Amazing how these schemers get around to fingering the other guy and taking advantage of each other..

Thursday, February 07 2008 @ 04:11 PM PST
Daniel McGowan: Remembering William Rodgers

Monday, February 04 2008 @ 05:47 PM PST
Contributed by: Anonymous
Views: 232
Anarchist MovementThis is a eulogy, two years too late, for my friend William Rodgers — known to friends, family and the movement as Avalon. Avalon took his life on December 21, 2005. This was just two weeks after our arrests in the Operation Backfire case and, by no coincidence, the Winter Solstice. In his absence, much has been made of his role in our Earth Liberation Front (ELF) group. Not surprisingly, the prosecutors in the case have painted him as a leader who recruited young, impressionable activists to do his bidding. This is not only false, but also insulting to the younger people in the case, who did get involved on their own.

Remembering William Rodgers

by Daniel McGowan, December 21st, 2007

This is a eulogy, two years too late, for my friend William Rodgers — known to friends, family and the movement as Avalon. Avalon took his life on December 21, 2005. This was just two weeks after our arrests in the Operation Backfire case and, by no coincidence, the Winter Solstice. In his absence, much has been made of his role in our Earth Liberation Front (ELF) group. Not surprisingly, the prosecutors in the case have painted him as a leader who recruited young, impressionable activists to do his bidding. This is not only false, but also insulting to the younger people in the case, who did get involved on their own. Snitches in the case have used his inability to respond to dramatically maximize his role in certain actions in an attempt to lesson the consequences of their own actions. One person went so far as submitting to the judge video evidence and testimony that has not been made public because it was deemed too personal for public consumption. Others on the margins have chosen to focus on Avalon’s flaws by spreading rumors or even by talking to the private investigators hired by the snitches.

I first met Avalon in the months leading up to the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle in late 1999 and developed a friendship with him instantly. His sly grin, easygoing and warm personality and humility impressed me, and I was happy to see that this quiet, older enviro was up to more than attending the EF! gatherings at which I first saw him. His rationality and quick thinking prevented disaster for our affinity group during the Seattle protests (I’m proud to say we took part in the Black Bloc). I distinctly remember getting ready to leave Seattle, and hearing his suggestion to “keep in touch.” Well, we did keep in touch. Much has been said of what we did in the years after that, but that will be told elsewhere.

Like so many of us, Avalon suffered from depression and despair, fueled by the realization of what our species is doing the planet. Living underground, juggling details of planned actions and double lives, and eschewing many of the things that our movement allies had access to is stressful. I know because I did it, and yet Avalon’s experience in that underground life dwarfed mine. I can’t help but think that this isolation and despair were major factors in his suicide. We moved on, and yet the cruel hand of the past — in the form of old friends and a Joint Terrorism Task Force — pulled us all back into our secret histories. Maybe for Avalon, it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. We will never know for sure. I remember seeing his name in a list of arrestees in a New York Times article while sitting in a New York City jail. It gave me some hope — I thought we could all fight these charges together, as a group of people who had lifelong solidarity with each other, as people who honored the oaths we made to each other. Sometimes, I lie there at night asking the questions I try to avoid: Could Avalon have stemmed the tide of informing? Would he have been the person who, having known some of the snitches for much longer than I, could really reach them — beyond their fears and to their core? I’ll never know these answers, but I do know this: Avalon would rather die and make a jailbreak than cooperate in any way with this immoral and unjust process.

The prosecution, knowing only hierarchy and bureaucracy, cannot conceive of a group without a leader, a pecking order and strict rules. Without Bill around to protest and because he was older than all of us, they found their puppet master. Suddenly the so-called “book club” was his invention and was deemed a “training school for arson.” Meyerhoff and Gerlach, grand quislings that they are, had the audacity to say with a straight face that Avalon pretty much did the Vail arson all by himself. Just reading about the ski resort’s geography, the large amount of fuel that was used and Bill’s slight stature made me laugh bitterly to myself about these lies. On some level, it’s the way the game is played for snitches. The government tells them what it wants to hear, and the cooperating witnesses jump through hoops like the well-trained pets that they are. To be clear, everyone involved with these actions and the “book club” are people like you and me. We have skills — some of us excel at one thing, others of us at another. However, there was no formalized hierarchy as suggested by the prosecution, and William Rodgers was no kingpin or leader of the ELF.

Avalon, like all of us, had his flaws and made mistakes, both personally and politically, in the way he lived his life and how he resisted environmental destruction. Our group attempted to deal with one of these areas — an accusation of sexual misconduct — and I’m sorry to say that we failed, due to not being equipped with the right ideas and strategies. It is all too easy to assuage our guilt about our own shortcomings by attacking others. I think it’s a better idea to focus on what we are doing in this world, rather than criticizing people who are not here to defend themselves. I thought of this often in court when I looked at my family, seeing the pained looks on their faces as they listened to attacks on me. Bill’s family and partner have had to endure a lot of grief in the last two years.

So when I think of Avalon, I don’t believe the hype spewed by aggressive and narrow prosecutors. No, I think of a soft-spoken, caring person who would give you the shirt off his back or carry a snake off the road; an avid, even obsessive recycler; someone who supported indigenous struggles and really got the connection between Earth-based cultures and ecological action. I knew Avalon was involved in the struggle against the Mount Graham telescope, but only after his death did I find out that he and his infoshop, The Catalyst, supported the campaign to protect the San Francisco Peaks (see Earth First! Journal May-June 2005).

When snitch Jacob Ferguson recorded a conversation with me through a wiretap in 2005, I asked him how Avalon was. He lied to me (big shock!) and told me that Avalon was happy and lived in an intentional community in Canada. I remember being really happy for him and hoping to run into him again one day, but for different reasons than why we last saw each other.

Avalon has been gone two years now, and yet it still isn’t real to me. Since I haven’t seen him for years, I can’t really take it all in without getting upset. Yes, one of our own betrayed us, and that action caused the death of my friend. How do I reconcile the truth? I don’t have a good answer except to say that we need to talk about these things and confront death in our movement. We need to grieve for our friends. Most of all, we cannot forget. This is my contribution to never forgetting William Rodgers: radical environmentalist, ELF activist, cave lover and sweet, kind man. I miss you, buddy.

–As printed in the Earth First! Journal, November-December 2007 issue.

And now the real finger pointing gets underway.


More Details Emerge in UW's Eco-Arson Case
What's this about the Mafia-like "Family"?
By Nina Shapiro
February 6, 2008

Kevin P. Casey
Briana Waters: from a bad “Family”?

When a group of radical environmental activists burned down the University of Washington's Center for Urban Horticulture in 2001, it turned out to be a big mistake. Contrary to what the perpetrators believed, there was no genetic engineering going on at the professor's office they targeted.

Now, one of the approximately 20 defendants indicted in twin cases (which tie together a string of other arsons in Washington and Oregon) is trying to prevent what she claims would be another mistake: her conviction. On Monday, 32-year-old Briana Waters will be the first of these defendants to actually go to trial. Some of the rest are fugitives; most have taken plea bargains. Waters, who claims she was home in bed at the time of the crime, was fingered by one of those who pleaded.

Last week, Waters emerged from a pretrial hearing in the Tacoma federal courthouse wearing a purple scarf and looking weary, her long blond hair pulled back from her face. She had traveled here from Oakland, Calif., where she and her lanky, blond male partner, who was by her side, are raising their 3-year-old and where, according to Waters' attorney Bob Bloom, she gives violin lessons to children and plays in Balkan bands. Waiting for her outside the courtroom were nine supporters, including a dreadlocked woman in a flowing turquoise robe. Many of these supporters decried as excessive the mandatory minimum sentence Waters faces should she be convicted: 35 years.

Bloom, a feisty attorney from Oakland, along with local co-counsel Neil Fox, insists Waters is not only innocent but the victim of government misconduct and dirty tricks. For example, they believe prosecutors improperly moved the case to Tacoma in order to find jurors who would be less sympathetic to the environmental movement. Prosecutors counter that the "center of gravity" of the charges is actually further south, since Waters and others in the underground movement were in Olympia at the time the plan was allegedly hatched. (The judge has ruled the change of venue to be acceptable.)

"Here's my situation," said the wise-cracking, gray-haired Bloom over sandwiches at a cafe across from the Tacoma courthouse where Waters, who declined to be interviewed, was having lunch with her supporters. "I'm [originally] from New York. I've practiced in a lot of political cases." Past clients have included members of the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, and the Puerto Rican independence movement. Call Bloom's voice mail and you'll be greeted with the following: "Hey, Britney's sister is pregnant and there's 151,000 dead people in Iraq. Leave a message."

Meanwhile, in hundreds of pages of documents both sides have already filed, a fascinating picture is taking shape: of an underground environmentalist cell that the government says was known among its members by the weirdly Mafia-like tag of "the Family." In Olympia lived the head of "the Family," a man named William Rodgers who went by the moniker "Avalon," according to government briefs. He was eventually arrested in Arizona and died in his jail cell, an apparent suicide.

According to the government, the cell was part of the Earth and Animal Liberation Fronts. Rodgers led divisions located in both Olympia and Eugene, Ore. In gatherings sometimes referred to as "book club meetings," members fixated on the genetic engineering of poplar trees. Genetic engineering has inflamed the passions of some environmentalists who believe it to be interfering with nature's biodiversity. The "Family" cell, the government says, staged arsons to stop it and even, at one point, "discussed whether it would be necessary to 'up the ante' and resort to assassinations." Although prosecutors don't suggest any assassinations were carried out, they say cell members, including Waters on at least one occasion, engaged in target practice. Waters denies it.

At the time of the UW arson, Waters was, by her account, finishing up her degree at Evergreen State College in Olympia. Her briefs say she was "spending hundreds of hours" on a school project: a documentary she was making about a tree-sit in the town of Randle, Wash., aimed at protecting old-growth forests. In a student report on "personal achievement" she submitted to Evergreen, she talked about taking part in a related protest at the Seattle offices of Plum Creek Timber Company. She was then dating a fellow Evergreen student named Justin Solondz, who is also charged in this case and remains a fugitive.

But Waters says she was a law-abiding environmental activist. In the early morning of March 21, 2001, when the Center for Urban Horticulture burned to the ground, Waters was asleep in bed, she says.

Prosecutors, however, say she borrowed a rental car from a family member on March 20 and drove with her boyfriend, Rodgers, and two others to the Greenlake Bar & Grill in Seattle. They ate dinner, then, sometime after midnight, headed to a dead-end street near the Center for Urban Horticulture, which is just outside the tony neighborhood of Laurelhurst, in the shadow of Husky Stadium. According to the government, Waters hid in the bushes with a walkie-talkie to alert the rest of the group if anyone was coming. Two of the others got into the Center and planted plastic tubs filled with gasoline, which were ignited by a switch triggered by an alarm clock. When Waters returned the rental car to her relative in Olympia, the government says, she told them she had traveled to Seattle to find an open emergency room because she needed treatment of some sort.

Much of the government's case hinges on the testimony of a woman who has pleaded guilty to a role in torching the center, and whose sentence is pending. In the months leading up to the arson, Jennifer Kolar worked as a software engineer with a Seattle company called Singingfish. She owned a yacht—yet was caught shoplifting at Whole Foods in the Roosevelt district, later explaining to an FBI agent that she did so for the cause, according to defense documents. A fellow member of the underground movement had complained of always being the one who had to steal food and supplies, and Kolar said she was trying to rectify that situation, according to the documents.

In a Dec. 16, 2005, meeting with FBI agents, Kolar identified four others as participants in the UW arson: Rodgers, a woman known as "Capital Hill Girl," Capital Hill Girl's "punk boyfriend," and "Crazy Dan." Just shy of two weeks later, she informed the government that she remembered another participant: Waters, who served as the lookout.

"We know Kolar is lying," Bloom says. He cites as proof the fact that Kolar has never named Oregon activist Lacey Phillabaum as a participant in the UW arson, yet Phillabaum has also pleaded guilty and is expected to testify against Waters. "If [Kolar] is lying about that, she's lying about other things as well," Bloom says. The defense for that reason moved to bar Kolar from testifying. Judge Franklin Burgess denied the request at last week's hearing.

Kolar is also at the center of the defense's claims of government misconduct. Waters' attorneys claim that the FBI report they were provided, describing the original interview with Kolar, did not list the four people she had named. Instead, the report attested that Kolar named herself, Rodgers, and a few others—a vague statement that leads the defense to believe that the FBI agents wrote a real, more specific report other than the one provided to the defense. The government says the report was authentic, and that the agents understood Kolar to be sure of the identities only of herself and Rodgers. Burgess found no evidence of misconduct and refused to hold oral arguments on the subject.

Indeed, the defense has gotten little love from Burgess, who also ruled that it cannot present testimony that equipment used in the arson does not constitute a "destructive device." This is an important matter for the defense because Waters is charged with using a destructive device during a crime of violence, and that charge by itself carries a heavy penalty: a 30-year mandatory minimum.