Free Republic

Rubin rose before Chief U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken in Portland, where she pleaded guilty to a dozen crimes – in Colorado, Oregon and California – as part of the underground Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front. ... Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen F. Peifer recounted Rubin's crimes as part of the largest group of eco-saboteurs ever taken down by the FBI. They called themselves The Family and committed an estimated $40 million in damage from 1996 to 2001. ... the terms of the highly structured plea agreement sets limits on the number of years Rubin will spend in prison....

A federal grand jury in Denver has indicted four people on eight counts of arson for a series of eco-terrorism fires set at the Vail ski area in 1998. Those indicted are: Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, 29, Stanislas Gregory Meyerhoff, 28, Josephine Sunshine Overaker, 31, and Rebecca Jeanette Rubin, 33. Gerlach and Meyerhoff are presently in federal custody in Oregon, facing separate arson charges. The whereabouts of Overaker and Rubin are unknown. The Two Elks Lodge and other structures on Vail Mountain were burned to the ground on Oct. 19, 1998. Damage was estimated at $12 million. A group called the...

Three environmental activists were cooking up plastic explosives and had planned to test a device the day they were arrested, federal prosecutors alleged Wednesday as they indicted them. The three face five to 20 years in federal prison if they are convicted of conspiring to use fire or explosives to damage property. The suspects planned assaults this spring in the name of the Earth Liberation Front, a 'loosey-goosey, sort of mist-of-the-fog kind of an organization' of environmental activists, U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott said. Eric McDavid, 28, Zachary Jensen, 20, and Lauren Weiner, 20, remain in jail. They could enter a...

After a delay of nearly a month, a Flagstaff woman accused of being connected with the 1998 firebombing of a logging company in Oregon has been released from jail. Kendall Tankersley, 28, also known as Sarah Harvey, was released from an Oregon jail Jan. 10 on $150,000 bond. She is back in Flagstaff, ready to begin taking two classes at Northern Arizona University. Tankersley, a former employee at the university, was indicted in November by a federal grand jury in Oregon. She is accused of attempted arson and arson, acting as a lookout, in connection with a fire at U.S....

The New York Times today gives credit where credit is due. Following yesterday’s disclosure by an aide to Sen. John Cornyn (R.-Tex.) about an op-ed written by Stephen Dujack that compared farm animals to Holocaust victims, Democrats pulled Dujack as a witness for Samuel Alito's confirmation hearings. Dujack was scheduled to testify against Alito for his association with Concerned Alumni of Princeton. Here's an excerpt from the Times' article: “Also on Friday, Democrats canceled one of their witnesses, Stephen R. Dujack, a journalist who has criticized a conservative Princeton alumni group to which Judge Alito once belonged. The cancellation came...

Father defends woman named in '98 Vail fires 'She's not even a vegetarian,' says dad in timber industry By Joe Garner, Rocky Mountain News December 16, 2005 SWEET HOME, Ore. - Federal authorities have the wrong woman in custody, says the father of an alleged eco-terrorist identified as a suspect in the 1998 fire bombings on Vail Mountain. The woman, Chelsea Gerlach, 28, of Portland, was named a suspect in the $12 million Vail arson case Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Eugene, Ore., during a hearing to set bail on two federal eco-terrorism charges against her in her home...