Feds Battle Different Kind of Terrorist: Eco Extremists

LOS ANGELES (Jan. 27) -- It was to have been a pre-emptive strike.

Early on a Sunday in September 2006, Steven James Murphy slipped into a Pasadena redevelopment project and placed a half-gallon bottle of gasoline on the second floor of a historic bungalow. Then, as he had been trained, Murphy stuffed two cigarettes -- wrapped at the bottom with 14 cardboard matches -- into a hole cut in the bottle cap, lit the ends and left.

Fortunately for the developers, the cigarettes burned out before the matches ignited, and Murphy's firebomb fizzled out.

The next day a work crew discovered the attempted arson and a scrawled message signed "ELF," for Earth Liberation Front, beginning a long investigative path that ended this month with Murphy, 44, pleading guilty to federal conspiracy charges in the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.

The case against Murphy illustrates one of the federal government's quieter battles against terrorism: tracking environmental and animal rights extremists who may burn, vandalize and threaten in the name of the Earth, and of lab animals.

Over the past decade, environmental and animal-rights extremists have maintained an erratic pace of arsons and acts of vandalism aimed at derailing development projects and scientific experiments while drawing attention to their causes. They also have become more active outside the U.S., suggesting that eco-terrorism has become an American export.

Last year, of more than 150 "communiqués" by Animal Liberation Front activists claiming credit for acts such as arson attacks and the mischievous release of lab test animals, at least 106 of them involved targets in Mexico, according to anonymous reports listed on the ALF Web site.

FBI officials estimate the animal-rights and environmental groups have been responsible for 1,500 to 2,000 domestic attacks over the past two decades, causing at least $147 million in damage.

California has borne the brunt of the recent domestic attacks, including a series of arsons and vandalism strikes against UCLA researchers. Since June 2006, there have been six significant attacks, including the attempted firebombing of houses, the torching of cars and one vandalism act in which the attackers slipped a garden hose through a window and flooded a house, causing $60,000 in damage.

Federal law-enforcement agencies came together in 2006 and won indictments against 13 people stemming from a series of attacks centered in Washington state, Oregon and Vail, Colo. At least seven of the defendants have pleaded guilty or been convicted in those cases.

In a separate indictment, Daniel Andreas San Diego of Berkeley was accused of planting bombs in 2003 at office buildings in Emeryville and Pleasanton, both in California's Bay Area. The indictment earned San Diego an unusual distinction: He is one of only three Americans on the FBI's list of 28 most-wanted terrorists. The other two are Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Indiana-born alleged member of the group behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York, and Adam Yahiye Gadahn, the California native under indictment for treason in connection with his alleged efforts on behalf of al-Qaida.

The activists have responded by naming on Web sites those who have become "snitches," posted beneath a quote that equates testifying against the activists with an act of "violence ... anything done to keep an informant out of the courtroom [is] 'self-defense.'" On another page, the activists post photographs of people they identify as federal agents.

While the animal rights and environmental activists may have forgone the large arson fires that once defined their efforts -- like Murphy's failed attempt in Pasadena -- other "incidents continue to occur on a daily basis," said Oren Segal of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.

"As is the case with many extremist movements, criminal activity associated with ALF and ELF tends to ebb and flow," he said. "Still, these groups have not gone away by any stretch of the imagination, and I would not discount the very real possibility of another major arson occurring or of someone getting hurt."

Drew J. Ptasienski, unit chief of the FBI's Domestic Terrorism Operations Unit, said that while the terrorists have sought to avoid injuring people in their past attacks, animal rights activists' "violent rhetoric has increased over the last couple years."

The animal rights and environmental activists overlap so much that neither FBI nor terror-tracking groups like the ADL differentiate between them. But their targets tend to diverge, Ptasienski said.

The environmental groups "are interested in what they perceive to be atrocities committed against Mother Earth, to include urban sprawl," he said. "For example, they may be angry with the amount of wood used to build homes and the perceived defacing of Mother Earth by bulldozing the land. They could oppose encroachment on wetland or wildlife habitats."