Update on 'Eco-Slur' Article

I posted an article Police Soften Up Public for Clampdown on Environmental Activists...

And looks like I was not the only one to smell a rat with the article;

THE OBSERVER’S MARK TOWNSEND - ‘PATSY, LIAR OR IDIOT’
http://ianbone.wordpress.com/....wnsend-patsy-liar-or-idiot/

GUARDIAN JOURNALISTS POLICE PATSIES YET AGAIN!
http://ianbone.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/guardian-journa...gain/

THE GUARDIAN ECO-TERRORIST JOURNO IS ARMY COMMANDER……..EXCLUSIVE!
http://ianbone.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/the-guardian-ec...sive/

And others wrote in to complain;

It was very disappointing to see the label 'eco-terrorist' used to slur environmental campaigners ('Police warn of growing threat from eco-terrorists', News, last week). Neither in Britain nor in the US have even the most radical environmental activists attacked people rather than property.

Your article is misinformed on a number of points. Rather than a single, centralised organisation, Earth First! is an identity adopted by various informal networks, with quite different histories in Britain and America. The story speaks of links between US and UK campaigners and the Earth Liberation Front, but our research showed that the ELF never took off in the UK. Research on environmental direct action taken in the name of Earth First! in the past 16 years shows that activists are overwhelmingly committed to nonviolence, and are not using terrorism, violence, or any other direct action to seek to reduce the Earth's human population.

When, in the late 1990s, some American politicians and media started to call activists 'eco-terrorists', it was the start of a concerted campaign which prepared the way for repressive policing and new laws curtailing fundamental civil liberties. Is the same thing about to happen here?

Indeed. Either shoddy journalism, or the start of a Green Scare here.