Protests With Debris appeared first on The Intercept.

As part of its permit to build Line 3, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, or PUC, created a special Enbridge-funded account that public safety officials could use to pay for policing Enbridge’s political opponents. The police were concerned about who state officials would hire to decide which invoices to pay or reject.

Last June, Kanabec County Sheriff Brian Smith wrote an email to other sheriffs along the pipeline route. “I think we need to let the PUC know that the person selected needs to be someone that we also agree upon,” Smith wrote. “Not a member of the PUC, not a state, county or federal employee, but someone that has an understanding of rioting and MFF operations” — referring to mobile field force operations, or anti-riot policing.

In response, Enbridge offered reassurances, according to other police on the email chain. “I had a discussion with Troy Kirby (Enbridge Chief of Security) this morning, and expressed concern over that position and the escrow account,” Aitkin County Sheriff Daniel Guida replied. “He indicated they have some influence on the hiring of that positon [sic] and he would be involved to ensure we are taken care of, one way or another.”

“They are being incentivized to carry out the goals of a foreign corporation, and they’re being taken care of for doing it.”

The exchange between the sheriffs is an example of the public-private collaborations between law enforcement and fossil fuel companies that have raised alarms for civil rights advocates and environmental activists across the U.S. Oil, gas, and pipeline corporations have forged a range of creative strategies for funding the police who respond to their political opponents, from paying elected constables for work as private security to creating an entire police unit dedicated to protecting infrastructure. Other industries have found ways to route money to police, but corporate law enforcement funding related to pipeline projects is among the most pervasive. Civil liberties advocates say the corporate cash raises troubling questions about private influence over the public institution of policing, noting that growing anti-pipeline protest movements have been met by heavy-handed police tactics.

With opposition to the Line 3 pipeline mounting, public records obtained by The Intercept shed new light on the depths of the cooperation between Enbridge and public safety officials in Minnesota — especially law enforcement agencies along the route. “They are being incentivized to carry out the goals of a foreign corporation, and they’re being taken care of for doing it,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s Center for Protest Law and Litigation, which is representing Line 3 pipeline opponents. She said the dynamic was on view in the sheriff’s description of Enbridge influence over the escrow account hire: “That communication is defining of the relationship between the Enbridge corporation and law enforcement in Northern Minnesota.”

Guida, the Aitkin County sheriff, told The Intercept that, at the time of the email, sheriffs were concerned the account liaison appointment was taking too long and believed Kirby, the Enbridge security head, could speed up the process. Asked for comment, Enbridge directed questions about the account to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission. In a statement, PUC spokesperson Will Seuffert said, “Enbridge had no input into the Escrow Account Manager selection.” The panel that made the appointment included two commission staff members and one from the Minnesota Department of Public Safety who worked “without any involvement from Enbridge, or any other parties,” he said.

In February, Richard Hart, a former official at the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office and a former deputy chief of police in Bloomington, Minnesota, was hired for the role. So far, he has approved more than $900,000 in Enbridge funding for law enforcement agencies and other public safety institutions.

For Indigenous water protectors, the cooperation between law enforcement and pipeline companies is part of a long history of public security forces being leveraged against Native tribes for private gain, going back to the violent westward expansion of the United States. Tania Aubid, an anti-Line 3 organizer and a member of the Rice Lake Band, which is part of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, said, “It’s keeping on with the Indian Wars.”

Money for Tear Gas

Chief among the law enforcement officers’ concerns about the escrow account, according to emails obtained through public records requests, was a rule in the Line 3 permit limiting how the funds can be used. Sheriff’s offices can use the account to pay for any public safety services “provided in and about the construction site as a direct result of the construction and removal of the pipeline,” but they cannot use it to pay for equipment, unless it’s personal protective gear.

It was widely understood — and a particular source of frustration — that so-called less-lethal munitions, such as tear gas, would not be reimbursed through the account. “We do know for absolute certain that munitions will NOT be an allowable expense,” noted Carlton County Sheriff Kelly Lake in a November 19 email to fellow members of the Northern Lights Task Force, a coalition of law enforcement and public safety officials set up primarily to respond to anti-pipeline demonstrations.

“So, we can get reimbursed for trafficking but not equipment needed to protect our community’s? [sic]” wrote Cass County Sheriff Tom Burch a few days later, in reply to an email that said Enbridge funds could be used to address an expected increase in human trafficking related to the arrival of hundreds of temporary workers.

The funding gap for less-lethal munitions was important enough that law enforcement officials raised it with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. In early October, Walz set up a phone call with the sheriffs along the Line 3 route. Ahead of the calls, Lake, the Carlton County sheriff, distributed a handful of talking points to the group. Among them was the problem of tear gas funding.

“One identified resource we know that will aid in response should the protests become violent and out of control is the use of less lethal munitions such as gas,” the talking points said. “We have been told by the PUC that this absolutely will not be an allowable expense for reimbursement through the Public Safety Escrow Account. Enbridge has said they would not directly reimburse this expense as they have put funds aside into the Public Safety Escrow Account already to be utilized to reimburse public safety for response.”

It continues, “If counties along the pipeline route face mass crowds of violent protests that are prolonged events, the small resources of munitions that we may have will be very quickly depleted. Without these less lethal options, there is an incredibly increased risk for responders, protestors, and the community as a whole.”

The governor apparently offered words of comfort. “Dave’s assessment is that it went very well and he believes that the Governor will figure out the funding piece and the munitions,” Lake said in an email after the call, referring to Dave Olmstead, a retired Bloomington police commander who serves as Minnesota’s special events preparedness coordinator for Line 3, overseeing the public safety response to the project. “It sounds like his staff was already trying to line up a meeting internally for them to discuss it.”

A spokesperson for the governor’s office did not answer a question about the phone call and directed all queries about state funding to the Department of Public Safety, which did not respond to a request for comment. Guida told The Intercept that his department has received no additional funding from the state to pay for less-lethal weapons.

Enbridge Funding Equipment

Regardless of what funding the governor arranged, less-lethal weapons, including tear gas, are baked into law enforcement’s plans for Line 3.

A Northern Lights Task Force document laying out the overarching police strategy for Line 3 protests, also obtained through a public information request, repeatedly notes the importance of protecting free speech rights, urging officers to “make reasonable efforts to employ ‘non-arrest’ methods of crowd management” and to target leaders and agitators, rather than detaining people en masse.

If targeted arrests fail to disperse a group, according to the document, then chemical weapons are allowed, including smoke, pepper spray, or a combination of the two, followed by longer-range pepper spray, pepper blast balls, and tear gas. Impact munitions, firearms-fired projectiles in the less-lethal category like sponge rounds, marking rounds, and pepper spray-tipped rounds can only be targeted at individuals whose actions put others in danger of injury. The use of dogs requires permission from local law enforcement commanders.

Guida justified planning for the use of less-lethal munitions by comparing the Line 3 opposition to the movement against the Dakota Access pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. “It seemed that without less than lethal munitions, when they lost control, that things would have continued to spiral out of control,” Guida said.

Verheyden-Hilliard is part of the legal team representing Dakota Access pipeline opponents in a class-action civil rights lawsuit against law enforcement officials in North Dakota, including a woman who lost vision in one eye after police shot her in the face with a tear gas canister. “If we want to look at what happened with DAPL, I think that’s a good idea,” she said. “The lesson we can learn from there is in fact that equipping all these local sheriffs with these very powerful and very indiscriminate and very dangerous weapons causes substantial injury and harm to people.”

None of the weapons have yet been deployed, but counties have stocked up. Beltrami County, which is located near but not on the pipeline route, even submitted an invoice requesting reimbursement from the Enbridge-funded escrow account for more than $10,000 in less-lethal weapons, including batons, pepper spray, impact munitions, and tear gas grenades, despite the restriction.

Hart rejected those requests but approved $911,060 in other reimbursements, including approximately $170,00 worth of equipment: mostly tactical and crowd control gear, as well as miscellaneous items. Reimbursements, for example, were made for port-a-potty rentals, which are considered personal protective equipment because, according to Hart, “the toilets protect jail employees from biological exposure during jail overcrowding.” Among other approved “personal protective equipment” are baton stops, which attach a baton to officers’ duty belts, and gas masks, which protect officers from the tear gas they deploy.

Shanai Matteson, an opponent of the Line 3 who is from Guida’s county, said it feels inevitable that tear gas and other munitions will be used. “What you practice for, and the mindset you have, is what you bring. They’re soldiering up to protect a private company’s assets, so what do we think is going to happen?” Matteson said. “Stopping work on a project that’s destroying the place that we live is not the same as violence that would warrant this kind of a response.”

The post Local Cops Said Pipeline Company Had Influence Over Government Appointment appeared first on The Intercept.

Enbridge, the Canadian energy-transport firm, is planning to route its Line 3 pipeline under the Mississippi, near where it crosses Highway 40. In winter, a pollution-control rule bars drilling under the frozen waters. As the ice melts away, so do the restrictions. Those organizing against the project worry that Enbridge could begin tunneling under the Mississippi and other local rivers any day — and the pipeline-resistance movement is getting ready for it.

“They got a lot of money, they got a lot of equipment, but we got a lot of people. Spring is coming. Let’s be outdoorsy.”

“They got a lot of money, they got a lot of equipment, but we got a lot of people,” said Anishinaabe water protector Winona LaDuke at an event last week with actor and activist Jane Fonda, which took place in front of the flowing Crow Wing River, not far from where Enbridge seeks to drill under its shores. “Spring is coming. Let’s be outdoorsy.”

Enbridge’s Line 3 project began construction four months ago. It was designed to replace a decaying pipeline of the same name; however, a large portion of its 338-mile Minnesota section, which makes up most of the U.S. route, plows through new land and waters. The project would double Line 3’s capacity for carrying tar sands oil, one of the most carbon-intensive fossil fuels in the world, at a moment when a rapid shift away from fossil fuels has become critical to address the climate crisis.

The delicate waterway ecosystems through which the pipeline passes have become the central organizing point of the anti-pipeline, or water protector, movement. Hundreds of rivers, streams, and wetlands face the specter of a tar sands leak after the replacement Line 3 begins operating. And the particularly intensive form of drilling required to tunnel the pipeline under rivers holds its own set of risks during construction.

Those same waters are central to the Anishinaabe people’s identity, and Anishinaabe women have led opposition to the Line 3 project. Over the past year, women and nonbinary people have organized small camps near planned construction sites. In recent weeks, they’ve led a steady schedule of gatherings and ceremonies at the edges of rivers, with some organizing more obstructive protests, known as direct actions, aimed at slowing pipeline construction. With spring on the horizon, pipeline opponents are poised to take even more obstinate stands to block construction at the river crossings.

Law enforcement agencies, with Enbridge’s support, are also preparing for the time when the rivers open up. Documents obtained by The Intercept confirm that local sheriff’s offices have for months been practicing for direct actions focused on the Mississippi River.

“Operation River Crossing”

This past September, members of the Northern Lights Task Force, a coalition of state and local law enforcement and public safety agencies set up to respond to pipeline resistance, gathered for the 12-hour training at Camp Ripley, a Minnesota National Guard training center on the Mississippi River south of the pipeline route. The exercise was titled “Operation River Crossing.”

In a manual for exercise participants, obtained by The Intercept through a public information request, officials from the Minnesota Department of Public Safety Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and the Minnesota State Patrol provide hints about what they fear will happen — and how they intend to respond.

Operation River Crossing was designed for law enforcement trainees from along the pipeline route to practice their response to a “civil unrest situation with threats to public safety including criminal damage to property, obstruction of transportation, assaults, threats to bystanders, and rioting.” Officers would confront a range of people posing as pipeline opponents. Some would be quietly holding signs. “Others are blocking the roadway and access to the work area and refusing orders to disperse. A small group of protesters has started threatening pipeline workers and law enforcement officers and lobbing balloons filled with urine and deer repellent.”

In the fictionalized scenario, law enforcement officers have access to various headquarters for cross-county coordination. “Two Regional Emergency Operations Centers (EOCs) have already been established: Northwest EOC near Crookston and Northeast EOC near Duluth,” the planning document says. A hypothetical state-level operation center had also been “partially activated” at Camp Ripley.

The manual also explains that fictive officers have been monitoring social media and using it to determine their strategies. “Public safety officials became aware of a spike in social media messaging activity regarding planned protests” at a second Mississippi crossing site in Aitkin County, downstream from the headwaters. “Multiple groups indicate they will travel to the counties along the route to protest the project,” the scenario says. “One of these groups is associated with past criminal activities during protests.”

In response to all these hypothetical details, the police would practice coordinated crowd-control tactics and methods of cutting away materials used to attach pipeline opponents to infrastructure. They would simulate the use of chemical munitions, while observers watched the training on bleachers.

Six months later, law enforcement agencies have put some of the planned exercises into real-world action. As the scenario foreshadowed, a Northeast Emergency Operations Center was activated November 30, shortly after the pipeline’s approval, according to Northern Lights Task Force meeting notes obtained by The Intercept. Multiple county sheriff’s offices now have their own extrication or cutting teams trained and ready to use equipment for cutting water protectors away from infrastructure. Some of that equipment has been paid for by Enbridge itself.

An escrow account set up by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission and funded by Enbridge, primarily to cover the costs of policing pipeline resistance, has distributed more than $500,000 to law enforcement agencies as of March 15. The account is not meant to be used for equipment, though, unless it’s personal protective equipment. The state-appointed account manager has rejected law enforcement requests for reimbursement of cutting tools. But there are ways around that. In Hubbard County, for example, Enbridge donated cutting tools separately from the escrow account.

The escrow account manager also rejected requests that had framed chemical munitions as “personal protective equipment.” Whether or not they’ve been reimbursed, law enforcement agencies have new stock available. No use of chemical munitions has been reported so far. Instead, water protectors say that they have seen increased traffic stops, aerial surveillance, and police officers following pipeline opponents in cars.

In an interview with The Intercept, Aitkin County Sheriff Dan Guida denied there has been an escalation of law enforcement’s response to water protectors in his jurisdiction. He spoke as he monitored his county’s extrication team, which was attempting to remove seven people that had attached themselves to an Enbridge Line 3 pipeline pump station. He said his county is not deploying aerial surveillance, that any traffic stops were a response to traffic laws being broken, and that he is committed to protecting the safety and First Amendment rights of water protectors, as well as the property rights of the pipeline company.

“When there is illegal activity around — it doesn’t matter what movement you’re involved in — we focus energy on it. That’s our job,” said Guida. A spokesperson for the Northern Lights Task Force did not answer a list of questions sent by The Intercept. Guida, who previously served in a leadership position for the task force, confirmed that his county participated in the Operation River Crossing training.

Nonetheless, tension between law enforcement agencies and water protectors is simmering, and the planned river crossings threaten to serve as a tipping point toward more aggressive policing.

Any Day Now

Enbridge has suggested that no river crossing is imminent. Last week, the company announced that Line 3 is now half complete and that the project will go on a “planned” two-month hiatus. Enbridge spokesperson Juli Kellner confirmed to The Intercept that river drilling will occur in the summer. Many opponents are hopeful that it will be enough time for President Joe Biden to intervene and stop the project, the way he stopped the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. There are also ongoing legal cases to stop Line 3, including from the White Earth and Red Lake tribal governments, whose treaty land the pipeline passes through.

Project opponents, though, remain on edge, wary of the possibility that any day they could receive word that drilling at one of 21 river and waterway crossings has begun. Darin Broton, communications director for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, told The Intercept that no rules prevent Enbridge from installing their pipeline under rivers where the ice has melted: “They are able to drill under those waters. The only condition was prior approval when waters were frozen.”

In November, the pipeline company commenced construction so swiftly that it caught local sheriff’s departments off guard, according to notes obtained by The Intercept from another Northern Lights Task Force meeting. “Enbridge has advised they intend to begin construction as soon as November 27 (much earlier than anticipated and without a 45 day notice as expected),” the document says. “We are approximately three to four weeks from all initiatives being fully operational but we are prepared to make it work in the interim.”

“If they bring that drill pad to that river, I’m there. If that means I’m standing in the water, I’m there.”

Much of the remaining drilling work involves a process called horizontal directional drilling, in which pipeline is threaded through a tunnel bored below the riverbed. The slurry of water and clay used as a drill lubricant can leak into waterways, clouding aquatic habitats or drinking water.

People’s greatest fears, however, center around what could happen once the workers leave the construction site: a spill. The largest inland oil spill in U.S. history happened in 1991 in nearby Grand Rapids, Minnesota; 1.7 million gallons of crude oil spilled from Line 3, the same pipeline that Enbridge is now replacing. In 2010, a Michigan community suffered a huge spill from another Enbridge pipeline.

Last Tuesday, as Clearwater County Sheriff Darin Halverson looked on, Anishinaabe women from nearby communities led a group in a ceremony, and men sang and drummed. As three giant puppets — a wolf, a bear, and a woman in a jingle dress — moved toward a wide bare gap in the trees — the pipeline easement — a figure in the dark truck parked in the easement driveway filmed the group with a phone.

Sarah LittleRedFeather, who is Anishinaabe and whose family is from White Earth, said she was undaunted by the resources being poured into law enforcement efforts against pipeline opponents: “It’s not going to stop us.”

“If they bring that drill pad to that river, I’m there. If that means I’m standing in the water, I’m there,” said LittleRedFeather, who works with the nonprofit Honor the Earth. “That’s what I’m waiting for. We’re praying that it won’t get to that point.”

The post Minnesota Police Ready for Pipeline Resistance as Enbridge Seeks to Drill Under Rivers appeared first on The Intercept.

The invoices, some of which were first described by the blog Healing Minnesota Stories, await review by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission. The agency maintains an escrow account set up so that Enbridge can reimburse public safety agencies for expenses associated with Line 3 construction, especially costs for policing protests. In its construction permit, the utilities commission clarified that the fund “may not be used to reimburse expenses for equipment, except for personal protective gear for public safety personnel.” The commissioners did not define the term “personal protective gear.”

“I don’t think by any stretch of the imagination batons could be considered PPE — or grenades,” said Tara Houska, an organizer with the anti-Line 3 Giniw Collective. “Those are obviously militarized equipment to be used to subdue and oppress the Indigenous people and allies that are resisting this project from going through our territory.”

The Beltrami County Sheriff’s Office did not answer a detailed request for comment.

For nearly a decade, Anishinaabe organizers have fought to stop Line 3, which passes through their treaty lands and traditional territory. Enbridge is replacing a deteriorating pipeline with a new, higher-capacity line that would allow the struggling tar sands industry of Alberta, Canada, to more cheaply send its oil to a transport hub in Wisconsin and then on to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Opponents point to the spill risk the project poses to more than 200 streams and 700 acres of wetlands, as well as the fact that tar sands oil is one of the world’s worst fossil fuels for the climate. One researcher found that the project’s annual carbon output would be equivalent to 50 coal-fired power plants.

So far project opponents haven’t seen law enforcement deploy the munitions that were purchased, said Genna Mastellone of the Line 3 Legal Defense Fund. Since construction began in December, however, she said sheriff’s offices in half a dozen counties have arrested more than 100 project opponents for attempts to stop construction, including by locking themselves to equipment, climbing inside sections of the pipeline, and blocking workers from accessing construction sites.

“Maintaining Peace”

The invoices show that the Beltrami County Sheriff’s Office began purchasing riot gear to respond to Line 3 protests in April 2016, in the immediate aftermath of massive protests against the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota. Local agencies spent at least $38 million on a militarized response that involved the use of water hoses, tear gas, and other “less than lethal” weapons. As of last summer, North Dakota was still seeking to recover the full expense from the Army Corps of Engineers, which manages much of the land on which resistance camps were located. Pipeline parent company Energy Transfer chipped in $15 million.

The Enbridge escrow account was designed to prevent a similar scenario in Minnesota by providing a means for the company responsible for the project to reimburse law enforcement for “maintaining peace in and around the construction site.” Law enforcement and public safety agencies are also invited to request repayment for traffic control, oversight of private security companies, and public health services related to construction. Some of the money could additionally be used for grants to deal with drug and human trafficking, problems associated with an influx of temporary workers. The Public Utilities Commission permit required Enbridge to deposit an initial $250,000 into the account.

Last October, the commission amended the permit to address “concerns about the type of equipment that might be used to ensure peace and safety in and around the construction and removal sites.” The amendment notes that “the Public Safety Escrow account may not be used to reimburse expenses for equipment, except for personal protective gear for public safety personnel.”

At a meeting last June, Commissioner John Tuma said that the aim of the fund was to reimburse things like overtime. “The state is not going to go around and buy stuff. That was never the intent here,” he said.

Commissioner Katie Sieben, who submitted the amendment, clarified that there should be opportunities for law enforcement to buy protective gear.

Another member of the commission, Matthew Schuerger, said that he supported the amendment but expressed misgivings. “We’re talking about law enforcement regarding folks that, to our knowledge, are going to be gathering peacefully to exercise their First Amendment rights. I am concerned about what we’re supporting and funding,” he said. He later asked how personal protective gear is defined.

“Things like a shield or turtle suit to protect law enforcement personnel in case there is any disturbance,” Sieben replied.

Ultimately, where Enbridge’s money goes will be decided by the escrow account manager, a position that was filled only last week. The new manager, Richard Hart, is a 30-year law enforcement veteran, most recently serving as deputy chief of the Bloomington Police Department for six years before moving to a position as an investigator for the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office.

Regardless of which items Hart decides Enbridge should pay for, the Beltrami County Sheriff’s Office has bought far more than protective suits and shields.

CS Tear Gas Grenades, Sharpies, and Saws

Of more than $190,000 in expenses that the Beltrami County Sheriff’s Office invoiced to the escrow account, at least $130,000 could be considered equipment, including nearly $20,000 worth of protective suits and shields. But the county also bought Sharpies, cameras, toolboxes, and saws to remove protesters who lock themselves to equipment.

In December 2016, the sheriff’s office purchased batons, shields, flashlight cases, and gas masks, most likely to protect law enforcement from their own tear gas — all described as “personal protective equipment” in an invoice submitted to the Public Utilities Commission in November.

Other invoices describe weapons as “PPE Equipment to use during Civil Disobedience events.” The sheriff’s office used the label on a request for reimbursement for an array of “less than lethal” weapons purchased last summer, when the department spent $1,074.40 on 40 CS tear gas grenades, $551.75 on 25 CS tear gas projectiles, and $1,975 on a launcher — all manufactured by Defense Technology.

Studies indicate that such chemicals can increase individuals’ risk of contracting respiratory illnesses. In an open letter written in the wake of uprisings over George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police this past summer, more than 1,000 health professionals recommended that police “oppose any use of tear gas, smoke, or other respiratory irritants, which could increase risk for COVID-19 by making the respiratory tract more susceptible to infection, exacerbating existing inflammation, and inducing coughing.”

Houska said project opponents now hold actions almost daily in below-freezing temperatures along the 337 miles of pipeline in Minnesota as they press the Biden administration to halt construction. “We’re fighting with every last bit of creativity and energy and collective power that we have to try to delay construction,” said Houska. “Our hope lies with the Biden administration and with, more importantly, the people. We’re in a climate crisis where the people need to stand with the earth.”

The post Minnesota Police Want a Pipeline Company to Pay for Weapons Claimed as PPE appeared first on The Intercept.

Project opponents are anticipating severe police and private security responses to protests, despite an attempt by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to formally bar Enbridge from “engaging in counterinsurgency tactics or misinformation campaigns designed to interfere with the public’s legal exercise of constitutional rights.” The language, part of a series of preconditions put forth by the Public Utilities Commission in advance of the project’s approval, is a direct response to concerns that Enbridge Line 3 opponents will see a security crackdown as sweeping as the one near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in 2016, during protests against the Dakota Access pipeline.

Line 3 opponents are not convinced by the utilities commission’s agreements and say they are already confronting police and private security tactics similar to those at Standing Rock.

“How do they enforce that? Who’s in charge of the flying monkeys?” asked Winona LaDuke, comparing Enbridge’s personnel to the Wicked Witch of the West’s primate minions in “The Wizard of Oz.” “We would find it very surprising that they would have any control.”

LaDuke, an Anishinaabe environmental justice activist and former Green Party vice presidential candidate, has spent years fighting Enbridge Line 3. Asked how she would define counterinsurgency, LaDuke said bluntly, “We’ve got drones over our property.” She continued, “It starts with surveillance, it expands to the use of informants, entrapment, falsifying situations, and getting people charged with things they should not be charged with. It involves bullying and intimidating tribal members and nontribal members.” And she said much of that has already begun in northern Minnesota.

“It starts with surveillance, it expands to the use of informants, entrapment, falsifying situations, and getting people charged with things they should not be charged with.”

“Enbridge will not tolerate human rights abuses and will not engage or be complicit in any activity that solicits or encourages human rights abuse,” company spokesperson Juli Kellner told The Intercept. “As a company, we recognize the rights of individuals and groups to express their views legally and peacefully.”

Will Seuffert, a spokesperson for the Public Utilities Commission, confirmed that “counterinsurgency tactic” and “misinformation campaign” are undefined by the agency. He said that the person in charge of monitoring Enbridge for such tactics is Minnesota Department of Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington, a former St. Paul police chief who will serve as the public safety liaison for the project. “The Commission respects the first amendment rights of the public, and the permit includes several provisions that are intended to support them,” he said.

The Enbridge Line 3 replacement pipeline would carry Canadian tar sands oil, one of the most polluting fossil fuels in the world, to the shores of Lake Superior in Wisconsin, traveling on its way through the territory of the Indigenous Anishinaabe people, under more than 212 streams and impacting 730 acres of wetlands.

In anticipation of the replacement project, since the summer of 2018, members of the anti-pipeline Giniw Collective have occupied a small camp 200 yards from where the pipeline is set to be built. The camp has served as a space to practice Anishinaabe culture, with a garden and sweat lodge, but also as a site to train for direct action protests.

Line 3 has actually been operating for more than 50 years but is only able to run at about half capacity because of its age. Rather than retiring a pipeline that is on its way to being obsolete — as policymakers wake up to the severity of the climate crisis and energy markets turn away from fossil fuels — Enbridge, with the support of government regulators, is instead spending $7.5 billion to replace it.

In addition to the climate risk, opponents point to the likelihood that a pipeline leak could damage lakes where wild rice is harvested, a staple considered sacred by the Anishinaabe. If construction begins as planned, the Giniw camp will be a base for pipeline resistance. Already, project opponents have participated in “lockdowns” to Enbridge equipment to slow preparations for building.

Kellner, the Enbridge spokesperson, said the company would not tolerate actions like lockdowns. “Criminal acts of sabotage and tampering, vandalism, trespassing and occupation of pipeline facilities are not peaceful, and have the potential to cause serious harm — not only to the perpetrators, but also to nearby communities, the environment, landowners and the employees who maintain these facilities,” she said. “We are committed to ongoing engagement and dialogue with all stakeholders and hope all sides will join in a dialogue on the issues and choose collaboration over confrontation.”

LaDuke noted that she and other Indigenous-led project opponents already spent seven years attempting to stop the pipeline through public hearings and other legal means and have been left with few options for protecting their land and water.

Minnesota officials have taken note of the incipient resistance and have been monitoring Line 3 opponents since 2017. The authorities are collaborating with Enbridge to manage the situation. Members of the Giniw Collective captured images in June 2019 of a law enforcement officer unloading a white Enbridge pickup truck full of tools, including bolt cutters and saws.

Hubbard County Sheriff Cory Aukes confirmed that the office accepted the donation from Enbridge and used the tools to cut loose pipeline opponents who had locked themselves to the company’s equipment. “They paid for tools that we needed and a little bit of equipment we needed one day. I wasn’t going to tell them no,” he said. “I’d much rather see the cost coming from them rather than all the taxpayers.”

Asked to describe how else the office works with Enbridge, Aukes replied, “I don’t know that we work with them — we certainly don’t work for them.”

In the autumn of 2019, Enbridge purchased the property adjacent to the camp. According to Tara Houska, a founder of the Giniw Collective, a white truck typically parks on the Enbridge property whenever trainings are scheduled at the camp, accompanied by a small plane that occasionally soars overhead. For more than a year and a half, members have noticed U.S. Customs and Border Patrol drones flying over camp every couple months, and a private drone has hovered low over their garden. A report by Gizmodo identified five CBP drone flight paths between this past February and June in areas linked to pipeline activity. (Enbridge said the company “does not use drones for security purposes, nor for routine pipeline monitoring.”)

Aukes said that his office is not involved in any aerial activity related to pipeline opposition. But pipeline opponents noted that sheriff’s officials have visited the camp or driven slowly by.

Houska, who is Anishinaabe, said the surveillance goes beyond just the camp. “When you walk in the grocery store of a town of 200 people, and there’s some guy taking a picture of you with a cellphone, that’s really obvious,” she said.

It’s not so different from what she saw four years ago, at resistance camps established near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Security forces set up a system of intensive surveillance that included aerial monitoring of resistance camps and the use of infiltrators pretending to be pipeline opponents. At the front lines of the protests, police and private security deployed dogs, tear gas, and water hoses in below-freezing temperatures. When the camps cleared out, after months of occupation, the state of North Dakota was left with a huge unpaid bill for the massive police response they’d used to defend the pipeline construction.

Minnesota officials have repeatedly accepted training and advice from public safety leaders from neighboring North Dakota who were involved in the repressive response at Standing Rock.

Minnesota’s government wants neither the bad press nor the huge expense associated with an aggressive law enforcement and private security crackdown. So in 2018, the utilities commission agreed to approve the pipeline only if Enbridge agreed to a series of conditions regarding its safety and security response.

Rather than preventing an overly close collaboration between the pipeline company and law enforcement, the agreement seems to have formalized coordination. In line with the requirements of the permit, Enbridge put together mandated public safety and security plans for each county through which the pipeline is to pass, which have already been approved by 15 local sheriffs — but are not available for the public to review.

“I’ve been followed for hundreds of miles along the line by different trucks. I don’t know if that’s counterinsurgency, but it’s certainly surveillance.”

Meanwhile, Enbridge will be paying directly, in advance, for law enforcement to police its opposition. Enbridge has deposited an initial $250,000 into a “Public Safety Escrow Trust Account” that will then be distributed to public safety and social services agencies along the pipeline route, according to approvals by Harrington and a separate Escrow Account Manager, who has not yet been appointed. Harrington will consult with local sheriff’s offices and other agencies to help determine how much additional money Enbridge should deposit.

A new provision added to the permit at the end of October says the escrow account “may not be used to reimburse expenses for equipment other than personal protective gear for public safety personnel.” It was a response to “concerns about the type of equipment that might be used to ensure peace and safety,” said a filing explaining the modification. The permit does not appear to prevent sheriff’s offices from accepting separate equipment donations such as the one in Hubbard County.

Enbridge spokesperson Kellner confirmed, “While Enbridge does have a grant program that funds first responder requests for training and safety equipment, this purchase was not part of that program.”

Sheriff Aukes said his office has not been able to access any funds from the escrow account so far and that policing the pipeline movement has already been “a huge use of our resources.” He said that pipeline funding or donations will not mean special treatment for Enbridge. “We simply don’t let it interfere,” he said.

However, the utilities commission’s moves did little to eliminate the risk of blurring the lines between public law enforcement obligations, which include protecting First Amendment rights, and the pipeline’s private interests, which include building the pipeline with as little disruption as possible, pipeline opponents said.

Houska pointed out, for instance, that the language barring counterinsurgency tactics is vague. “Does that mean they’re saying Enbridge can’t have security forces and send informants into camps?” she asked. “Does that mean they can’t categorize us as jihadists?” As the Intercept has reported, pipeline security did both during the Standing Rock movement and explicitly framed its operation as “counterinsurgency.”

Regardless of the agreement, all indications point to significant monitoring of pipeline opponents. “I’ve been followed for hundreds of miles along the line by different trucks,” Houska said. “I don’t know if that’s counterinsurgency, but it’s certainly surveillance.”

Opponents are still hopeful that Minnesota public health officials will intervene to stop construction due to Covid-19 concerns or that a judge will halt the project until legal challenges are resolved.

“If our own Democratic governor isn’t willing to stand up for our environment, then I guess we’ll turn to Washington,” Houska said. She said she’d ask President-elect Joe Biden to examine the environmental impacts of the Line 3 replacement. “It is obvious on its face that this does not meet emissions standards, this does not meet our climate goals,” she said. “This is an affront to any sort of move toward just transition.”

The post Minnesota Tells Pipeline Company Not to Run “Counterinsurgency” Against Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.

Enbridge, a Canada-based energy company that claims to own the world’s longest fossil fuel transportation network, has labeled Line 3 the largest project in its history. If completed, it would replace 1,031 miles of a corroded existing pipeline that spans from Alberta’s tar sands region to refineries and a major shipping terminal in Wisconsin, expanding the pipeline’s capacity by hundreds of thousands of barrels per day.

The expanded Line 3 would pass through the territories of several Ojibwe bands in northern Minnesota, home to sensitive wild rice lakes central to the Native communities’ spiritual and physical sustenance. Given that tar sands are among the world’s most carbon-intensive fuel sources, Line 3 opponents underline that the pipeline is exactly the kind of infrastructure that must be rapidly phased out to meet scientists’ prescriptions for mitigating climate disasters.

The Line 3 documents, which were obtained via freedom of information requests, illustrate law enforcement’s anxiety that pipeline opponents could galvanize support on a scale similar to the Dakota Access pipeline struggle, which drew thousands of protesters to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in southern North Dakota.

A police response like the one in North Dakota is a significant concern for Line 3 opponents. At Standing Rock, law enforcement used water cannons, rubber bullets, armored personnel carriers, and sound cannons in an operation that resulted in serious injuries. Aided by private intelligence and security firms working for the pipeline, they gathered information on protesters via aerial surveillance, online monitoring, embedded informants, and eavesdropping on radio signals. In a time of growing resistance to fossil fuel industries, the public-private partnership served as a chilling example of law enforcement agencies acting as bulwarks of the oil industry.

In 2017, Enbridge began construction on the tiny portion of Line 3 that cuts into Wisconsin. Local police reports describe two security firms, Raven Executive and Security Services and Securitas, keeping tabs on protesters and reporting their activities to law enforcement. It was the protests in Wisconsin that sparked the multistate coordination led by Minnesota. The state’s fusion center developed a reputation as “the keepers of information for the Enbridge protests,” as one sheriff’s analyst put it, receiving information on Line 3 opponents from police departments in at least three states. While fusion centers were originally established to facilitate counterterrorism intelligence-sharing, they have increasingly played a role in monitoring, interpreting, and criminalizing political activity.

Meanwhile, opposition research firms that market their services to energy companies have also singled out Line 3 as the next likely flashpoint of opposition to a U.S. pipeline project. Executives of the public relations firm Off the Record Strategies and the private intelligence firm Delve, which the National Sheriffs’ Association contracted in 2016 to dig up information on DAPL opponents, gave an overview of their work at a pipeline industry conference in 2017. “If you look at Line 3, they’re already arresting activists in Minneapolis. They’re already doing encampments in Wisconsin,” Delve CEO Jeff Berkowitz told conference attendees, according to audio obtained by The Intercept. “I think the next one is potentially going to be worse than DAPL.”

Tribal attorney Tara Houska, who is Ojibwe from the Couchiching First Nation and the national campaigns director for Honor the Earth, has been deeply involved in organizing against Line 3.

“It’s clear that Enbridge is doing everything they can to have a very highly skilled force of security and law enforcement at their fingertips to do what they can to stop any resistance to Line 3,” said Houska, who also took part in the struggle at Standing Rock. “And if anything, it seems like what they’re doing is much more coordinated than what we saw in North Dakota.”

Tipping Off Law Enforcement

As Line 3 construction got underway in Wisconsin, protesters stalled the pipeline’s progress by locking themselves to equipment and using disabled cars to erect a blockade. Between August and September 2017, police arrested at least 13 people. Incident reports turned over by the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office show that during this time, Enbridge security guards routinely contacted sheriff’s deputies to report the activities of pipeline opponents.

In July, a security guard whose LinkedIn page indicated that he worked for Raven Executive and Security Services informed a sheriff’s deputy that his company “monitors the online activities of the pipeline protesters.” Another security officer reported that the company’s excavators had mysteriously been moved, then used his audience with the sheriff’s office to mention a vague tip about Winona LaDuke, the Ojibwe former vice-presidential candidate and a staunch Line 3 opponent. LaDuke had been seen in the area recently, the security officer said, and her “boyfriend” had been heard stating that he wanted to “do something to the pipeline.”

Throughout August, Neo Gabo Benais, who is from Ojibwe country, posted the coordinates of Line 3 construction sites on social media and shared photos and videos taken from inside the sites. The same month, an Enbridge security guard reported to the sheriff’s office that he had “posted threatening messages on Facebook.” Another caller identified as a Securitas employee said he had been seen “driving slowly around the pipeline 3.”

Neo Gabo Benais told The Intercept that in 2002, an Enbridge pipeline ruptured near where he lived and fished in Minnesota, spilling 252,000 gallons of crude into a marsh. “I’m just trying to spend their money up,” he said. “It’s really a waste of time, them surveilling me.”

According to its website, Raven is “owned and operated by current and former law enforcement professionals.” In 2015, the company launched Raven Executive Unmanned Aerial Vehicle services. A filing with Federal Aviation Administration indicates that Raven intended to utilize its drones to inspect “energy pipelines.”

Securitas is an enormous, publicly traded corporation with operations in over 50 countries. It owns the nation’s oldest private security company, Pinkerton, which became notorious for its union-breaking activities and infiltration of leftist organizations at the turn of the 20th century.

Neither Raven nor Securitas responded to requests for comment. Enbridge did not respond to requests for comment.

“The Keepers of Information”

In September 2017, the Wisconsin Statewide Intelligence Center emailed information about recent arrestees to the fusion centers in their home states of Minnesota, South Dakota, Michigan, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana.

The next month, an analyst from the Minnesota Fusion Center pledged to ensure that law enforcement in disparate counties would be “well-informed of any potential hazards relating to the Line 3 project.” In an email sent to the fusion center, a crime analyst from Minnesota’s Beltrami County noted, “There is concern about Winona LaDuke.” The analyst listed four properties that LaDuke was suspected of owning and speculated about which might be used to put up protesters.

Another email sent to the fusion center noted that Jackie Fielder, a San Francisco-based organizer with the fossil fuel divestment organization Mazaska Talks, had arrived at one of the protest camps in Minnesota. The report speculated not on criminal activity but on whether her presence could signal “increased support from Mazaska Talks and its connections.”

“A fusion center has no business keeping track of a nonviolent divestment campaign that aims to promote Indigenous rights,” Fielder told The Intercept.

LaDuke agreed. “I don’t understand why I’m being looked at as a criminal when a corporation is proposing to destroy my water,” she said. “I am not a criminal, I am a water protector.”

By May 2018, the Beltrami County Sheriff’s Office had established a shared web resource concerning Line 3 opposition, to which 19 police officers in eight jurisdictions had access, as well as the fusion center.

“The Minnesota Fusion Center recognizes and values citizens’ constitutionally protected rights to speak, assemble, and demonstrate peacefully,” Drew Evans, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, said in a statement. “Because public demonstrations are sometimes targeted by individuals seeking to commit crimes or promote violence, the fusion center routinely monitors public sources for potential hazards to the people of Minnesota and its critical infrastructure.”

Brendan McQuade, assistant sociology professor at SUNY Cortland and author of a forthcoming book on fusion centers, sees the Minnesota records as part of a more troubling trend. “What the police aren’t mentioning is that people will likely be living lives of terror and privation by the end of the century due to climate change, and it’s these battles right now that will decide whether that happens,” he said. “Instead, they are casting even entirely nonviolent actions as threats to so-called critical infrastructure.”

Putting “a Marker Down”

As law enforcement and emergency managers tightened their coordination and intelligence-sharing on protesters, they repeatedly turned for guidance to North Dakota officials who had been involved in repressing the Standing Rock fight.

In September 2017, Cody Schulz, then-disaster recovery chief for the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services, gave a quasi-scientific overview of NoDAPL at a Minnesota emergency managers conference. He claimed that at any given time, around 400 protesters at Standing Rock were “willing to commit criminal acts,” while 80 were “willing to commit dangerous or violent acts.” Other slides attempted to justify the use of fire hoses and dogs to quell protests and stressed the need for a robust public relations operation.

In late 2017 and early 2018, members of the Cass County Sheriff’s Office, a major architect of the DAPL police operation, gave three more presentations on lessons learned in North Dakota to law enforcement in Wisconsin and Minnesota, including an association of SWAT officers.

At the Platts Pipeline Expansion and Development Conference in November 2017, Delve CEO Jeff Berkowitz and Off the Record Strategies CEO Mark Pfeifle gave a presentation to pipeline executives on how to prepare should opposition to future infrastructure projects develop the way NoDAPL did.

As part of law enforcement’s counterinformation campaign in response to NoDAPL, Berkowitz said, Delve developed “sort of fake ‘wanted’ posters, with the rap sheets of some of these folks.”

Pfeifle said one of his company’s goals was to deter protesters from becoming involved in the movement to begin with. “A lot of things that we were doing were being done to put a marker down for the protesters. And, ‘OK, if you’re going to go protest somewhere? There’s going to be consequences from it.’”

Prior to their work for the National Sheriffs’ Association, both executives spent years as elite Republican spin doctors. Pfeifle worked as an Iraq War public relations specialist for the George W. Bush administration, while Berkowitz directed the Republican National Committee’s multimillion-dollar opposition research operation.

Neither Delve nor Off the Record Strategies responded to requests for comment.

Worth Fighting For

Construction is already complete across most of Line 3’s route, and Enbridge has told shareholders that it intends to have oil flowing by November. But it awaits final approvals in Minnesota from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and several permitting agencies. This past June, despite receiving 68,000 comments opposing Line 3, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission unanimously voted to grant Enbridge a “certificate of need” for the project.

The Minnesota Department of Commerce filed a lawsuit challenging the approval last month — a rare instance of one state agency suing another over a major infrastructure project. Outgoing Gov. Mark Dayton made a statement opposing the project on the grounds that most of the tar sands bitumen would not meet demand in Minnesota but would instead “flow through our state to supply other states and countries.” Gov. Tim Waltz told reporters in January that he was weighing whether to drop the lawsuit.

Resistance to new pipelines has taken a major toll on the tar sands industry. In August, a Canadian judge scuttled federal permits for the Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline expansion, ruling that the federal government had failed to adequately consult with Indigenous nations in the pipeline’s path. In November, responding to a lawsuit by tribal and environmental groups, a federal judge in Montana ordered the U.S. State Department to complete a new environmental impact review of the Keystone XL pipeline.

In December, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley announced that her government would curtail the province’s oil production, particularly from tar sands, saying that there wasn’t enough pipeline capacity to ship the crude to market, although sagging prices and market saturation are also major factors.

“Enbridge — they need this to stay alive. This is their last vampire suck of blood. I’m looking at this vampire, and I’m like, I’ll do everything I can for you not to get that,” LaDuke said. “From Lake Superior to the border to the river where the pipeline will come in if they are allowed to go forward — the majority of this area is water, 10,000 lakes. It is a beautiful place, so it is worth fighting for.”

The post How Police, Private Security, and Energy Companies Are Preparing for a New Pipeline Standoff appeared first on The Intercept.

In July, Danielle Oxendine Molliver, the tribal liaison brought on by Minnesota’s Department of Commerce to consult with indigenous leaders about Enbridge Energy’s Line 3 pipeline, resigned in protest of what she called a flawed environmental review process that lacked transparency, professionalism, and fairness.

In a resignation letter submitted on July 24, Oxendine Molliver stated, “There are a multitude of reasons why I have come to this decision. The single most important one is the failure of the state of Minnesota to fulfill its obligations of good faith and fair dealing with the tribes in connection with the Line 3 project.”

She added, “I feel as though my resignation is the only option to maintain my integrity, commitment, and standing with the tribal communities as both a liaison and indigenous woman.”

In an interview, Oxendine Molliver told The Intercept that the department had not adequately responded to the concerns of tribal members and had marginalized her after Enbridge claimed she was being overly sympathetic to indigenous pipeline opponents.

A moment of clarity came as Oxendine Molliver packed her bag on June 5 to fly to rural Minnesota for the first of 22 public meetings on the draft environmental impact statement she helped write. A superior at the Commerce Department called to inform her that instead of being stationed at a table to field questions about the pipeline’s impact on tribes, Oxendine Molliver would be directing guests to the cookies and coffee.

“I just kind of laughed,” Oxendine Molliver said. “It means Enbridge has the authority to call the governor’s office, who then has the authority to control the permitting process.”

The governor’s office declined to comment on a personnel matter. In a statement, Ross Corson, the director of communications for Minnesota’s Commerce Department, told The Intercept that because Oxendine Molliver “has left state employment, she is not in a position to claim what specific concerns are, or are not, being addressed in the final EIS, which is still being prepared.”

“In this process, the agencies do not advocate for a particular position, but must act as impartial fact-finders for the commission, which also extends to the role of the tribal liaison. Complaints about any possible bias are treated seriously,” Corson added.

Enbridge spokesperson Shannon Gustafson stated, “We’re committed to following the regulatory process for the Line 3 replacement project and only ask that it be a fair and equitable process for everyone involved.”

On Wednesday, Gov. Mark Dayton extended by a week the deadline to publish the final environmental impact statement, to August 17, “in order to provide the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) with the best possible information on which to base its decision.” He noted that the EIS included more than 2,860 public comments. Additional hearings will follow its publication, after which the Public Utilities Commission will use the statement to determine whether the pipeline can go forward.

“Don’t pride yourself on being the state that is better than DAPL,” Oxendine Molliver said. The process “is not transparent.”

An Enbridge tank farm in an aerial photograph taken above the Athabasca Oil Sands near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, on June 19, 2014.

Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline reaches from the center of Canada’s tar sands region in Alberta to Superior, Wisconsin, with most of its 364-mile U.S. portion passing through Minnesota. Line 3 has ruptured multiple times since it was built in the 1960s, resulting in a 1.7-million-gallon spill in 1991 and a 252,000-gallon disaster in 2002, among other accidents. Today, it is corroded and cracked. Given its degraded state, by 2008 the pipeline’s capacity had been reduced. As a penalty for another million-gallon spill in 2010 on a different corroded Enbridge pipeline, the company signed a consent decree with the federal government agreeing to replace Line 3 by December 2017 or undertake additional efforts to prevent ecological harm.

The decree happened to serve Enbridge’s interests, providing a new argument in the company’s efforts to pressure Minnesota’s government to approve a proposal to replace Line 3 and greatly increase its capacity. The new line would expand the 34-inch pipe to 36 inches and increase its current capacity from 390,000 barrels per day to at least 760,000 barrels, closer to what it originally pumped. Meanwhile, the old line would remain in the ground, its combustible material removed and its ends sealed shut.

Five bands of Ojibwe have filed as intervenors in opposition to the Line 3 replacement plan. Affected tribes have expressed concern about leaving the decaying line, which passes through the Fond du Lac and Leech Lake reservations, in the ground. Although the proposed new route does not cross reservation boundaries, it cuts through wild ricing lakes, hunting grounds, and other sacred areas to which indigenous people also have legal rights. And given that tribal members are disproportionately low-income, impacts on their well-being require careful consideration in the environmental review process.

Oxendine Molliver, who previously worked as a tribal liaison in Minnesota’s Human Rights Department, was recruited and loaned to the Commerce Department late in the process to meet with the tribes and ensure their perspectives were included in the draft environmental impact statement. Her hiring was announced on March 28, a month and a half before the draft would be released, on May 15.

With only weeks to meet with 11 tribes and incorporate their concerns, Oxendine Molliver began flying to tribal areas around the state. “I thought better late than never. I came in thinking really optimistically,” she said. “No one’s going to be pro-pipeline, but how can we get it transparent, so their story is told in the document?”

The meeting that led Enbridge to report her to the governor’s office was on May 31, with the Minnesota Chippewa tribe. Oxendine Molliver introduced herself as a member of the Lumbee tribe from North Carolina: “As a working mother and as an activist and as someone who wants to participate, I am honored to see you all make that happen for your families, and I am honored by the gentle way you have pushed the systems in which you have to work.”

“Folks [have] said to me offline, ‘I don’t know how you do it. I don’t know why as a native you even want to discuss the pipeline or be involved at any level on a project like that,’” she said. “You’ve got to infiltrate — you’ve got to be part of the system. We need more leaders, we need more people who are qualified who have the traditional knowledge, who have the sovereign knowledge, who have the language, culture — we need those folks to be in the systems with which we have to operate.”

She told attendees that the draft environmental impact statement did not offer any opinions, only facts that could guide decisions. However, she assured the audience, “I think that there are conclusory comments there if we really listen.” She read aloud a portion of the draft:

Any route, route segment, or system alternative would have a long-term detrimental effect on tribal members and tribal resources. The impacts cannot be categorized by duration (short-term or permanent) or by extent (region of interest, construction work area, permanent right-of-way). It is also not possible to determine which alternative is better when each alternative affects tribal resources, tribal identity, and tribal health.

If Enbridge had had its way, there would be no environmental impact statement at all. The process is not always required for pipelines and is frequently controversial. In 2015, a Minnesota court sided with environmental groups and forced the state to undertake the impact statement process for both Line 3 and another controversial proposed Enbridge pipeline, Sandpiper, which would have transported oil obtained via fracking from North Dakota’s Bakken region. After years of pushback from indigenous and environmental opponents, Enbridge axed the Sandpiper project in fall 2016.

Under the Obama administration, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers launched an environmental impact statement for the Dakota Access Pipeline, at the height of the NoDAPL movement. The process, which would have delayed construction, was effectively canceled by President Donald Trump when he took office in January.

After being sidelined, Oxendine Molliver spent meeting after meeting ushering guests to the refreshments, but at a final meeting held just for tribal members, on June 27, she was struck by images presented by Sheila Lamb, who is Ojibwe and Cherokee and has long been involved in environmental activism. They showed long lines of pipe being transported by truck and rail, and stacked inside a fence.

“There are staging areas already,” Lamb said, according to a transcript of the proceedings. “The newest one is between Kettle River and Rice. It is a huge fenced area with barbed wire on top, the whole nine yards, where they’re taking the pipes to. We’re talking trucks running every 10 to 15 minutes carrying in pipes. As of yesterday, there were 35 carloads of pipes just that we could count sitting right in Carlton.”

“Is this already a done deal?” Lamb asked the Commerce Department officials. Her question touched issues that extended beyond the scope of the environmental impact statement. Enbridge has already started construction in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, as well as on the 12-mile segment in Wisconsin. Minnesota is the last state that hasn’t granted regulatory approval, giving it huge sway in determining the future of the pipeline.

Jamie MacAlister, a project manager for the Commerce Department, replied to Lamb, “[Decision-makers] don’t know that there’s pipes stacked up out here. In fact, I didn’t know there was pipes stacked up out here until I came to this meeting.” She added, “Enbridge does not have any permits. They’re not allowed to do any construction until they receive those permits.”

Indeed, Enbridge lacked any permit to begin building the pipeline. But that didn’t mean the company couldn’t start getting ready. It had received five construction stormwater permits from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency in 2015 for Line 3 storage yards along the proposed routes.

But Oxendine Molliver says the Commerce Department avoided making that clear. A few weeks after the meeting, she arranged a sit-down with Lamb and the department’s commissioner, Mike Rothman, who expressed concern and told Lamb the department would look into the issue, according to Lamb and Oxendine Molliver. Shortly afterward, Oxendine Molliver said she was told by two Commerce Department officials that Enbridge did have permits, but the department was “keeping it on the down-low.”

While construction of the pipeline itself still required the Public Utilities Commission’s approval, Oxendine Molliver said she “was horrified” by the department’s lack of transparency in response to questions from tribal members. She requested that the staging issue be noted in the EIS, but was rebuffed.

As the department began to finalize the text, she noticed other issues that tribal members had raised were missing from the document. In May, the Fond du Lac band of Lake Superior Chippewa contacted the Minnesota Department of Transportation after hearing that highway construction had begun on top of a native cemetery. After halting the project, the agency found human remains at the construction site. The burial site is not far from Enbridge’s preferred pipeline route. Tribal members expressed concern about the adequacy of gravesite databases and the cumulative impact of seeing relatives’ graves desecrated alongside construction of an unwanted pipeline. Oxendine Molliver asked that language be added to the text.

Other issues were described in ways that failed to convey why they were meaningful to communities near the pipeline route. The draft included a section on the history of the Sandy Lake Ojibwe community, for example, describing how in 1850, thousands of Ojibwe were forced to migrate from Wisconsin in order to receive the annual supplies promised to them in treaties; when only three days’ worth of supplies arrived, hundreds of people died. The draft did not mention that the group’s descendants still live in the area, many of them in poverty. And a reader would have to compare maps to understand that the pipeline would pass near Sandy Lake, cutting across the route native community members use to reach another Ojibwe community to the south.

And there were things left undone, Oxendine Molliver said. The June 27 meeting with tribal members had not been transcribed, and she said her communications with Commerce officials suggested comments collected there would not be reviewed or incorporated. Broader questions she raised were dismissed. Would the document address the cost to taxpayers of legal actions taken by environmental and indigenous groups related to the pipeline? Would it note that transporting new tar sands oil into the country conflicts with state initiatives, such as Dayton’s membership in the U.S. Climate Alliance?

In her last days as tribal liaison, Oxendine Molliver began hearing complaints from Commerce Department management. She was asked to cancel a planned trip to visit a reservation. She was pulled into a meeting and told that they weren’t sure it was working out. She saw all this as retaliation. As the final version of the EIS was sent to consultants to be finalized, without many of the changes she’d requested, she submitted her resignation letter.

“My best-case scenario was they were going to do this really awesome environmental impact statement, and the facts would be just so staggering,” Oxendine Molliver said. “I thought if you have this document, and the tribes have intervened, you can’t put your finger over your ears and be like lalalala for too long.”

At the meeting that led Enbridge to complain about Oxendine Molliver, Winona LaDuke, a longtime environmental activist who played a key role in the movement to kill Sandpiper, described her takeaways from the draft environmental impact statement. “When you go all the way through it, it says, we heard you. We heard that your people are hurting. We heard that your people can barely hang on. We heard that this is the only land you have. We heard that this is the only wild rice you have. We heard that your communities are already under a lot of duress. We heard that your communities are already sick from contaminants,” she said. “But mitigation is gonna be good.

“We don’t want to throw down a camp like Standing Rock, but this is not Morton County — you’re not getting another pipeline through here,” she added. “And there are hundreds of Ojibwe people and thousands of other people that are going to stop that line if you approve a permit. So we’d just like to stop it before we get to that.”

Opponents of Enbridge Line 3 publicly launched two camps on Wednesday, one on the White Earth reservation and another near the Fond du Lac reservation.

The final decision on the pipeline isn’t expected until next April.

Top photo: Enbridge is already storing pipes along the proposed route in Minnesota, despite lacking approval to build the new Line 3 pipeline.

The post Tribal Liaison in Minnesota Pipeline Review Is Sidelined After Oil Company Complains to Governor appeared first on The Intercept.