ELF FIRES

ELF Fires burned luxury homes on the STreet of Dreams in a suburb near Seattle Monday, and investigators found a spray painted message purportedly left by the Earth Liberation Front.

The ELF sign, a white sheet that had the initials of the Earth Liberation Front in scraggly red letters, mocked claims the luxury homes on the "Street of Dreams" were environmentally friendly, according to video images of the sign aired by KING-TV.

"Built Green? Nope black!" the sign said.

The ELF fires started at a development of unoccupied, furnished luxury model homes where developers show off the latest in high end housing, interior design and landscaping. The homes are later sold.

The ELF Fires are suspicious because they were set in multiple places in separate houses. Fire Investigators confirmed that the ELF sign was found at the scene of the fires in the community north of Woodinville, where some homes were still under construction.

A woman is currently trial in Tacoma for a suspected ELF fire at the University of Washington in 2001. Briana Waters, a 32-year-old violin teacher, is accused of serving as a lookout while her friends planted a devastating fire bomb.

The fire is one of the most notorious in a string of arsons that investigators say were perpetrated from the mid-1990s to 2001 by ELF.

No one was hurt in the arson at UW, but its Center for Urban Horticulture was destroyed and rebuilt at a cost of $7 million. It was targeted because the ELF activists mistakenly believed researchers there were genetically engineering trees, investigators said.

Ecoterrorism

More than a decade after they began setting fires across the West, remnants of the radical Earth Liberation Front stood before a federal judge, one by one, to hear her decide: Had they committed acts of domestic terrorism?

First, Stanislas Meyerhoff. Quiet, shy, his hair turning gray at 30, the slightly built Meyerhoff was dwarfed by the angular expanse of the courtroom. “I was ignorant of history and economy and acted from a faulty and narrow vision as an ordinary bigot,” Meyerhoff said, in May. “A million times over I apologize ... to all of you hard-working business owners, employees, researchers, firemen, investigators, attorneys and all citizens whose property was destroyed, whose holidays were ruined, whose welfare was thwarted and whose sleep was troubled.”

And so a violent chapter in the environmental movement ended - with a whimper. Once feared by some and admired by others for their willingness to use any means necessary, these militants are in decline. “Radical environmentalism failed,” said James Johnston of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. “Whether radical environmentalists admit it or not, they failed.”

Although crimes by environmental and animal-rights militants still occur, they have been sporadic. And although authorities cannot declare victory over radical militants, the movement has been significantly weakened. Johnston and other activists, community members, investigators and experts agreed that environmental protest by arson had pretty much run its course long before “Operation Backfire,” a joint task force of federal and state agencies, began making arrests in 2005.

Underground

They say the environmental movement remains strong - building on the work of grass roots activists, or supporting mainstream advocates such as former Vice President Al Gore, or going deeper underground to avoid the fate of the 10 activists brought to justice in Eugene. “The environmental problems on the planet aren't getting any better, they're getting worse,” said Jim Flynn, former editor of the Earth First! Journal and a veteran of protests in Eugene. “People will do what it takes to either try and stop environmental degradation, or draw attention to it.”
But by 2001, the movement was already over for most of the ELF cell known as “The Family.”
Bound by youth, idealism and frustration over the ineffectiveness of more traditional environmental protest methods, they had turned to secret meetings, codes and stealth attacks on private and public property, setting fires in the dead of night to draw attention to their cause. Among other targets, they ignited logging trucks, a slaughterhouse, SUVs at a car dealership, ranger stations and a government lab, causing $40 million in damage from 1996 to 2001.

The largest chunk of that damage was done in October 1998 to a ski resort in Vail, Colo., by William Rodgers, the man at the heart of the cell. Short, red-haired and intense, Rodgers ran down a mountainside from bucket to hidden bucket of diesel and gasoline, setting them aflame while a young woman he had recruited, Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, waited for him in the truck they had used to transport the fuel.
Rodgers is dead now, committing suicide in an Arizona jail cell just before Christmas in 2005. He had been working at a bookstore he co-founded when an informant in Eugene set off a series of arrests.

During the heyday of “The Family,” Rodgers was an influential and charismatic leader. “He was a zealot in the classic sense of the word,” Johnston said.

High schooler recruited
For some, it went beyond charisma. He had what was called a “Svengali-like hold” on Gerlach, who was a 16-year-old high school student in Eugene when she first met Rodgers at an Earth First! camp in Idaho. She developed a crush on the 28-year-old man who had adopted the nickname “Avalon,” after the mythical island where King Arthur went after his death.
Gerlach immersed herself in Rodgers' writings about sabotage and incendiary devices, progressed to participation in planning and strategy for “The Family,” then moved to roles in arson that “ran the gamut and included research, reconnaissance, lookout, device-assembler, driver and communique writer” - all according to court documents filed by federal prosecutors, the source of much of what is known about the ELF cell.
When the group broke up in 2001, Gerlach became romantically involved with another co-defendant, Darren Thurston, who helped her support herself by selling marijuana and ecstasy until her arrest in December 2005. By the time Gerlach was sentenced this May, her tone was contrite and repentant. Like many of her co-defendants, she claimed she had changed her ways.
“It's very clear to me now that if you want to live in a world of peace and equality, you need to embody those qualities in your own heart and actions,” Gerlach, now 30, told the judge. “I am grateful I have been given this opportunity to reconcile my past.”
Gerlach was among eight of the 10 members of “The Family” who apologized or repudiated their roles - including Meyerhoff, who had been her boyfriend at South Eugene High School and got involved with ELF because he had fallen in love with her and wanted to prove himself to her as an “eco-warrior.”
Meyerhoff also had a desperate need to be accepted, seeking a surrogate family with his activist comrades before he abandoned the cause to find a life for himself, eventually enrolling in college in Virginia to study biomedical engineering.

Differing motives

Kevin Tubbs, a Nebraska native who once worked for PETA organizing demonstrations against killing livestock, also got involved in arson as a way of proving himself, in his case, to win back a girlfriend who began an affair with another activist.

When Tubbs found a new love in 2001, he told his fellow arsonists he was leaving the movement to start over and have a family.

Others also chose different paths after what they considered mere flirtation with the radical tactics of their small, tightly knit cell.

Kendall Tankersley was about to enter medical school when she was arrested in 2005.

Daniel McGowan, a latecomer to “The Family” who also began his activist career in animal rights, went back home to his native Brooklyn to work for social justice causes, such as prisoner rights. He had married and says he had put his brief experience in Oregon behind him.

Thurston, a Canadian animal rights activist turned environmentalist, presented letters from family and friends saying he dreams of returning to Canada and working with computer technology.

The portrait that emerges is a band of young people, compassionate toward animals, seeking direction in life, looking to impress each other and reinforce their own sense of self-worth as much as they were looking for a cause. Mostly, they were desperate for attention for that cause.

“I think that's really what all these actions are about - is really getting public attention to some of these issues,” said Flynn, who was once repeatedly splashed with pepper spray as he doggedly resisted arrest during a 1997 protest to prevent the removal of some old trees considered a landmark in Eugene.

“If we were able to affect policy change through more legal means, then certainly that's the way these people would go,” Flynn said. “Nobody enjoys being underground, and that lifestyle.”

U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales saw “The Family” in a much different light, calling the case “the largest prosecution of environmental extremists in U.S. history” who were responsible for “a broad campaign of domestic terrorism.”

U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken agreed - to a point. She ruled some of their crimes fit the federal definition of terrorism but others didn't; she imposed sentences ranging from 37 months for Thurston to 13 years for Meyerhoff.
Terrorism?

McGowan, the son of a New York City police officer whose family witnessed the effects of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, says comparing burned trees and SUVs to terrorism cheapens the meaning of the word.
“It's hard to stomach being from New York and seeing the effects of terrorism ... and then to be called that and to know that's going to chase you the rest of your life,” McGowan said.

He points out that nobody was ever hurt in any of the 20 fires set by ELF members, although McGowan agreed with prosecutors there was always a risk.
“But the reason people were not hurt, aside from luck, is because great care and attention was taken,” McGowan said. “These are a group of people who are very, very much about preserving life.”

One of the lead investigators in the multi-agency “Operation Backfire” task force was Bob Holland, a veteran Eugene police detective who spent years tracking down “The Family.”
Holland said there are radical activists who are still underground, although he predicted that any violent protests in the future would more likely be carried out by individuals rather than groups, because groups are only as strong as their weakest member - a lesson learned from the Eugene case that he also hopes serves as a deterrent.

But he agreed that the Eugene group was driven largely by their need for camaraderie and a common cause at a unique moment in the history of the environmental movement.
“These people were so disenfranchised,” Holland said. “And they met each other and found out they weren't the only people who felt this way.”

 

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A Terrible Thing to Waste

Convicted as an ecoterrorist, a brilliant young scholar nose-dives in prison

By JUDITH LEWIS, LA WEEKLY

 

When Billy Cottrell was first sent up to Lompoc Federal Penitentiary, he thought he had landed the perfect job. A brilliant student of theoretical physics at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Cottrell has a high-functioning form of autism that makes it difficult for him to pick up on people’s emotions, but also gives him a grave appreciation for detail. At Lompoc, he thought, he would do secretarial duty in the “boiler-room office,” spending many hours alone, filing, sorting, typing and proofreading. He could be useful.

Before his first day, however, prison officials got nervous. They knew Cottrell was smart; they’d seen his physics textbooks and writings. And wasn’t this the kid who’d been convicted of blowing up Hummers somewhere in Los Angeles? Thinking he might find a way to rig the water heaters to blow up the prison, Cottrell says, they denied him the job.

Next, Cottrell was offered a job mowing Lompoc’s copious lawn. This appealed to Cottrell’s jittery need for physical exertion. Before he was arrested, he could run a marathon in under three hours, even sleep-deprived and hopped up on Rockstar energy drink. Once again, however, the penitentiary’s guardians said no: Cottrell says prison guards worried that he might use the gasoline in the lawn mower to make a bomb.

Finally, Billy Cottrell — who got kicked out of high school a few times yet wrote an essay to the University of Chicago so impressive he was accepted into its competitive math-and-science program, who snagged an appointment at Caltech to study the arcane complexities of string theory, and who many prominent scientists consider a genius — found a job he could keep. He stood up to his knees in filth, sorting through his fellow inmates’ putrid detritus in the prison dumpsters.

It’s a job most prisoners get as a single day’s punishment. Cottrell did it for three and a half months.

Since the day he arrived at Lompoc, 18 months ago, say his lawyers, family and friends, Cottrell has been harassed, threatened and taunted by the prison population and, in some cases, also by the guards and the administration. Because in the rigid world of prison, Cottrell has been labeled a terrorist.

Lompoc guards whispered the word at him as he passed. Visitors heard guards refer to him as their “very own ecoterrorist.” Cottrell later learned he had been used as an example in a training video on how to deal with terrorists in prison, “so now every prison guard in the country recognizes me as a terrorist on sight,” he wrote in a January 10 letter to the L.A. Weekly. He has been denied common privileges such as exercise, visitors and phone calls. Ultimately, he was banished to solitary confinement — the Hole, in prison parlance — like a violent thug.

And all because of one night in the summer of 2003, when Cottrell helped two friends deface and destroy dozens of sport utility vehicles in the name of the environment. Those who know of Cottrell and his tough prison sentence stretching to 2010 — the judge piled on an additional three years, without benefit of a jury rendering — say Cottrell is being mishandled, persecuted and, within the prison walls, compelled to become the very radical his prosecutors argued he was in court.

Meanwhile, he awaits word on two legal fronts: first, whether the California 9th Circuit believes jurors should have heard about his autism, and second, whether the federal courts will mirror the California Supreme Court in declaring judge-rendered sentence enhancements unconstitutional.

Back when he was sentenced in April 2005 to eight and a half years in prison, the judge, an ex-Marine named R. Gary Klausner, didn’t think Cottrell’s intellect or his autism should have justified leniency. But a great many scientists around the world, including Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, have publicly objected to the apparent fact that his intellect and psychological quirks, combined with the “terrorism” label attached to his crime, have provoked prison guards to single him out.

“Billy has been selected for the especially harsh treatment reserved for ‘a terrorist,’ ” reads a letter in Cottrell’s defense signed by Hawking and seven other prominent scientists. “[His] treatment in prison, far from being rehabilitative, is nothing short of nightmarish.”

The letter was distributed to prison authorities and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals at Cottrell’s October 18 hearing, held to determine whether the jury should have understood his psychiatric diagnosis — which the judge barred from the trial. But instead of helping him in prison, the letter seemed only to make things worse: Two weeks after the hearing, Cottrell was mysteriously thrown in the Hole.

University of Chicago professor Peter Freund, who drafted the letter his colleagues, including Hawking, later edited and signed, calls Cottrell’s ordeal “a tragedy.” One of the world’s pre-eminent authorities on theoretical physics, Freund supervised Cottrell’s senior thesis on string theory, the work that landed him a coveted spot working with Hiroshi Ooguri in Caltech’s physics department.

“If you told me John Doe was treated this way, someone I didn’t know at all, I’d feel revulsion at this systematic way the prison system is destroying a human being,” Freund says. “It’s horrible and it’s unfair. But with Billy, it’s also a loss to science. It’s too painful to watch without doing everything you can to stop it.”

There was a time, not too long ago, when Billy Cottrell was an eccentric but amiable Ph.D. candidate at Caltech, “a few degrees removed from reality,” according to Freund, but harmless. He had not yet been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, the peculiar form of autism whose sufferers typically excel at advanced math and fail miserably at social skills.

But looking back, the signs were there: You might imagine him similar to Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man, only less eccentric, much smarter and, as he would tell you, much better-looking. “He always talked kind of fast, like a robot,” says his mother, Heidi Schwiebert. “I used to call him my little Mr. Spock.”

Cottrell disliked silly, institutional rules: At the University of Chicago, he once refused to complete an assignment and instead turned in a lengthy and detailed essay on why the assignment was dumb. And he displayed bad judgment sometimes, says his friend Jesse Bloom, who has known him since the two were undergraduates at the University of Chicago. “When we had [David] Letterman on campus at Caltech,” Bloom remembers, “Billy ‘streaked’ [naked] across campus because people were daring him to do that.”

But he was not much of an environmentalist, or even all that liberal. In fact, in his 2004 trial, covered by Newsweek and CNN, no evidence ever emerged — and the prosecutors never suggested — that Cottrell was involved in the environmental movement at all. He watched Bill O’Reilly as regularly as he read The Nation. He voted for Schwarzenegger. He did not rebel against society so much as hold accountable the lazy people running it.

“Billy believed that most problems could be traced to lazy people who would rather complain than put in a little hard work, and he thought they should show more determination and stop making excuses,” says Bloom. “But I never saw him be mean or hostile to anyone.”

On the night of August 22, 2003, Cottrell would later testify, he had only intended to tour around Southern California with his friends Tyler Johnson and Michie Oe, plastering SUVs with bumper stickers. Going in, the plan was so innocuous, rising only to the level of a graffiti prank, that even Cottrell’s mom, Heidi, was involved.

An attractive blonde in her 50s, with big blue eyes and a curly bob haircut, Schwiebert is a horsewoman, although that’s where her interest in environmentalism ends. But she was fed up enough with polluting road hogs that she volunteered to print up bumper stickers for the three young people that would say “SUV = TERRORISM.” “I told the printer I didn’t particularly agree with the slogan myself, but I supported their right to free speech,” she recalled. At the printer’s, another “I” slipped in, and the stickers came out condemning “TERRIORISM.”

In the defense account of that night, Tyler Johnson, angry about the misspelling, demanded that Cottrell pay him back the $200 he’d spent on materials. Johnson offered to forgo the $200 if Cottrell would use his own car to chauffeur Johnson and his girlfriend, Michie Oe, around town while they spray-painted the offending gas-guzzlers.

Johnson and Oe, say Cottrell and his lawyers, had run out of gas. Cottrell agreed to take his car instead. On the way, Cottrell stopped at a gas station, and they filled several containers with gasoline.

At a Mercedes lot in Arcadia, Johnson, Cottrell and Oe sprayed seven or eight $30,000-to-$40,000 vehicles with slogans like “Fat, Lazy Americans” and “I [heart] Pollution.” In nearby Monrovia, they sprayed a Toyota Tundra and a Honda Passport with “Polluter” and “Killer.” At one car lot in Duarte, they painted 21 SUVs with the words “SUV’S Suck Hi,” and “Smog Machine.” At another Duarte lot, they hit 26 more. And on several vehicles they scrawled the initials ELF, the acronym for Earth Liberation Front.

As far as anyone knows, no ELF really exists; its Web site, www.earthliberationfront.com, is no more than a front for Viagra and repo ads (and now it’s for sale) (See LA Weekly's "Earth to ELF: Come In, Please," December 22, 2005). But in April of 2003, a few months before the SUV vandalism spree and five months before Cottrell’s arrest, the FBI’s assistant deputy director for counterterrorism, John Lewis, had gone before a Senate committee claiming that ELF and like-minded groups were America’s greatest domestic-terrorist threat. The feds were eagerly prosecuting a number of alleged environmental saboteurs who fit that view.

Because of the acronym spray-painted on the vehicles, says one of Cottrell’s lawyers, Michael Mayock. “They were watching this case at the highest levels in Washington.”

Against this tense national backdrop, Cottrell’s lawyers, Mayock and Marvin Rudnick, had asked the jury to believe that Cottrell was shocked when Johnson, without warning, stuck a rag in one of the just-filled gas containers, lit it and lobbed the homemade Molotov cocktail at a red 2003 Hummer H2 at the Clippinger Hummer dealership in West Covina. Cottrell’s defense relied on his claim that he was not part of that plan, that he insisted Johnson stop, and that he believed that Johnson would not lob another device.

But Johnson pulled out another Molotov cocktail, and then another, and another. He pummeled the Clippinger Hummer lot with so many of the minibombs, in fact, that the fires lit up 14 vehicles. All told, on that August night, after several hours of cruising, defiling and burning, 125 SUVs and other vehicles were damaged and destroyed, racking up $5 million in damage to vehicles that had traveled between states — a technicality that invoked the Interstate Commerce clause and made Cottrell’s a federal case.

The jury didn’t buy Cottrell’s defense, and no wonder. Both Johnson and Oe had disappeared before Cottrell’s arrest, and are still at large. There was no extracting their story about their night of arson. The jury had plenty of evidence to place Cottrell at the crime, including the use of his red Toyota Camry and his image on one dealership’s surveillance video.

Most important of all, Judge Klausner allowed no discussion on how Asperger’s might have affected Billy Cottrell’s judgment.

One of the most incriminating pieces of evidence left behind in Duarte that night was the carefully scrawled equation eiπ + 1 = 0, a magical formula discovered by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in the 18th century. It was also the very formula Cottrell and a friend had painted on the University of Chicago’s astronomy-building tower years ago, climbing up to write it in large print near the roof. The presence of the equation on the SUVs made it easier to connect the crime to Cottrell. In effect, Cottrell had left a calling card.

It takes a certain mastery of mathematics to appreciate the beauty of this equation, known as “Euler’s identity,” a simple, elegant line of code that employs five fundamental mathematical constants. If you can’t quite grasp that — most people can’t — you might be able to understand why Cottrell seems an oddball to so many people.

This strange line of symbols was a mark of his identity; a thing he celebrated in spray paint, breaking laws as he did so. It is a symptom consistent with Asperger’s syndrome, of a mind that can focus narrowly and cleanly on abstract hypotheses about the origins of the universe like string theory, but cannot detect ordinary nuances and gestures that signal when behavior might be questionable or when, as Cottrell still claims, a good friend holding a spray can assures him there will be no more violent explosions — and then there are many, many more.

Lead prosecutor Beverly Reid O’Connell, now a Los Angeles Superior Court judge, when asked by the Weekly whether she believed at the time of the trial that she was prosecuting Cottrell for an act of terrorism, as the prison system seems to see it, responded, “I’m not going to comment on that.”

Was there an effort, from higher levels in Washington, to prosecute someone for “ecoterrorism” at the time? Reid O’Connell responded, “I can’t comment on that.” Her co-prosecutor, Jason De Bretteville, laughed out loud at the suggestion, denying that the feds were involved. In 2004, neither prosecutor had any trouble portraying Cottrell as Reid O’Connell described him to the jury: “A scheming, arrogant person who is disdainful of the law.”

His friend Jesse Bloom readily concedes, “Billy made a bad impression at his very first hearing. The newspapers were accurate when they described how he shook his head and ‘smirked’ at the judge. But they didn’t know Billy.”

In November of 2004, Billy Cottrell was convicted on one count of conspiracy and seven counts of arson, carrying a minimum sentence of five years. In April 2005, Klausner sentenced Cottrell to five years, plus three and a half years — on the grounds that his acts could be defined as terrorism.

A California Supreme Court ruling on January 22 declared that such “determinate sentencing” violates the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a trial by an impartial jury by “placing sentence-elevating fact-finding within a judge’s province.” But that doesn’t directly help Cottrell, who was convicted in federal court. Even though no evidence emerged during the trial that Cottrell was a “terrorist,” the judge decided he was, and sentenced him accordingly.

Better days: Cottrell with his $10,000 math prize, 2002 Friends watched from the outside as Cottrell struggled to make something of his time in prison. They ordered him physics books and newly published papers from science journals so he could continue his physics studies. Cottrell even persuaded the Lompoc education coordinator to order Chinese-language tapes and textbooks for the library, because he wanted to study Mandarin. On Saturdays, Cottrell organized relay races on the prison track.

The majority of prison inmates read below the ninth-grade level. The prison system encourages them to get GEDs and, on paper at least, encourages earning higher degrees. Cottrell thought he could help. In the fall of 2005, he submitted proposals to prison officials for a calculus class, “complete with four months’ worth of homework, quizzes and tests” that Cottrell had written out from scratch on yellow legal pads in his cell.

He may not have been popular with the guards, but his fellow inmates knew a good thing when they saw one: One hundred hardened criminals signed up to study calculus, according to Cottrell. Cottrell would be Jaime Escalante, teaching tough math to the underprivileged.

But Cottrell was a very rare item in the federal prison system — a real, homegrown environmental “terrorist” in the eyes of prison officials. After all, even though prosecutors did not present a single piece of evidence linking the strange genius Cottrell to any radical movements — either before or after that night in the Los Angeles suburbs — hadn’t a judge convicted him?

First, prison officials claimed they had “lost” his calculus syllabus — twice, Cottrell says. He resubmitted it, patiently handwritten, three more times. Then, Cottrell got the news that no one would be studying math with him in prison at all. As with the mowing job and the boiler-room work, he says the prison administration created special rules for their unusual new prisoner who came with the word “terrorist” attached. They feared, they told him, he would teach other inmates how to make bombs — “something,” Cottrell wrote to the Weekly, “that I know absolutely nothing about.”

In court, Cottrell had come off as obnoxious and weird, which did not endear him to the jury. “Objection!” he’d yell. “Irrelevant!” When prosecutor Beverly Reid O’Connell, then an assistant U.S. attorney, cut him off once, he shouted, “But I know this one! I know this one!” (Interestingly, Reid O’Connell today insists she recalls none of his inappropriate courtroom antics.)

In prison, he was regarded as downright freakish. His mother believes that prison guards took an early dislike to him because he wasn’t able to play their games. “He can’t play the subordinate,” she says. “He’d die first.” Cottrell himself thinks the guards were jealous of his intelligence. Whatever the truth, Cottrell has been hardly more popular with the prison guards than he was with the jury.

Next, Cottrell told friends and family on the outside, the guards assigned him a new cellmate, an especially tough bad actor known around prison for starting fights. In the summer of 2005, that man at first tried to tear apart Cottrell’s books, then tried to poke his eyes out with a broom, according to Cottrell. Cottrell fought him off and, he says, got blamed for the fight.

In his letters to the Weekly, he says one prison official took away his physics papers, telling him that the science he was studying conflicted with the teachings of Jesus. Another forbade his Chinese studies, even after he had learned Mandarin so well that, he says, he served as a translator between guards and a Chinese-speaking prisoner.

But his worst months in prison came late last year. Shortly after the Bureau of Prisons Office of Inspector General released a report suggesting that federal prisons — including Lompoc — were not dealing harshly enough with convicted international terrorists inside the prisons, Cottrell was told he would have to serve as a witness in a bizarre “investigation.”

The probe focused on Lompoc’s Department of Corrections education coordinator, who procured the Chinese-language study materials for Cottrell. Cottrell says that when he refused to testify against the education coordinator, he was thrown into the Hole at Lompoc, and denied visitors and phone calls.

Cottrell says he was not given a clear explanation for his detention. “I haven’t been given any formal sanctions, no lock-up order from the Captain [of the prison guards], no rationale, no date of release, no anything,” wrote Cottrell in a December 18 letter to the Weekly. “They’ve taken every single physics text, Chinese story and piece of literature I’ve accumulated . . . and told me it’s all going to be burned.

“As far as I know,” he concluded, “I’m in the Hole for studying Chinese.”

Prison officials refuse to comment on many of his allegations, but concede that some of what Cottrell claims may have indeed occurred.

Bruce Kates first alerted the Weekly to Cottrell’s situation. A musician and professional piano tuner, Kates also attended Caltech as a math student. (“I didn’t have the goods,” he said, “but I could recognize people who did.”)

Kates is solemn, earnest and scholarly-looking. He is balding, wears glasses and speaks gently, in carefully punctuated syllables. It was clear that he cared deeply about Cottrell. Several times, as his voice rose with emotion, I thought he might weep. “If Billy loses his mind in prison,” he said, “we have lost a great resource in the world of science.”

I met with Kates the first time the day before Thanksgiving last year, along with Cottrell’s mother, who had cobbled together frequent-flier miles to come to Los Angeles in hopes that she could visit her son on Thanksgiving, even though the prison administrators had warned her that she couldn’t.

Schwiebert didn’t have any illusions that her son deserved special sympathy; she didn’t think it was newsworthy that her son was in prison. She just wanted the prison to follow its own rules. “You’re not supposed to be denied privileges unless you’re doing something wrong,” she said. “And they don’t tell us what he’s done wrong.”

She also wanted to get clear information about his well-being and whereabouts. Cottrell had been in the Hole since early November, and communication since then had been almost nonexistent. “At this point,” she said, “we don’t even know whether he’s dead.”

Schwiebert did manage to get through the gates on Thanksgiving Day, when holiday substitutes were on duty. But the next day, with the regular prison staff back in force, she was once again told her son would not be allowed visitors for months.

Cottrell went into the Hole on November 3 and stayed there until early January. It was cold. When Kates visited him, he found the temperature in Cottrell’s cell was at a chilly 68 degrees, and Cottrell was wearing only a T-shirt.

Intermittently, his books were confiscated, returned and taken away again. Once, he says, his physics study papers were snatched up because they were a “fire hazard” — one of the few claims made to the Weekly by Cottrell that Lompoc spokesperson Erwin Meinberg obliquely confirms. “They might take papers away if they’re a fire hazard,” Meinberg says, an echo of Cottrell’s account. Another time, Cottrell wrote in a letter to the Weekly dated January 10, his books were taken because he didn’t have the receipts to prove he owned them.

Again, Meinberg doesn’t dispute that this might have happened. “Sometimes [inmates] have to have proof that something belongs to them,” he says. “[The guards] might take things away if they think that they’re stolen.”

To which Cottrell replied in a letter, “How could I have that proof? I’m in the Hole.”

Meinberg does deny that any prison official swiped Cottrell’s physics texts on religious grounds. “I’ve never heard of something like that happening,” he says.

Both Schwiebert and Kates believed that Cottrell’s situation in prison had grown worse since October 18, when his appeal was heard before the 9th Circuit.

The hearing had gone extremely well, according to Cottrell’s lawyers, who argued before the court that Cottrell’s Asperger’s diagnosis should have been heard during his trial. “There’s a precedent in California,” says Rudnick, “that if you have a ‘gross and identifiable disability,’ it can be used to explain the actions of the defendant. But we weren’t allowed to do that. It was as if [Billy] was blind, and the jury was extra hard on him because he could not answer the question ‘What did you see?’ ”

Psychiatrist Gary Mesibov, retained by the defense, had diagnosed Cottrell with Asperger’s. The psychiatrist working for the prosecution did not dispute it. But while Judge Klausner allowed Cottrell’s lawyers to discuss his condition in their opening statements, Klausner changed his mind soon after. The jury never heard another word about it.

There is some reason to believe the 9th Circuit appeals court might view Cottrell’s Asperger’s and its influence on his behavior as relevant to how he behaved the night of the SUV arsons. In contrast to Judge Klausner, 9th Circuit Judge Harry Pregerson last October seemed to indicate some knowledge about what it means to suffer from Asperger’s. Pregerson asked Mayock and Rudnick how their client was doing in jail. The lawyers remain hopeful that the court will reverse the conviction and send it back for a new trial, or change his sentencing.

“I have not seen such interest by judges in a criminal defendant’s case,” Rudnick says of Pregerson. “We’ve come a long way since the conviction. The judges seemed very, very concerned about his case and his welfare in prison. It looks to me like they wanted to do something.”

But they have not acted yet, and with each day that passes, Rudnick’s optimism seems to flag. “I am puzzled about the failure of the 9th Circuit to follow up on its seemingly supportive position,” he wrote to the Weekly in January. “Since the applicability of Asperger’s is new to the criminal law, and this is a terrorist case, the only thing I can think of is that they may be waiting for another decision from another panel. Or they may be fighting over language in the decision in order to get a 3-0 vote instead of what looked like a 2-1 vote.”

Shortly after the Weekly sent a Freedom of Information Request to the Bureau of Prisons, the slow-talking and personable Meinberg sent over a letter, by e-mail on January 5, stating that Cottrell’s phone and visiting privileges had suddenly been restored, and explaining that Cottrell had been placed in “administrative detention” following a “security breach.” In other words, he had been thrown in the Hole — but for what, neither Meinberg nor the Bureau of Prisons was saying.

When asked by the Weekly to describe the security breach involving Cottrell, Meinberg remarked, “It’s in the realm of the secret squirrels” — conjuring up images of tiny creatures scurrying about the penitentiary halls, making decisions about the prisoners’ future in cackling little confabs. Meinberg insisted the details of the security breach were no secret to Cottrell, however: “Oh, he knows. He knows,” Meinberg intoned.

I requested a visit with Cottrell, but just before the request was reviewed, Cottrell was transferred to Victorville Federal Correctional Institution in the high-desert town of Adelanto, California. Again, I faxed over a request to visit. A few days later, Victorville’s spokesman, Ed Gaunder, told me, “We’re unable to have you conduct an interview because the warden, Joe Norwood, deems that there could be a security issue involved with this inmate. There’s some history there.”

When asked what that history was, Gaunder said he couldn’t talk about it. But his response seemed to suggest that prison officials see Cottrell as a true-blue terrorist, given their literal reading of his conviction. “You pretty much have to just read between the lines of his sentence,” he said.

When I asked him to confirm that he meant the nature of Cottrell’s crimes made him a security risk, even in a prison that holds Aryan Brotherhood murderers and Mexican Mafia hit men, Gaunder backed down, saying, “You’re taking that out of context... I guess I wish you wouldn’t have heard that.” Gaunder finally said, “Basically, the reason this interview won’t be conducted is because the security and safety of this institution is at stake. Therefore you will have to manufacture your story from what the inmate says.

“But I can tell you this,” he added before he hung up. “Prisons are run pretty similar through the federal system. We do not tolerate misconduct from staff members in the federal prison system. So I’m going to say that some of those [Lompoc] incidents did not happen... We don’t mistreat inmates in the federal prison system.”

Cottrell is not unaffected by his unusual treatment. Evidence in his letters implies that he is becoming increasingly radicalized — mimicking in some ways the kind of person the prosecutors tried to paint two years ago, when he was still a theoretical-physics scholar at Caltech.

In a letter to the Weekly in December, he worried that media coverage of his situation in prison might make his story “seem rare and unusual... But although my case is unique in its details, there are many, many good, productive people in prison for no apparent reason. The majority of people are here for victimless crimes and were supporting families at the time of their arrest.”

By the end of December, in a letter to Bruce Kates, he sounded more bitter and focused in his anger: “Many people in prison speak openly about revolution. How many of these people can our government produce through its abusive penal system before we have one on our hands?”

The mind that should have been dialed into exploring the great problems of our scientific age instead wanders idly inside a federal prison, examining the social order in all its perverse detail. While stewing in the Hole, Cottrell began to compare his situation, and the situation of other prisoners like him, to the situation of the Jews in Nazi Germany.

“Focusing too much on the artificial constructs of our government lends credence to the idea that they somehow represent the morality which we really value,” he wrote to the Weekly, in urging the paper not to focus on his imprisonment when, he now argues, much greater issues are at stake. “It’s as if the SS were to execute a Jew for not wearing his armband, and an underground newspaper were to indignantly report that the SS was wrong since the armband was merely too dirty to see.”

When scientist Peter Freund drafted the letter protesting Cottrell’s mistreatment in prison, he initially included language about rehabilitation. “Then I had a lawyer read it, and he said, ‘Oh, you are so naive! Their stated purpose is not to rehabilitate. It is to punish.’”

But in fact, the Bureau of Prisons Web site states that the bureau exists to “reduce the potential for future criminal activity by encouraging inmates to participate in a range of programs that have been proven to reduce recidivism.”

In practice, Freund is right. None of what’s allegedly being done to Cottrell is reducing his potential for criminal activity in the future.

Rehabilitating somebody with Asperger’s syndrome like Billy Cottrell would mean doing something the federal system is not set up to do: plying him with so many physics texts that he wouldn’t have time to socialize, and allowing him to work out his anxiety and energy on the prison track. It would also mean letting him use his overachieving brain to teach physics and calculus (it arguably would help other prisoners too).

Heidi Schwiebert says that life has improved for her son at Victorville, especially now that he has been released from his horrific months in the Hole.

“He’s allowed to go outside now,” she says, “and he gets exercise.” But the many books she’s sent him on string theory and theoretical physics remain missing, she says, and new ones she sends don’t arrive. Deprived of those books, Cottrell’s mind goes without the stimulation of the scientific studies that have focused and calmed him ever since high school, when he went without sleep poring over Einstein.

From the inside, he watches the judicial system spend a small fortune in taxpayer dollars prosecuting, imprisoning, and then drumming up paranoia among prison guards and prisoners over a college kid who went on a vandalism spree against Hummers.

“Here we have [our] politicians, who are not charged with crimes, setting this planet on a disaster course for some fleeting political advantage, while others are sent to prison for taking a stance against this,” Cottrell wrote in his last, much more angry letter from Lompoc.

“The harsh sentence in my case was designed to both distract attention from the policies which motivated my friends’ actions, and to deter more people from supporting what is essentially a just cause.”

His arguments may contain the seeds of truth, but at this moment they can do him nothing but harm.

 

 

Vail arsonists to be sentenced

Two individuals that have been accused of setting the 1998 fire at the Vail, Colorado ski resort will be sentenced in court in December on 8 counts of arson that occured from the fire that caused over $12 million in damage.
Chelsea Gerlach and Stanislas Meyerhoff, both 29 years old, were arraigned recently in US federal court in Eugene, Oregon. The two women are to enter pleas and be sentenced on Decemeber 14th, when they are also to be sentenced for other arson-related crimes to which they pleaded guilty in July, 2006.

Under the plea deals, both individuals have agreed to have their Colorado charges transferred to Oregon to be settled along with their other federal arson cases.

In the 1998 attack on Vail Ski Resort, the investigators found empty plastic jugs that had contained gasoline near the fires at the Vail ski resort that destroyed three new buildings including the lodge at the top of the mountain and the Two Elk restaurant, a favorite hot-spot for snow skiers returning from the Siberia and China bowls, along with damaging four ski lifts.

Federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms investigators found numerous points around the structures where the fires were set.
In an e-mail communique attributed to the Earth Liberation Front known as ELF, a radical environmental group that said the fire was retaliation for Vail's planned expansion on to 4,100 acres of national forest land.

The site was listed as among the last Canada lynx habitat in Colorado.

Since then, more than 100 lynx have been released in Colorado and for the past three years, those lynx have produced young and the ski resort has completed the expansion.

The Vail crimes focused national attention on radical environmentalists who credited their attacks to the secretive ELF and Animal Liberation Front. The Vail fires are one of 18 separate attacks charged to a group of 13 people between 1996 and 2001.

Meyerhoff, who renounced ELF, earlier pleaded guilty to 54 charges related to seven separate attacks in a plea deal for a recommendation from federal prosecutors that he be sentenced to 15 years and eight months, according to court records.

As part of his deal, authorities in Michigan, Arizona, Washington, Wyoming and California will not prosecute potential cases against him, court records showed.

Gerlach pleaded guilty to 18 charges in five separate attacks.

She has apologized for the harm and fear created by her actions, which she said were motivated by "a deep sense of despair and anger at the deteriorating state of the global environment."

Prosecutors have recommended Gerlach get a 10-year sentence.

Authorities in Wyoming, Washington and California agreed not to pursue potential cases against Gerlach, according to court records.

Of the 13 defendants, six have pleaded guilty, four face trial and three are fugitives.

 

Bush administration's hotly controversial warrantless surveillance programs

 

A federal judge in Eugene wants to know whether the government used warrantless wiretaps to investigate a group of radical environmentalists charged with committing more than a dozen acts of sabotage in Oregon and the West between 1996 and 2001. Since indictments were issued last year, six defendants have brokered plea agreements in exchange for testimony, leaving four non-cooperating witnesses headed for trial, three fugitives and one defendant who committed suicide in jail.
The mainstream media paid no attention to U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken's ruling last week telling federal prosecutors to respond to questions about surveillance. But it's significant for two reasons. First, it makes way for a new challenge to the Bush administration's hotly controversial warrantless surveillance programs. The administration insists that it has the constitutional authority to spy on terrorists without judges' approval; this case would most likely provide the first challenge to that stance involving a domestic "terror" case. Second, the issue could ultimately unravel the high-profile charges against a group of activists associated with the Earth Liberation Front, which the government has portrayed as one of the most serious "terrorist" threats to domestic tranquility. "It's going to be embarrassing...for the government if they find out they've used warrantless surveillance," says Lewis & Clark Law School professor John Parry, who specializes in criminal and constitutional law. "They're going to have some explaining to do." Facing Aiken's Sept. 12 deadline, the government may simply refuse to respond, most likely citing something called the state secret privilege-a tactic Aiken may or may not buy. If the government does testify that it used warrantless surveillance, the judge will have a chance to rule on the big question: whether the wiretaps, approved with nothing more than the president's OK, violate Fourth Amendment guarantees to freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. If the judge rules that investigators' methods broke the law, then the resulting evidence could be excluded. Depending on how much evidence was gathered-directly or indirectly-through the use of warrantless wiretaps or other electronic surveillance, prosecutors may have a hard time continuing their case. "The entire case could be thrown out," says Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center in Eugene, which has assisted in the defense. Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Peifer said he could not comment on the case.

The Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program came to light in a New York Times report in December 2005. The paper reported that shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush gave the go-ahead for federal investigators to eavesdrop, without a warrant from a judge, on Americans' electronic communications with people overseas. The administration is adamant that it has the constitutional authority to snoop on international terrorists-and though the Eugene eco-sabotage case appears to be an entirely domestic matter, investigators have made a point of alleging that ELF has international connections. Since news of the warrantless wiretaps broke, dozens of civil lawsuits have been filed against the Adminstration, including one by an Oregon-based Islamic charity, decrying the program as a slap at civil liberties. Two weeks ago, a federal district court judge in Detroit issued the first opinion in a civil case declaring the program unconstitutional. The criminal case in Eugene presents an advantage to the defense not offered in the civil matters: If warrantless surveillance was indeed used, the government, not the defendants, bears the burden of proof. The prosecutors must show that illegal means weren't used to gather evidence. In motions before Aiken, defense attorneys have asserted that the government's repeated references to terrorism are a strong sign that warrantless surveillance played a role in the investigation. Last May, a deputy assistant director of the FBI testified before Congress that the ELF and the related Animal Liberation Front represent "one of today's most serious domestic terrorism threats." The "terror" label made investigators' jobs easier in the Oregon case, giving them access to terrorism task forces and interstate warrants. Of course, the defendants haven't actually been charged with terrorism. Instead, the indictment lists arson, conspiracy, use of a destructive device and destruction of an energy facility. But court documents repeatedly refer to the crimes as acts of terrorism, and federal prosecutors have sought sentence "enhancements" earmarked for offenses involving terrorism. So why include eco-saboteurs under the banner of terrorism? For one, it may be easier to bag an "eco-terrorist" than a member of an al Qaeda cell. And as the definition of "terror" grows, the zeal to guard against it may spread to other crimes. "If you can do [warrantless surveillance] for these guys, who can't you do it for?" Parry says. "If this is part of the war on terror, then I think this is a much broader war than anyone ever imagined."

Craig Subpoenaed to Federal Grand Jury in Eugene; ELF Investigation Continues..

NEWS ADVISORY February 15, 2006

Craig Rosebraugh Subpoenaed to Federal Grand Jury in Eugene, Oregon; ELF Investigation Continues

PORTLAND, OR - On Tuesday, February 14, 2006, Craig Rosebraugh received a subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury currently convened in Eugene, Oregon investigating a series of actions committed by the Earth Liberation Front.

Federal agents approached Rosebraugh as he sat in his vehicle and demanded he roll down his window, presumably to accept the subpoena. He refused, rolled up the windows, locked the doors, and cranked the stereo. After yelling at him, the agents left the subpoena on his windshield.

The grand jury subpoena - the eighth Rosebraugh has received in the last nine years - commands him to appear in Eugene to testify at 9:00am on March 16, 2006.

Investigating ELF actions that occurred between 1996 and 2001, the grand jury convened in Eugene is responsible for indicting eleven people in January 2006 in connection with ELF activity throughout the Pacific Northwest and Colorado.

Rosebraugh served as an unofficial spokesperson for the ELF from 1997 through 2001. Receiving anonymous communiqués from the underground activists, he released the information to the news media and conducted interviews internationally in support of the group. In 2000, Rosebraugh co-formed the North American Earth Liberation Front Press Office (NAELFPO), a media resource organization based in Portland, Oregon. In February 2002, Rosebraugh was subpoenaed and appeared in front of the US Congress in a subcommittee hearing on "ecoterrorism." He pled the Fifth Amendment at the proceeding to 54 out of 56 questions, effectively stonewalling the hearing.

Witnesses subpoenaed to testify before federal grand juries are not allowed to be accompanied by their attorney inside the proceedings, nor are they allowed to rely upon their Fifth Amendment privilege and remain silent. Witness that do plead the 5th and remain silent are commonly forced to take immunity at which time they must answer all questions that fall under the scope of the immunity. Witnesses refusing to answer any question under the scope of immunity usually are jailed for contempt and held for up to eighteen months or the remaining length of the grand jury.

For the last nine years, Rosebraugh has consistently resisted the grand jury inquisitions, refusing to cooperate and provide any information to investigators.

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FBI Arrests 3 Suspected ELF Members In Placer Co.In Fire's Wake, Logging Study Inflames Debate University Study Challenges Cutting Of Burnt Timber

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post
February 27, 2006

MEDFORD, Ore. -- If fire ravages a national forest, as happened here in southwest Oregon when the Biscuit fire torched a half-million acres four years ago, the Bush administration believes loggers should move in quickly, cut marketable trees that remain and replant a healthy forest.

"We must quickly restore the areas that have been damaged by fire," President Bush said in Oregon four years ago after touring damage from the Biscuit fire. He called it "common sense."

Common sense, though, may not always be sound science. An Oregon State University study has raised an extraordinary ruckus in the Pacific Northwest this winter by saying that logging burned forests does not make much sense.Logging after the Biscuit fire, the study found, has harmed forest recovery and increased fire risk. What the short study did not say -- but what many critics of the Bush administration are reading into it -- is that the White House has ignored science to please the timber industry. The study is consistent with research findings from around the world that have documented how salvage logging can strip burned forests of the biological diversity that fire and natural recovery help protect.The study also questions the scientific rationale behind a bill pending in Congress that would ease procedures for post-fire logging in federal forests. This, in turn, has annoyed the bill's lead sponsor, Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), who has received far more campaign money from the forest products industry than from any other source, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.Logging after fires is becoming more and more important to the bottom line of timber companies. It generates about 40 percent of timber volume on the nation's public lands, according to Forest Service data compiled by the World Wildlife Fund, and accounts for nearly half the logging on public land in Oregon.But there is much more to the dispute than money. The Oregon State study was published in Science, the prestigious peer-reviewed journal. It appeared after a group of professors from the university's College of Forestry, which gets 10 percent of its funding from the timber industry, tried to halt its publication.Professors behind the failed attempt to keep the article out of Science had earlier written their own non-peer-reviewed study of the Biscuit fire -- a study embraced by the Bush administration and the timber industry. It said post-fire logging and replanting were exactly what was needed to speed growth of big trees and suppress fire.A couple of weeks after the Science article appeared and infuriated the forest industry, the federal Bureau of Land Management, which footed the bill for the study of the Biscuit fire, cut off the final year of the three-year, $300,000 grant. BLM officials said the authors violated their funding contract by attempting to influence legislation pending in Congress.After the cutoff, Democrats in the Northwest congressional delegation complained about government censorship, academic freedom and the politicization of science in the Bush administration. Within a week, the BLM backed down and restored the grant.

Oregon State University has officially scolded the forestry professors for inappropriate behavior and praised the authors of the Science article.

Still, the issue is far from over.

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On Friday here in Medford, there was a field hearing of the House subcommittee on forests and forest health, which is chaired by Walden, chief sponsor of the forest recovery bill that was cast in a dim light by the Science article.

In this corner of Oregon, where environmentalists and logging interests have been jousting for decades, jawboning about forest policy is a spectator sport. The hearing, held in Medford City Hall, was so packed with spectators that the fire marshal insisted it could begin only after he delivered a stern lecture on emergency exits.

The hearing's star witness -- and principal punching bag -- was Daniel Donato, lead author of the Science article and a graduate student at Oregon State's forestry school. By at least a decade, he was the youngest participant in the hearing. Rail thin and wearing neatly pressed khakis, he looked even younger.

Walden accused Donato, 29, of having failed to tell his federal research supervisor about the findings of his study, as is required by the terms of his research contract with the federal government. Donato conceded that he had not known about the requirement for consultation and that he knows more about it now.

Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.), another member of the subcommittee and a co-sponsor of the forest recovery bill, was even more disgruntled. He charged Donato with a long list of professional failings and character flaws, including "deliberate bias," lack of humility and ignorance of statistical theory.

Donato smiled nervously through these attacks and politely -- but firmly -- told the hearing that his article was solid on its facts and fair in its conclusions. He also said the forest study should not be viewed as, nor was it intended to be, the final word on post-fire logging.

After Donato was excused, one of the nation's best-known forest ecologists attempted to summarize the world's collective scientific knowledge on logging after fires. Jerry Franklin, a professor of ecosystem science at the University of Washington's College of Forest Resources, warned the hearing that Congress should be careful not to prescribe salvage logging as a cure-all for every forest fire.

Salvage logging and replanting can often succeed, Franklin said, if the intent is to turn a scorched landscape into a stand of trees for commercial harvest.

If, however, Congress wants to promote the ecologically sound recovery of burned federal forests, Franklin said, the overwhelming weight of scientific research suggests that "salvage logging is not going to be appropriate."

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Alleged Plot To Blow Up Cell Towers And Power Plants

(JAN 13 2006 CBS 13) SACRAMENTO The F.B.I. has foiled an alleged plot to blow up cell towers, power plants and U.S. Forest Service sites by arresting three suspected ELF members in Placer County.

The FBI made the arrests this morning after a long investigation. 20-year-old Zachary Jenson of Monroe, Washington, 20-year-old Lauren Weiner of Philadelphia and 28-year-old Eric Taylor McDavid of Foresthill, California were taken into custody in a shopping center parking lot in Auburn. The FBI says the three were acting on behalf of the Earth Liberation Front.

The FBI says the arrests were based on evidence that the three were plotting to use explosives to blow up several sites. Their alleged targets included facilities owned by the United State Forest Service, cell towers and power plants. Although, the FBI says they do not believe there was any immediate danger to the public.

The federal government calls the Earth Liberation Front an environmental terrorist group with no known leader. They have claimed responsibility for dozens of attacks that have caused an estimated $40 million in damage.

This is not the first ELF arrest in Placer County. In February of last year, 21-year-old Ryan Lewis of Newcastle was arrested in connection with a series of explosive devices found at several Placer County sites. The FBI says he also was acting on behalf of the ELF.

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Canada to Extradite Eco-Terror Suspect

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - A court on Thursday ordered the extradition of suspected eco-terrorist Tre Arrow (search), one of the FBI's most-wanted fugitives, to face firebombing charges in the United States.

Arrow, born Michael Scarpitti is accused of participating in the 2001 firebombing of logging and cement trucks in Oregon. The FBI claims he is associated with the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a group that has claimed responsibility for dozens of acts of destruction over the past few years.

British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Kristi Gill ruled that there was enough evidence against Arrow to have him extradited to face federal charges. His lawyer said he would appeal, a process that could take months.

The former U.S. Green Party candidate for Congress in 2000 - who says the trees told him to change his name - last week told the court that he was innocent of the charges and a target of a government conspiracy.

"I am innocent of the charges the U.S. government is trying to pin on me," Arrow said. "Just as many other activists have experienced, I am being targeted by the U.S. government and the FBI, not because I am guilty but because I have chosen to challenge the status quo."

In extradition cases, Canadian prosecutors represent the extraditing state, in this case the United States. For an extradition to be ordered, the B.C. Supreme Court had to find there was sufficient evidence to convict Arrow on the same charges in Canada.

Prosecutor Rosellina Patillo said evidence from the United States Attorney in Oregon indicated Arrow was among four conspirators involved in the bombings of a gravel company and a logging company between April and June of 2001. The evidence comes from statements of Arrow's three coconspirators who have pleaded guilty to the bombings at a Mount Hood logging company.

The suspects intended to firebomb a U.S. Forest Service office, but abandoned the idea after they found the security system was too tight, Patillo said.She said the Ross Island Gravel Company was targeted "because it was guilty of stealing soil from the earth." In that attack, three trucks were blown up and the damage was $200,000. The second attack, on June 1, 2001, was against a Mount Hood logging company. They placed incendiary devices under seven vehicles, damaging three at a cost of $50,000.She said that in each case, the incendiary device was a plastic container filled with gas; the fuse was a stick of incense with matches attached to it.

Arrow's lawyer, Tim Russell, contends the evidence against him from his coconspirators is hearsay and inadmissible in a Canadian court.Arow is seeking refugee status in Canada, but that process has been suspended pending the outcome of the extradition hearings, his lawyer said.The 30-year-old Arrow contends he won't get a fair trial in the United States because of the FBI's assertion that his alleged crimes are acts of terrorism. He faces federal charges in Oregon of using fire to commit a felony, destroying vehicles used in interstate commerce and using incendiary devices in a crime of violence. The charges carry up to a combined 80 years in prison.

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FBI Settles With Environmentalist

Josh Connole was mistakenly jailed in connection with SUV arsons. He will receive $100,000.

By David Rosenzweig
Times Staff Writer November 15, 2005

The FBI has agreed to pay $100,000 and issue a letter of regret to an environmental activist who was mistakenly jailed as a suspect in a string of arsons and vandalism at four SUV dealerships in the San Gabriel Valley in 2003, his lawyers said Monday.Josh Connole, who spent four days behind bars before being freed, sued the FBI, contending his civil rights had been violated and his reputation destroyed.

The attacks, carried out in the name of the radical Earth Liberation Front, destroyed or damaged more than 125 SUVs. A Caltech graduate student, William Cottrell, was later convicted and sentenced to prison in the case.Had Connole's suit gone to trial, the FBI would have been up against testimony from a former federal prosecutor who said she warned an FBI supervisor that his agents had no probable cause to arrest Connole. The 27-year-old Connole, who now lives in Oregon, said Monday he was pleased with the settlement and hoped it would send a message to the law enforcement community that "you can't throw people's civil rights out the window in the name of fighting terrorism."Connole's attorneys, William Paparian and John Burton, said the $100,000 payment was arrived at following negotiations mediated by a U.S. magistrate judge in Los Angeles. They said the FBI agreed to issue a letter of regret but that the language was still being worked out.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Richard Patrick, who represented the FBI in the talks, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

In a deposition in September, former Assistant U.S. Atty. Beverly Reid O'Connell, now a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, recalled receiving an urgent phone call during the early hours of Sept. 12, 2003, three weeks after the attacks, from FBI senior supervisor Edward Ochotorena, seeking a green light to arrest Connole.Connole, who was under 24-hour surveillance at the time, had just driven to the Pomona police headquarters to report that he was being followed by strange men in unmarked cars."We have a situation going on out here. We have officer safety issues. I'm going to arrest him," O'Connell quoted Ochotorena as telling her.

"You don't have probable cause to arrest him. I'm not giving you our authority and you better document it," O'Connell said she told the agent.O'Connell said their conversation was heated. "I was yelling at him," she said.

Notwithstanding her warning, Ochotorena directed a team of FBI agents to arrest Connole immediately. Connole was taken to an FBI office in West Covina for questioning and booked into the West Covina Police Department jail on suspicion of arson.

West Covina police, who participated in Connole's arrest, have apologized, saying they regretted the notoriety he had received. The city gave Connole $20,000 to settle a damage claim.

During a deposition taken in July, Ochotorena said he felt no need to apologize and refused to concede that Connole was innocent, despite the fact that he is no longer a suspect in the case. "I don't have any evidence that places him at the scene, but by the same token, I don't have any evidence that says with 100% certainty, as you put it, that he was not involved in the crime," Ochotorena said.Ochotorena went on to suggest there was a "remote possibility" that Connole might have been involved in the "planning or execution or otherwise on the periphery of the crime."The FBI official noted that a law enforcement bloodhound had led his handler to Connole's doorstep after being exposed to a scent from a cigarette lighter that was recovered from the scene of one arson attack. Ochotorena said the dog's "hit" still troubles him.Burton and Paparian contended the dog-sniffing evidence was nothing more than a "Rin Tin Tin fantasy." In the lawsuit, they said there is no scientific basis for taking a weeks-old scent from an object like a cigarette lighter, have a dog distinguish it from other human scents and follow it to the owner.

"The literature is replete with instances of a dog appearing to follow a scent when it is, in fact, taking cues from its handler," they argued.Connole came to the FBI's attention after television stations broadcast footage of a roaring blaze at a Hummer dealership in West Covina the night of Aug. 22, 2003. The next day, a woman telephoned the FBI to report her suspicions about a small group of environmentalists who lived as a collective across from her home in Pomona. She said she had seen cars with out-of-state license plates parked on the street on the night of the arsons.

Connole, who grew up in Orange County, lived at the address as part of a cooperative called Regen V, which stood for regeneration of energy. He drove an electric-powered car, installed solar panels and was active in the antiwar movement.FBI Agent Stanley Snock, assigned to head the investigation, said during his deposition that he ordered a stakeout of three houses occupied by the co-op's members. He said their names were turned over to an FBI investigative analyst who keeps tabs on domestic terror groups.

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The analyst, a civilian FBI employee, provided information that "led me to believe Mr. Connole probably had beliefs that would be conducive to someone who might perpetrate an ELF [Earth Liberation Front] action," Snock said.Asked to explain, Snock said that besides belonging to a collective that was "very pro-environment," Connole was affiliated with Food Not Bombs, a movement that espouses diverting money from the military to feed the world's hungry.

The agent acknowledged, however, that he knew of no link between Food Not Bombs and domestic terrorism.

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Indictment lists arson at UW, attacks on cropland

 

Before environmental saboteurs set fire to the University of Washington's Center for Urban Horticulture in 2001, they ravaged canola crops in Eastern Washington and sliced open hybrid trees in Oregon, according to a new federal indictment released Thursday. The activists had decided a year before to focus on genetically engineered crops, and had debated targets during a secret meeting in Tucson, Ariz., the indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle alleges. Then, sometime before dawn on May 21, 2001, five arsonists fire-bombed the UW horticulture center, destroying several endangered plants along with it, the indictment charges. Four people, Briana Waters, 30, Justin Solondz, 26, Josephine Overaker, 31, and Kevin Tubbs, 37, were indicted Wednesday in crimes associated with either the UW fire or another arson in Olympia. Before Wednesday, only Waters had been charged specifically in the UW fire. The new indictment adds Solondz as an alleged participant in the UW fire. That makes three named suspects in that fire. The third, William Rodgers, an Arizona bookstore owner, committed suicide in an Arizona jail cell in December.Prosecutors say there were five arsonists; the two others have not been publicly named. The newest indictment was filed 10 days before a statute of limitations was to run out on the most serious UW offense - use of a destructive device in a crime of violence, in this case jugs of gasoline hooked up to timers. Waters and Solondz both face that charge now. The U.S. Attorney has charged Overaker and Tubbs in connection with an Olympia arson, but they have not been specifically charged in the UW fire. But all the suspects have been previously charged in connection with a string of environmental crimes across the West between 1996 and 2001. An additional 11 people also have been charged in those crimes, ranging from a fire at an Olympia wildlife laboratory, to the toppling of an electrical transmission tower in Oregon to a $12 million arson at a ski resort in Vail, Colo.
The new indictment says Waters, Solondz, Overaker and Tubbs, along with Rodgers, set out in early 2000 to recruit more activists to their cause, holding a series of clandestine meetings in four states to discuss tactics. In one meeting in Santa Cruz, Calif., one conspirator demonstrated how to create a fire bomb, prosecutors allege. A few months later, they contend, Solondz and others visited a Monsanto canola farm in Dusty, Whitman County, and ruined five acres of the crop. The next spring, prosecutors allege, Solondz and others cut the bark of 800 hybrid poplar trees at three farms in Corvallis, Ore., run by Oregon State University. Authorities believe Solondz and Overaker are out of the country. Waters is free pending trial. Tubbs is in jail in Oregon awaiting trial.The horticulture center has since been rebuilt, at a cost of $7 million.

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