This article kinda reminds me of the Dime Novel writers of yesteryear. The truth didn't mean as much as getting your name in print by telling Paul Bunyan type fables about folks that could hardly be as worthy of print as the authors claimed. If one could take the authors words and put them in a corn field, the Bull Patties could fertilize for a decade.



Interview with author of Coronado biopic (Counterpunch)‏

Sent: June 24, 2009 2:45:14 PM

Counterpunch Magazine
An Interview with Dean Kuipers
Firebrand: Rod Coronado's Flame War
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
June 19 - 21, 2009
http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair06192009.html

He was the firestarter, shooter of flaming arrows. He traveled the
night-path, unseen, leaving ashes and wreckage in his wake. He was the
escape artist, the man of few traces, the Yaqui warrior, who communed
with animistic spirits. He was the sinker of ships, liberator of
coyotes, scourge of the animal skinners.

Or so the myth goes, anyway.

He is, of course, Rod Coronado, the most notorious radical animal
rights activist—no, activist isn’t the right word—avenger of our time.
Some call Coronado a terrorist. But he is devoted to
non-violence—non-violence against living beings. He shows no mercy
toward machines, research labs, fur farms. In dozens of incendiary
actions that destroyed tens of millions in property, not one person
was seriously injured. Not even Rod. Yet it is fair to say that
Coronado’s season of retributive fire changed the game for
environmentalists and animal rights activists. It upped the ante.
Congress, pushed by the fur lobby and medical research establishment,
used Coronado’s dramatic raids as a pretext for a series of punitive
federal and state laws that equated nonviolent acts of sabotage to
domestic terrorism. Burning down a barn that housed animal skinning
equipment or torching a few SUVs could now land you in federal prison
for twenty or thirty years. With a straight face, the FBI would claim
that environmentalists, like Coronado, (and not neo-Nazis like John
Van Brunn or anti-abortion zealots like Scott Roeder) constituted the
most dangerous domestic threat to the United States. More than a
dozen activists, many of them inspired by Coronado’s tactics, are now
in the federal pen staring down long prison terms for emulating
Coronado’s pyrowar. How did it come to this?

Now veteran journalist Dean Kuipers steps forward with a thrilling
book about Rod Coronado’s life and his audacious assaults against the
fur industry and the medical research complex. Kuipers’ book,
Operation Biteback, is an intimate and chromatic portrait of an
American Revolutionary, the John Brown of the Animal Rights Movement.
Kuipers has known Coronado since the early 1990s and has had
unparalleled access to Rod and his circle. All this adds up to a rare
inside look at the tactics and social dynamics a militant underground
movement. Kuipers vividly evokes the battleground and the stakes,
taking his readers into the gruesome abattoirs of the animal skinners
and the vile medical research labs on college campuses across the
country. The more buildings Coronado torched, the more draconian was
the government response. In tracking the often bumbling efforts of
the FBI to nail Coronado, Kuipers also tells the grim story of how
non-violent environmental activism came to be treated as terrorism by
law enforcement at both the state and federal level--Constitution (and
coyotes) be damned.

Q -You first met Rod Coronado at a cafe in Venice, California in 1992.
At that very moment, the FBI was zeroing in on him for string of
daring raids and arsons at mink farms and animal research labs on
several campuses, including Oregon State, Washington State and
Michigan State. Even though the smoke was almost fresh on his
clothes, he looked you in the eye and told you he had nothing to do
with them. Did you believe him?

A -I believed Rod when he told me he was not the arsonist, but I
strongly suspected that he had inside knowledge about the arsons. He
was always in the proximity of the fires, yet it seemed so unlikely
that he would be talking to the press if he were guilty. This was
exactly the same position that law enforcement was forced to take at
the time: many people had a hunch that it was Rod, and some of the
state and federal arson investigators were sure it was him, but even
they had to admit there was simply no evidence. Nothing tied him to
the fires, so we all had to go with Rod’s own explanation: that he was
just the messenger for the ALF. It was being the messenger that
finally got him busted for the MSU fires; he was prosecuted for being
part of the conspiracy, not for setting the fire itself. But then,
unbeknownst to the rest of the world, part of his plea bargain was
that he admitted his role as the actual arsonist in all of the Bite
Back arsons. That information was sealed. No one knew that except some
federal prosecutors, his attorney and a judge, until Rod told me about
a decade later. He had a good poker face.

During those years, Rod was living a double life--at night launching
raids to liberate mink and coyotes and burning research labs during
the day publicly reporting on these anonymous feats as the spokesman
for a group called CAFF and later the Animal Liberation Front. You
quote the Oregon eco-commune leader Chant Thomas as referring to Rod
as living a "Clark Kent/Superman" existence. This must have exacted a
tremendous psychological toll, as well as putting the FBI on his
trail.

By his own admission, Rod really wanted to control the way his message
was received by the press. He wanted his Operation Bite Back actions
to be understood as Ghandian nonviolence and as protests for the way
animals are treated. Not as rash, unconsidered violence. He thought
the rest of the movement would step up and explain that to the press,
but of course they wanted no association with any arson campaign. Too
dangerous. So he exposed himself to the press, over and over, and his
paranoia grew. I think he became a paranoid wreck. He had no intention
of getting caught, so he had to accept that he would die in this
campaign, and putting his face on TV day after day only made it more
likely someone would come after him. His relationships with all his
friends and lovers and supporters were strained by his behavior. Lots
of people wanted him to stay away. I think he came to believe that the
fur industry had a bounty on his head because of this paranoia. He did
have some reason to believe it was a bounty, but it was a thin logic.
His exhaustion and fear just blew it all out of proportion.

Q -For me, Rod's first act of sabotage, the sinking of half of the
Iceland whaling fleet, remains the most spectacular and
consequential. Can you describe that raid and more generally his
relationship with Paul Watson and Sea Shepherd?

A -Paul Watson was one of Rod’s earliest environmentalist heroes and
role models, and he still maintains great respect for him today. Rod
joined Sea Shepherd and began giving them money when he was 12 years
old. From my discussions with them both, the respect is mutual and
heartfelt. Rod had many historical role models, especially among
Native Americans, but Paul was the one Rod saw on TV, out on the ice
in Canada, physically interfering with the killing of seals. As Rod
told me later, he didn’t grow up wanting to be the cameraman on such a
campaign, even though he knew the images were part of Paul’s strategy:
he wanted to be the man stopping the killing just like Paul. And,
remarkably, immediately after leaving high school he skipped college
and joined Sea Shepherd with his parents’ blessing and Paul welcomed
him. Rod’s parents dropped him off at the boat. He never looked back.

Rod and David Howitt went to Iceland in 1986 to stop the country’s
whaling industry, which was small but took a fair number of whales
every year. They lived in England for a bit while the Sea Shepherds
battled the traditional killing of pilot whales in the Faroe Islands,
then, already veterans of that campaign but only about 20 years old,
they both moved to Iceland and got jobs where they could observe the
whaling business there for about a month. They didn’t just sail in
there and do the job in a day. This action got a lot of accolades
because it was a model of nonviolence: they doggedly recorded the
comings and goings of the security for the boats and the whaling plant
until they were sure of a time when targets would be empty. They went
on to the boats when they knew they were empty, and still searched
them to be certain. Then they opened the valves in the bottom that
would let sea water in, at some fair risk to themselves. They walked
away undiscovered, but even if they had been arrested, their intention
was that no one was going to be hurt.

Same for the whaling station. They smashed it up and damaged
equipment, but made it obvious they were doing so. They didn’t
sabotage the equipment in a way that someone would inadvertently use
it and be injured or killed. They made a loud, clear statement. It was
only luck that made it all go so well that they got on a plane and got
away, but anti-whaling sympathizers around the world were thankful
that they’d done it in such a way that no one was put at risk.

Plus, it was 100 percent effective. Those boats did not kill whales.
It took the Icelanders a while to refloat and rehab the boats, and
during that time whales were unmolested.

Q -Rod had multiple affairs during the time of his Operation Bite Back
and many of these women would also join him in his acts of sabotage.
During the GreenScare cases, the FBI turned jealous former lovers
into informants. Can you talk a little about the sexual relations of
the Animal Rights Movement underground?

A -Very interesting question. The threat attending movement romances
has definitely changed in the last few years, and as far as I can
tell, there are two explanations for what has changed between the
early ‘90s and now. The first is that in the Operation Bite Back
cases, prosecutors had no evidence against any of Rod’s contacts. They
jailed Kim Trimiew and Deb Stout for half a year each on contempt
charges, hoping they’d turn on Rod, but there was no evidence to
compel them to do so. They were massively inconvenienced, and
suffered, but they were not under threat of being prosecuted
themselves as accomplices. In the Green Scare cases, they had lots of
evidence in the form of testimony from a drug addict who was
definitely facing consequences from the drug charges and needed an
out.

The second is a change in the severity of the penalties allowed by the
new eco-terrorism laws and the use of terrorism sentencing
enhancements. Rod was prosecuted for arson, and got the max: 5 years.
If he’d been prosecuted today, he probably would have been charged
with multiple counts of “Use of a Destructive Device,” which could
have brought a Life sentence. Faced with a charges like Life + 1,115
years, as some of the Green Scare defendants were, and with strong
evidence against them making it clear they are likely to be convicted,
most people crack.

Sexually, however, I suspect this won’t change the basic dynamic of
love in the trenches. The heat of activism is a lusty environment, no
matter if you’re a nonviolent treehugger or a fire-and-brimstone
Christian evangelist or a crew of bank robbers: when the action is
hot, the one who is sharing it with you is also looking hotter. That
person next to you in the foxhole understands the cause and why it’s
important – or at least how you feel about it. They’re sharing a
campfire with you and maybe a cheap hotel room or at the very least, a
secret. That’s sexy. That’s not going to change. But these huge
potential prison sentences have definitely introduced a note of
caution into any relationship, even platonic ones.

Q -If you added up the amount of economic damage done by all of Rod's
acts of arson and sabotage is possible to come to any conclusions
about much of a bite Operation Bite Back took out of the fur industry
and the animal researchers? In other words, is there any evidence at
all that Coronado's raids inflicted any long-term damage on his
targets?

A -There was some damage and it had some strong effects. A couple
operations just folded up, like the Oregon State University
experimental fur farm at Corvallis; it was already greatly diminished
by public outcry against fur in the 1980s and early ‘90s, and was
being supported by grants, and Rod knew that, so he targeted that
grantor, the Mink Farmers Research Foundation. When Rod burned it, it
never recovered. Some other private farms also eventually decided to
go out of business rather than risk that kind of attention any
further. The man who sold Rod his mink farm went out of business right
there on the spot. So there were impacts.

But, as an industry, Teresa Platt of the Fur Commission USA tells me
that the industry was economically unharmed by Rod’s campaign.
Operation Bite Back was a strong psychological and political shock,
but never really threatened to shut down the industry.

Q -You've been writing about the radical environmental movement for a
long time time. How where does Coronado rank as a figure of influence
among the likes of Dave Foreman, Paul Watson, Mike Roselle and Judi
Bari?

A -Paul Watson has to be the big influencer right now, with his TV
show, “Whale Wars.” This is a coup in every way: as ecological
campaign, as media, as spiritual influence. No one in this movement
has ever broken through this big. Funny, because friends of Paul’s
tell me that, even back in the 1980s when Hollywood was optioning his
books for money, he downplayed the significance of that, saying that
what he really wanted was a show like MTV’s “Real World.” He wanted a
reality TV show to make a huge impact. He was right. Oddly, Paul
Watson is now the new Jacques Cousteau.

All these people are influential, however, among their various
constituencies. Roselle and Foreman are very well respected and that
respect crosses over to Republicans, conservatives, old-school
Conservationists, and Sixties-style activists who believe in beer and
truth-telling but still also have a traditional self-image as
patriotic Americans. Judi Bari is hugely influential among women and
North Coast forest activists. Getting carbombed definitely gives a
person a holy aura. Rodney is influential with a later generation and
his influence has persisted among the young. He is young-seeming, not
bound to Sixties ideologies or lifestyle tropes, not a hippie. He is a
Native American and thus seems less burdened by ideology and more
engaged in a spiritual pursuit. Plus he went way over the line into
hardcore direct action – arson, property destruction on a huge scale –
so he kicked open a door that many want to see left open: that one
solution to many ecological problems is just to sink the boat.

Q -Until recently, the radical environmental and animal rights
movement in the US (as opposed to Great Britain) could rightly claim
that no one had been killed or injured during any of its direct
actions. Can you address Rod Coronado's views on non-violence?

A -At the time of Operation Bite Back, Rod believed that no action was
violent if it didn’t harm or risk harm to any living thing. Thus,
arson was not violent if the building burned down and no one was hurt.
His definition is very clean and many people agree. Even the law used
to agree. The definition of violence and also terrorism was about
visiting hurt on human beings and animals up until the late 1980s. It
has helped Rod’s definition greatly that no one was ever hurt in
actions undertaken in the U.S., in over 1200 known actions and $1
billion in damages. That is an astounding track record. In the UK,
there have been injuries and even deaths attributed to the movement
and so the movement there has forfeited a bit of moral high ground.

There is a very important struggle going on right now that should be a
concern for the U.S. environmental and animal rights movements: those
who oppose the radical environmental agenda have worked with the U.S.
government to take control of the definitions of both nonviolence and
terrorism. Since the 1992 Animal Enterprise Protection Act, property
destruction is now defined as violent. Where that line is drawn has
now become incredibly vague. Pulling up survey stakes could now be
deemed “violent” under the law, depending on the situation. The 2001
Patriot Act and the 2006 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act have only
made that definition more malleable in the hands of prosecutors, by
opening up the definition of terrorism to mean almost any act in
support of a politically motivated federal act of violence. Even
websites. Or speeches.

In 2007, federal prosecutors threatened to give Rod a terrorism
sentencing enhancement for making a speech – a speech that resulted in
no actual act, no federal act of violence, no subsequent act at all.
Leading to the inevitable conclusion that even speech itself can be
construed as violent. And as terrorism.

Now the Bureau of Prisons is stretching the definitions of terrorism
to pull inmates into secretive Communications Management Units in
prison even if they’re acquitted of terrorism charges but are
convicted of some incidental procedural crime, like contempt of court.
Being associated with a terrorism investigation can get you locked up
in a hole where no one will ever find you. The rules about what is and
isn’t violence, and what is and isn’t terrorism are becoming very
blurry. It would serve the activist community well to begin demanding
clarity.

Q -Arson remains a taboo tactic even among some of the most militant
environmentalist, such as Dave Foreman in his prime and Paul Watson.
Can you speculate on why arson had such an allure for Coronado?

A -It’s easy, cheap and totally effective. Simple as that. If you burn
a business down, like Jonathan Paul and his co-defendants burned the
Caval West horse slaughterhouse, sometimes it never reopens. That can
cost as little as a gallon of gasoline and a sponge. For Rod and
others, it also once had a spiritual element; it was seen as a
cleansing fire. A redemptive act.

Q -It seems to me that Rod engendered tremendous loyalty among his
friends and often his friends paid a heavy price for even a passing
association with him. They were placed under surveillance, their
homes were raided, they were hauled before grand juries and publicly
harassed. At least three of his friends spent more than 150 days in
prison on contempt charges rather than talk about Rod to federal
grand juries. That goes with the territory, I guess. But on several
occasions Rod seemed to exploit this loyalty without much regard for
the potential consequences. I'm thinking here mainly of the
philosophy professor Ric Scarce, author of Eco-Warriors, who let Rod
stay in his house in Pullman while he and his family went on a
vacation. Rod used the Scarce home as a staging area to launch raids
on animal research labs on the campus. Is there any evidence he felt
any regret about the extreme jeopardy he exposed his friends and
family to?

A -Rod tells me he had all kinds of regrets, but in the same way he
had accepted that he would likely be killed during this campaign, he
accepted that he would also likely lose the friendships of everyone
who worked with him. He had decided this was just a cost of going to
war. Of course, it didn’t actually work out to be so clean and neat,
because Rod is a friendly, loving person and all throughout the
campaign he tried hard to maintain his relationships where he could.
He tried to convince people to forgive the fact that he had to go all
the way or else just quit. Then, much to his surprise, he survived and
eventually got out of prison and had to deal with all the messiness
he’d left. As you see in the beginning in my book (the final version
has a quote in the preface from an unidentified activist who is angry
at Rod), many people did not welcome him back afterward. Even now, 17
years after the last time he set any kind of fire that I know about,
people say they’re afraid to have him around.

Q -When Rod was arrested, the mainstream environmental and animal
rights movement were quick to denounce him. Indeed they even
supported bills like the Animal Enterprise Protection Act to prove
how much they opposed his tactics. Who stood by him?

A -The radicals and Indians stood by him. The Earth First Journal
lionized him and took him into its editorial collective: when he got
out of prison, he immediately went to work there. The Native American
community never even batted an eye. They were there for him all
through the trial and afterward. You can’t get a crew that is more
likely to doubt the claims of the federal government than Native
Americans. ALF and ELF and similar underground organizations quickly
claimed Rod as a hero. Among animal rights organizations, only PETA
came close to embracing him. Because Ingrid Newkirk’s positions are so
strident, she could afford to say she supported his goals, even if she
still had to back away from his use of arson. No membership group
could actually support the use of arson.

It is true that most mainstream groups had to denounce the use of
arson. It’s just too likely to hurt someone – a firefighter, a
passerby, and unintended victim. However, Rod didn’t really lose much
support among individuals in the movement. His stature amongst
environmental activists is largely untarnished. Privately, people
still tell me all the time that the Iceland action is one they will
admire forever and that Bite Back, though problematic, is work they
understand and respect. As one respected professor told me in a note a
few days ago (and I’m paraphrasing): “I’m sitting here drinking a Sam
Adams. He was another radical that was not embraced during his time.
But one day we’ll probably be drinking a Rod Coronado or a Dave
Foreman and toasting what a patriot he really was.” I think Rod’s
legacy among the movement is secure.

Q -The subtitle of your book is Rod Coronado's War to Save the
Wilderness. Isn't this something of a misnomer? Most of Rod's direct
action in Operation Bite Back was geared toward animal liberation
wasn't it, not keeping roads out of wild lands and chainsaws from old
growth forests?

A -True enough, it probably would have made more sense to say “Rod
Coronado’s War to Save American Wildlife.” But that’s just too
limiting. It was the mountains and trees and rivers and PEOPLE, too;
he was trying to save Native Americans as much as native wildlife. All
part of the wilderness, to me.

For at least, a couple of decades there's been a sometimes bitter
divide between animal rights activists and environmentalists. Rod was
someone who had a lot of respect in both of these often camps. But
his tenure as editor of the Earth First! Journal was contentious.
Many old-line Earth First!ers saw the Journal, once the principal
magazine of the radical environmental movement, become transformed
into an organ of the animal rights movement and stifled by an
obsession with identity politics.

Rod had spent a lot of time with militant movement women, Native
Americans and others who demanded to have their perfectly legitimate
issues heard, and who thought the EF Journal was a good place to air
them. He listened. He himself is Native American and of Mexican
heritage, so he brought his own concerns about the environmental
movement, which has always been about white men. You can see even in
the Bite Back communiqués that the list of key issues is broadening,
as several of the missives talk about the subjugation of women and
other issues that are not strictly about animals or conservation. This
was the main reason Dave Foreman told me he left Earth First!: he
understood that it was important to find supportive communities for
transgendered individuals, or multiracial environmentalists, but those
issues weren’t strictly about conservation of species. Those were
human problems, and needed a publication dedicated to human problems.
Rod was predisposed to have more tolerance for identity politics.

Q -While Rod grew up in a middle class Bay Area home, he is of Yaqui
descent and one of only a handful of environmental activists who
isn't white. Can you talk about the role that Native culture played
in informing Rod's philosophy and his style of resistance?

A -At one point in his life, Rod was a mad Indian. And Indians have
plenty of reasons to be mad. During Rod’s youth, the FBI snuffed the
American Indian Movement with a bag of dirty tricks and Rod studied
that history, the history of the Indian Wars of the 1800s, and the
particular histories of his personal heroes like Geronimo and Crazy
Horse. His heroes, including Ghandi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr., all died bloody.

That history drove him in two directions. For one, it drove him into
militant confrontation with those who exploit native wildlife. He saw
himself as a Native American defending his own kind. Like Geronimo, he
went to war.

However, indigenous spirituality also turned him away from that path.
When he was on the run after Operation Bite Back, his interest in
finding a living, ritualized spirituality on which he could base his
environmental activism drove him back to the Yaqui, on a quest. There,
he found he needed to help spiritual leader Anselmo Valencia, and the
at-risk youth on the Pascua reservation south of Tucson, and his own
people. He needed to help them get along and survive as people, not as
warriors in an environmental struggle. He veered off the warpath and
began working on the reservation, and particularly with religious
rituals and the youth. This was an entirely new direction that he
continued in prison and after he was released.

Q -Can you talk about Rod's relationship to his friend Jonathan Paul,
who in 2006 plead guilty to burning down the West Cavel
slaughterhouse in central Oregon?

A -I’ll let Rod and Jonathan Paul speak for themselves, I think, but
my understanding is that they came to some disagreements when they
were both working as Global Investigations in 1990 and ‘91, getting
video footage of fur operations, and Rod kept pushing for more
dangerous actions. They had a falling out, but when Rod was
underground Jonathan tried to see him and also defended him in public,
and went to prison on a contempt charge for half a year for refusing
to divulge information about him. And Rod expresses nothing but
admiration for that. So their mutual respect remained unbreakable.

Q -Rod came to believe that the fur industry and the feds had put a
bounty on his head and that he would likely be killed by the feds or
some hired gun of the fur lobby. Ironically, many of the fur farmers
felt the same way about Rod, believing that he was intent on hurting
or killing them. Can discuss the kind of paranoia that descended
over both camps?

A -I believe this came mostly from federal dissemination of
information about attacks in the UK, some of them unverified and some
later discovered to be the work of provocateurs. The UK animal rights
movement, beginning in the 1970s, had engaged in much more aggressive
actions, many including bodily harm to researchers and even attempted
murder, and all the talk at the federal level, including Congress, was
that this type of behavior was headed for the U.S. But it never
materialized. The movement in the U.S. was adamant about publicly
denouncing firearms, in particular.

Some of my interviews demonstrated this perfectly. One of the officers
who once spotted Rod doing surveillance at Washington State University
expressed certainty that Rod and his accomplice had a rifle. He was
terrified that they were going to engage in a “running gun battle.”
But Rod had no weapon with him on that surveillance. It was just fear
that made the officer see that.

Rod had more reason to think that he might be shot as he continued his
campaign. On more than one occasion, farmers told him outright that
they’d shoot trespassers, and many farm hands wore sidearms on the
job. Rod was breaking the law, trying to burn people’s property and
destroy their livelihoods in the dark of night. On one occasion a
farmer burst out of his trailer door with a rifle in his hands. That
wasn’t imagination. It just wasn’t so far-fetched that he might catch
a bullet in this line of work.

Q -In 1992, Congress enacted the Animal Enterprise Protection Act,
largely in response to Rod's raids on the University animal research
labs. This bill was the first step toward equating non-violent acts
of sabotage with eco-terrorism. It was followed over the next decade
by the Patriot Act and the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which
impose life sentences for non-violent crimes. Does Rod feel at all
responsible for prompting this crackdown? Should he?

A -He does not feel responsible for this, as far as I can tell.
Because he wasn’t alone. Even in 1992, there had been attacks at Texas
Tech and medical facilities out East that weren’t Rod’s doing and
which got even more Congressional attention than his campaign did. He
merely contributed. Rod has been most influential, however, when it
comes to communicating his beliefs about property destruction and
environmental philosophy. That has led to a serious and still-mounting
effort to shut him up, and shut up all peole like him. Thus, the BOP
has built the Communications Management units in prison to curtail the
prosyletizing of eco-radical inmates. And they’ve prosecuted Rod’s
speech.

And now, just in the last few days, they’ve imposed absolutely
outrageous probation restrictions on Rod, who is out of jail and
trying to reconstruct his life in Michigan. He was a model prisoner in
jail, but they’ve got him on house arrest, no cell phone, no computer,
a whole raft of draconian restrictions. It’s not because of his
behavior, or his crimes. And it contradicts the instructions of his
sentencing judge. It’s because of his influence as a communicator of
ideas.

Q -In 2006, Rod was arrested on the flimsy charge of demonstrating how
to use an explosive device during a talk in southern California, even
much more detailed information on how to make firebombs is available
to any teenager on the internet or in the Anarchist's Cookbook.
During the trial, it was revealed that federal agents had
deliberately manipulated some of the evidence to make it seem like
Coronado was encouraging someone in the audience to make such a bomb
and use it. The case ended in a hung jury with 11 of the 12 jurors
voted to acquit. Can you explain why Coronado ended up entering a
plea deal in this case and serving a one-year prison term? Doesn't it
set a bad precedent for first amendment cases?

A -Yes, the First Amendment took a real ding in this weird, rare case.
But they prosecuted Rod for a speech he made regularly. And even
though the government lost, it required huge resources for Rod to
muster a defense. So when they lost, the government came right back to
him and told him they had recordings of many other similar speeches,
and they’d just keep prosecuting him unless he took a plea. Eager to
get this off his back, to not go broke constantly defending himself,
and to get to the real business of raising his two kids, he took a
year and a day.

Q -The new wave of animal rights activists seem to have abandoned
Rod's commitment to nonviolence. Researchers and their families have
been targeted in the past couple of years. Assassination of
vivisectionists has been openly talked about, if not directly
advocated. Much of this seems to be emanating from your end of the
coast down there in southern California. I tend to believe that one
reason we've seen this kind of threat escalation is because of the
punitive nature of the eco-terrorism laws. When you can be facing
multiple life sentences for an arson where no one was injured there's
not much deterrence for engaging in actions that might maim or kill
people. Thoughts?

A -This is a very important topic of discussion for the environmental
and animal rights movements. I don’t have any problem saying that the
people who target researchers for actual bodily harm and assassination
actually are terrorists, because that’s the definition of terrorism.
And that makes every day activism more dangerous – far more dangerous
– for the entire movement. It sets everyone up for conspiracy charges.
It turns the public against the movement. It drives a terrified
Congress to pass stiffer and stiffer laws and to loop more and more
people into crimes of association in an attempt to stop the threat. It
puts the local cop and hired security firm in a defensive position
where they think every animal rights activist carries a gun, and so
makes it much more likely innocent (or at least unarmed) people will
get hurt.

But while the temptation is to see these superheated sentences as a
kind of feedback loop, driving the truly militant over the edge, I
don’t have any evidence that this is what’s causing the recent rash of
terrorist acts in L.A. It could be one group of acquaintances, or even
like-minded folks who’ve never met, who’ve just decided they’re fed up
and they’re going to kill someone.

Crossing the line into arson or heavy property damage – burning labs,
destroying experiments, etc. – puts a person at risk no matter what
the laws. Rod was only facing 5 years for arson, but he figured he’d
get shot by a farmer or a security guard, and so he resigned himself
to the idea that he’d die during Operation Bite Back – even if he
maintained his nonviolent principles. Heavier jail sentences probably
wouldn’t have made him abandon those principles, so let’s not make too
much of that logic.

Q -Your last book was Burning Rainbow Farm about the self-immolation
of a stoner community in Michigan. Now you've written about the
country's most famous eco-arsonist. Any concern that you might be
perceived as suffering from "pyromania-by-proxy" syndrome?

A -Ha! No, it’s purely coincidence that both of these stories happen
to involve fire. As I noted above, fire is cheap, effective, and has a
spiritual quality that drives people to use it in protest and in
anger. Maybe my next book will have to feature lots of snowy mountains
or a chain of clear mountain lakes to bring me back into balance as a
writer. I’ll look forward to getting cooled off.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like
Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His
newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press /
CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.