Josh Connole arrested for firebombing

As mentioned here earlier:

 Federal authorities arrested a Pomona solar panel installer Friday in connection with the firebombing of a West Covina Hummer dealership last month, an attack linked to the radical environmental group Earth Liberation Front (ELF)

Josh Connole, 25, was taken into custody outside a Craftsman bungalow that he and five friends had converted into a self-styled co-op dedicated to veganism, conservation and the quest for world peace. Friends said Connole had nothing to do with the vandalism and describe him as a pacifist who is committed to change without violence.

 Sources close to the investigation said that Connole could be seen on surveillance tape shot just before the fire at the Hummer dealership.

Federal investigators followed Connole for three days before arresting him on multiple counts of arson and felony vandalism. He is being held in lieu of $825,000 bail.

In a phone call from his cell, Connole said that agents had the wrong man.

“I didn’t have anything to do with that,” he said. “I didn’t know what Earth Liberation Front was about. Someone mentioned to me the Hummer incident when it happened, but I don’t watch TV or read newspapers. I know nothing about it I’m no more involved in causes than standing on corners with signs. I’m not an active member in any organization.”

Connole said that he was shown the surveillance photos while he was being interrogated and that they bear no likeness to him.

As to a link to ELF, their website implies they had no direct knowledge of the attacks.

Although the ELF Press Office has received no communications about these actions from the persons responsible, spraypainted signatures at all scenes indicates claims of responsibility by ELF activists.

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Note:

The slow loading of PoliZeros the past day or so may have been caused by the Google ad.

There were three external sites referenced from the home page, the blogrolls from blogrolling.com, the comments from Radio UserLand, and the Google ad. I removed each one, then tested the system. Removing the blogrolls or comments made no difference. Removing the Google ad made an instant difference.

So the Google ad is gone, at least for a few days…

Is anyone else having speed problems and is the speed better now?

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Breaking News

Reliable sources tell me that Josh Canolla (see story on Friday), an activist from Orange County, will be arraigned today, Saturday, in Federal Court in Los Angeles for involvement in the destruction and burning of Hummers a few weeks back.

People at an antiwar vigil in Santa Ana on Thursday reported being tracked by five FBI cars. At 1 am Friday morning, the FBI raided the co-op where Canolla lives and took him into custody, and stayed there until they got a search warrant.

A Saturday arraignment is highly unusual, another sign this is a big breaking case - and will probably make major headlines.

And I believe PoliZeros is the first news source to report this.

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Winning their hearts and minds again?

US army blunder ‘kills eight Iraqi officers’

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Where oh where, can my WMD be?

From our trusted source, Deep Audit:

U.S. officials told NBC News that Navy divers are beginning to search a reservoir in northern Iraq after reports of barrels at the bottom that could contain chemical weapons or missile parts.

(From whence, of course, they could be launched with only a 45 minute notice.)

Secretary of State Colin Powell, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, still insisted weapons of mass destruction will be found: “They will see that there was no question that such weapons exist, existed, and so did the programs to develop more.”

(Yah blah blah)

What about those unmanned planes the United States said could have been used to spray biological or chemical weapons? An Air Force report from October says they were never built for that purpose…

Despite the failed search, at Fort Stewart, Ga., on Friday, President Bush again raised the specter of Saddam’s weapons: “Because of our military, catastrophic weapons will no longer be in the hands of a reckless dictator.”

But members of his national security team are now saying removing Saddam was justification enough for the war - that he himself was a weapon of mass destruction.

(Brilliant!  Just Brilliant!  Hussein IS A WMD!  Obviously, so were his sons.  Why didn’t we think of that?)

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Thousands demonstrate to support Arafat

Tens of thousands of Palestinians took to the streets in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip on Friday to denounce Israel’s decision to “remove” Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, while the US called the threat “unhelpful.”

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Exploiting the atrocity

Paul Krugman in the NY Times

The press has become a lot less shy about pointing out the administration’s exploitation of 9/11, partly because that exploitation has become so crushingly obvious. As The Washington Post pointed out yesterday, in the past six weeks President Bush has invoked 9/11 not just to defend Iraq policy and argue for oil drilling in the Arctic, but in response to questions about tax cuts, unemployment, budget deficits and even campaign finance.

Meanwhile, the crudity of the administration’s recent propaganda efforts, from dressing the president up in a flight suit to orchestrating the ludicrously glamorized TV movie about Mr. Bush on 9/11, have set even supporters’ teeth on edge.

And some stunts no longer seem feasible. Maybe it was the pressure of other commitments that kept Mr. Bush from visiting New York yesterday; but one suspects that his aides no longer think of the Big Apple as a politically safe place to visit.

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