Arsonist about to learn his fate: To be sentenced March 8th.

The Salt Lake Tribune- By Matt Canham and Lisa Rosetta

As firefighters scrambled to snuff out the flames consuming a West Jordan home-improvement store, Justus Ireland took his place among the spectators. He thought they would never catch him. His only lament was he didn't have a camera to capture the pandemonium. Days later, when members of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force said they wanted to chat, Ireland kept his cool. In fact, he was elated. The same man who displayed speeding tickets in his home, who thrived on sparring with police, was ready to play. Scott McCullough, a state Probation and Parole agent, and FBI Special Agent Matthew Miller met Ireland in the parking lot of a Provo restaurant.
"The first thing he says to us is, 'I know what you want to talk to me about. It's the fire,' " McCullough said. Ireland calmly explained he had recently been fired for not showing up to work at Stock Building Supply but proclaimed his innocence in torching the place. "Red flags were going off all over," Miller said. "But I wouldn't say we walked out of there thinking he was absolutely, unequivocally our guy." The task force would spend the next three months watching Ireland, talking to his friends and relatives and piecing together a case that would ultimately result in a federal conviction. If investigations are like jigsaw puzzles, Miller said, "Our puzzle was pretty darn right." The fire: West Jordan fire investigator Bryan Crump was sound asleep at his station when the sirens blared just before 2 a.m. on June 14. It was the "third alarm" on a business fire, meaning the fire was technically challenging or huge. This one was huge. "As soon as we pulled out of the fire station, you could see it," Crump said. Firetrucks from surrounding cities arrived to battle the conflagration, which tore through a back building at Stock Building, 1333 W. 9000 South. The fire destroyed the structure, loads of lumber and a number of forklifts. Firefighters needed 40 minutes to knock down the blaze, which caused about $1.5 million in damage. A fire marshal walking the perimeter was the first to notice the large forest-green letters spray-painted on the main building: E-L-F. He called the feds immediately. ELF stands for Earth Liberation Front, a loose-knit association of environmental avengers who commit vandalism and arsons to attract attention. Layer by layer, Crump searched the rubble but uncovered no obvious cause for the blaze. Fire dogs never picked up the scent of gasoline or other flammable liquids. Still, the arsonist left clues that helped the task force crack the case. The investigation: Ireland's f irst mistake was trying to torch a delivery truck that had all of the windows rolled up. The high-temperature road flare sputtered out, starved for oxygen. Among the most important clues Ireland left: a can of Sherwood-green spray paint, plucked from a locked cabinet accessible to only four people. Investigators found the discarded can in a garbage pail near the wall marked ELF. The paint led McCullough and Miller to Ireland's door and their encounter in the Provo parking lot five days later. They subsequently called him in for a polygraph. "He didn't do well," McCullough said. "It led us to look at him more and more." Ireland told him that on the night of the fire he had decided to take a late-night drive and happened to travel by his old workplace. Seeing the building in flames he pulled over and watched. The agents didn't buy it, but one piece of evidence had them more than a little puzzled. The day after the arson, a fax sent from the University of Utah's Greenwood Health Clinic in Midvale to KSL Radio accused Stock Building of destroying the ozone and posing a serious health risk. The fax listed other potential targets, including a Hummer dealership and Kennecott Utah Copper Corp. The task force spent more than a day interviewing those at the clinic, looking for links to Ireland, Stock Building or ELF. They came up empty-handed. While the FBI analyzed the fax machine, Miller and Crump took a trip to Arizona, where Ireland has family and where he was once convicted of a sex crime. They talked to his cell mates, his family members, friends and coworkers. Ireland called ahead to tell them he was being investigated but never let on that he started the blaze. He also called McCullough, thinking he was in Arizona and asked about the weather. McCullough hung up and thought: "He knows we know, and now he is daring us to prove it." The arsonist: Even as a young child, Ireland had a fetish for flames. "There was indication after indication he was fascinated with fire, " Miller said. Ireland once loaded a couch into the back of a truck, lit it on fire and paraded it around his neighborhood. Another time, he filled a bucket full of batteries and lit it on fire to see if it would explode. As long as six months before the incident, Ireland was researching ELF Web sites, reading up on incendiary devices and gleaning information from The Anarchist Cookbook. He concocted a plan to set ablaze his former employer's site, an "easy take," he told investigators. Besides, Ireland liked to tango with cops. He once put a radar detector in his car and flew by police officers to see their reaction. He also kept a scanner in his car and prowled for crime and accident scenes. "He loved to chase the lights," Miller said. "Anytime he saw fire trucks or police cars, he gravitated to those." Ireland told investigators he was flattered to be a suspect in the Stock Building fire. His comments kept the FBI glued to him. "He liked the negative interaction with law enforcement," Miller said. "He kind of tried to push the envelope." The confession: With loads of circumstantial evidence, but nothing to tie Ireland directly to the arson, investigators decided to roll the dice, McCullough said. On Sept. 8, Ireland was jailed for allegedly passing a fake $100 bill at a mall. U.S. Attorney's Office prosecutors turned up the heat on him, telling him they would file an arson charge that could net him 30 years in prison unless he admitted to setting the Stock fire. "The more we went back to him, the more uneasy he got," Miller said. "You could almost sense he knew things were winding down, they were getting tighter." Ireland soon caved. He explained how and why he ignited the flares that burned Stock and described his attempts to cover his tracks. "He laid it all out and it matched what we knew," McCullough said. Wearing a green-colored Stock Building Supply cap, a pair of Adidas shoes and blue rubber gloves, Ireland scop ed out the lumber yard for half an hour to make sure he was alone. Locating a hidden key, he unlocked a cabinet and grabbed two cans of spray paint and a pair of bolt cutters, which he used to cut a section of chain link fence to allow for a quick escape. Ireland also created a "smoke screen" to send investigators down the wrong path. He sprayed the letters ELF in different writing styles on a Stock Building Supply truck, a metal garage door and on a cinder-block wall to suggest more than one person was involved. He then placed a lighted road flare under a pallet of cardboard boxes in a storage room, and another one in the cab of a Stock Building Supply truck. As the flames grew, he drove off, making a loop around Salt Lake County before returning to watch the fire he had ignited. The next day, Ireland loaded up his personal fax machine in his backpack and drove around looking for a place to plug it in and fax letters to KSL Radio. He stopped at the Greenwood Clinic and faxed the letters, using an unattended fax machine rather than his own. Later, with the barbecue on his apartment balcony, he burned the hard drives from his mother's computers and the envelope containing KSL fax numbers. Ireland's confession didn't shock investigators. It gave them a sense of relief. "It was a great feeling," Crump said. "This is our guy. No doubt." Sentencing * Justus Ireland, 24, is scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court for setting fire to Stock Lumber Supply in West Jordan. He faces five to 20 years in prison and fines of up to $250,000.

Eco-porn: Great Sex For A Good Cause

Tommy and Leona are having sex on a tree stump in the middle of a Norwegian clear-cut. Leona, with a mop of brown dreads and a lip ring, looks dreamily across the demolished forest as Tommy, a little shaggy in nothing but a knit hat, works his magic.
A few minutes earlier, Leona and Tommy stood at the same spot lecturing about the evils of industrial forestry. But now they're moaning in feral ecstasy, overcoming the powerful negativity of the place -- the broken branches and dried-out logs -- with the juices of the life force itself. Welcome to(FFF), a porn site with a difference. Along with raw, explicit images and videos with scenes like the one described above, FFF is well stocked with facts about the world's forests. On the Web site, naked sylphs share space with graphs of forest loss over time and exhaustive lists of the benefits tropical rain forests provide to society. It's a novel approach to eco-activism, certainly, but one the duo hopes will help save the planet. Indeed, in its first year of operation, this unlikely project has raised nearly $100,000 for rain forest protection through the sale of paid memberships. "Everyone must try to create something good using what they have," Tommy told me by phone from the apartment the couple shares in Berlin. "We had nothing, just our bodies." With backgrounds in progressive and green theater and teaching troubled teens, Leona Johansson, 21, and Tommy Hol Ellingsen, 28, wanted to do more than just protest the state of the world -- they wanted to make a difference. To them, eco-porn is the obvious choice. "Porn makes really, really a lot of money," Tommy continues in his soft Norwegian accent, "so why not use that money for good?" Easy enough, right? But, so far, the pair's biggest challenge has been giving the money away. It's a conundrum they didn't anticipate when they got their start in their native Norway, where they managed to obtain seed funding from the federal government. "We said we were starting an alternative environmental organization," says Tommy. Most of the material on FFF features the gentle Burning Man-esque couple and/or their friends romping in every imaginable combination. The great outdoors is a favorite setting, of course, but scenes are also set in apartments, photo studios, sex clubs and elsewhere. The sex runs the gamut from couplings involving vegetables used as sex toys to performances by scary-looking shaven-headed German Goths and is unflinchingly graphic. Like those of most porn scenarios, the plots of the video segments are vestigial at best, but in written material and between the scenes, Leona and Tommy share their feelings for the forest with visitors to the site. But even Norway has its limits. In front of 5,000 people at a music festival last summer, the couple delivered a brief talk about human impacts on natural forests. Shedding his clothes, Tommy asked the crowd, "How far are you willing to go to try to save nature?" He and Leona, grinning, then launched into a raunchy live demonstration of precisely how far they'll go for the forest. Front and center on top of a speaker, the pair ground into each other while a local band played a heavy metal dirge called "Go Forth and F--." Leona and Tommy, along with the band, were charged by authorities in Kristiansand, Norway, with staging a public sex show. When Tommy dropped his pants in the courtroom, the couple was fined the equivalent of $1,500 each, but they refused to pay. Instead, they moved to more liberal-minded Berlin, where FFF is now produced. The notoriety has done wonders for FFF. Norwegian news outlets covered the trial with the sort of overblown salaciousness typical of media in quest of cheap ratings. Yoko Ono -- whose 1969 Bed-ins for Peace with John Lennon made international headlines -- reportedly called the whole affair the best art project she had seen in Norway. The site now has more than 1,000 paying members, and its forest fund continues to grow. Even better, FFF is getting help from all over the world -- ranging from detailed ecological data for the site to donations of pornographic videos and other imagery. As the green community still wrings its hands about the "death of environmentalism" in the wake of the re-election of George W. Bush, eco-activism seems to have lost its way. FFF's success in entirely sidestepping the staid mainstream at this moment is a breath of fresh air. "A lot of environmental organizations are too boring, too serious," says Tommy. "It scares people away. It's possible to use irony and play around with this negative information about the state of the world and still get the information out without being too radical or angry. It's important to have fun." And the work he and Leona do on FFF certainly looks like a lot more fun than knocking on doors gathering signatures or writing yet another letter to out-of-touch decision makers. "We have fun when we have sex, and we have fun when we have sex with others," Tommy told me. It's no secret that sex sells do-gooder causes just as well as it sells cars and soda. Long-running campaigns by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that pair scantily-clad women with heads of lettuce and barnyard animals perennially attract a lot of attention -- attention supporters must defend against accusations of sexism. But FFF's approach is very different. The site features real people, not airbrushed sex objects, and the diary Leona contributes to the site is affecting and sweetly humanizing. "Sex-positive erotic expression and environmentalism naturally go hand-in-hand," says Bay Area writer and cybersex pundit Annalee Newitz. "Both are efforts to show what is beautiful and valuable about the natural world." Other sex-themed sites make donations for green causes: Bay Area-based vegporn.com, for example, which features "a cast of sexy vegans and vegetarians," gives 5 percent of its profits to vegetarian groups each month. But the site's owner, who calls herself Furry Girl, says the site is not designed mainly for this purpose. "Some of us vegans just like looking at naked ve gans," she says. , perhaps the only porn site specifically created to raise money for a cause, boasts a mission-centered approach as far removed from the sleazy and exploitative milieu of the mainstream porn industry as its fund-raising work is distinct from more traditional tactics. "It's good to see environmentalists thinking creatively," continues Newitz, "and acknowledging that we wouldn't have nature without sex." But not everyone shares this enthusiasm for FFF's brand of environmental education. In one session featured on the site, Leona, in a blue wig, starts the lesson by flogging another woman with a huge leek. This unorthodox approach hasn't ingratiated FFF to mainstream environmental organizations, who Leona and Tommy feel are too prudish to embrace the potential of porn -- or even to accept its money. "WWF (formerly known as World Wildlife Fund) Norway didn't want to speak with us -- they pushed us out of the office," says Tommy. "We wrote to WWF in the Netherlands; they said they couldn't take our money, either. After the court case, suddenly, nobody wanted to talk to us at all." Though they're perpetually seeking funds, mainstream environmental organizations seem allergic to money raised through porn. Major Bay Area-based organizations I contacted for this story responded with terse brush-offs. "There are just certain stories that there is no upside to being quoted in," said one staffer at a national environmental organization based in the Bay Area. "What is morality when people are destroying the world?" counters Tommy. "It all started so innocently. We never imagined it would be so much trouble to give away the money -- it's blowing us away how surreal it all is."Because they've had no luck with mainstream groups, Leona and Tommy are instead moving forward on a project in which they will work directly with indigenous communities in Costa Rica and the Brazilian Amazon. "It makes much more sense to just go somewhere and help an Indian tribe directly and avoid the administrative costs," says Tommy. As if being on the lam from the Norwegian courts and getting the cold shoulder from environmental groups isn't enough, FFF's sudden success has swamped Leona and Tommy, who still operate the site themselves. They bear the brunt of not just most of the copulation on the site but also the billing, Web-page creation and other business elements. "The project is too big for us alone -- we're sitting in front of the computer 24 hours a day now," Tommy told me. "We never imagined it would be so big so fast. Now we want it to become more like a community -- we want people to be able to run it and upload content without us." In spite of these growing pains, the site's success has been lucrative. FFF now has $90,000 in the bank earmarked for forest conservation. It's a considerable achievement for a shoestring 1-year-old organization of two people, suggesting that the pair has tapped into an undiscovered fund-raising wellspring. Can porn save the planet? "We wanted to create a trap to capture a lot of people who were never interested in the forest but were interested in sex -- everyone's interested in sex," says Tommy. "Many of these people have never given to the environment before." For Tommy and Leona, however, it's more important that visitors to the site peruse FFF's environmental material than the photos of the two of them in a leather-and-latex flesh pile in a Berlin sex club. "We believe in the spirituality of nature," says Tommy. "[The Web site] is something we really believe in. For us, sexuality is something really natural. We don't do it to provoke -- it is the right thing to do, and it helps connect to spiritual nature. One of the purest acts humans can do is making love to each other." That making love and saving the world can be so natural and yet so troublesome speaks volumes about our culture. But it is clear where Leona and Tommy stand: "We're happier trying to do something against that system than trying to live with it," says Tommy. "Often, it's the same people disrespecting nature who are putting down sexuality. We see the rain forest untouched by humans as the last place on Earth where God is untouched."
Gregory Dicum, author of Window Seat: Reading the Landscape from the Air, writes about the natural world from San Francisco. A forester by training, Gregory has worked at the front lines of some of the world's most urgent environmental crises. For more of his work, see www.dicum.com/list

Arrest Made in One of Three California Arsons

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Investigators said Thursday they have made an arrest in one of three recent alleged eco-terror arsons or attempted arsons east of Sacramento. Ryan D. Lewis, 21, was arrested Wednesday at his home in Newcastle and charged with the Jan. 12 attempted firebombing of a commercial building in the nearby city of Auburn, northeast of Sacramento. The FBI (news - web sites) and U.S. attorney's office said the arson attempt was believed to have been committed on behalf of the Earth Liberation Front, a shadowy environmental extremist group. No arrests have been made in a similar attempted firebombing at a subdivision in nearby Lincoln Dec. 27, or in an arson at an apartment complex in Sutter Creek to the south Feb. 7. The FBI said its Joint Terrorism Task Force is continuing its investigation. The five incendiary devices found at the Auburn commercial complex matched three devices found in homes in the upscale Lincoln subdivision, the FBI has said. < Letters to several newspapers purporting to be from the Earth Liberation Front said the attempted Lincoln arson was a statement against suburban sprawl, while the Auburn office building was targeted as "a statement against work and the horror of the (cubicle)." The letters promised more actions "every few weeks." None of those devices exploded, but seven crude explosive devices at the Sutter Creek apartment complex caused an early morning blaze. Fire sprinklers helped minimize the damage. Nearby graffiti asserted that "We will win - ELF," investigators said. The FBI says ELF has caused more than $100 million in damage since 1996, including an arson at a five-story condominium under construction in San Diego in August 2003 that caused $50 million in damages.

Extradition hearing set for Tre Arrow

VANCOUVER (CP) - An extradition hearing date has been set for a man branded an eco-terrorist in the U.S. The hearing for Tre Arrow, also known as Michael Scarpitti, will begin April 18. He will remain behind bars until then, having been denied bail last month. Arrow, who has applied for refugee status in Canada, was arrested in Victoria last March and was found guilty of shoplifting at a Canadian Tire store. He is wanted by the FBI in Oregon, accused of fire-bombing logging and cement trucks in 2001. Arrow is seeking refugee status in Canada. In September, Arrow was sentenced to two days in jail after pleading guilty to shoplifting and giving a false name to police. He struggled briefly with the officer who held him until police arrived. Officers, however, became suspicious about his identity. Checks ultimately revealed he was on the FBI's most wanted list as an alleged domestic terrorist.

Book published on the Earth Liberation Front

Don't believe what the government and mass media say about the ELF, find out for yourself! (ELF) will soon be hitting the shelves of independent bookstores around the country. 'Earth Liberation Front 1997-2002,' edited by former ELF Spokesperson, Leslie James Pickering, traces the ELF's first five years of activity through communiqués, underground newspapers, interviews, testimonies and releases.
The Earth Liberation Front is an international underground organization that uses direct action to sabotage corporations and government agencies that profit from the systematic destruction of the natural environment. The ELF are considered the #1 domestic terrorist threat by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and have caused over $45 million in damages in the US since their appearance in 1997. Their record includes the $12 million arson at Vail Resorts in October, 1998, the $1 million arson at Boise Cascade's NW Regional Headquarters in December, 1999, the $1 million arson at the United States Forest Service Northeast Research Station in Irvine, Pennsylvania, on August 11, 2002, and over 3 dozen other serious actions.
is the first time a complete and thorough text on the Earth Liberation Front has been made available to the public. The text includes all communiqués released by the ELF between 1997 and 2002, articles from underground newspapers on the ELF, testimonies from the February 12, 2002 House Subcommittee on Ecoterrorism, an interview with an ELF Spokesperson and much more, and is intended to leave the reader with pondering the realization that a revolution is necessary in America.

Escape From Halifax

Captain Paul Watson delivered a lecture in a somewhat hostile environment on Tuesday, July 12. He narrowly escaped with his freedom. He arrived at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia to deliver a lecture on the Canadian seal slaughter sponsored by the Animal Rights Collective of Halifax.

Captain Watson did on-camera interviews with the local television stations before beginning his talk. The lecture was attended by about fifty students and members of the public. There were also Department of Fisheries and Oceans officers in the audience and four police officers.

Captain Watson used the opportunity to blast the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for destroying the Atlantic fisheries."It was Canadian government mismanagement and incompetence that destroyed the cod fishery on the East coast and the salmon fishery on the West coast. It is the same incompetence that is presently destroying the snow crab fishery. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans with their hired biostitutes have catered to the interests of corporate greed for decades and they continue to refuse to consider the interests of conservation. They continue to scapegoat the seals. As a result the entire eco-system of the Northwest Atlantic has been irreparably damaged," said Captain Watson.

When questioned about the welfare and the concerns of fishermen, Captain Watson was blunt and to the point. "The fishermen are responsible for the situation they find themselves in. It was their draggers, their trawlers, and their long liners that wiped out the fish. They have no one else but themselves to blame. My sympathy lies with the species they plundered and not with them," he said.

Needless to say this was not the message that the Fisheries officers wanted to hear.

After the talk, some students told Captain Watson that the police had positioned themselves to cover the exits to the room. Captain Watson assumed that this meant he might be arrested or served with a summons, most likely for actions with the ship during the March and April seal campaigns.

Looking out a window of the Student Union Building, Captain Watson could plainly see a parked paddy wagon and police cars. A paddy wagon meant an arrest and jail - this was not a mere summons.

Captain Watson took a back exit but was immediately spied by a plain clothes policeman who called out his name. Captain Watson stepped into a stairwell and ran down three flights of steps. He could hear the man chasing him down the steps. He heard additional footfalls joining the first. He reached the ground floor and ran up a second set of outdoor steps around a couple of corners and entered a pub. He made his way to an upstairs deserted beverage room where he decided to sit down, pull out his laptop, and do some work while he waited for the police officers to grow tired of searching for him.

From the window, he could see the officers scurrying around the Student Union Building. He saw them enter the pub. They looked around and left - apparently unaware of the upstairs beverage room.Inside the Student Union Building, the students who attended the talk were followed to their cars when they left the building.Captain Watson waited in the beverage room for three hours. He could see the plain clothes officers sitting in two cars watching the building.At 6:00 p.m. the pub closed and the manager found Captain Watson in the beverage room. Captain Watson said he was up there because it was a quiet place to work and he needed to finish a report. The manager said he could take his time to pack up. At 6:15 p.m., Captain Watson slipped out a side door and avoided the police by walking through back lanes, a park, and around to his car which was parked only a half a block behind the officers.

Captain Watson stepped off the sidewalk to the back of his car, quickly opened the driver's door, slipped behind the wheel, and drove away, passing the police officers who were intently looking at the building.

He then drove out of Halifax.

Captain Watson was actually in Nova Scotia to attend a joint Board meeting by the Sierra Club of the United States of which he is a Director and the Sierra Club of Canada. The meeting is being held in White Point, Nova Scotia, not far from where the Farley Mowat had been berthed in Liverpool in March earlier this year.The Department of Fisheries and Oceans was aware that Captain Watson would be attending this meeting and was prepared to arrest him at the meeting.Captain Watson decided to leave Nova Scotia instead of attending the meeting.

The question: What were the police intending to arrest him for? Apparently Captain Watson is wanted for conspiracy to disrupt the Canadian seal hunt by bringing his ship to the seal killing grounds without the permission of the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans.

Captain Watson and his crew had all applied for the permits to go to the hunt and they were told they could be issued permits but only on the condition that the ship would dock in the Magdalen Islands and the crew report to the DFO offices to receive the permits. Captain Watson and his crew could not do so because the fishermen of the Magdalen Islands threatened to kill him and his crew if they landed in their community. And this was not an idle threat. In 1995, Captain Watson was beaten severely in the Magdalens and his crew threatened when he attempted to introduce seal-brushing to the sealers (a cruelty free non-lethal form of utilizing seals by gently brushing their molting hairs which could be used in the same way eider down feathers are utilized - the hollow transparent seal hairs have the same insulating qualities as eider down).

During this year's Seal Campaign, eleven Sea Shepherd crew were arrested on the ice in March and charged with violating the "Seal Protection regulations" by approaching within a half nautical mile of a sealer without permission.The Sea Shepherd Eleven are scheduled to appear in court for trial in September in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.Immediately prior to their arrest, some of the Sea Shepherd crew were violently assaulted on the ice by sealers. The brutal attacks were video-taped and clearly show sealers striking the Farley Mowat crew members with sealing clubs.Despite this evidence, no charges have been laid against any of the sealers. Instead the government is using the statements by the assaulted crew members and the videotape as evidence that the crew members are guilty of the crime of photographing a sealer killing a seal.

Captain Watson did express concern at the Dalhousie lecture that this leniency towards allowing the sealers to commit physical assaults against seal defenders is giving the sealers the confidence to escalate their aggression. "When someone is murdered on the ice by a sealer, it will be the Canadian government that is responsible for giving the green light to violence against seal defenders," he said.

Captain Paul Watson is now safely out of Nova Scotia and is safe to return to his ship to prepare for campaigns to oppose poachers in the Galapagos and confronting outlaw Japanese whalers in the Antarctic Whale Sanctuary.

SAN FRANCISCO, March 31, 2006 (AFP) - A mother that gives violin lessons will face trial in the northwestern US state of Washington on charges she was an environmental terrorist, prosecutors said on Friday.

Violinist mom charged with being US environmental terrorist

SAN FRANCISCO, March 31, 2006 (AFP) - A mother that gives violin lessons will face trial in the northwestern US state of Washington on charges she was an environmental terrorist, prosecutors said on Friday. Briana Waters, 30, of the famously liberal California city of Berkeley, has pleaded innocent in a Seattle federal court that she that fire bombed a horticulture center in 2001. A US district court judge allowed Waters to remain free pending the start of her trial in June, but ordered that she turn in her passport and have her whereabouts monitored electronically. Waters was the first person charged in connection with an attack that destroyed the Center for Urban Horticulture at the University of Washington in May of 2001, according to Emily Langlie of the US Attorney's Office. The fire was one of a series of arson attacks in the Pacific west that police believe were committed by militant environmental activists linked to the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front. "This is just one step as we attempt to bring to justice those responsible for the UW Urban Horticulture fire," said John McKay, United States Attorney for the Western District of Washington. "As we move toward the five-year anniversary of that devastating blaze, I applaud the investigators who have worked so doggedly and diligently to put the pieces of the puzzle together." Federal prosecutors indicted 13 people last year in connection with arsons branded as "domestic terror." Two of those people were part of "an overarching conspiracy" to fire bomb the horticulture center, prosecutors said. A mother and a self-employed violin teacher, Waters' background included being a "tree-sitter" who perched in branches to save ancient trees from logging. Waters would face a mandatory minimum punishment of 35 years in prison if convicted as charged with arson and using a destructive device to commit a violent crime.