Political Quotes

“Madam President, in 1989, Tracy Stone-Manning rented a typewriter to draft and then send a letter threatening those who might choose to harvest trees. The letter stated that the trees in question had been sabotaged with hundreds of pounds of spikes. She closed the letter with: ``You bastards go in there anyway,'' meaning notwithstanding her threat, ``and a lot of people could get hurt.'' She and her cohorts thus used the threat of physical violence to achieve a political goal. This is the definition of terrorism. In 1993, multiple associates of Ms. Stone-Manning were convicted of tree spiking by a Federal jury. Though she signed and swore that the information provided to the committee was ``to the best of [her] knowledge and belief, current, accurate, and complete,'' Ms. Stone- Manning told the Energy and Natural Resources Committee that she had never been investigated. This was, in fact, not true. It was widely reported that in 1990, Ms. Stone-Manning was required to give hair samples, a full set of fingerprints, and writing samples. This was already a year after she had conspired with her circle of friends, members of the radical environmentalist group Earth First!. She was still not cooperating with the authorities. Now, how do we know that she was, in fact, a target of the investigation and not simply a bystander? Well, we know that based on a letter from Michael Merkley, a retired special agent criminal investigator for the Forest Service.…”