So they’ve gone and convicted one of those Earth Liberation Front activists with “eco-terrorism.” Stanislas Meyerhoff, age 29, got 13 years. (But he was the informant so his sentence was light; his buddies will get a lot more.)

They say he’s an “eco-terrorist” because ELF had goals, political ideals—namely, “economic sabotage and guerrilla warfare to stop the exploitation and destruction of the natural environment” (according to their own press).

Setting fires is a pretty goddamn stupid thing to do. But. Nobody was harmed, by design. A police station burned, an SUV dealership, a ski resort, and some corrals where the federal government was keeping wild horses.

“Eco-terrorist.” Hmm. What do you call former Environmental Protection Agency head Christie Todd Whitman, who lied when she said that the air at Ground Zero was safe to breathe after 9/11?

She lied to the "first responders"—police and firemen and women and all the good people who volunteered to rescue victims trapped in the WTC. She lied to the clean-up crews. She lied to the downtown residents—families with children—and all the people who worked in the downtown area. Many are now sick and dying, and many more will become ill, because of a lack of information and preventative gear.

“For the First Time, the City Connects a Death to 9/11 Dust,” says the New York Times today, in an article about Felicia Dunn-Jones, a civil rights attorney who was engulfed in the toxic WTC cloud and died five months later. On May 18, Whitman finally agreed to testify before Congress about the federal government's "handling of the air quality and health issues" following September 11.

Is Christie Todd Whitman an "eco-terrorist"? Not because she spread terror—but because she didn't?

Is her former boss, President George W. Bush, who ordered her campaign of misinformation?

See Rosebud #27, in the October, 2006, archive, for a re-print of George Bush's executive order.