(SF Bay Guardian - 1/21/98) Forget about right-wing militias and fringe religious lunatics. Judging from a bizarre FBI drill at the Presidio this week, a more pressing threat to our national security is environmentalists.
The elaborate, expensive training exercise took place Jan. 14 and involved the San Francisco, Sacramento, and Honolulu offices of the FBI; the U.S. Coast Guard; the U.S. Park Police; and the San Francisco Police Department. The drill was based on the following scenario, as described to us by Robert Walsh, FBI special agent in charge:
"A fictitious oil spill occurs in San Francisco Bay. A misguided, very violent group using this incident to wrap themselves as environmentalists decide that the pace at which the coast guard and the EPA are attempting to clean up this oil spill is unsatisfactory. They ... raid the EPA office and to take hostages -- EPA workers and coast guard employees. The FBI gets involved early on because a Presidio park police officer gets shot and killed by the group."
Frankly, we're more concerned about misguided politicians wrapping themselves as environmentalists in order to get elected. Couldn't the FBI do something about that?
Earth First! organizer Alicia Littletree called the scenario "an FBI smear job. I don't know of anywhere in the world where ecoterrorists exist," she said. "Why would [the FBI] be creating such a fictional scenario unless they're getting some mileage out of it in the P.R. department?"
The exercise was particularly chilling, Littletree said, because it evoked memories of the bureau's infamous "bomb school" in Eureka, Calif., where the FBI taught law-enforcement agents how to manage bombs and respond to acts of domestic terrorism. In 1989, soon after the bomb training, Earth First! environmental activist Judi Bari's car was bombed; Littletree and others suspect the FBI was involved.
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[posted Sat, Jan 23, 1999]
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