.
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<f. -
Zapatista Army of National Liberation, Shining Path (!!),
Animal Liberation Front, and - you guess it - Unabomber! A
sidebar to the article claims that the Native Forest network
was "hand-picked" under the personal supervision of Prince
Phillip (where's my paycheck Phil?). It only gets weirder.
Another headline article in EIR is entitled "Greenpeace: Shock
Troops for a New Dark Age."
There's lots more. During the 1994 Second International
Temperate Forest Conference, which ABC, the FBI and Clausen
claim was attended by the Unabomber, Clausen issued a press
release entitled "Terrorist Group Earth First! Sponsors
Conference at the University of Montana." It contains a
laundry list of people and organizations which were slated to
attend (plucked straight off EcoNet by clever Clausen), all
thus connected with Terrorism because Barry says it's a
terrorist conference. He asks why a "terrorist organization"
is being allowed to use a university facility that is funded by
the citizens of Montana?
You get the idea. There's plenty more garbage where this
came from. We are likely to see more of this crackpot in the
near future. The bummer is, people believe the crap he is
spewing on his frequent speaking tours. Be sure to attend and
record it if he comes to a town near you.
The real kicker is that Senators Conrad Burns and Slade
Gorton, at Barry's urging and based on his hyped-up
"information" contained in a document he wrote entitled
"Report on Terrorism: The Real Truth," wrote to the head of
the FBI in June of 1995 asking him for an investigation based
on Clausen's info of "organized crime, drug dealing, and Earth
First (lumped in one sentence in the letter). The Unabomber
may well be the catalyst for this investigation.
We need lots of help tracking Clausen and countering his
lies with the facts. Especially with this unibomber mess
"exploding" in our faces! Let me know if you can help. And
watch your topknots.
For the Forest,
Phil Knight
Native Forest Network
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No justice, no peace.
FYf:
See also USA Today, 4/10/96, article by ex Reagan cabinet official Linda
Chavez, "Want motive for unabomber? Media should ask more questions about
Kaczynski's ties to radical environmental groups."
Clearly there has been a campaign since Gilbert Murray's death to make
the Unabomber fill the shoes of the strawman "eco-terrorist" that the
anti-enviros have falsely painted.
I don't think this will go away, they'll keep flacking the hell out of
it. Please send me anythiing related you come across. Note that this article
which was written 4/8 moved onto the CompuServe wire 4/10.
Expect more of this trash.
John Stauber
........................
Forwarded Story
......................
Headline: ENVIRONMENT: UNABOMBER CASE SPOTLIGHTS RADICAL ...
Wire Service: OTC (COMTEX Newswire)
Date: Wed, Apr 10, 1996
SAN FRANCISCO, (Apr. 8) IPS - The arrest by U.S. federal investigators of a
suspect in the case of the mail-bomb anarchist known as "the Unabomber" has
thrown a radical environmental group into the spotlight.
A hunt by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), conducted by 150
officers headquartered here, culminated in the arrest last week of Theodore
Kaczynski.
Described by the FBI as a white male in his 50s, Kaczynski was a 1962
graduate of Harvard University who taught mathematics at the University of
California at Berkeley in 1967-68. He later exchanged his university life for
that of a recluse in a remote mountain town in the northern Rocky Mountain state
of Montana.
In the past 18 years, the Unabomber has killed three people and wounded 23
others. According to a manifesto the Unabomber mailed last year to two
newspapers, the mail bombs were meant to bring attention to the disastrous
impact of the industrialization of society.
Television news reports here have sought to link Kaczynski to Earth First, an
anarchist group with thousands of followers across the country. ABC network news
noted that, for one thing, in 1994 Kaczynski attended an Earth First
presentation called Focus on the Multinationals. The presentation was at a
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conference held by the Native Forest Network at the University of Montana.
A key concern of Earth First in this country is the rapid destruction of
ancient forests. Members advocate nonviolent resistance to logging by timber
companies. Activists have disabled equipment and sat in trees to stop logging.
Similar groups operate in Australia, England, Germany, and other countries.
Earth Firsters also drive metal spikes into trees to scare away loggers who
would not want to damage their saws and mill equipment. The activists insist
they always notify loggers of "spiking" to ensure that nobody gets hurt.
Earth First activists argue that the ABC story was built on old accusations
made by Barry Clausen, a timber industry worker who wrote a book titled "Walking
on the Edge: How I Infiltrated Earth First," published by the Contract Loggers
Association in Washington State.
Clausen claims that the last two people killed by the Unabomber worked for
organizations that were targets for protests in a list drawn up by the magazine
Live Wild or Die, published sporadically by Earth First sympathizers.
Among those targeted was the U.S. petroleum multinational company, Exxon.
Thomas J. Mosser, who was killed by a Unabomber mail bomb in December 1994,
worked for Burson-Marsteller, an advertising agency that did business with
Exxon. It is, however, unclear whether Mosser himself actually worked on Exxon
contracts.
Five months after Mosser died, another bomb blew up Gilbert Murray, president
of the California Forestry Association, another of the organizations on the Live
Wild or Die list.
Earth First activists point out that senior FBI staffer Horace Newborn has
since testified that the FBI now dismisses Clausen's evidence as unreliable.
But investigators have also kept tabs on Earth First because of a resemblance
between the Unabomber's ideology and that of the radical environmental group.
Earth First followers contend that human beings should not destroy or control
other species.
The Unabomber states in the 35,000-word manifesto, published by the
Washington Post and the New York Times, that "The positive ideal that we propose
is Nature. That is, WILD nature: those aspects of the functioning of the Earth
and its living things that are independent of human management and free of human
interference and control."
In the same manifesto the Unabomber apologizes to environmentalists for the
link that might be made between the manifesto and radical environmental
ideology.
The FBI has nevertheless conducted a major search in the San Francisco Bay
area, home of a large number of Earth First sympathizers. The probe was also
guided by the fact that five of the 16 bomb attacks by the Unabomber have
occurred in this area, two of them in the university town of Berkeley, east of
the San Francisco Bay.
"The FBI wanted to know if I had ever been to Idaho and all sorts of other
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matters," said Dennis Fritzinger of the Warrior Poet Society, one of those
•interviewed by the FBI. "I really do feel that there was an attempt to target
outspoken Earth Firsters."
"Earth Firsters are not violent," said another of the group's activists who
preferred not to be named. "But government agencies like the FBI like to portray
us that way because it makes people condemn us.“
Kaczynski's links to the Bay area have been noted. But staffers at University
of California-Berkeley say the man was just as reclusive when he lived here.
"Kaczynski seemed almost pathologically shy, and as far as I know he made no
close friends in the department," John Addison, then vice-chairman of the
mathematics department, wrote in a June 30, 1969 letter to Kaczynski's thesis
advisor at the University of Michigan. "Efforts to bring him more into the swing
of things had failed."
Earth First chroniclers say that the connections are simply a coincidence.
"I really don't think that the Unabomber was connected to Earth First," says
Susan Zakin, author of "Coyotes and Town Dogs," a book about Earth First.
Zakin says that Earth First has passed its peak as a national movement. In
fact, she credits part of this downfall to the FBI, which she says has sown fear
and paranoia among members.
Six years ago, a bomb exploded in a car carrying two prominent Earth First
activists, Darryl Cherney and Judi Bari, from a house in Oakland, near Berkeley.
The incident is often cited as evidence of the violent nature of Earth First.
But Bari and Cherney insist that the bomb was planted in the car, and they point
to the FBI. Bari is currently suing the federal agency over the incident that
caused her injury.
"If anything, the whole Unabomber incident shows how incompetent the FBI is,"
says Chris Clarke, editor of Terrain, the magazine of the Berkeley Ecology
Center. "Despite the millions of dollars that they spent on the investigation,
the capture of Kaczynski was a result of the fact that his family turned him
in."
Copyright 1996