Rod Coronado: Radical environmentalist goes to trial under terror law

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_6854734

Radical environmentalist goes to trial under terror law
By ALLISON HOFFMAN Associated Press Writer
Article Launched: 09/10/2007 05:46:20 PM PDT


SAN DIEGO—A few hours after a $50 million condo project burned down,
apparently in an eco-terror attack, Earth Liberation Front spokesman Rod
Coronado stood in front of a San Diego audience and explained how to build
a homemade Molotov cocktail.
Now, Coronado is going to trial in federal court on a single count of
distributing information on explosives, destructive devices and weapons of
mass destruction with the intent that his listeners commit illegal acts of
violence, a charge that could land him in prison for up to 20 years under
post-Sept. 11 legislation.

Prosecutors say Coronado, a longtime environmental activist renowned for
helping sink whaling ships and destroying mink farms and animal research
labs, wanted people to follow in his footsteps—although they do not link
him to the condo project fire.

In court documents, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Parmley wrote that
Coronado told his audience that "there is no other way to deal with these
places than fire" and later told the television program "60 Minutes" that
he was "asking for people courageous enough to take those risks for what
they believe in."

Coronado's trial begins on the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks. Now 41 and recently married, the activist says the abrupt shift
in America's tolerance for violence and civil disobedience dramatically
changed the landscape for environmental activism in a way he didn't
recognize until he was charged.

"In today's world, people striving for social change through the mediums
that I have chosen are lumped together with the kinds of people who do fly
airplanes into buildings," Coronado said recently from his home in Tucson,
Ariz.
Jurors hearing the trial before U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller will
have to decide whether Coronado was simply exercising his First Amendment
right to speak publicly about illegal activities or trying to inspire his
listeners to go out and commit eco-terrorist acts in the name of
conservation.

"What Coronado said is only very slightly different from what textbooks or
newspapers routinely describe, so the question is to what extent does the
speech lose its protection when the speaker intends it to be used for
specific violence," said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University
of California, Los Angeles. "And then the difficulty is that judgments
about a person's motive are often quite mushy."

As a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front—a shadowy group named one of
the FBI's top domestic terrorism targets—Coronado was a high-profile
advocate of arson and other illegal tactics.

He arrived in San Diego on Aug. 1, 2003, hours after an early morning fire
destroyed a five-story, 206-unit apartment complex, an underground parking
garage and a construction crane in the University City area. A 12-foot
banner left at the scene read: "If you build it, we will burn it. The ELFs
are mad."

No one has ever been charged in connection with that fire, the costliest
act of eco-terrorism in U.S. history.

At the lecture he gave that night, Coronado demonstrated how to make an
incendiary device out of an apple-juice jug after an audience member asked
about his tactics in a 1992 arson at a Michigan State University mink
research facility, for which he served nearly five years in federal
prison.

Coronado says he was simply answering a question, not inciting people to
any specific action.

"It was a question about how I personally had carried out a specific
action, which I'd already gone to prison for and paid for with four years
of my life," Coronado told The Associated Press. "I guess I'm one of those
naive Americans who was raised to believe that free speech was a protected
right and that our government didn't imprison people for expressing
opinions contrary to their own."

He wasn't charged until 2006. By then, he had gotten into trouble with
Arizona authorities for disrupting a government mountain lion hunt in 2004
with other members of Earth First!, a group best known for forest protests
aimed at halting logging. He was sentenced to eight months in prison for
conspiring to impede a federal officer and destroying government snare
traps and sensors.

In September 2006, Coronado renounced violence, writing that the "economic
sabotage" favored by environmentalists in the 1980s and 1990s should be
set aside in favor of building environmentally sustainable communities.

"I almost feel like it's almost more of a disservice when (environmental
activists) engage in tactics that might be considered equally unjust,"
Coronado said. "It's not that I don't recognize their importance
historically, but there's just not enough return when we engage in tactics
that may feel good at the time but don't gain anything long term."