Last year, Canadian police arrested Sea Shepherd’s First Officer, Peter Hammarstedt, and Captain, Alex Cornelissen. In Canada, it is illegal to witness or document the slaughter of the seals. They were charged with approaching, witnessing and documenting the killing.
They were interrogated for 4 1/2 hours, during which time they said absolutely nothing, refusing to even acknowledge the police in the room. They went into the room following the legal advice that “Nobody talks, everybody walks.”
In this clip from the interrogation of Peter Hammarstedt, the RCMP compare Sea Shepherd to “Palestinians” with bags full of bombs, and at one point the cop says, “…unless I got ya all wrong and you’re planning a 9/11 or something here.”
It’s not surprising that the Canadian government deported the two for life rather than allow the PR nightmare of them standing trial. Given the caliber of questions we see in this video, a trial would have been quite entertaining.
Of course, this kind of terrorism rhetoric isn’t an isolated instance, it is government policy. Find out more about how environmental activists became the “number one domestic terrorism threat” at the Green Scare background page.