Letters to the Editor
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Plenty of reasonable doubt
Reading through other Briana articles, and the letters in response to this article, it seems like the damning evidence is that Briana may have had something to do with renting a car, that may have been used by ELFers that night. I say may, because I don't know. I haven't seen any evidence, one way or the other, and the articles don't really point to any.
What the articles do point to is that women who have a strong motive to label anyone else they can, and who's evidence changed, and who's evidence contradicted other equally guilty people's evidence, are the only "evidence" that she was there.
Frankly, I went to a politically active college. I was acquainted with plenty of sketchy people, who's life details and every activity I certainly didn't know. And being young, and stupid, I might have helped my boyfriend borrow a rental car if he wanted one. Not if I knew he was going to commit crimes with it, obviously not. But how many of us were young and stupid in college, and had boyfriends that we later learned a lot about, and regretted greatly? Briana's story could be mine, or any of the other 1000+ women in my graduating class, or any of the millions of women in this country who, back in college, once dated the wrong guy.
If we're going to put someone in jail, there needs to be real evidence that they committed a crime. Testimony by people with a vested interest in naming others just doesn't cut it, if all they can offer is their own suspect word, and not actual, corroboratable evidence. And evidence that she was dumb enough to lend her boyfriend a rental car is not evidence that she knew of, or participated in, a crime. Even if she did lend him a car, could he have lied to her about why he wanted it? Oh, I don't know - men never lie to their girlfriends, do they?? None of this comes close to eliminating "reasonable doubt." It just doesn't.
The sad fact is that since 9/11, our federal government has repeatedly overlooked the requirement for actual evidence before conviction or incarceration, not once but in hundreds of cases: that minor little detail that used to be a cornerstone of our legal system.
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These people are insane.
And not the "good kind" of insane, the one that gets you off.
If they did it, lock them up. End of story. They burn things (and take the chance of killing innocent people) for no good reason, and if they somehow think it will bring anyone round to their cause, they are delusional.
And if someone burns a place down for insurance money, lock them up in an adjoining cell. Maybe they can trade arson stories, for what remains of their lives.
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Ignorance and activism
"Prosecutors used scare-mongering to get the jury to convict an innocent person"?
GASP! Well, I never!
I'm sorry if an innocent person was convicted and inasmuch this article is about that topic, I am as outraged as anyone should be.
But there is another issue in the article and it is the issue of activism itself.
An activist is a person who wants to change something very specific in MY world whether I want it or not. That alone makes activists sort of unlikeable people, in whom arrogance and selfishness is combined with a single issue zealotry.
I am not against opening eyes, but eye-openers (iconoclasts, rebels, etc) want to change something in my world while persuading me to join in and want the change together with them.
For an activist, the narrowness in focus is in mutual feedback with a serious level of ignorance about some fundamental aspect of the topic at hand.
In case of the ELF people, it is summed up in the following sentence:
" genetically engineering trees for the benefit of the timber industry. They said his research would "unleash mutant genes into the environment" and "cause irreversible harm to forest ecosystems."
This shows a shocking (but not surprising) degree of ignorance of biological science and the fundamentals of logic. Mutant genes are unleashed into the environment - where else by the way? - every second by good old Mother Nature. In fact the activists themselves are the beneficiaries of mutant genes that had the fortune to assemble into the genome of a homo sapiens by a few billion years of evolution.
This type of ignorance is akin to the one underlying the activism against "genetically modified foods" which is widespread in Europe and for some miraculous reason has not gained foothold in the US. All of the cultivated food crops are genetically different from their wild antecedents, how else could they look bigger or juicier? They are all genetically modified after thousands of years of selective breeding and hybridization.
Such levels of pervasive structural ignorance of the topic at hand is crucial to the development of activism. Experts in their topic know all too well that nothing is as simple as it sounds. The typical activist has oversimplifications, misunderstandings and the total lack of awareness of alternative explanations in his/her head regarding the mechanics of the issue they are ready to sacrifice themselves and even others for.
It is sad to contemplate that institutes of higher education, such as apparently Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., turn out fanatic ignoramuses like the ones the article talks about, and what's more they prosper as well known magnets for people interested in such type of activism. It being a state college, in this case the fostering of stupidity and violence was done with governmental assistance, to boot! So it is not only educational malpractice but misuse of taxpayer dollars as well, just to add insult to injury.
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Re: plenty of reasonable doubt
Seventh, you say you haven't seen any damning evidence and the articles don't point to any. That's my point exactly. This article seems to be the most thorough (among the others I googled) - and this article doesn't mention what seems to be a vital piece of evidence. Now I have no idea what ALL the evidence is, and I certainly don't know enough about the case to know whether or not there's enough reasonable doubt. What I do know is that this article neglected a major fact and seems, to me, to be pretty biased. That's not to say Waters is guilty - it's just to say that I don't think anyone can make a decision about her guilt or innocence based on the selective reporting in this article.
I will say that being young and stupid and a college girl in love isn't really a valid defense for being an accomplice in any sort of crime....and I say this as someone who was once a young stupid college girl in love with a sketchy guy.