see link for full story
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2012/1 ... riorities/How The Pursuit Of Animal Liberation Activists Became Among The FBI’s ‘Highest Domestic Terrorism Priorities’
By: Leighton Woodhouse Saturday October 27, 2012 11:57 am
On January 16, 2006, two federal agents pulled off of Oregon’s Route 66 and onto a dirt road in the Southern Cascades, about nineteen miles northeast of downtown Ashland. They didn’t get far. There was a blizzard, and the road was buried in snow. The agents were forced to stop just a couple miles short of their destination.
On most winter mornings, the road that forced the agents’ retreat was plowed by Jonathan Paul, a tall, broad-shouldered, 39 year-old volunteer firefighter with a shaved head and a soul patch. Paul had gotten off to a late start that day; it was nearly time for lunch. While the FBI agents sat in their stalled vehicle, Paul climbed into his snow plow, which he kept parked beside his fire truck in the garage next to the solar-powered house where he lived with his wife and three dogs. At the intersection with Route 66, the agents watched as Paul pulled up the road and drove past them. They turned their car around and followed him onto the mountain highway.
Five minutes later, Paul pulled into the parking lot of the Green Springs Inn to order one of the few vegan items on the menu of the only restaurant in the area. The FBI vehicle pulled in behind him, and the agents followed Paul inside. One of them flashed his badge, and Paul knew at once that a nearly nine year-old crime had finally and inevitably caught up to him.
On July 21, 1997, the Cavel West Horse Rendering Plant, in Redmond, Oregon, was burned to the ground. It was never rebuilt. While in operation, the Belgian-owned slaughterhouse killed and dismembered as many as 500 horses per week, according to Paul, many of them formerly wild animals rounded up by the Bureau of Land Management and adopted out to private individuals who then sold them to the plant to be butchered. The meat was packaged and shipped to Europe and Japan for human consumption.
For over a decade, neighbors had petitioned and protested in a seemingly endless campaign to shut the plant down. In addition to the ethical concerns, Redmond locals complained about the stench, the constant screams of the horses, and the blood overflowing the local sewage system, backing up into neighbors’ bathtubs and knocking out the city’s water treatment plant.
An incendiary device consisting of a mixture of glycerin soap and diesel fuel nicknamed “vegan jello” accomplished what a decade of legal means had failed to achieve. Paul, along with an activist he had recruited named Jennifer Kolar, had mixed the fuel. The other three participants in the arson were Kevin Tubbs, a Nebraskan transplant who had moved to Eugene to work for the Earth First! Journal, Joseph Dibee, a software engineer at Microsoft, and Jacob Ferguson, who later turned into an FBI informant. Tubbs served as driver and lookout. Ferguson carried the fuel, and Dibbee planted the devices. After the ignition timers were set, the perpetrators fled the scene in Tubbs’ van. They stopped at a pre-determined location to dispose of their clothes, gloves and masks and destroy them with muriatic acid. A few days later, the “Animal Liberation Front – Equine and Zebra Liberation Network” faxed a communiqué to Craig Rosebraugh, ALF spokesperson, detailing the steps taken in the action and claiming responsibility for it.
Paul was prepared for his arrest; he had been expecting it. Over the last four years, the government had conducted a multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional investigation into a string of arsons and other property crimes by radical animal rights and environmental activists with the Animal Liberation Front and its sister organization, the Earth Liberation Front. The investigation was called “Operation Backfire.” The month before, based on information provided by Ferguson, who had worn a wire and recorded conversations with his former colleagues, the FBI had arrested Tubbs, along with six other underground activists (Ferguson had once tried to record Paul implicating himself as well, but Paul had refused to discuss his past with him). Paul had known and worked alongside some of the arrestees; others were strangers.
Paul could not have known it, but his fellow activists’ long-standing pledges to refuse to assist prosecutors in the event of arrest broke down almost immediately. All of the defendants except for two — William Rodgers and Daniel McGowan — had hastily signed plea bargains and agreed to cooperate with the investigation (McGowan’s case was the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary, “If a Tree Falls”). Rodgers was so shaken by the government’s success in turning his co-defendants that he committed suicide in his cell.
Information provided by the cooperating defendants led to the arrests of Paul and six other activists. Three of them chose to cooperate with the FBI, while four, including Paul, refused. (Three more suspects remain fugitives, Dibbee among them.)
Four days after his arrest, the Department of Justice issued a press release referring to Paul and the other defendants as terrorists. At a press conference announcing the activists’ indictment, FBI Director Robert Mueller, standing alongside Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, cited the pursuit of environmental and animal rights-related criminal perpetrators as among the agency’s “highest domestic terrorism priorities.”
by fruhmenschen » Sat Oct 20, 2012 2:16 am 
