by Tom Randall (NAPSA)—While the FBI thus far has prevented al Qaeda from staging a 9-11 encore, it’s been asleep at the switch in dealing with homegrownterrorist groups such as the notorious Earth Liberation Front (ELF). A radical group with clandestine cells up and down America the Pacific Coast, At Risk ELF stepped up its campaign of arson @ in mid-August by torching 20 new Hummers worth more than $1-million at a car dealership in West Covina, a Los Angeles suburb of 106,000. ELF launched its August offensive a few weeksearlier by setting a $50-million fire that destroyed an unfinished 205-unit apartment complex near the University of California at San Diego campus. The militant group also claims responsibility for setting dozens of fires in the United States over the past decade including major arson fires at Michigan State University’s Agriculture Hall in 1999 and an under-construction ski resort in Vail, Colorado the year before. While ELF’s activities thus far have not killed any innocent bystanders, it’s only a matter of time before its penchant for fivealarm mayhem begins to claim lives. Other far-left environmental groups such as the Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace— although not as violence-prone as ELF—have joined them in protests that turned ugly, such as one that trashed downtown Seattle during a meeting of the World Trade Organization there in the fall of 1999. Such tactics, of course, are the last resort of groups who should have filed idea bankruptcies decades ago and now must resort to obtaining their goals by intimidation rather than intellectual debate. These kind of totalitarian tactics should be nipped in the budif humankind is to avoid the massive oppression their practitioners would like to impose on freethinking democratic societies. The federal government gets reasonably good marks for preventing foreign terrorists from committing further atrocities against Americans on the home front, but it seems to be turning a blind-eye to those outrages committed by the domestic variety. The FBI’s failure to bring ELF’s leaders to the bar of justice and prosecute their criminal acts sends an appalling message that can only encourage renegade members of al Qaeda and other terrorist cells currently lying low in the U.S. and Canada. Those terrorists obviously are watching ELF operating with impunity in the western United States and taking copious notes. If ELF can engage in such terrorists acts in California and Colorado, Islamic militants may well come to believe they can do likewise in the crowded urban areas of the Northeast. Dissent is fine and the birthright of every American, but the wanton destruction caused by the economic sabotage of groups like the Earth Liberation Front is terrorism pure and simple. The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and other law enforcement agencies waging the war against terror ought to be pursuing ELF with the same vigor that they’re pursuing al Qaeda. Tom Randall is a senior partner at Winningreen LLC (www.winningreen.com), an environmental policy think-tank.
