Episode 4: Ghosts and myths

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. And save over $390 this holiday season. Book your next vacation rental home on Virbo. Average savings $396. Select homes only. At the BBC, we go further so you see clearer. Through frontline reporting, global stories and local insights, we bring you closer to the world's news as it happens. And it starts with a subscription to BBC.com.

giving you unlimited articles and videos, ad-free podcasts, the BBC News Channel streaming live 24-7, plus hundreds of acclaimed documentaries. Subscribe to trusted, independent journalism and storytelling from the BBC. Find out more at bbc.org. I'm Adrian Dunbar and this is a story about a time in Irish society when nothing was ever quite what it seemed. It was shocking horror that anything could actually happen like that in the Phoenix Park.

It was wrong, unviolet and obscene. Welcome to Obscene, the Dublin Scandal. There's nothing fires up the imagination in a small country more than the idea there's someone wandering around who's going for it. We couldn't believe that this culprit for these crimes would have been associated with the most senior law officer in the country. If this thing is what we think it is, it would bring down the government. Listen to all of Obscene, the Dublin scandal first.

On BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. A note before we get started.

This episode features strong language and a reference to suicide. We are with our backs up against the wall. We're off the cliff. Over the past 18 months... As producer Georgia Cat and I have been working on this project, we've heard people saying a lot of things like this. Things are very, very bad. However bad you think they are, they're probably worse.

This is Rupert Reid, an academic and environmental campaigner in the UK. Fires in the west coast of the U.S. and the fires in the Arctic, for God's sake. I mean, fires in the Arctic. What the hell is our planet coming to? tumbling down the cliff itself. We have to try to stop ourselves falling and then we have to try to start painfully hauling ourselves back up again. But how do we do that? Around the world...

As more and more people take to the streets calling for change, environmental actions are high profile, becoming increasingly disruptive. The tactics of today's environmentalists bear no resemblance to that of the so-called family. Their methods are about raising awareness, mass civil disobedience, marching in the streets. Many say They're disruptors, not destroyers. But even so, words like eco-mob, eco-zealots, and even eco-extremists and eco-terrorists are back in the news again.

on both sides of the Atlantic. We've been looking back to when the term eco-terrorist became part of the world's vocabulary. at a time when it was identified as the number one domestic terror threat in America. Arson. vandalism, violence, extremist movements known to support acts of domestic terrorism. In this series, you're going to hear people who 20 years ago sensed we were in a pot of water slowly reaching a boiling point and chose to take...

things further. How we judge their actions of 20 years ago may not be a thought experiment for much longer. in 2040 or 2050, on 2021 or 2022? Are they going to say, ah, yes, thank God the government cracked down on those pesky eco-extremists? Or are they going to say...

Thank God the government didn't crack down so hard on those pesky eco-extremists that they weren't able to really warn us and get us moving in time. Or are they going to be saying, and I've got to tell you, I think this is the most likely scenario, Christ. If only we'd listen to them rather than allowing government to brand them as eco-terrorists. This is Burn Wild. Episode 4. Ghosts and Myths.

I'm Leah Satilli. At the heart of the story of the Earth Liberation Front and the so-called family are two fugitives whose mugshot sat on the FBI's most wanted domestic terrorist site. Jo DeBay now awaiting trial. And a woman named Josephine Sunshine Overacre. Sunshine. Every day she's gone is one more day she's stuck her finger in the eye of one of the most powerful law enforcement agencies in the world.

Midway through our reporting, Sunshine was the focus of an episode of a TV show called America's Most Wanted. It's a show that's been around since the 1980s. Each episode spotlights several fugitives who've evaded law enforcement and asks for the public's help in keeping an eye out for them. And for decades, it has proven to be a great way for the government to own the story about the people they want to find the most. The descriptions they give are almost identical to those on the FBI's page.

On this particular episode, the hosts talk about Sunshine, a hologram, this cartoonish version of her wearing jeans and a tight red tank top. rotates in between the two hosts. The FBI launched the biggest eco-terrorism investigation in the history of the FBI into Josephine Overaker and her group. Every member of the group was caught except... And she, well, the hologram version of her looks nervous. It breathes.

Chests moving up and down. And it's really weird. With self-made firebombs. Huge reward. $50,000 for any information leading... And this is the narrative on Sunshine that dominates. They really want to get her. All right. And snippets like this.

And the FBI's story is really all we've had to go on. And that story is kind of thin. It says she could be a midwife, a masseuse, or a firefighter. Here's Georgia, the producer. It says she's got a hairy upper lip. And she's vegan. And I think that when you're referencing a hairy upper lip, you're pretty desperate, aren't you? And I don't think veganism is as uncommon today as it might have been 20 years ago.

So where are we? I mean, we've been on this now for... It's end of September 2021, so we've been working on this for all of this year. We've been trying to figure out how to handle Sunshine's place in this story. I have been so frustrated how we couldn't... find a damn thing about Sunshine. People who knew Sunshine weren't willing to talk to us. And there's nothing that infuriates me more than a one-sided story.

I'd been losing sleep, searching endlessly for anything I could find about sunshine that would give us clarity. And finally, I got a bite. A tiny one, but a bite nonetheless. Which is why on this autumn day last year, I'd called Georgia. So she went to a boarding school. I found some photos. Some photos. posted online from a high school trip. It looks like a rafting trip that people went on in 1992. Somebody that she went to high school scanned and put online. I mean, it's her.

Her with a life jacket on. Hunking her friends, sticking her tongue out, like basically just being 18. Probably 17 or 18. It's a totally different picture to that FBI one where she's, well... glowering we've never seen a photo of her smiling and on these photos people have tagged her like i've always thought of her josephine sunshine over acre and people are like oh josie over acre josie boarding schools in the uk are pretty expensive

They're normally quite exclusive. Is that the same thing? It's $54,000 a year. So yeah, it's a very expensive private school. The photos give us a window into another version of Sunshine, a girl laughing with her friends. who maybe came from money. It's like she's a real person, something rather than this. Just mugshot, yeah.

And it shows us that she grew up with an early love for the Earth. This might be the end of what we find, but maybe it's the beginning of something else. I hope it is. We reached out to administrators both past and present at the school, and they never got back to us. But from their website, you get an idea of the curriculum. They say that graduates of the school will, among many things, learn to be stewards of the environment. So...

Maybe it's no surprise she would be the kind of person to one day take action on behalf of it. But what does this level of commitment do to someone over time? You can see here. We're looking at a woodland with mostly sycamores. At a woodland protection camp in Staffordshire, England, Georgia's been spending time with some activists who spent months occupying forests slated to be cut down. Tents and some built structures around. Tents, tarps and...

After taking part in many civil disobedience actions These activists have spent months occupying woodland like this that's been destined to be cut down. Can you describe what it's like, like I guess kind of emotionally? draining exhausting and amazing living on camps will like simultaneously wear you down and break you as well as in a lot of ways rebuild you as a totally different person

It was like a shift from like activism, whatever you want to call it, being like an aspect of what you're doing to being like your totality, being everything that you do. Yeah. Like eviction, fever and stress is a really big part of being on camps and it's something that is a major contribution to burnout and stress and it can be traumatic.

Even before the felling and the police and bailiffs come, just the stress of being in a place and knowing that something is coming, that's traumatic in itself and people go for weeks and months of just... anticipation of like that adrenaline building and building and then when the moment finally comes you're already fried and your cortisol levels are like through the roof and you've been living outside in

the wet for six months it's not necessarily sustainable long-term way to live it can really destroy you it can take a long time to to rebuild yourself after that The level at which you're able to rebuild yourself really depends on how strong your community is. The Earth Liberation Front and so-called family weren't in a camp like this, occupying a physical space. But the emotional space these activists tell Georgia about...

That's recognizable to us from conversations we've had with people from that time too. The actions took an emotional toll. Chelsea Gerlach. For all the years that I had been an activist, I really had been in this mentality of there's a war going on and I'm defending the forest.

And that's what my life is about. And I don't have time to mess around with, oh, I'm just going to go hike in the woods and enjoy myself. I've got to be on the grind. And that was... damaging to my psyche being disconnected from the source of love that ultimately was the reason that i was doing the actions that i was doing being motivated by love but not being connected to nature, which even to this day is my biggest source of solace. Chelsea says her activism meant separating herself.

from the very thing that inspired her to do those actions in the first place. That ability to revel in the wonder of the natural world. And she talks about the stress of being away from friends and family. Especially in the years she went underground. You know, my family not even knowing where I was, having very little contact with them. That was really difficult. Yeah.

The one person whose story parallels Josephine Sunshine Overacres the most is Joe DeBay. Like Sunshine, Joe disappeared when the arrests happened in 2005 and spent 12 years on the run. We left Joe in the last episode on that day that he realized the FBI were onto him. Joe DeBay had guns, and the authorities knew that. Joe tells us he was afraid they might come in shooting. My father was like...

Why don't you just go back home? By home, his dad meant Syria, a country where Joe was also a citizen by right of birth and where he had plenty of family. And a country with, of course, No extradition to America. Joe says he believed the FBI were surveilling him, that they tapped his cell phone. When he decided to flee the country, Joe says he had a plan.

I sent my phone north to Canada with an associate. The associate would light the phone up. To throw them off his trail. And from here, things get pretty fast in the furious. His phone goes north, and Joe goes south. I had several cars. I was working on Microsoft at the time. And I put myself through college by driving pizza around. So I was a pretty good driver.

And so I took him on a ride and eventually lost him. I was a pretty good driver. Joe drives to Mexico, walks over the border, somehow skips past immigration, and catches a flight. to Syria. That story, Joe, I mean, it's like, I mean, it's great. It's like a crazy story. Like it's almost, did you like, were you surprised you pulled it off? No.

I just want to say this was impossible to fact check. And it might sound hard to believe. But at the same time, the more we speak to him, the more I get the sense that Joe has a different threshold for danger than most people. In Syria, Joe got a job working at the University of Kalamun, teaching computer security and renewable energy engineering, developing the curriculum for these fields that are still being taught in the country today.

But in 2010, with war about to break out, he fled to another country without extradition to the United States, Russia. Russia was a bit of a challenge. I left Syria in a really big hurry and I spoke three words of Russian. But the idea was that I was supposed to go there and wait out the war. And things just didn't quite work out the way I thought I would. The war in Syria kept going. And with his face plastered on FBI wanted posters, he stayed in Russia, eventually getting residency there.

And he says he pretty much built a life there. He was working developing biodiesel. He'd take used cooking oil from local restaurants and factories, put it through a refiner he'd built to produce a fuel for a local construction company. And... He met his wife at a yoga retreat. So I went to the seminar. Where, we didn't see this one coming, people were walking on a bed of nails. Which, Joe...

always the engineer, was helping construct so a nail didn't go through someone's foot. I spent the whole day making sure all the nails were evenly spaced with a ruler, and I wanted to see somebody walk on them. So I went to the seminar, which is one of the people walking on the nails. Did her feet get bloody? No, nobody got holes in their feet. Apparently it was uncomfortable, but... You know, my life has taken many strange turns, and that was one of them, but I'm very happy that it did.

it's hard to know what to make of Joe DeBay. This whole story is so far-fetched, from the car chase to the bed of nails. But on the other hand... It's kind of an unbelievable thing, too, to evade the FBI for that long. Did you tell your wife, you know, I have this thing that happened and... No, I kind of like...

I told her I had a past, that let's just make a future. And she accepted that. Were you trying to live, like, kind of keep a little bit of a low profile? You know, I just sort of lived my life. I mean, life went on. Life went on, but it was a different life. For over a decade, Joe had cut off contact with everyone back home, family and friends. I was not in touch with anyone here. And while he says his old friends are still his friends,

When he was gone, they didn't even know that he was alive. I talked to my friend and he basically told me that they'd had a funeral for me. So, it was pretty sad. Back in Seattle, where he is now, I get the sense that Joe's life is just a worse version of what he left behind in 2005. He spent three years in jail where he'd contracted COVID and had his jaw broken. He was granted release to home detention until his trial. I mean, he definitely grasped the seriousness of the charges.

and the nature of the situation but i still have some hopes is the idea of like a a very stable life um scary in any way to you No, it's really appealing. It is really appealing. I've always been like, I want a stable life. That's just not how things have panned out. You know, say this case goes away, what is it that you... You know, I haven't dared go dream that far. I'd really like to get a job doing something with the environment. Obviously I want to be with my wife.

His wife still lives in Russia. And 12 years passed while Joe was away. Twelve. People have aged, and now he's dealing with that. His father has dementia. And Joe is caring for him. With your dad, I mean, is he able to understand your situation? It's beyond his ability right now. You know, it's really heartbreaking.

I mean, it sounds like you've had to get really good at remaking your life. It's pretty hard. Like, it's really sad to do that because every time you remake your life, you know, you lose.

everything you had before. Seven months after finding those photos of her on the internet, I was still looking for anything more on the other fugitive, Sunshine, or as her high school friends called her, Josie. And one day, a package showed up in my mailbox. Oh, wait. Yeah! Can I show you something? Yeah. I asked Georgia to call me. School 93. This is Josephine Sunshine's high school yearbook, issued the year she graduated. Jackson Brown played?

I mean, they must have serious money to be able to pay these people. The yearbook isn't pictures of the band at football games or cheerleaders. They went to Belize, Grand Canyon. It's a school where students learn about the outdoors in the outdoors. was going and disappearing for two weeks into the desert. I went through the book and I'm like looking for her, you know, did you have Where's Waldo? Yeah, Where's Wully, I suppose. Oh, it was, okay, so we had Where's Waldo.

And that's what I felt like I was playing like, here's Waldo for Josephine Sunshine over Acre. I'm pretty sure this is her. See this face right here? Funny at the top, there's like some weird poetry that says, sunshine upon you. May the long time sunshine upon you. All love surround you and the pure light within you guide you all the way on. I mean, it's like flowers and like, it feels like. It feels very Ani DeFranco. And not only is there Sunshine's face, but a note from her family.

Dear Sunshine, while everybody's dancing in a ring around the sun, nobody's finished. We ain't even begun. So take off your shoes, child, and take off your hat. Try on your wings and find out where it's at. Love, Mom, Jim, and Thor. And then there's like the little Grateful Dead dancing bear. She's a hippie. Since starting on this project... We've been looking for any environmentalist from that time who might have known sunshine. It might speak. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, I think so.

One day, Georgia and I were on the line with a pretty infamous activist named Rod Coronado. I'm not used to using headphones. I never use headphones. It's just a little weird for me. Rod was a prominent activist in the 1980s when he sunk two whaling ships as a part of an action with a group called Sea Shepherd. He got involved with the Animal Liberation Front in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

He says he's retired from radical activism now. He works all of his time protecting wolves in an above-ground capacity. But back when he was, Rod was prolific. No one was ever injured in his actions, but... They were serious. He bombed a Michigan State University lab in 1992 that did experiments on minks. He served nearly five years in prison for that one.

And it wasn't the end for him. He also firebombed a fur farm. And when he was released from prison for that, he ended up in a halfway house in, you guessed it, Eugene, Oregon. where he worked for the Earth First Journal. They hadn't made that connection yet about like, hey, this guy just got out of prison for ALF actions. Maybe we shouldn't let him work at the Earth First Journal. Instead, you know, I was able to be a part of all that and see these young people.

One of them being Josephine Overaker, you know, just a young kid at that time. I don't know, I say young kid, but she was probably in her 20s or something. This is the first time Sunshine has been brought up without my asking. So I try to keep it cool. She, you know, is a little bit cagey. None of these people straight up told me what they did. Do you recognize the portrayal that the FBI puts out on her? Does it gel up with the person that you knew?

No, absolutely not. They say the same things about me. They're now saying about Josephine and about the propensity towards violence or disregard for life. I think that's completely opposite to who they really are. I've always felt like the thing that separates a lot of people in the direct action movement or the environment have been that we don't engage in physical violence. You have really intelligent, eloquent, and often...

you know, educated people, and Josephine was one of those people. As we talk to Rod, it's easy to hear his version of Sunshine as his own myth. To Rod, It's like she's a woman who can do no wrong. Passionate about protecting ancient forests and animals. I think that that's probably the type of person that Josephine still is, wherever she is.

If they haven't caught her yet, it's probably because she's being very good at being invisible. And if she is out there, she'll have seen what happened to everyone else. As Joe fled to Syria and Sunshine fled to somewhere, the FBI was putting on the pressure on the members of the family they had behind bars to get their convictions.

Retired FBI agent Jane Quimby played a major role in the takedown. When we did our arrests in 2005, it was a big deal to be able to say, we've arrested these people are terrorists and we're going to charge them with a terrorism enhancement. Because you've invested all this manpower and all this money to fight the terrorism threat and you want to have something to show for it. But the security culture that people have told us about, that extended to after the arrests too.

The idea of the family that was explained to us. FBI agent Tim Suttles. Is that if they ever get caught, they would not help or cooperate law enforcement. They would protect their family. But the authorities had something they could leverage. Joe DeBay's attorney, Matt Schindler. There's the practical reality of being called a terrorist, but there's also a legal consequence to that. It's very important to the United States.

By calling the family terrorists, when they were arrested, the government could invoke serious terrorism sentencing enhancements. Far longer prison terms, maximum security prisons, scary things. that could be used to try to get someone to budge on that stance of no compromise. That's where the hysteria, the language, the semantics of all of this stuff comes into play.

gave people really long prison sentences that were really unjustified, in part because of the hype surrounding all of this. And I'll say that. You don't say that, Joe. But it's true. FBI agent Tim Suttles. They were looking at some serious time. Some of them were looking at life in prison. We knew right away that we were, that the prosecution was seeking a terrorism enhancement.

Chelsea Gerlach. The charges that I was facing carried a mandatory minimum sentence of 35 years up to, I think it was like 235 years or something like that. A lot of time. So the only way to avoid a life sentence, this is the way that it was explained to me, is to cooperate with the government, accept whatever plea agreement they're willing to give you.

In the end, almost all the defendants pled guilty. When did you realize that some of your co-defendants were cooperating with the authorities? I found out pretty early. Super distressing. It felt like dominoes were falling. Daniel McGowan from New York refused to cooperate with the authorities. As soon as we were able to put together a group of co-defendants that did not want to cooperate and were not willing to sell each other out, we grouped up. So there ended up being...

He was sentenced. to seven years. Chelsea Gerlach did cooperate with investigators. At sentencing, the judge said Chelsea still had to pay for her crimes. but deserved to have some hope of redeeming her life after strong cooperation after her arrest. She was sentenced to nine years. Chelsea had known one of the people who was arrested in the big FBI sweep since she was 16 years old. She'd met William Rogers, who went by the nickname Avalon, at the big protest in Idaho.

Like Chelsea, he was in jail having been scooped up on the day of the big takedown. Retired FBI agent Jane Quimby. That would have been kind of like the seminal case, you know, hey, this is the guy that burned down Vale. Just a few weeks after the big arrests, Jane got a call from the case agent. He called and said, you know, are you sitting down? And I said, no, but I can be. And he said, the Avalon...

killed himself in the jail. He had died by suicide. I said, well, I guess in some ways that simplifies the prosecution, but it just kind of created a hollowness and, you know, you don't, you don't... wish ill will on anyone. I was saddened by the fact that that was the choice that he had made. And in the aftermath of Avalon's suicide, Facing years and years behind bars, Chelsea hit rock bottom. I was in maximum security for, I think it was the first three years of my incarceration.

Just crying and crying and lost and confused and the racing thoughts about losing everything. I mean literally everything. The material things. The relationships, my identity, any future hope that I might have had. Daniel spent much of his sentence... in one of the country's restrictive communication management units designed to keep inmates, typically convicted terrorists, from outside contacts. My dad visited a number of times.

and my dad's quite elderly and I remember this tiny little like cube that my dad had to squeeze into and this chair is like way too big for the space and my dad just sat there uncomfortably. He's there to see me, and so it gives me very much a feeling that that's my fault, that he's in discomfort. My mom was not in very good health. She actually passed away when I was in prison.

I was in the communication management unit, so I had to advocate really hard to get phone calls. You know, we were being monitored by the counter-terrorist unit. You know, I had people on the outside, my family calling, asking for a bedtime, excuse me, a bedside.

phone call and it was off schedule and at the time we were only allowed one phone call a week so we had to fight pretty hard and I had to, you know, I got my phone call and I got a phone call with my siblings when my mom passed away. Yeah.

Chelsea's cooperation seems to have created a schism in this movement. And Chelsea told us about the blowback she faced after. I had given so much of my life from when I was... like 14 all the way up to I think I was 28 when I got arrested you know all the years as a frontline activist and organizer to being underground and all of the sacrifices that that required being on the run and how stressful that was and then facing a life sentence and going to prison for this movement

which just turned on a dime. The movement just turned on me as a snitch. I expected that. I knew that that was coming. I'd been in the movement long enough to know that that was the consequences. But to go to the next level of saying these people are enemies of the movement, the backlash against the cooperators kind of became, well, we can't really...

do anything about corporate power and the wholesale destruction of the earth. Because that's not really happening. But we can say mean things on the internet about these people who did. and now are trying to save themselves from a life sentence to become the target of the very movement that I had been very much embedded in and given my life to.

For my entire life, going back to when I was 14 at that point, that was pretty rough. And with every deal that was taken, the government story just got stronger and louder. The family was an underground terrorist cell. They were terrorists. Joe's attorney, Matt Schindler. I guess I hadn't thought of that, that this has just never really been argued, huh? In response to statements made in this episode...

that by calling the family terrorists when they were arrested, the government could invoke serious terrorism sentencing enhancements. The FBI told us, the government sought the terrorism enhancement because the crimes met the definition. the unlawful use of force or violence committed against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population,

or any segment thereof in furtherance of political or social objectives. I'm wondering if you think that the label terrorists, that life in prison, those things like that, are those... A bridge too far? No, I don't think so. FBI agent Tim Suttles. There's enough legal mechanisms, letter-writing campaigns, run for office, volunteer, leverage those resources instead of...

Criminal acts. Joe wants the case to go to trial because he doesn't want to be forced into a plea deal, one that would leave him pleading guilty to charges he tells us he had nothing to do with. He hopes if it does, they can get answers about the plea deals with past defendants and whether they were fair. And he also wants the government to answer questions he has about the case, including his capture.

Joe would be picked up in, of all places, Cuba. There was an Interpol red notice out for him. He was flying back to Russia through Cuba. after a trip to Ecuador where he says he had been starting a coffee business. He says he was biometrically catalogued in El Salvador and then he landed in Cuba. It was in the middle of the night. I don't know exactly what time, but I would assume it was around midnight. This guy comes up to me. They get me out and put me in this car. I was driven.

to some sort of jail, basically. They put me in this outdoor cage for a while. Until, Joe says, he's moved to a room, an interrogation room. They've got this document. And he wanted to know about arson and trying to get me to say that this is me. And of course, I'm not too eager to do that. They'd stripped me naked at this point. I was naked.

They get this other guy, he unrolls a bunch of tools in front of me. We're trying to communicate through my limited Spanish, some limited English, a bit of Russian. It had like very serious ramifications, right? The guy's standing there, he's got his tools, and I don't get what they're trying to ask. Joe says they haul him off to a jail cell with no water.

It was brutally hot, unbelievably hot. Like, no water. About the third day, I was in pretty tough shape. I'd been going in and out of consciousness. The third day, like, they bring in this translator. Are you ready to talk? I'm like, yeah, sure, let's talk. He would answer questions in exchange for water. He says he'd say anything to just get something to drink. This went on for around 10 days, Joe says, until the CIA showed up. In their Gulfstream 3 and took me away.

We put Joe's claims about his capture and incarceration in Cuba to the FBI and the CIA. The FBI told us that they cannot comment since this case is going through court proceedings. And we didn't hear back from the CIA. In a July court filing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Quinn Harrington stated that Joe's... quote, speculation that the United States could have been aware of alleged mistreatment by Cuban authorities is nothing but conjecture. The FBI has no knowledge of any alleged mistreatment.

Debe was evaluated in Havana by an FBI SWAT medic to determine whether he could fly and to, quote, document any injuries he may have suffered while being detained in Cuba. In a statement filed in July, FBI agent Tim Suttles said, Other than claims made by Mr. DeBay, I am unaware of any mistreatment suffered by Mr. DeBay while in custody in Cuba.

By the summer of 2022, Georgia and I had been working on this project for more than 18 months. We'd spoken to countless law enforcement agents about the terrorist label, trying to wrap our heads around how a group who never harmed anyone became a domestic terror priority. And we thought we'd got there. But...

You look at Dylann Roof, who killed all those people in the church in Charleston, a black church there. I mean, people in press conference, like they would say, this is terrorism, but weren't actually charged with anything that... enforces that perception of terrorism. You know what I'm saying? I do. When I was looking at this, the Charleston shooting, that left nine people dead. And sure, it wasn't Charleston's terrorism. And similarly...

Chelsea and Daniel weren't charged with terrorism. They were charged with arson and conspiracy and all of this. But they were threatened with these terrorism enhancements, right? There are cases of white supremacists who threatened or committed violence that have. gotten the terrorism sentencing enhancement but I think the thing that's just really notable is there are these cases that have not garnered a terrorism enhancement which is just

I just can't wrap my head around that. I think that you and I probably just have the question of like, why this case and not this other case? Exactly. I think that it's very unclear. And I think it would be really good to have somebody. Who has, like, worked closer to these cases? Just talk about this disconnect that we're feeling. We got Daryl Johnson, former Homeland Security analyst, back on.

I try to be objective in calling terrorism in all forms out. The tactic of using arson is a violent tactic, and so I think that the terrorism label applies to these types of activities. Daryl is clear. He says what the family did is terrorism. But... Nevertheless, we need to be applying the terrorism label equally. We just seem to be going around in circles. We can't understand why some things are labeled terrorism.

And others are. So unfortunately, the label of terrorism is subjective when it comes to the U.S. government. They selectively apply it in certain circumstances and remain silent about it in others. Do you remember discussions about like the label terrorist being applied? Yeah, two things. Number one.

You got to kind of put into the historical perspective of when these arson attacks were happening. So we were in a period where white supremacy and anti-government extremism, there had been a crackdown in the aftermath of Oklahoma City. And what was left as the primary domestic terrorist threat was these animal rights and environmental extremist arsons. And so that's why you see on the record in whatever year it was, 2000.

five or whatever and said that the eco-terrorism was the number one domestic terrorist threat is because they were the most active at the time the second thing i wanted to bring into this is that you have a very powerful industry out there that lobbied Congress to get penalty enhancements against animal rights and environmentalists who use the arson tactic against their targets and facilities.

And so you had this Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act which was passed that gave penalty enhancements and called these types of activities with the label terrorism. The defendants arrested under Operation Backfire weren't tried under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. But it's worth saying something about it here.

because it widened the definition of terrorism when related to animal rights and environmental extremists. It was passed in 2006, the year after the arrests. And what is it? Is it just... increase the penalty? Yeah, much like hate crime legislation. So if somebody murders an individual, if you did this because of a person's ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation,

They have hate crime legislation in many states that gives additional years in prison because you were motivated by hate. Similarly, this Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act does the same thing. for animal rights extremists, environmental extremists. What do you think of that? I think it's a good idea, but if you're going to do it, I think there needs to be a more balanced approach. So rather than singling out animal rights and environmental extremism...

Just do domestic terrorism in general. Here we are in 2022 still trying to get a Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act passed. That's been ongoing for five years, but we don't have an industry or lobby behind it to push it over the finish line. Was it all about money then in designating who is a threat? In the case of these eco-terrorists, you know, they were causing financial harm and damage to these corporations. And so, yes, that definitely played a role.

Do you think that the threat from the Earth Liberation Front to ordinary Americans at that time was more serious than the threat from the far right?

Absolutely not. Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front, for the most part, targeted specific industries. For the most part, the general public wasn't targeted. What did you think of the sentences people received? So I do feel that the sentencing is... a bit heavy handed, especially when you compare it to white supremacists and militia members who have been arrested and prosecuted for, you know, having huge arsenals of illegal weapons.

plotting attacks to kill people things of this nature and they seem to be getting lighter sentences that was the plan was to break the back of the arson capability of the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, and I think it succeeded. But it came at a cost, and that is we've got these people that are imprisoned. for lengthy periods of time, and they haven't killed anybody. But that's the nature of politics and the nature of counterterrorism.

We asked the FBI whether political pressure played into the conviction and sentencing of the family. In a written statement, they told us the evidence proved and they admitted to committing criminal acts. In the first episode of this series, we spoke to Patty Strand, a Dalmatian breeder who runs a group called the National Animal Interest Alliance. She told us about the fear that was put into organizations like hers.

I have not seen sentences that made me feel that they were being too hard on them. These are people who destroyed people's lives and property. Patty had mentioned the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. She'd said she'd supported the provisions it brought in. After speaking to Daryl, we called her back up and put to her the comment that the terrorist label was applied partly because of industries coming together to lobby Congress.

That's how lobbying works in the United States. I have to tell you, I think that the public was so ready to impose some sanctions and restrictions, jail time. for the people conducting these activities, really was not that difficult. There was a real interest in finally being able to deal with the folks behind this movement. We're talking ALF, ELF.

and all of the others with myriad names, a time had come where people were just sick of it. And I think lawmakers, no matter how good they are, one of the main goals they have in their life is just to be reelected. And so I think that you could say that lawmakers, a majority of lawmakers would not have supported this if they did not believe that the majority of their constituents wanted something done to limit these activities.

think that those terrorism enhancements ended up having on the movement? Well, Daryl Johnson. I would say it's had a chilling effect. I think that sent a lot of... scare and fear throughout the movement itself. So we haven't really seen the same level of arson attacks or anything really since that time period. No matter how long this takes, we're going to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline.

In 2018, protests against a 1,172-mile-long pipeline in North and South Dakota saw over 140 arrests, predominantly of the indigenous protesters. who started the protest. We definitely saw how law enforcement freaked out during the Dakota Pipeline protests and wanting to crack down on those people, and it definitely seemed like they were... much more hyper-responsive to that versus some of these mass shootings that we've had that actually killed people.

A woman who dismantled construction equipment and valves had a terrorist enhancement applied to her sentence. Daniel McGowan. This individual, her name is Jessica Reznicek, and she is doing eight years. for her role in sabotage of the Dakota Access Pipeline. A year longer than I got, she got a terrorism enhancement, and now she's living her next six or so years in federal prison.

Things just repeat themselves, right? And it really does seem like history repeats itself. But in other environmental actions, courts seem to have been siding with activists. In 2016, a small group of valve turners shut off an oil pipeline to stop the flow of Canadian tar sands into the United States. One of them was a man named Ken Ward, who was acquitted of multiple felonies by arguing something called the necessity defense. Essentially,

He had exhausted all legal options to stop the oil flow, and so he was forced to break the law. It worked. On Georgia's side of the Atlantic, in the UK, Questions over how authorities respond to activists and protesters have been making headlines. In recent years, some judges have handed out what's been described as lenient sentences, but...

Last summer, Georgia and I spoke with Rupert Reid, an academic and environmental campaigner in the UK, who you heard at the beginning of this episode. In the UK, in my country, we've got the government trying to remove judicial review, so to roll back... the power of judges who have been giving some kind of remarkable rulings in favour of environmental action. We've got a really authoritarian crime bill going through. It's extremely worrying.

In the UK, the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Act passed into law this year. has increased penalties for, quote, willfully obstructing a highway. It increased the range of conditions police can impose on public assemblies and created powers for the police to place conditions on, quote, unjustifiably noisy protests. In addition, a public order bill being proposed includes measures that will

criminalize the highly disruptive acts of locking on and tunneling and creating a new preventative court order targeting the most prolific protesters. Activists we've spoken to in this series are extremely concerned about this. like those George has been recording with up in the woods near Staffordshire. I don't really know what, for people who have no relationship with this world, what people actually see us as, like people who are involved in this campaign.

environmental activists more generally like wasters time wasters and i think that's been like the narrative that's tried to be pushed certainly with the like the the police courts sentencing and crime bill it's this thing of like people like

Getting in the way of hard-working people's lives, blah, blah, blah, blah. We are seen as... the outsiders who are disrupting life for ordinary hard-working people and we are now viewed as the disruptors to this delicately balanced system that is working just fine if only we'd... play ball i feel like with this new policing bill i feel like we're really really on the brink of something and like the camps like this are going to become more and more common

Former Home Secretary Priti Patel, who introduced the bill, declined our request for interview, but in a written statement told us, The right to protest is a fundamental principle of our democracy. But we will not tolerate guerrilla tactics that cause misery to people going about their day to day lives.

The Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Act and the Public Order Bill ensure that key services that the public rely on, such as transport and energy, are protected from those deliberately disruptive and dangerous protests. The bill also provides the police with new powers to better balance the rights of the general public to go about their daily lives free from serious disruption or harm with the right to protest peacefully.

I really think we have to interrogate this word extreme. Rupert tells us he's been called an extremist for his actions, which are absolutely non-violent. Because we need to remember that, of course, people who argued for women's suffrage, for example...

and did quite full-on stuff, including window breaking and so on. They were condemned at the time, but of course it's just obvious now in retrospect that they had right on their side. My view is that it isn't really violence unless you're harming somebody. As we get to halfway through this series, we have to wonder what Sunshine's place in it is. You know, with Sunshine, the government says she's this terrorist.

She's on the FBI's most wanted domestic terror list. They've been looking for her for, what, almost two decades. I think the other thing to say is that, you know, I don't... I mean, yeah, I've made programs before about where we are looking for somebody. This doesn't feel like that and it doesn't feel it should be like that. You know, I think that what we want to do is just like flesh out.

something more about her what's her place in the wider story we're looking at about the right way to bring about change how far is too far to go what can her story tell us about that and it can't tell us very much when all we've got to go on is Government's narrative, I don't think. You know, no one's been able to just fill out the rest of the story of like, who is this person? I mean, I think that there's just this veil of secrecy around her from all sides.

And I think that that's like on us to try and somehow pierce. You know, what we've been looking at with the terrorism enhancements and this kind of, I guess, what we're getting at and people are going to take away very different things on it is. Should they have been called terrorists? So the question I suppose following on from that, the fact she's still on there, there's that question, should she be? Right? Yeah. Yeah. I just kind of have to wonder, like, how much of that is a myth?

you know, that's been created around her to sort of enforce an idea. She's been this ghost, sometimes a hologram, who props up the narrative that environmentalists can become terrorists. Perhaps a warning to others of what might come if they go too far. I think they're just saying, here's this boogeyman, this boogeywoman, you know, that's out there. I guess it's so much it still feels really fluid.

So, who is she, really? To understand Sunshine better, we decide we need to go to a place she was steeped in, to the very center of this story. To the place that brought together not only the key characters you've heard from, but where their ideas came from. It's a place that's not only the epicenter of the story of the family, but the epicenter of ideas that challenge notions of morality.

of what the right thing to do is in the face of a burning planet. I don't advocate sending bombs in the mail. And there we find things that are not only surprising, but unsettling. But were those people innocent?

I don't think so. That's next time. No way. And we make a wild discovery. See ya, sunshine. It's not what we were expecting to find, but it would be like drawing the shades back on a window and finally being able to see through to another world entirely. Burn Wild is presented by me, Leah Citilli. It's co-written by producer Georgia Cat and me. Fact-checking by Rob Byrne. Featuring Archive from America's Most Wanted.

The theme is by Echo Collective. Composed, performed, and produced by Neil Leiter and Margaret Hermont, and recorded, mixed, and produced by Fabian LeSueur. With new composition and sound design from Phil Channel. Podcast script recorded and engineered by Slater Swan at Anjuna Recording Studio. Series studio and mixing by Sarah Hockley.

The commissioning executive is Dylan Haskins. The editor is Philip Sellers. Burn Wild is a BBC Audio Documentaries production for BBC Radio 5 Live and BBC Sounds. Please subscribe and tell everyone about us. We're really proud of this project. And leave a review to help other people find us. Before you go, this is Georgia, the producer of Burn Wild, just chiming in to let you know about another BBC podcast which Leah and I have made. It's called Two Minutes Past Nine.

and it examines the legacy of the Oklahoma City bombing 25 years on. It was on that show we first spoke with Daryl Johnson, who you heard in this episode, and it's all available to listen to now. Here's Leah. At the beginning of 2020, I set out to try and understand what led 26-year-old Timothy McVeigh to commit America's deadliest domestic terrorism attack. When he gets talking about the US government, he gets this look in his eyes.

That will chill you to the bone. But then, the world changed. And so did our podcast. There are now armed vigilantes claiming they're protecting property. We draw a straight line from the incidents of today. right back to Timothy McVeigh. 25 years later, we've moved on. I think we would rather not deal with it. Two minutes past nine from BBC Radio 4. Make sure to subscribe on BBC Sounds.

At the BBC, we go further so you see clearer. Through frontline reporting, global stories and local insights, we bring you closer to the world's news as it happens. And it starts with a subscription to bbc.com. Giving you unlimited articles and videos, ad-free podcasts, the BBC News Channel streaming live 24-7 plus hundreds of acclaimed documentaries. Subscribe to trusted, independent journalism and storytelling from the BBC. Find out more at...