http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/03/01/0301activ... / By Steven Kreytak, Austin American Statesman

Men arrested at Republican convention came from passionate community.

As eight Austin activists made the 1,200-mile drive to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., in a rented van last summer, they talked about things like food, politics and protests, said 21-year-old Gabby Hicks, who was part of the group.

They also talked about ways, when protests seemed to be growing heated, to defuse the situation — by sitting down, for example, Hicks said. "There was no really serious conversation about destruction or hurting people or anything that I would view as violence. We were all under the impression that this was nonviolent civil disobedience."

But the van was hauling 34 homemade riot shields. And during the four-day convention in St. Paul, two members of the Austin contingent — Bradley Crowder and David McKay — were arrested, accused of building a cache of homemade firebombs.

Authorities say Crowder and McKay intended to use them on police vehicles and perhaps even police officers.

Media outlets around the nation reported on the charges that the two men manufactured and possessed Molotov cocktails.

McKay is scheduled for a retrial March 16 after a mistrial was declared in Minneapolis on Feb. 3.

Crowder pleaded guilty in January.

Reports also focused on how the men were part of the Austin Affinity Group, the name the FBI gave to the activists who went to St. Paul in the rented van.

In recent weeks, some self-described radical Austin activists, some of whom were in Minnesota for the convention, have spoken up in defense of the pair, who are both 23. They call McKay and Crowder naive young men who were talked into making the Molotov cocktails by Brandon Darby, 32, a more seasoned activist secretly working with the FBI. McKay used that defense at trial; Darby denied pushing the men to make the improvised bombs.

The Austin activists also say their community is a nonviolent collection of people who dedicate themselves to changing a variety of societal ills and who think nonviolence is the best way to make those changes.

They protest corporations and governments, saying that those institutions impose their will without the consent of the people affected.

The same activists say theydevote much of their lives working to find grass-roots solutions to community problems, such as creating community gardens to address hunger and promoting the use of bicycles as nonpolluting and healthy transportation.

They rally around a common set of efforts such as the Inside Books Project, which sends books to prison inmates, and Treasure City Thrift, a collectively owned and volunteer-runEast 12th Street secondhand store that uses its profits to support other community organizations.

"We all share a vision of a society that can be different than the one we are currently living in," said Lisa Fithian, 47. "It's a society rooted in cooperation and not competition, where we are not driven by profit motive and greed. We are committed to building structures that fit people's needs, where we all have power."

McKay and Crowder grew up in Midland but were living in Austin last year. The larger group of area activists they mixed with is difficult to define and quantify — some of them say they number in the hundreds; others, the thousands. Some say that they share goals and work on projects with more mainstream politically active residents — such as minimizing environmental damage caused by development — but that they are different because they are willing to be arrested to make a statement and generally have little faith in government to solve problems.

They refer to themselves as a community or as part of a movement, but there is no formal structure. Some say they moved to Austin from other places because of the robust political scene here. The University of Texas keeps a steady flow of disaffected students feeding the ranks.

"What I am interested in is people realizing their own power," activist Scott Crow said, "and doing things block by block and neighborhood by neighborhood."

Crow, 42, said he moved to Austin from Dallas this decade to be among more politically like-minded people. He co-founded an activist training camp and has organized and participated in protests against things such as the Iraq war and in favor of animal rights.

He earns a living working at Ecology Action, a collective-run recycling center downtown.

Fithian has no permanent job but says she stays busy, whether it's organizing demonstrations against free-trade agreements in places such as Cancun or rallying janitors on strike in Houston or doing environmental work on behalf of Austin's Save Our Springs Alliance. Fithian said she lives frugally and sometimes is paid, by environmental groups, for example, for her organizing support for specific issues.

"I have a passion for fairness and justice," she said. "My work is transformational work. It's helping people accessing their power."

Hicks, 21, pursues various causes as well, whether it's volunteering at Resistencia Bookstore in South Austin, an activist meeting center, or working for equal rights or immigrants' rights.

"I feel like not everyone in the radical community specifically protests. They might do other things like volunteering," she said.

Texas Civil Rights Project Director Jim Harrington, who has represented some frequent protesters in court, said the radical contingent of Austin's activist community is "very committed to social change and really works at the grass roots of it."

"They have a different political philosophy. They are more progressive with some socialist ideas about limited capitalism, economic limitation," he said. "They do all this at considerable personal sacrifice."

Fred Burton, a former federal agent who is a vice president at the Austin-based global intelligence company Stratfor, said he thinks the Austin activists, given that they took shields with them to St. Paul and were caught with Molotov cocktails, "were intent on causing anarchist kind of disruptions."

Burton said that for a national event such as the Republican convention, federal authorities would have gathered intelligence on various radical groups that were planning to attend.

The activists themselves and federal authorities often refer to small cells of activists who plan and travel together as "affinity groups," he said.

Such groups, Burton said, often communicate on public Web sites or in e-mail blasts that are easy for authorities to intercept. In the case of the Austin activists, the FBI's decision to have Darby attend the group's meetings probably meant it suspected the group was intent on violence, he said.

"Do I think that the activist community here are every day sitting around thinking about ways to plot against the government?" Burton said. "Probably not. But in this specific case, the evidence appears to be that they did."

FBI officials and federal prosecutors declined to comment for this story.

On a recent afternoon at Treasure City Thrift, a meeting place for local radical activists, area residents rummaged through boxes of clothing out front labeled "free," and members of the Yellow Bike Project, which is sharing the space, milled around the parking lot, fixing bicycles. Inside, next to the used clothes, were fliers for a variety of causes, including raising money to free former Black Panthers from a Louisiana prison, and a business card for an online store set up to raise money for Palestinians.

It was at Treasure City that Crow met Crowder, who worked at a ThunderCloud Subs shop and liked to talk about politics.

"He's a bookworm," Crow said. "We would talk about how to build sustainable communities."

Fithian also met Crowder at Treasure City and had similar recollections. "He knew I was a trainer, and he tried to just learn from me," she said.

Fithian said she regularly travels ahead of major events to plan the best ways to bring together disparate groups and to cause the biggest disruption.

She went to St. Paul for the first time in September 2007 to organize demonstrations for the 2008 convention, she said.

In early 2008, Hicks said, handfuls of local activists thinking of going to St. Paul to protest at the convention began meeting in homes, at MonkeyWrench Books and at Treasure City. The group was later dubbed the Austin Affinity Group by the FBI.

Members of the RNC Welcoming Committee — a self-described anarchist and anti-authoritarian organizing group created to disrupt the convention — paid a visit to Austin and helped the Austin activists plan for the protests, Hicks said.

Criminal conspiracy to riot charges are pending against eight members of the RNC Welcoming Committee, according to news reports.

At these gatherings, Crowder and McKay never talked about violence and instead were focused on coordinating logistics — funding, housing and transportation to St. Paul, Hicks said.

The day after the van arrived in St. Paul, authorities, working on a tip from Darby, found the trailer and seized 34 shields, helmets and batons that "looked like cut-off shovel handles," court documents say.

Prosecutors have said that McKay and Crowder built the firebombs in Minnesota because they were angry that police officers had seized the trailer.

In a conversation recorded by the FBI, McKay told the FBI informant later identified as Darby that he planned to throw the explosives at a parking lot used as a staging area for police and federal agents, an FBI affidavit said.

"What if there's a cop sleeping in the car?" Darby asked McKay, according to the affidavit.

"He'll wake up," McKay replied, according to the affidavit.

McKay also said, "It's worth it if an officer gets burned or maimed," the affidavit said.

On the third day of the convention, authorities raided an apartment building where McKay and Crowder were staying and seized eight assembled homemade firebombs in the basement.

Hicks said building bombs is not indicative of the goals of Austin's radical community, where "there's a strong belief in humanity."

"The idea is that, if you put your effort into the community and the building of personal relationships within community," she said, "that makes a community that does not need a government."