Did You Know...

Has the Earth Liberation Front struck again? KIRO TV in Seattle has live, streaming coverage of a massive fire in Snohomish County, WA. Four luxury homes on the “Street of Dreams” development–long a target of environmental extremists–are burning. ELF left its mark:

Eastman told KIRO 7 Eyewitness News that firefighters arrived to find one home engulfed in flames. Two other homes were burning and a fourth home was smoking.

An incendiary device was left in each home, firefighters said. A total of five devices were found. A device in one home apparently didn’t go off.

The homes were built last summer as part of the “Street of Dreams” project.

He said a passerby heard explosions at about 5:15 a.m. that sounded like gunshots.

KIRO 7 Eyewitness News reporter Michelle Millman said a sign on a fence near one of the homes read: “Built Green? Nope black! McMansions in RCDs r not green. ELF.”

Yes, question the timing. An ELF activist is currently on trial for ecoterrorist bombings at the University of Washington in 2001.

Though she has been an active advocate for the environment, Briana Waters insists she would never condone arson as a means to a political end.

“It’s very dangerous to human lives,” she testified Wednesday in federal court. “I’ve always been someone who feels very strongly about not hurting people in any way.”

The 32-year-old violin teacher is accused of serving as a lookout while her friends planted a devastating fire bomb at the University of Washington in 2001.

The fire is one of the most notorious in a string of arsons that investigators say were perpetrated from the mid-1990s to 2001 by members of the Earth Liberation Front, a loosely organized collection of radical environmentalists.

Waters was one of five people indicted in the arson at the university. She faces a minimum of 35 years in prison if convicted of conspiracy, possessing an unregistered destructive device, arson and use of a destructive device during a crime of violence.

No one was hurt in the arson at UW, but its Center for Urban Horticulture was destroyed and rebuilt at a cost of $7 million. It was targeted because the ELF activists mistakenly believed researchers there were genetically engineering poplar trees, investigators said.

Waters told jurors she had no part in the crime.

Prosecutor Mark Bartlett took issue with Waters’ assertion that she would never consider arson as a way to make political statements.

Bartlett pointed to a 1998 New York Times Magazine article about radical environmentalists which quotes Waters, then a senior at The Evergreen State College, as saying she “totally” supported arson “as long as people don’t get hurt.” Tiffany Tudder, a fellow student at the time, testified that she remembered Waters making that statement.

I’ve written extensively about the ELF/ALF reign of terror on researchers, scientists, and property owners across the country. Their m.o.: Saving the planet by any means necessary. Laws and lives be damned.

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Flashback: Here’s a Hot Air news segment on Ecoterrorism 101 and the penetration of eco-terror chic in pop culture. What are your children learning about eco-thuggery in school today?