Letters to the Editor
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Tough to get from Olympia to Seattle in 48 minutes
I know, I've made that 60 mile trip a lot, and you'd generally have to drive like a maniac. But like Amerigo says, maybe she bought gas on the road out of town, and got to this meeting just a little late. It seems these facts should be known and must have been communicated to the jury; were they?
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@Amerigo (and @Theodore Rigley)
Tough to get from Olympia to the University of Washington in 48 minutes? Try virtually impossible at 7-8PM unless I-5 has been cleared of traffic. Using the state capitol building (which is in the central-north area of Olympia) to the U District as a rough measure of distance, you get approximately 65 miles. In order to get there in 48 minutes, she would have had to have been driving at a sustained speed of close to 90MPH. Given the typical slowdowns in Tacoma (near the Tacoma Dome), Tukwila (near SouthCenter Mall) and Seattle (through downtown), a sustained speed of 90MPH would have been highly unlikely. You're lucky if you can do 50MPH in good conditions.
I don't know if Waters was, in fact, involved with the arson at UW, but at the very least, the information regarding her presence in Olympia at 7:12PM is extremely damaging to the case.
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Would everyone agree they were terrorists if they had accidentally killed someone?
Fires burn and they don't always stop when they're supposed to. They may be fighting for a good cause, but yes, these folks are terrorists, not "activists."
The folks in Al-Qaeda also believe they are fighting for a good cause. The goodness or badness of causes is highly subjective. The legality of setting buildings on fire for a cause isn't.
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"Frankly, assuming she did participate in the alleged acts..."
I rather surprised that so few of you seem to understand how 'our' government works when it comes to things like this! The fact that she's been convicted on the basis of testimony by bribed/threatened (your choice) witnesses under the new post-9/11 Big Brother counterterrorism laws ought to be a HUGE RED FLAG! Yet here you are, gentle Salon Readers, willingly stipulating that because a jury was convinced to vote guilty, it's probably true and then happily moving on to discuss how harshly she should be punished!
As far as I'm concerned, when the Government tries to send someone up the river on the basis of basically nothing but coerced testimony, it's virtually guaranteed that they have no case. The US Government simply has ZERO credibility when it comes to things like this, they've lied under these circumstances FAR too many times! Even if they had 'concrete' evidence, there's a good chance it may have been planted. It's also entirely possible that FBI instigators stirred the pot, so to speak. Look up 'Thermcon', an (exactly) similar plan. Not that that's necessarily what happened here, just that it speaks to the Government's lack of credibility.
From the article: "According to two women who testified against her in return for dramatically reduced sentences, Waters hid in a shrub near the Center for Urban Horticulture with a walkie-talkie, ready to alert the others if the campus police strolled by. Waters testified she wasn't even in Seattle that night." Later in the article it states that neither of these witnesses remembered Briana Waters having anything to do with the case for weeks; they named names but not until they'd been through several interviews and had been offered plea deals did they name Ms. Waters.
Do you really suppose that the jury was allowed to hear about how this testimony was obtained? Knowing how it was obtained would any of you, as a juror, consider it to be reliable and untainted? Just because the government told you so?
Also: "A third cooperating defendant, Stanislas Meyerhoff, who had earlier implicated Phillabaum, his own fiancée, in the fire, told investigators that he was "familiar" with Waters but that she was "not involved" in the arson." Even 'reliable' eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, and none of these witnesses are even remotely reliable. So who're you gonna believe, the unreliable witness with nothing left to lose, or the ones with plenty to gain?
The assertion in other articles that she's responsible for the getaway car seems also to be unsupported by any actual physical evidence, in fact there appears to be NO forensic evidence at all to support the government's case. On the other hand, there's the usual evidence of the government stacking the deck: closed hearings, exculpatory evidence not admitted, defense expert witnesses not permitted to testify, 'modified' FBI interviews admitted... sound familiar yet?
This isn't the Judi Bari case, actual arson did occur, but does anyone remember how that one worked out? Exoneration plus a multi-million dollar civil verdict against the FBI? And have you ever looked into the ugly details behind it, the connections between the timber companies and the government? And remember this is very small potatoes compared to what the CIA does and has done routinely for decades.
I think many of you are WAY too eager to pass judgement here without looking behind the curtain.
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re: reduced sentences in return for testimony
SB: well, sure, the testimony of those who have received reduced sentences in return for testimony is suspect. But that's hardly something that only happens post 9/11. The War on Drugs people have been using that tactic for years. I first encountered it in grade school when a teacher told me I'd be punished for talking in class unless I ratted out who was actually talking.
Funny, I would have assumed that people who commit illegal acts because they feel strongly enough about their chosen cause to break the law on its behalf would EXPECT that jail might be one of the possible consequences of their actions.
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With laws like this, who needs enemies?
"But the USA Patriot Act created a new category of domestic terrorism, which is defined as an offense "calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government" or "to intimidate or coerce a civilian population"."
Under this definition of terrorism you could easily indict George Bush, Dick Cheney, David Addington, John Yoo and a host of others involved in the Bush administration, for doing precisely what it says. And no need to be arguing over the veracity of informants to establish their participation--the public record has all you would need. Such laws are very dangerous, particularly when so much of our system of checks and balances has been subverted by those in power.
Walt Kelly was right.