Yesterday’s Seattle Times contained an article titled “Is Ecosabotage Terrorism?”
Who is a terrorist?
After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, it was clean-cut Timothy McVeigh, a brooding loner — infused with hatred of the government — who was convicted and put to death for that crime.
After 9/11, which claimed the lives of more than 2,900 people, it was the bearded visage of Osama bin Laden.
This year, the Bush administration has touted the arrests of terrorists of a different kind — homegrown militants who have embarked on arson attacks to protest treatment of animals and the environment.
During the past three years alone, FBI counterterrorism agents have conducted at least 190 investigations into property crimes claimed by the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). None of the crimes injured or killed people.
Now, before you ask if this was an editorial, let me confirm that it was not. It was printed and e-published in the ‘Local News’ section, but we’ll get back to that in a minute.
The article goes on to talk about the FBI keeping an eye on and investigating the crimes committed by the enviro-terrorists, as well as quote members of that agency, the legal counsel for the eco-terrorists and a guy from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Of course, the FBI quotes confirm that these crimes should be investigated by the FBI as terrorism, but the last two do their best to minimize the crimes and their destruction, even after the article finds legal definitions that agree with the FBI official that coordinated property destruction attacks are terrorism.
I seriously doubt that the article’s author, Hal Bernton, wrote the title before the story; so one has to wonder why he titled it as such? Even Canada’s uber-leftist Globe and Mail was able to come up with the gumption to call eco-celeb fugitive, Tre Arrow, an “Environmental Terrorist” in last Friday’s edition.
Which brings me back to as to why the story appeared where it did int he paper. Could it be partly because Arrow is very likely soon to be returning the local area to be tried on Arson charges stemming from when he burned a Portland logging companies trucks down to the rims?
Granted, it is very unlikely that anyone from the Seattle Times subscription area will ever be on Arrow’s jury, but if you’re going to get a question answered by your article, you don’t go asking it at the beginning unless you’re still wondering.