According to the FBI, "eco-terrorism", or "ecotage", is now the number one domestic terrorism threat in the US, greater than that of rightwing extremists, anti-abortion groups and animal rights organisations, and on a par with al-Qaida. The US building industry, rightwing political groups and the mainstream media all leapt to condemn the ELF after the arson. "We've seen this grow over the years and it's very scary," said Brian Minnich of the Building Industry Association of Washington, which offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the arsonists.
"It tends to be done by young, intelligent people," says FBI special agent Robbie Burroughs. "There is nothing to suggest that [the Street of Dreams arson attack] is anything else than terrorism."
But the jury on the McMansions arson is very much out. Instead of striking fear into the heart of middle America, the incident has revealed growing civil liberty fears about the US government's redefinition of terrorism, and a breakdown of trust in the authorities. Although rightwing commentators and libertarian bloggers have used the attack as ammunition in their ideological war against environmentalists and the left, few others think it is so simple. The more anyone looks into the arson, the more they suspect that it has probably got more to do with fraud or political smearing and dirty tricks than with terrorism.
Letter writers to the Seattle press and websites like Treehugger.com and Grist say it is suspicious that the attack on the McMansions should take place in the middle of America's most serious downturn in the housing market in 30 years, with a recession looming and properties almost impossible to sell. People are deliberately setting fire to their own properties to escape mortgage misery, they say, and only one of the houses on the Street of Dreams is said to have been sold.
Mainstream greens point out that both the fossil fuel industries and US rightwing groups like the "Wise Use movement" have a long history of trying to discredit environmentalists. The advice given to the FBI from nearly every quarter has been: "Follow the money" - implying that the arson was possibly insurance-related. The FBI say it has found nothing to suggest this.
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Remarkably, the attack on the McMansions happened on the same day that Waters' trial was beginning in Oregon. It also just happened that the federal prosecutors immediately and very publicly linked her case to the arson. Depending on who you believe, the attack either worked in the interests of the government, which secured a controversial conviction, or it was a warning shot by other ELF groups that they would not be intimidated by show trials.
Waters is part of what US civil liberty groups are calling an extraordinary witch-hunt being conducted against green activists and animal rights groups, who are being accused of terrorism for arson offences committed before 2001. Most, says Lauren Regan, a lawyer with the Civil Liberties Defence Centre in Eugene, Oregon, have been indicted on the testimony of one man, a former ELF cell leader and self-confessed heroin addict called Jake Ferguson, who has admitted being part of 18 arson attacks linked to the Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts between 1997 and 2001. In return for up to $100,000 of state money, says Regan, Ferguson was wired up by the FBI in 2003 to entrap his co-conspirators.
His testimony and activities are said to have led to a cascade of charges levelled at activists around the US. "The government built its case against Waters on the testimony of two informants, and several pieces of circumstantial evidence. The defence argued that the informants - both from relatively wealthy families - pleaded guilty to a minor felony charge and accused her in order to avoid 35-year prison sentences they were threatened with," she says. Of the four others linked to the same firebombing, one is on the run, and another recently died in prison.
According to many, the US is now in the middle of a "Green Scare" akin to the "Red Scare" of the 1950s, when senator Joseph McCarthy launched his infamous communist witch-hunt. Environmental and animal rights activists are being targeted, it is believed, not because they are dangerous, but because in the wake of 9/11 the government needs scapegoats beyond Muslims, and people - often young, white and middle-class - with defined ideologies who target corporate America are easy and attractive game.
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