RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events FBI Warns of Eco-Terrorism Threat

WASHINGTON — The FBI warned law enforcement agencies of the potential for criminal activity in response to a call for action in support of a convicted eco-terrorist, according to the weekly bulletin issued by the agency and obtained by Fox News.

"Supporters of anarchist and convicted arsonist Jeff Luers have designated Saturday, June 12, 2004 an 'International Day of Action and Solidarity with Jeff 'Free' Luers,' alternatively entitled 'J12,'" the FBI said in the bulletin.

"J12 events are planned in Eugene, Oregon; Olympia, Washington; San Francisco and Modesto, California; Lawrence, Kansas; Morgantown, West Virginia; Worcester, Massachusetts; Portland, Maine; and Lake Worth, Florida."
Luers is from Eugene, Ore. According to the FBI, he is widely celebrated as a martyr within anarchist and extremist animal rights and environmental circles.

On June 16, 2000, he was convicted for his involvement in an Earth Liberation Front - style arson at a truck dealership and an attempted arson at an oil company in Eugene. He is serving a 22-year prison sentence — the longest, according to the FBI, ever handed down for eco-terrorist actions in the U.S.

The ELF is a radical group of environmentalists that has claimed responsibility for various acts of arson and vandalism and is listed as the FBI's No. 1 domestic terrorism priority.

"Luers' notoriety could potentially inspire autonomous ELF cells to carry out symbolic actions in solidarity with Luers against traditional targets, such as SUV dealerships, lumber logging facilities, and residential construction sites in environmentally sensitive areas during J12 events," the FBI noted.

"While the FBI has no specific information regarding planned terrorist actions to coincide with J12 events, law enforcement officers should be alert to indicators of possible terrorist planning, including suspicious surveillance of targeted industries, such as SUV dealerships, animal research laboratories and construction sites," the FBI said in the bulletin.

The Earth Liberation Front has claimed responsibility for a string of arsons in Detroit, Philadelphia and San Diego, where a fire last year destroyed a 206-unit apartment complex under construction, causing $50 million worth of damage.

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Chris Oakley said:
They make PETA look like the voice of reason.

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People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has donated over $150,000 to criminal activists -- including the terrorist Earth Liberation Front (ELF), and individuals jailed for arson, burglary, and attempted murder. When asked by eight different media outlets to explain the purpose of a $1,500 gift to the ELF, PETA officers and spokespersons gave eight different and contradictory answers.

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thedoctor said:

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Chris Oakley said:
They make PETA look like the voice of reason.

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Actually, they don't since PETA is helping fund them.

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They do? I should have known.

The recent indictment of 14 anarchists, including 11 associated with the extremist groups Earth Liberation and Animal Liberation fronts, showed the federal government is getting serious about ending domestic terrorism.

Eleven suspects are charged in a 65-count indictment with torching or blowing up public and private property in five Western states. Their targets included forest ranger stations, lumber companies, meat-processing companies, a ski resort and electrical infrastructure. The government said they sought to bring about social and political change through arson, intimidation and harassment. The other three suspects conspired to blow up a dam, fish hatchery and research laboratory in California, prosecutors said.

The ALF-ELF reign of terror has gone on too long. The FBI estimates these groups are responsible for at least 1,200 criminal acts since 1990 and caused damage exceeding $100 million. Among their usual targets are farmers, ranchers, miners, loggers, manufacturers, researchers and homeowners.

The Clinton administration did little to stop the destruction. It wasn't until the Bush administration arrived that the FBI got serious about eco-terrorism. Since 9/11, much attention has been focused on the war against Islamic terrorism, but the FBI considers ecoterrorism the greatest domestic threat and ALF and ELF the nation's top terrorist groups.

It is gratifying the Justice Department is beginning to round up these saboteurs, but with many hundreds of unsolved cases still on the books, 14 arrests are insufficient deterrence. Congress should pass legislation proposed by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., to increase the penalties for ecoterrorism.

federal grand jury in Eugene on Thursday indicted two more people in the 2001 arson at a Clatskanie tree farm, court officials said, bringing the number charged in the case to six.

In all 14 people are charged in what government prosecutors describe as an arson conspiracy across several Western states over five years.

Nathan Frazer Block, 24, and Joyanna L. Zacher, 28, were arrested Thursday in Olympia, Wash., after the 14-count indictments were handed up.

Government attorneys will seek their return to Eugene to face trial, said Karin Immergut, U.S. Attorney for Oregon.

They are charged with arson and attempted arson and with carrying and using a destructive device in relation to a crime of violence.

The latter charge alone carries a minimum 30-year sentence.

Already charged in the Jefferson Poplar Farm case are Kevin Tubbs, Stanislas Gregory Meyerhoff, Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, and Daniel Gerard McGowan, who face Oct. 31 trials in U.S. District Court in Eugene.

The government alleges the arson at the tree farm was part of a broad conspiracy from 1996 through 2001 in Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, Colorado and California, in which elements of the radical groups the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front allegedly took part.

Other defendants in the various arsons include Joseph Dibee, Josephine Sunshine Overaker, Rebecca Rubin, Jonathan Mark Christopher Paul, Sarah Kendall Harvey, Susan Savoie, and Darren Todd Thurston.

Other targets listed in the alleged conspiracy include the Superior Lumber Co. in Glendale, a plant inspection service facility in Olympia, a fire at U.S. Forest Industries in Medford, energy transmission towers in Eastern Oregon, a meatpacking company in Eugene, wild horse and burro facilities in California, a Colorado ski resort and an SUV dealership in Eugene.

An animal rights group and six of its members were convicted of terrorism and Internet stalking yesterday by a federal jury that found them guilty of using their Web site to incite attacks on those who did business with or worked for a British company that runs an animal testing laboratory in New Jersey.

The case was the first test of the Animal Enterprise Terror Act, enacted in 1992 to curb the most aggressive tactics used by activists. The verdict, which came after 14 hours of deliberation, was called an insidious threat to free speech by some activists, but was cheered by research scientists, some of whom are lobbying Congress to tighten restrictions on protesters.

During the three-week trial, defense lawyers acknowledged that a Web site run by Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty posted home addresses and other personal information about animal researchers and others. But the activists said they were simply trying to shame their targets into dissociating themselves from the company, Huntingdon Life Sciences, and they disavowed any involvement with the vandalism, death threats, computer hacking and pipe bombs against those on the Web site.

Although federal prosecutors presented no evidence that the defendants directly participated in the vandalism and violence, they showed jurors that members of the group made speeches and Web postings from 2000 to 2004 that celebrated the violence and repeatedly used the word "we" to claim credit for it.

Prosecutors also produced telephone records indicating that the president of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, Kevin Kjonaas, called a man charged with bombing a California biotech lab shortly after the explosion.

Jurors were also shown a videotape of the group's director, Lauren Gazzola, at a protest in Boston, making reference to the previous acts of violence and warning a target, "The police can't protect you!"

America’s universities are both the major targets as well as the incubators of a rapidly growing class of criminals—eco-terrorists.

“The Department of Justice named them the number one domestic terrorist threat,” Sen. James M. Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, told a college-age audience at the Eagle Forum’s annual summit on Capitol Hill in Washington, D. C. “Their direct actions include bombings, stalking of individuals and teaching members how to commit arson.”

“They attacked and destroyed a ski lift, an SUV dealership, and an apartment complex.” Four hundred tenants were evacuated from that complex.

Sen. Inhofe chairs the U. S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. In that capacity, he has discovered just how radical environmentalists can be.

“The killing of an animal and the killing of a human are morally equal,” Dr. Jerry Vlasak of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) told Sen. Inhofe in a hearing. “At American University, he tried to show college students how to commit arson,” Sen. Inhofe remembers. Dr. Vlasak has called such acts “a morally justifiable solution to the problem” of alleged animal abuse.

He has also said, “A mouse is the moral equivalent of a child.”

Two other groups—the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front—are responsible for 1,200 acts of violence and $200 million in damages, Sen. Inhofe notes.

universities can serve as a breeding ground for eco-terrorists as well, frequently sponsoring talks by the likes of Dr. Vlasak. “Yes, I believe they do enable the eco-terrorists,” Sen. Inhofe said. “At Oklahoma University people who advocate the overthrow of the government are brought in as speakers.”

And their nurturing stance towards such groups has a real world impact that goes even beyond the university labs such groups repeatedly target. “Employees of GlaxoSmithKline were stalked,” Sen. Inhofe recounts. “The New York Stock Exchange refused to list them because of terrorist threats.”

In his effort to bring such information front and center in congressional hearings, Sen. Inhofe can rarely count on bipartisan support. “Democratic Party funding comes from such groups,” Sen. Inhofe says. “The Democrats were funded by organized labor until about 15 years ago, then by the American Trial Lawyers Association, which conspicuously exempted itself from Campaign Finance Reform.”

“Now, far left environmental groups provide most of their funding.”

Jennifer Kolar and Lacey Phillabaum seem unlikely criminals.

Well-educated young women passionate about environmental causes, they share a love of the outdoors and similar backgrounds. Both grew up in Spokane and attended the same public high school.

The women were concerned about what was going on around them -- the logging of old-growth forests, the slaughter of animals for sport. Like many Northwest activists, they pushed for change.

But their activism morphed into something more dangerous -- and now both are headed to prison.

Before dawn on May 21, 2001, Kolar cut the glass that allowed fellow Earth Liberation Front members to sneak into the University of Washington office of professor Toby Bradshaw, who was studying the genetics of fast-growing hybrid poplar trees. Phillabaum's role is still unclear, but she was also on the scene, court documents show.

Bradshaw and other researchers at the UW Center for Urban Horticulture would be arriving within hours, so the ELF squad must have worked quickly to plant the firebombs -- plastic buckets of fuel rigged with cheap digital timers, assembled in someone's garage. Their goal: destroy the research on genetic engineering of poplars to avert an "ecological nightmare" for native forests.

The fire ignited in Bradshaw's office spread through the building and raged for hours. Rare books, endangered plants and decades of botanical research went up in flames, causing $7 million in damage.

Both women are cooperating with authorities and have admitted to belonging to ELF and participating in the UW firebombing. The FBI has branded ELF an underground radical group and a top domestic terrorism threat.

At their January sentencing in Seattle, Kolar faces between five and seven years in prison; Phillabaum faces three to five.

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Captain Sammitch said:
They should be savagely pummeled... with tree branches.

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No. Leather belts.

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the G-man said:...
At their January sentencing in Seattle, Kolar faces between five and seven years in prison; Phillabaum faces three to five.[/LIST]

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Matter-eater Man said:

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the G-man said:...
At their January sentencing in Seattle, Kolar faces between five and seven years in prison; Phillabaum faces three to five.[/LIST]

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That's not much prison time considering this could have burned some people up, beyond the huge amount of damage. They must have some good information, I can't imagine that this type of crime has such a low prison time otherwise.

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Denver police have arrested a 24-year-old man in connection with at least two fires involving Hummer sport utility vehicles in recent days.

An officer arrested Grant Barnes during a routine traffic stop about 11:30 p.m., after finding suspicious materials in his vehicle. He was in the same neighborhood, police said.

A couple in Denver's Cherry Creek neighborhood said their Hummer was engulfed in flames earlier this week, and the flames spread to another car parked nearby.

It's similar to an incident last Saturday when neighbors said they awoke to find Hummer in flames.

According to police, the man is being questioned about other recent vehicle fires.

Police said that the letters ELF left on one of the vehicles was put there several days after the arson.

The ELF may be in reference to the Earth Liberation Front, an eco-terrorism group.

• Four large homes are burning at a "Street of Dreams" model home development north of Woodinville, and the Snohomish County District Seven Chief Rick Eastman told KING-TV that a sign saying ELF was left at the scene.
  
  ELF or Earth Liberation Front has claimed responsibility for other arsons, including one at the University of Washington in 2001 for which a woman is now on trial in Tacoma.
  
  Eastman also told KOMO-TV that the fires are suspicious because they were set in multiple places in separate homes.
  
  Eastman says police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are investigating.
  
  No reports of injuries in the three-alarm Monday morning fire. Eastman says some of the homes were still under construction.
  
  Eastman says one is a total loss and two homes are substantially damaged. He says fires also were set at a total of six homes.
  
  The Street of Dreams is an annual showcase of luxury homes in the Seattle area. The latest development is off Highway 522 at Echo Lake Drive.

• In September, a British jury shook up the world of green politics when it accepted a lawful-excuse defense for property dam-aged with the intention of averting even greater damage from climate change. In an effort to draw public attention to government support for new coal-fired electricity projects, six Greenpeace activists painted Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s last name on a smokestack at the Kingsnorth power plant in Kent. The plant’s owner, the energy company E.ON, claimed that the paint cost more than $50,000 to remove.
  
  With supporting testimony from the NASA climate-change expert James Hansen and a representative of the Inuit community of Greenland (who described watching villages “eroding into the sea”), the protesters convinced the jury that the threat posed by Kingsnorth carbon was not only real but also immediate enough to justify their high-profile graffiti. What’s more, they claimed, by halting the plant’s carbon-dioxide emissions for a day, they averted more than $1.5 million worth of damage to human health and wealth around the globe.
  
  The decision has elicited strong reactions, including concern that it will be used to excuse a wide range of normally criminal acts. Some legal analysts doubt that other courts will follow suit. Though he hasn’t publicly commented on the verdict, former Vice President Al Gore, for one, seems intent on ensuring that its reasoning is tested again soon. In a recent public forum at the Clinton Global Initiative, he called on young people to engage in “civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration.”

• The Center for Consumer Freedom says President-Elect Barack Obama’s pick for “regulatory czar” of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein, is a radical animal rights activist.
  
  The piece points to a 2002 paper written by Sunstein entitled “The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer” as Exhibit A.
  
  In this paper, Sunstein argues for the “rights” of animals and placing them on a par with the rights of human beings. He laments that current laws which protect animals from cruelty do not include hunting, medical research, and food animals.
  
  He also argues that animals should have the right to bring lawsuits…with humans (presumably animal rights activists) as their representatives, of course. Sunstein attempts to justify this absurdity by comparing it to adult representation of children in legal matters.
  
  From his argument against using animals for food: Killing animals, whether or not troublesome, is far less troublesome than suffering. But if, as a practical matter, animals used for food are almost inevitably going to endure terrible suffering, then there is a good argument that people should not eat meat to the extent that a refusal to eat meat will reduce that suffering.
  
  Sunstein is also up for banning hunting: We might ban hunting altogether, at least if its sole purpose is human recreation. (Should animals be hunted and killed simply because people enjoy hunting and killing them?
  
  The article also includes a link to a video of Sunstein giving keynote speech at a Harvard University’s 2007 “Facing Animals” conference. The video of Sunstein starts about 39:00 and includes this stronger affirmation of his desire to ban hunting: “We ought to ban hunting, I suggest, if there isn’t a purpose other than sport and fun. That should be against the law. It’s time now.”

• Marie Mason, a 47-year-old environmental activist, was sentenced Thursday to nearly 22 years in prison for a 1999 arson attack at Michigan State University’s Agriculture Hall that caused more than $1 million in damage.
  
  The incident was prosecuted in a Michigan federal court as a domestic terrorism case, and U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney referred to Ms. Mason’s acts as an “abandonment of the marketplace of ideas.”
  
  Ms. Mason helped set the Michigan State fire along with her former husband, Frank Ambrose, as a protest against research into genetically modified crops.
  
  
  Mr. Ambrose cooperated with authorities in implicating Ms. Mason, who, as part of her plea, also admitted responsibility for another $3 million in damages caused in other acts of vandalism, including “destroying homes under construction in the Detroit area and Indiana and setting fire to two boats owned by a man who formerly raised minks,”
  
  Ms. Mason had said she acted on behalf of the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group.