Environmental Extremist Gunned Down before Detonating Bomb, Killing Hostages

Environmental extremist James Lee’s plan to force the Discovery Channel to air environmental propaganda ended Wednesday afternoon when police shot and killed the gunman as it appeared he was preparing to detonate a bomb and kill hostages inside the Discovery Channel headquarters.

Lee, who wielded two guns throughout the hostage scenario, had several metallic canisters strapped to his chest and back.

In a telephone conversation with an NBC News producer Lee stated, “I have a gun and I have a bomb. ... I have several bombs strapped to my body ready to go off.”

"SWAT officers heard a shout, they heard a pop. They were unclear if that was a gunshot or if it was the suspect detonating a device," Montgomery County Police Chief J. Thomas Manger told ABC Good Morning America. "The officers immediately confronted the suspect. He had a gun out and he was shot at that point."

Police found several explosive devices strapped to Lee, with still more explosive devices in a bag and a box that Lee had brought with him.  

"Attached to propane cylinders, he had pipes that contained shotgun shells. In addition he had a couple of pipe bombs strapped to it. They appeared to have some sort of firework type material inside of them," Manger said.

Lee was first arrested for engaging in disruptive environmental protesting outside Discovery Channel headquarters in 2008. At the time, he explained he had had an environmental “awakening” after seeing Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.”

In “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore bemoans the fact that peaceful, democratic means have not motivated people to enact his desired global warming restrictions. “I used to believe in democracy,” Gore says near the end of his movie. 

In 2006, Grist magazine staff writer David Roberts wrote, "When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards -- some sort of climate Nuremberg.” The penalty imposed in Nuremberg for war crimes was death.

In 2007, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (I) invited Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to keynote a state-sponsored conference designed to rally public support for global warming legislation. During his remarks, Kennedy called the producers of conventional, carbon-based energy "traitors" and perpetrators of "treason," and then demanded they be punished as such. The U.S. Constitution authorizes the death penalty as punishment for treason. Crist neither condemned the remarks nor made any attempt to distance himself from them.

In 2008 NASA global warming activist James Hansen said CEOs of fossil energy companies   “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature." The penalty for high crimes against humanity is death.

As Lee prepared to storm Discovery Channel headquarters with his guns and bombs, he issued a manifesto and a list of demands, much of which reads like an environmental activist wish list.

“The Discovery Channel MUST broadcast to the world their commitment to save the planet and to do the following IMMEDIATELY:” reads the title of the manifesto.

Among the demands:

“Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. … Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. Do both. Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed!

“Find solutions for Global Warming, Automotive pollution, International Trade, factory pollution, and the whole blasted human economy. Find ways so that people don't build more housing pollution which destroys the environment to make way for more human filth! Find solutions so that people stop breeding as well as stopping using Oil in order to REVERSE Global warming and the destruction of the planet!”

“Saving the Planet means saving what's left of the non-human Wildlife by decreasing the Human population. That means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies!”

“Develop shows that will correct and dismantle the dangerous US world economy.”

Lee is not the first, or even the most threatening, environmental activist to engage in acts of terrorism. Unabomber Ted Kaczynski wrote an anti-technology environmental manifesto and targeted for death prominent people whose work conflicted with environmental extremism. Eco-terrorists have similarly attacked businesses, laboratories, and homes of people they believe are harming the environment.