Free Republic

PORTLAND, Ore. – Radical environmentalist Tre Arrow on Tuesday pleaded guilty to arson charges as part of a deal with prosecutors that will keep him behind bars for more than two years. Arrow, who legally changed his name from Michael Scarpitti, was charged with firebombing three cement trucks at Ross Island Sand & Gravel in Portland and setting fire to logging trucks and a tractor near Estacada. On his Web site, the 34-year-old said recently he did not want to risk receiving a life prison sentence and called the plea deal an offer he "couldn't refuse." On Tuesday, he entered...

03/17/2008: "Eco-Terrorism On Orcas" ”I did it to punish the rich white people of Orcas Island and make them pay for the death of the whales and the depletion of the rain forests” -Mondragon Gabriel Thomas Mondragon, 29 years old, who recently arrived from New Mexico, explained to Sheriff’s Deputies that in an attempt to make the people on Orcas “suffer just like the whales and trees”, he attempted to use a tree limbing saw -on a metal pole- to cut through a 69,000 volt power line.

Portland, Ore. (AP) -- An environmental activist who was serving time in a Canadian prison has been extradited to the United States to stand trial on ecoterrorism charges despite his arguments that he faced political persecution here. Tre Arrow, formerly Michael James Scarpitti, was indicted by a U.S. grand jury in April 2004 on charges of taking part in the destruction of concrete and logging trucks in Oregon. The indictment came after his arrest in British Columbia on local charges of shoplifting, assault and obstructing a police officer after a security guard caught him trying to steal a pair of...

Giving birth is a burden on the world. This is according to British born, Toni Vernelli, 35, who had an abortion 10 years ago to ensure her carbon footprint would be kept to a minimum, the U.K.'s Daily Mail reported Sunday. Vernelli -- who works for an environmental charity -- was later sterilized to help "protect the planet", the Mail reported. "Having children is selfish. It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet," Vernelli told the Daily Mail, adding she believes bringing new life into the world only adds to the problem. The Mail also...

SACRAMENTO - A federal jury on Thursday found a 29-year-old environmental activist guilty of conspiring to burn down or blow up a northern California dam, a genetics lab, cell phone towers and other targets. Eric McDavid of Foresthill, Calif. faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for what FBI agents said was as an eco-terrorist plot in the name of the Earth Liberation Front, a shadowy, loose-knit group of environmentalists that has claimed credit for arsons throughout the West. McDavid and two others were arrested in January 2006 after purchasing bottles of bleach, a car battery,...

A man who set firebombs in seven large SUVs last March pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 years in prison Wednesday. Grant Barnes... using the methods of the eco-terrorist group Earth Liberation Front... When Barnes was arrested, police found a box of seven of the devices in the back of his car. Police said they are replicas of bombs shown on ELF's Web site.

Two years after his 2002 graduation with honors as a double major in physics and math, Cottrell was charged and convicted as one of the nation's first ecoterrorists of the post-Sept. 11 era. He was found guilty of conspiracy and arson in the 2003 firebombings of Hummer and other sport-utility vehicle dealerships in the Los Angeles area to advocate a radical environmentalism. Two conspirators remain at large... In what prosecutors say was an example of his brazenness -- his supporters say it evidenced his behavioral disorder, one that's akin to a high-functioning autism -- Cottrell became a remorseless braggart while...

U.S. Seeks Closing of Visa Loophole for Britons -Full Story- Omar Khyam, the ringleader of the thwarted London bomb plot who was sentenced to life imprisonment on Monday, showed the potential for disaffected young men to be lured as terrorists, a threat that British officials said they would have to contend with for a generation.But the 25-year-old Mr. Khyam, a Briton of Pakistani descent, also personifies a larger and more immediate concern: as a British citizen, he could have entered the United States without a visa, like many of an estimated 800,000 other Britons of Pakistani origin.American officials, citing...

A Denver judge halved the bond today for a suspected eco-terrorist accused of setting firebombs in large SUVs after his father, a Colorado Springs lawyer, agreed to post the bond. Bond for Grant Barnes, 24, was reduced from $200,000 to $100,000 after defense attorney Phil Cherner told the judge that Barne’s father, Thomas Barnes, a former deputy district attorney in El Paso County, would ensure that his son appears in court. Prosecutor Ryan Younggren said he and the victims objected to a bond reduction because Grant Barnes might plant more firebombs if he gets out. Grant Barnes, suspected of using...

Wednesday, May 23, 2007 The horrors facing a first offender locked up with hardened criminals in the nation's high-security federal prisons highlighted testimony Tuesday in the sentencing hearing of Stanislas Meyerhoff, the first of 10 defendants to be sentenced in the Operation Backfire prosecution of radical underground environmental activists. The hearing is expected to conclude today in Eugene before U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken, who will decide Meyerhoff's prison term and rule whether his crimes were acts of terrorism, a ruling that could bring a stiffer sentence. Through the day, prosecution and defense lawyers dueled over whether Meyerhoff was an...

EUGENE, Ore. – Declaring fires set at a police station, an SUV dealer and a tree farm acts of terrorism, a federal judge Wednesday sentenced the first of 10 members of a radical environmental group to 13 years in prison. U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken commended Stanislas Meyerhoff for having the courage to “do the right thing” by informing on his fellow arsonists after his arrest, but declared that his efforts to save the earth by setting fires were misguided and cowardly, and contributed to an unfair characterization of others working legally to protect the environment as radicals. “It was...

Rachel Carson honor at risk in Senate May 23, 2007 WASHINGTON – Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn has effectively blocked a resolution to honor environmental author Rachel Carson on the 100th anniversary of her birth, saying that her warnings about environmental damage have put a stigma on potentially lifesaving pesticides, congressional staffers said yesterday. Sen. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., had intended to submit a resolution celebrating Carson, author of the 1962 book “Silent Spring,” for her “legacy of scientific rigor coupled with poetic sensibility.” Carson, who died in 1964, would have turned 100 this Sunday. Cardin has delayed the legislation, a spokeswoman...

Apparently, saving the whales is more important than saving 5.5 billion people. Paul Watson, founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and famous for militant intervention to stop whalers, now warns mankind is “acting like a virus” and is harming Mother Earth. Watson’s May 4 editorial asked the question “The Beginning of the End for Life as We Know it on Planet Earth?” Then he left no doubt about the answer. “We are killing our host the planet Earth,” he claimed and called for a population drop to less than 1 billion. The commentary reminded readers that Watson...

Activist a 'pirate,' not eco-terrorist By ROD MCGUIRK ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER MELBOURNE, Australia -- Paul Watson flies the Jolly Roger from his ship and boasts of ramming more boats than any living seafarer, part of an anti-whaling crusade that even Greenpeace calls too radical. Watson and his group came under withering criticism this season, summer in the Antarctic, for tactics that some say put the lives of whales above the lives of people. A Japanese whaling ship caught fire after being chased and harassed by Watson's fleet, the ships and volunteers of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which not only...

J.D. Protiva now faces criminal assault charges in addition to Forest Service charges of illegal logging and construction. A Coconino County grand jury has indicted J.D. Protiva on six felony charges ranging from aggravated assault to endangerment after he said he strung heavy cables across a motorcycle trail on the flanks of the San Francisco Peaks. One motorcyclist hit a cable earlier this fall on the Challenger Trail near Schultz Pass and fell. He was not seriously injured. Protiva appeared before Judge Fred Newton at Coconino County Superior Court for a few minutes on Tuesday afternoon. He asked for a...

For anyone who has seen The Manchurian Candidate, the recent nomination of Hank Paulson for Treasury Secretary should be a big scare. In the film, private interests brainwash a candidate for the presidency. By using psychological triggers, the private (or I suppose we could call them “special”) interest manipulates the unknowing candidate as a puppet to do their bidding.  On Tuesday President Bush announced his nomination of Henry “Hank” Paulson for Treasury Secretary. Paulson, currently the CEO of financial giant Goldman Sachs, is generally well-regarded by his peers on Wall Street. During his tenure, Goldman has seen some of the...

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...

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. 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...

SAN DIEGO (AP) - Federal prosecutors on Wednesday unsealed an indictment charging an environmental activist with teaching others how to start an arson fire during a 2003 lecture in San Diego, where the costliest act of ecoterrorism in U.S. history had just occurred. Prosecutors said Rodney A. Coronado gave the lecture 15 hours after a $50 million fire destroyed a massive apartment complex in a north San Diego neighborhood. The indictment, however, does not link Coronado to that fire. Coronado, 39, was arrested Wednesday in Tucson, Ariz., on a charge of distribution of information relating to explosives, destructive devices and...

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...