Ellerman update — Josh and Clinton on the outs with ALF support network

The Animal Liberation Front and
its supporters are fuming that convicted animal rights terrorists Josh Ellerman, 19, and his brother |Clinton Ellerman|, 21, are apparently
cooperating with prosecutors and providing them with detailed information
about ALF activities. A press release from the North American A.L.F. Supporters
group claimed,

… evidence is growing that shows that Clinton Colby
Ellerman, convicted A.L.F. activist, and one of the five facing new charges,
has been willingly giving evidence on other activists to federal authorities,
possibly for a number of months.

The five indicted individuals referred
to in the release are Josh and Clinton Ellerman, Andrew Bishop, Alexander
David Slack and Adam Troy Peace. All have been indicted by federal prosecutors
in Utah for their role in the 1997 firebombing of a mink farm. Josh
Ellerman recently plead guilty to the charges against him and received
a 7-year sentence for his role in the arson. Ellerman could have received
35 years, and his relatively light sentence is believed to stem from his
ongoing cooperation with prosecutors.

The North American ALF Supporters
release claims that “no activist has the right to endanger the lives
of and liberty of others in a strategy to save their own hides.”
Got that? ALF members have the right to commit arson, burglary and a whole
host of violent crimes, but reporting said crimes endangers the safety
and liberty of ALF activists.

In response to these allegations,
the North American ALF Supporters group announced it is
removing the Ellermans from its list of animal rights prisoners for whom
it offers support.

Sources:

New arrests and b possibility of grassing
surround Utah A.L.F. Actions… North American A.L.F. Supporters
Group, Sept. 17, 1998

Animal-rights bomber gets 7-year prison sentence. The Salt Lake Tribune, September 11, 1998.

Further Fallout Over Off-Road.Com Article

In the past week several more
news outlets wrote stories about Lycos dropping Envirolink, host of many
animal rights web sites, after an article written by Norm Lenhart, senior
editor at Off-Road.Com. In general the subsequent articles have only reconfirmed
the suspicions expressed here last week about Lycos’ move.

An article at Wired’s web site
quoted EnviroLink founder Josh Knauer as confirming that EnviroLink’s contract
did not have any minimum hit requirements, leaving out EnviroLink’s apparently
low click through rate as an explanation. Wired also quoted Knauer as
saying he believes Lycos is in breach of its contract with EnviroLink.

The articles, unfortunately,
also demonstrated how willing the media are to let animal rights
extremism slide. In Wired’s story, for example, writer Steve Silberman
characterized Lenhart’s article as a “flame job” and spent two
paragraphs describing EnviroLink’s content by focusing on the allegedly
satirical Church of Euthanasia, completely ignoring Lenhart’s documentation
of the Animal Liberation Front Information Site articles on how to commit
arson located on EnviroLink’s servers — which was the real flame
job as far as this writer is concerned. Post-Gazette writer Michael Newman
didn’t even see fit to mention that EnviroLink hosts the ALFIS site in
his piece on the controversy.

The on-line animal rights
community continues to whine about Lycos’ decision. A message on a mailing
list maintained by the Humane Society of the United States said that,
“EnviroLink is experiencing severe funding problems due to what may
be described as a disinformation campaign.” Of course the author
of this message, like authors of several similar ones, never bothers to
point out any factual errors in Lenhart’s article.

An email posted on the animal
rights terrorist list “Frontline” summed up the controversy
this way:

10 short days after Off-Road.Com published a scathing slanderous attack
on the server Envirolink.org and several of it’s hosted environmental
and animal rights web sites, Lyco’s [sic] decided to drop its corporate
sponsorship of EnviroLink.

The issue is not whether
you care about the environment or animal rights but about Internet censorship
and and [sic] free expression on the Internet. What is next to be attacked?

Got that? When ALF members
firebomb a warehouse, that is peaceful, nonviolent protest. When Off-Road.Com
persuades Lycos to drop its sponsorship of EnviroLink, that’s censorship.

Josh Ellerman sentenced; 5 other animal rights activists indicted

On September 10 a judge in Utah
sentenced animal rights terrorist Josh Ellerman to seven years in jail
for his role in the March 1997 firebombing of the Fur Breeders Cooperative
in Sandy, Utah. Ellerman faced up to 35 years in jail but received a reduced
sentence in exchange for his cooperation in the prosecution of fellow
members of the Animal Liberation Front.

Earlier in the week, five other animal
rights activists were indicted in Salt Lake City for alleged acts of terrorism.

Assistant U.S. Attorney David Schwendiman
warned that animal rights terrorism would be vigorously prosecuted:

We support and defend the rights
of people to say and think what they want. But when they choose to express those beliefs through violence that endangers
lives and destroys property, it will be met with swift and sure prosecution.

Ellerman and the five recently indicted
animal rights activists were members of the “straight edge”
movement whose members foreswear drugs, alcohol, tobacco, casual sex, meat
and leather — but as Steve Milloy pointed out, apparently
not explosives.

Lycos and EnviroLink have a parting of the ways

On May 14, 1998, the Internet
search engine/portal Lycos entered into an agreement with EnviroLink,
which among other things hosts web sites for extremist animal rights groups,
to send Lycos users searching for information on the environment to EnviroLink’s
web site. On August 10 Lycos summarily, and apparently without prior notice,
severed its ties to EnviroLink. What happened between May 14 and August
10? Norm Lenhart happened.

Lenhart, senior editor for
the online racing enthusiast magazine Off-Road.Com, wrote a lengthy scathing
article for the August issue pointing out that EnviroLink hosts everything
from a web site for the terrorist group, Animal Liberation Front, including
information on how to firebomb stores and build bombs, to the bizarre
Church of Euthanasia with its slogan, “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself.”
Lenhart’s article was a tour de force and one of the best anti-animal
rights pieces I’ve seen on the web (hey, he even quoted from an article
on this site). Lenhart accomplished this by simply quoting extended passages
directly from EnviroLink’s site and saying, in effect, to Lycos, “Do
you really want to be supporting this?”

Then on Thursday, August 13,
an email was posted to a mailing list run by animal rights terrorist supporters
“No Compromise” claiming that because of Off-Road.Com’s article,
Lycos was terminating its contract with EnviroLink. The “No Compromise”
email said EnviroLink’s supporters should start a letter writing campaign
to Lycos to get them to reverse their decision. The email also called
for a fund raising effort to help prop up EnviroLink, claiming that without
the Lycos sponsorship EnviroLink would only have “funds for two months
of operation. This will mean no more hosting of Animal Rights organizations,
both national and grassroots (including No Compromise, the ALF Info Site
and others), as well as e-mail lists.”

Not that all the money should
be spent on keeping EnviroLink afloat. The email also called for raising
money to help fund a libel lawsuit against Off-Road.Com for its article.

In an article on the controversy
for News.Com, reporter Janet Kornblum’s interviews with the players involved
tended to raise more questions than they answered.

Lycos attorney Jeffrey Snider
confirmed that Lycos indeed severed its relationship with EnviroLink but
claimed the Off-Road.Com article played no part in that decision — well,
sort of. Snider told Kornblum, “They [Off-Road.Com] made a complaint
and asked that the site be taken down and the site was taken down. The
fact that the two occurred at the same time was coincidental.”

A fundamental disagreement

So if it wasn’t Off-Road.Com’s
expose and complaint that led to the break, what was the cause? Snider,
like a good lawyer, would only say “there is a fundamental disagreement
about the intent of the contract” between Lycos and EnviroLink but
wouldn’t go into any further detail claiming “the contract is confidential.”

Josh Knauer, executive director
of EnviroLink, maintained that his company “complied in all material
respect to this contract and EnviroLink performed as was mandated in the
contract.” Knauer seems to take Snider’s comments about there being
no link between the termination of the contract and the Off-Road.Com article
with a grain of salt, telling Kornblum, “Basically I’m still not
ready to say why Lycos dumped us, but there certainly seem some events
occurring that have to be more than coincidental.”

Lycos lawyer Snider only added
to such suspicions when he told Kornblum that, although it had nothing
to do with Lycos’ decision, the Off-Road.Com article “pointed out
to us some things about certain sites being served up under the EnviroLink
domain that we didn’t know about and we felt were misleading to our users.
We will admit that it’s misleading to our users to have those kinds of
sites available [under a button that says] ‘save the planet.'”

Whatever the cause of the
break, Knauer confirms that without the money it was expecting from the
Lycos deal, EnviroLink faces serious financial difficulties. “This
agreement with Lycos was a major, major, major source of our funding for
this year,” he told News.Com. “We need to look toward other
corporations that have the backbone to stand up and have free speech and
free expression heard on the Internet.”

So what’s really going on here?

Reading between the lines,
here’s my take on the situation (note, this is completely my speculation
— I have absolutely no inside knowledge of any of these events).

It seems clear from Snider’s
comments that Lycos took the unbelievable step of signing a contract with
EnviroLink without being aware of the sort of sites EnviroLink hosts.
This is simply an incredible position for a company like Lycos to put
itself in. It’s not like EnviroLink tried to hide the ALF Information
Site or the Church of Euthanasia — spend more than a few minutes surfing
its site and you’ll run smack dab into content like this. That Lycos would
enter into a contract without thoroughly evaluating EnviroLink shows just
how fast and loose deals are being struck on the Internet.

Snider’s remarks are also
more interesting for what they don’t say. Specifically Snider never
comes out and denies that Lycos dropped EnviroLink because of EnviroLink’s
content. Once this is apparent, the idea that Off-Road.Com’s article wasn’t
the main cause of the decision to terminate the content doesn’t necessarily
seem improbable. Here’s what I think happened. Lycos didn’t have a complete
idea of what was on EnviroLink’s site. But as they began receiving news
feeds and checking out the content since the signing of a contract in
May, Lycos became more aware, and probably deeply concerned, about the
sort of content they were seeing.

A decision to drop EnviroLink
was probably already in the works when Off-Road.Com dropped its bombshell,
probably pushing Lycos finally into making its abrupt decision. That the
problem was content and not some other issue, say technical issues, can
also be seen in the sudden and unannounced way Lycos ended its contract.
According to Knauer Lycos gave absolutely no warning before hand — EnviroLink
workers just came in one day and found they could no longer upload information
to Lycos.

So why the tight lip from
Lycos? Why all the secrecy? Again, Snider is earning his money. Forget
the silly idea of a libel suit against Off-Road.Com — a much more likely
scenario is a breach of contract suit filed by EnviroLink against Lycos. If the break is indeed over content issues, Lycos might face legal trouble.
It may not have known about the sites EnviroLink hosts, but that’s hardly
EnviroLink’s fault assuming EnviroLink did indeed meet the material requirements
of its contract as Knauer claimed. Certainly a press release announcing
the deal and posted on Lycos’ site in May indicates that Lycos believed
it had all of the information it need to praise EnviroLink as the preeminent
environmental site on the Internet. I don’t see how Lycos could claim
EnviroLink misled them, but that appears to be what Snider might be hinting
at — that Lycos paid for mainstream environmental content only to learn
that EnviroLink is overly represented by radical and extremist groups.

Animal Rights Hypocrisy and Nonsense

Finally, lets not leave this
whole affair without commenting on the wholesale hypocrisy of EnviroLink
and No Compromise on this affair.

First there’s the threat of
a libel lawsuit against Off-Road.Com raised in the “No Compromise”
email. This is highly ironic given that one of the issues environmentalist
and animal rights activists have expressed support for is the so-called
McLibel case in the United Kingdom. McDonald’s sued two activists, Helen
Steel and Dave Morris, for libel for distributing a fact sheet titled
“What’s Wrong With McDonald’s?” The fact sheet accused McDonald’s
of a variety of wrongdoings. After a three-year trial — the longest of
any British trial in history — the two were convicted and fined $90,000.
The animal rights community criticized this abuse of the law.

So what do they do when somebody
criticizes their sacred cows? Turn around and suggest a libel suit against
those who exercise their rights to free expression, proving themselves
no better than the “evil corporations” they hate so much (the
Off-Road.Com article, by the way, doesn’t even come close to meeting the
U.S. legal definition of libel – such a lawsuit would almost certainly
be thrown out as frivolous.)

Second, EnviroLink director
Knauer’s plea for corporate sponsors is highly amusing in a pathetic sort
of way. Both the sites EnviroLink hosts as well as the content it features
directly from its home page regularly denounce “corporate domination”
and often any sort of market capitalism as representative of an unjust
social order. So what does EnviroLink do to support itself? It runs to
these very same corporations its web sites denounce for whatever funding
it can get. Apparently there is no need for these people to believe they
have to be consistent in their views and actions.

Which puts Knauer’s implication
that Lycos doesn’t have the “backbone to stand up and have free speech
and free expression on the Internet” into perspective. Certainly
EnviroLink has the right, protected by the US Constitution and the laws
of other enlightened nations, to say whatever it wants and avoid being
censored — that would and should be illegal. In fact even though it has
apparently lost its funding from Lycos, the EnviroLink site is still up
and available to the hundreds of thousands of people who view it.

But does supporting free expression
mean that Lycos and others are obligated to contribute to organizations
dedicated to destroying the very foundations upon which they are built?
If an AIDS victim refuses to give money or buy products from EnviroLink
because it hosts groups that oppose animal testing even to find a cure
for HIV, is she preventing EnviroLink from exercising its rights to free
expression? Of course not.

In fact by ending its relationship
with EnviroLink, Lycos is exercising another fundamental right — the
right of free association. Lycos would not (I hope) partner with a Holocaust
revisionist site to provide its users with information on World War II.
It would not (again, I hope) partner with Sinn Fein to provide its users
with information about Ireland (for those unaware, Sinn Fein is the political
arm of the Irish Republican Army). Similarly Lycos should be applauded
for exercising its right of free association to avoid partnering with
a site that includes among its offerings, instruction on how to commit
acts of terrorism against medical researchers trying to find treatments
for diseases and conditions that continue to debilitate and kill many
human beings.

Sources:

Action Alert. No Compromise, Press Release, August 13, 1998.

Lycos ends environment site alliance. Janet Kornblu, CNET News, August 14, 1998.

Lycos to feature Envirolink, the premier environmental site on the Internet. Lycos/Envirolink, Press Release, May 14, 1998.

McLibel two convicted. Environmental News Service, June 19, 1997.

Animal Liberation Front creates potential environmental disaster

Last weekend members of the Animal Liberation Front attacked a fur farm in
near Ringwood, England. The activists freed about 6,000 Mink and released
them into the surrounding area.

Unfortunately the mink were released
into an area called The New Forest, a wetland which was listed as one
of the world’s 900 most important wetland areas at the Rio Earth
Summit a few years ago. Since mink are extremely efficient predators,
much of the wildlife at this environmentally sensitive site has been
put in danger by these terrorists who claim to be looking out for animals.

As Howard Taylor, a forest-keeper
in the area, told Agence-France, “The mink is at the top of the food
chain. They are not fussy about what they eat – birds, eggs, small mammals,
fish, anything … Whoever let these animals out, if they think of themselves
as environmental warriors they should have thought of the environmental
consequences of releasing such a vicious predator into such a delicate
ecosystem.”

Terrence Smith, the owner of the
fur farm that was attacked, told BBC News, “It is an act of gross
stupidity that has not only harmed the welfare of these animals, but also
endangered other local wildlife and put the public at risk.”

Meanwhile, local farmers are busy
shooting the mink, with those who escape that fate almost certainly doomed
to starve to death. Chalk another “victory” up for animal rights
extremists.

Sources:

Wildlife disaster anticipated as 6,000 mink set free. Agence-France, August 9, 1998.

Mink terrorise Hampshire after farm release. BBC News Online, August 8, 1998.

Mink run wild after attack on fur farm. Macer Hall, Electronic Telegraph, August 9, 1998.

No Compromise publishes tirade by Rod Coronado

The extremist pro-Animal Liberation Front zine No Compromise recently published
a lengthy tirade by animal rights terrorist Rodney Coronado. Coronado is currently serving
a 57-month sentence for aiding and abetting arson and handling stolen
property. Coronado helped fire-bomb a Michigan State University laboratory
in East Lansing, destroying decades of research into protecting wild mink.

So what does this convicted arsonist have
to say — the government is repressing him. That’s right. In Coronado’s
mind the only reason authorities wanted to jail him for arson was because
ALF activities “threaten big business and the government itself.”
Coronado describes the federal indictment of Josh Ellerman as having a
“political motivation” and complains about continuing “government
harassment and prosecution” of animal rights activists.

Coronado, like other ALF activists
and their supporters, believes that because ALF only firebombs buildings
and automobiles that they aren’t terrorists (or even violent). This
has to set a precedent for self-deception. Of course what ALF engages
in is terrorism. As my dictionary defines it, terrorism is “the unlawful
use or threatened use of force or violence to intimidate or coerce societies
or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.”

In his tirade Coronado admits this
is exactly the purpose of ALF actions, writing “when every new animal
abuse enterprise must factor into their prospective budgets the possibility
that they might be targeted by our less passive forces … then and only
then will they begin to see the need to change.” ALF’s purpose
is to intimidate laboratories and researchers into abandoning their activities.
As Coronado puts it, “our opposition [will] eventually be forced
to reckon with us in a civil manner.”

How people are to be expected to
reckon with arsonists “in a civil manner” is a subject Coronado
doesn’t choose to address.

The most ironic part of Coronado’s
diatribe is his complaint that law enforcement agencies are busy tracking
down ALF members “rather than violent offenders targeting women,
children and senior citizens.” Maybe Coronado didn’t notice
that every time he and his compatriots firebomb an installation or commit
other acts of violence, police and fire officials have to commit large
resources to solving those crimes that otherwise might be used solving
other crimes. This is not, however, the fault of the police and fire officials
but of Coronado and his compatriots.

In addition, while Coronado seems
to be under the delusion that setting fire to an empty building causes
no physical harm, in fact he and other ALF terrorists are endangering
the lives of fire and police officials who must put out these blazes.
Every year too many fire fighters lose their lives battling fires started
by arsonists. It is only a matter of time before the animal rights terrorists
add to this total.

If Coronado really wants police
to stop investigating ALF arsons he should convince his fellow activists
to stop setting fires in the first place. Until then, police and fire
officials will continue to expend resources tracking down animal rights
terrorists.

Source:

Government sanctioned repression at all time high – fight back. Rod Coronado, No Compromise, 1998.