She and fellow Earth First!er Darryl Cherney, who was in the car with her when the bomb went off, filed suit against the FBI for targeting the two of them as the culprits and abandoning any pretext of hunting down the actual bomber(s). Judi and Darryl are charging the FBI with false arrest, illegal search and seizure and violation of civil rights.
That suit has given her access to FBI documents and opened the way for her to question FBI agents under oath; sifting through the 17 volumes of material that the FBI has grudgingly made available, she and her lawyers have turned up information which raises serious questions about the FBI's role.
FBI agents were at the scene of the bombing within minutes, and almost immediately announced that Bari and Cherney were terrorists on their way to a violent action and that the bomb was theirs. Their rationale: the bomb had been on the floor in the back seat of the car when it exploded; Bari and Cherney couldn't help but have seen it; ergo it was their bomb. Agents buttressed that scenario with tales of alleged environmental "terrorism" involving Earth First! in Arizona and unknown persons who had taken down some power lines in Santa Cruz, California. (In the Arizona incident, an FBI informant had persuaded a local group to cut some power lines, then set up the action, provided the tools, shown the group how to use them and led them into the waiting arms of arresting officers.)
But documents and photographs wrung by court order from the Oakland police show clearly that the bomb was directly under the driver's seat of the car, completely hidden from view. The bomb's trigger mechanism, which Bari has been able to inspect, was a device activated by the motion of the car, hardly the sort of thing one would carry along on a trip to Santa Cruz.
Bari and Cherney were headed to Santa Cruz to take part in a concert and rally in support of the upcoming Redwood Summer, a nonviolent drive modeled on the 1961 Freedom Summer civil rights campaign in the South, aimed at bringing to a halt the destruction of northern California's ancient redwood forests. The Santa Cruz concert and rally was part of a nationwide effort designed to gain support for that drive. The meeting they had left just prior to the blast was a Redwood Summer planning meeting. Information culled from FBI and OPD materials indicate that the FBI told the Oakland cops that a female source high up in Earth First! circles had informed them that "the Earth First! 'heavy hitters' were on their way to Santa Cruz for an action."
Of course the Redwood Summer idea was a direct challenge to the timber industry. Company executives had been threatening dire consequences and whipping timber workers' joblessness fears up to a frenzy, almost openly inciting violence. A logging trucker had rammed Bari's car from behind at 45 miles per hour after one protest rally (she and her two young daughters miraculously escaped serious injury); she could identify the driver as one whose truck had been blocked at the demonstration but the only police follow-up was to write him a traffic ticket. She received several death threats, one in the form of a photograph of her with crosshairs superimposed over her image. Here too, police chose not to investigate; one deputy sheriff told her they'd investigate if she turned up dead.
A week after the Oakland blast, an anonymous writer sent a letter to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat claiming credit for that bombing as well as for an incendiary device which had gone off but fizzled at a Louisiana Pacific lumber mill in Cloverdale, California the week before. The letter, couched in fundamentalist religious terms, and signed by the "Lord's Avenger," took Bari to task for her pro-choice politics, her "paganism" and her defense of the forest, citing these as the reasons for the bombing. But it also described in perfect detail--and in knowledgeable technical language--the makeup of the car bomb and of the bomb at the Cloverdale mill. The "lone assassin" implication of the note fit well into any agency attempt to duck responsibility for the bombing but the FBI chose rather to claim that it was a key piece of evidence suggesting that an Earth First! accomplice had placed the bomb and written the letter in an attempt to get Bari and Cherney off the hook; they stuck to that story even after a search of Bari's home turned up no evidence of such a tie.
Another peculiarity involves the Patty Hearst- style "Tania" photo of Judi Bari holding what purported to be an assault rifle. The snapshot, which Bari says was a joke, first appeared in a local alternative publication; but a slightly different shot--released by the Ukiah Police Department--showed up in the mainstream press, as supposed proof that she and her Earth First! associates are terrorists. The second photo came to the Ukiah police accompanied by a typewritten note from a self-proclaimed police informant falsely stating that Earth First! was indeed training with weapons and offering to help nail Bari for selling marijuana. Bari has been able to match that letter to one of the death threats she received and to determine that they both were written on the same typewriter.
However, though Bari has turned over all the death threats, a number of fake press releases purportedly from Earth First! but actually circulated by the timber companies, the matching notes, material relating to the "informant" letter and other information suggesting that somebody else did the bombing, FBI files clearly indicate that the agency has followed up on none of these possible leads; the FBI still considers Bari and Cherney to be suspects in the bombing.
By far the most interesting material Bari has found in the files is a three-page memo describing a "bomb school" which the FBI put on at College of the Redwoods in Eureka, California just a month prior to the Oakland blast. Agent Frank Doyle, a top FBI bomb expert (who, incidentally, headed the FBI response team at the scene of the Oakland bombing) was in charge of this one. The "range activities" for the course took place, according to the memo, on land owned by timber giant Louisiana-Pacific. Louisiana-Pacific was a principal focus of the 1990 Redwood Summer protests.
What do "range activities" involve? In this case, students recreated three crime scenes, one of which was essentially the same scene as the bombing in Oakland. This in spite of the fact that--according to one FBI agent--car bombing almost never happens in this country.
Along with photographs showing clearly that the bomb was directly under the driver's seat, the Oakland police coughed up a video taken at the scene of the blast while Oakland officers and FBI agents were waiting to examine the blast scene. The microphone picked up two interesting comments by the waiting cops: one voice refers to the situation by saying, "This is it! This was the final exam."
Another asks a question: "How do we know this isn't a real bombing?" The response: "We don't know; that's the problem."
At one point northern California Congressional representative Dan Hamburg was able, with Bari's help, to persuade the House subcommittee on the judiciary to being an inquiry into the actions of the FBI. It was through the subcommittee, in fact, that Bari was able to obtain some of the documents now available to her. The FBI refused to cooperate at first, citing the lawsuit as the reason, but committee chair Don Edwards responded angrily with a letter informing the Agency that the committee has oversight responsibility and the lawsuit doesn't absolve the agency from responding to committee requests for information.
However, the stall has continued--the FBI first called for a private meeting, then cancelled it--and has, in fact, worked. The hearing is dead, at least for this session of Congress. Faced with the necessity of starting over again, Bari is asking supporters to press the new chair of the subcommittee--the two top possibilities are Representatives Pat Schroeder and Barney Frank--to again schedule hearings.
Bari feels that a Congressional hearing would get at some of the facts about FBI misconduct in the bombing case, but that's not her only concern; it could also dig out information about what many observers see as a continuing Cointelpro, or domestic counterintelligence operation, within the FBI.
There are indications that that might be the case: the photo with crosshairs is a well-used Cointelpro stunt as are the death threats and faked documents. And Special Agent Richard W. Held, who was in charge of the FBI's San Francisco office at the time of the Bari bombing, made his FBI name and reputation running the original Cointelpro operation in the late sixties and early seventies.
Cointelpro was designed, in the words of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize" political dissidents. It was through Cointelpro that the FBI was able to frame Black Panther Geronimo Jijaga Pratt and American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier. The FBI insists that they discontinued all Cointelpro activities after the 1975 Church hearings revealed that the program had instigated the murders of several Black Panthers, infiltrated and seriously disrupted the American Indian Movement and spied on a number of legally-functioning organizations, but at least one former agent has said that only the name was dropped; the activities never stopped.
Held was considered a rising star in the FBI's pantheon, right up until his surprise announcement of his resignation in May, 1993, the day after Bari made public the Oakland police photos which clearly proved that the FBI had lied about the placement of the bomb.
Strengthening Bari's conviction that Cointelpro is alive and well is the current atttempt by at least one group of Sonoma County-activists to publicly portray her as a violent person--Bari is dedicated to nonviolence and, in fact, brought about a split in Earth First! ranks by insisting on a nonviolent approach. Bruce Anderson, publisher of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, has apparently signed on to that attempt with an opinion piece implying that she was indeed carrying her own bomb.
The lawsuit is scheduled for hearing in March, 1995, though Bari expresses some doubt that it can happen that soon as there is so much material to go through. She has barely scratched the surface and it seems not at all unlikely that her quest will turn up even more interesting revelations.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2004
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited