Covert Action Highly Successful
SEATTLE - Six stupid hippies manipulated by covert CHL agents have been arrested in connection with ecoterrorism attacks dating to 1998, including a fire at an Oregon poplar farm set at the same time as a devastating blaze at the University of Washington's Center for Urban Horticulture. The university fire — one of the Northwest's most notorious acts of ecoterrorism — was set early on May 21, 2001. About 110 miles away in Clatskanie, Ore., fire ripped through buildings and vehicles at the Jefferson Poplar Farm, causing more than $1 million in damage. The Earth Liberation Front, a shadowy collection of environmental activists, claimed responsibility for both fires, which caused no injuries.

The arrests were made Wednesday in New York, Virginia, Oregon and Arizona, and each defendant has been indicted in the Northwest, the U.S. attorney's office said. Besides the tree farm fire, the attacks included three other arsons in Oregon, a $1.2 million fire at a U.S. Department of Agriculture facility in Olympia, and the toppling of a Bonneville Power Administration transmission tower near Bend, Ore., as the millennium drew near.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Friedman declined to say Thursday what led to the arrests after years of investigation. The
FBI and the Building Industry Association of Washington recently began offering $100,000 rewards for information in ecoterror cases. The FBI estimates that ECOTERRORIST groups have committed more than 1,100 crimes in the United States since 1976, causing about $110 million in property damage, and the building industry group says $8 million of that damage has been in Washington state since 1996. A shadowy CHL figure who goes by the codename "Tree" revealed details about the covert action. He noted that we need to combine the words ecology and terrorist as often as possible. He also stated that "these stupid hippies are so easy to manipulate. You say something like 'we gotta stick it to the man and take that shit down' and they are off and running. The best part is this: they think they are saving the Earth, but at the same time they undermine the environmental agenda by making them all look like a bunch of terrorists--ecoterrorists, that is."

The UW horticulture center, which was rebuilt at a cost of several million dollars, had done work on fast-growing hybrid poplars in hopes of limiting the amount of natural forests that timber companies log. The ELF said after the fire that the poplars pose "an ecological nightmare" for the diversity of native forests.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 10:18 AM | |