A day after federal agents arrested Unabomber suspect Ted Kaczynski, ABC TV's April 5 World News Tonight lead story reported that the FBI had information linking Kaczynski and Earth First!. At least two nationally syndicated newspaper columnists have repeated incorrect "facts" about EF! broadcast by ABC. Congressman Frank Riggs (R-CA) also tried to link EF! and the Unabomber.
The staff of the Earth First! Journal debunked the accusation in an open letter to ABC News titled "ABC Trash Journalism - Unabomber and Earth First!?"
ABC's chief investigative reporter Brian Ross said he had learned that "Kaczynski's name appeared in FBI files in November of 1994 in connection to an FBI investigation of a radical environmental group called Earth First!." Ross continued, "Over the years, Earth First! has been best known as a violent group, spiking trees and blowing up logging equipment, and in many respects, its anti-corporate philosophy parallels that of the Unabomber."
Ross did not identify his source of information about FBI investigations, but he did interview on camera Barry Clausen, a timber-industry paid, unlicensed "private investigator" who claimed to have inside information about EF!. Clausen has made a career of demonizing EF! More about Clausen later.
Judi Bari, the Northern California Earth First! (EF!) leader crippled by a motion-triggered pipe bomb placed under the driver's seat of her car in 1990, said in a telephone interview that EF! long ago renounced tree- spiking and is committed to non-violence. She said EF! never used or advocated the use of explosives, and that public impressions to the contrary are the result of a continuing smear campaign by both the anti- environmentalist "Wise Use Movement" and the FBI. "Bombing is outside of the ideology, and always has been," Bari said. "It is outside the debate of even the most extreme person in Earth First!"
FBI Sued for Smearing Bari and Earth First!
Bari's lawsuit against the FBI for its handling of her case has been progressing in federal court for five years. The FBI stepped in within minutes of the bomb blast and accused Bari and her passenger Darryl Cherney of knowingly transporting a bomb which went off accidentally. Bari's lawyer wrote in a legal brief that the FBI showed up on the scene so quickly it was as though they had been "waiting around the corner with their fingers in their ears."
After nearly two months of sensational headlines fed by FBI statements, the Alameda County District Attorney declined to file charges against Bari and Cherney for lack of evidence. In addition to false arrest, illegal search and seizure and denial of equal protection of the law, Bari's suit charges the FBI with conspiracy to discredit Bari and Cherney as terrorists in the manner of COINTELPRO, thereby interfering with their rights to free speech.
The suit has survived three attempts by the FBI to get it tossed out, and it has provided Bari over 6000 pages of FBI files. Bari says FBI agents swore in depositions in her case that the FBI was not investigating EF!, but FBI documents she obtained strongly suggested otherwise.
Bari and Cherney filed a new lawsuit April 10 accusing the FBI of conspiring in a coverup of the facts surrounding the 1990 car bombing. The suit accuses the FBI of a "complete and remorseless failure to ever investigate the bombing as an attack" on Bari and Cherney, and of fostering suspicion that they are radical environmental terrorists. The suit asks for a court order forcing the FBI to cease the alleged coverup and take reasonable steps to arrest the people responsible for the bombing. The FBI closed the bombing investigation in 1993. Bari told the Santa Rosa Press Democrat "FBI agents have lied under oath during depositions, have illegally withheld information and lied to Congress in a bid to hide their own wrongdoing."
COINTELPRO Ñ FBI's Political Covert Actions
COINTELPRO was the FBI's code word for covert action "counterintelligence programs" begun under J. Edgar Hoover's direction to, in the FBI's own words, "disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize" the civil rights, black liberation, antiwar and other progressive movements. The program was first exposed when a Black Panther "Committee to Investigate the FBI" broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania in 1971, removing files and providing them to the press.
The 1975 U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights hearings into the FBI's political operations found the FBI's COINTELPRO activities to be illegal, involving massive violations of constitutional rights. These findings led to Attorney General's guidelines which forbade the FBI to investigate or maintain files on domestic groups unless a crime is involved. The guidelines have remained in effect for the past 20 years, but have been weakened or eliminated by the "anti- terrorism" bill just passed by Congress and signed into law. The FBI documents are available in book form from South End Press, Chicago, under the title "The COINTELPRO Papers," by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall.
After learning that ABC's April 8 Good Morning America program also covered the alleged EF!-Unabomber connection, Bari said she phoned ABC's Brian Ross, accusing him of slandering EF!. When she asked him to name one example of EF! blowing up logging equipment, Bari said Ross responded, "You spike trees, don't you." She replied, "First of all, we don't, but secondly, there's a huge difference between spiking trees and blowing up logging equipment, especially when you're trying to link us with the Unabomber."
Attorney Michael Deutsch of the New York based Center for Constitutional Rights also spoke with Ross on Bari's behalf. Ross would not identify his source as to the contents of FBI files, however former FBI agent Rick Smith of San Francisco was on the April 8 show with Ross. Smith, who retired from the FBI last month, had been the FBI's spokesman on the Unabomber case and on the Bari bombing case as well.
A March 31 San Francisco Examiner article about Smith's retirement said his primary assignment for 20 years had been counterintelligence. With the dissolution of the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the excitement was gone for Smith. The Examiner quoted him saying, "You felt like you won but ... we lost the enemy. It didn't have the same level of interest for me."
Besides Smith, ABC's April 7 "This Week with David Brinkley" show featured another recently retired FBI agent, John Douglas, who helped develop a profile of the Unabomber, and who is rushing into print a book tentatively titled "Unabomber: On the Trail of America's Most-Wanted Serial Killer."
ABC Informant is Agent for Timber Industry and "Wise Use"
The April 5 ABC TV story featured Barry Clausen, a private investigator for the timber industry and "Wise Use" Movement. ABC reporter Brian Ross said Clausen had been "trying to persuade the FBI since last August that the Unabomber had to have some kind of connection to Earth First! or other radical environmental group."
In a speech to the timber lobby group California Forestry Association (CFA) in Sacramento January 26, 1995, Clausen described EF! as "the enemy." He said he had infiltrated an EF! group in 1989 as a paid agent of "people within the timber industry and mining and ranching in Montana." His 1994 book about EF! was published by the Washington Contract Loggers Association. He said he had been on about 50 radio stations and in 48 newspapers since his book came out, and gave speeches to Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, timber and ranching groups. He also publishes a newsletter called "Eco-Terrorism Watch." Apparently Clausen's whole livelihood is based on demonizing Earth First!
In his CFA speeh Clausen suggested violent means of dealing with radical environmentalists, holding out as models Turkish anti-terrorist police units who used machine guns mounted on dirt bikes. He also admired the way Turkish police threatened to sink a Greenpeace ship, no matter who was on board, unless it left Turkish waters.
As it happened, Clausen's speech to CFA was delivered three months before CFA's executive director Gilbert Murray was killed by the Unabomber's last bomb on April 24, 1995. Murray was described as a "Wise Use Leader" in a news release from "Wise Use" founder Ron Arnold's Center for Defense of Free Enterprise Internet site. The article says Murray was killed "by a mail bomb from an ecoterrorist. In an instant, the Unabomber, spouting Deep Ecology rhetoric against industrial civilization, took away a promising leader of the broad Wise Use Movement. Gil's memory should inspire us to greater achievements, not derail us into seeking links between our political opponents and his death." Obviously Barry Clausen did not take this advice to heart.
Clausen and the Wise-Use pro-timber industry group Putting People First scheduled an April 11 press conference in Montana, claiming he had an attendance list containing the name "Casinski" from an environmental conference held at the University of Montana in 1994. Clausen canceled the event after EF! and the Native Forest Network scheduled their own press conference an hour earlier in the same hotel. The San Francisco Chronicle reported the next day that Clausen refused to produce a copy of his purported list or say how he obtained it.
Other Comments in the Media
USA Today's April 10 edition ran a piece titled "Want Motive for Unabomber?" by nationally syndicated columnist Anna Chavez of the "conservative" Center for Equal Opportunity in Washington, D.C. Chavez asked, "... is (the Unabomber) at least loosely affiliated with an organized radical group that advocates a war on modern technology? The Unabomber may well have taken his inspiration from the writings of Earth First!'s radical fringe." Chavez repeated the charge from the ABC report that Kacynski's name appeared in FBI files on EF!. She made the false charge that EF! founder Dave Foreman once published a how-to manual that provided instructions for eco-sabotage, including making explosives...." In fact the only mention of explosives in the manual is the advice to "stay away from them."
Rush Limbaugh joined in the frenzy April 12, calling Kaczynski "a liberal, environmentalist wacko" who "is known to have read Earth First! literature." Limbaugh went on to say he recalled that a few years ago "a couple of EF! wackos were blown up by the bomb they themselves had made and were transporting in their car, ... something that shows how the environmentalist wackos are anything but nonviolent people who just want clean air and water." Without naming names, he clearly was repeating the false allegations leaked to the press by the San Francisco office of the FBI in the Bari/Cherney case.
Just as the uproar seemed to be dying down, Boston Globe syndicated columnist Jeff Jacoby's column appeared in newspapers across the country April 24. In the Santa Rosa Press Democrat (owned by the New York Times) the article was titled "Eco Fringe Escapes Blame." Jacoby excoriates the media for not blaming the environmental movement for the crimes of the Unabomber. He repeats the misinformation from the ABC newscast, referring to "radical groups like Earth First, which blow up logging equipment and demand the blood of environmental 'villains' Ñ such as those the Unabomber killed." He wrongly calls the large November 1994 environmental conference sponsored by the Native Forest Network at the University of Montana "an Earth First meeting." He asserts that "Kaczynski attended that meeting," although no one claims to have any evidence of that except Barry Clausen. Jacoby's column also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Not every news outlet was taken in by the Wise Use smear campaign, however. The Dallas Morning News April 11 ran a story saying: "Federal law enforcement officials on April 10 said documents found in Unabomb suspect Theodore Kaczynski's cabin 'indicate research' into environmental issues, but 'no direct link to any radical group or movement.' Members of Kaczynski's family said he did not belong to any environmental groups, and 'prominent' environmental groups in California and Montana said he is not on any of their mailing lists."
Republican Congressman Frank Riggs, whose Northern California district includes the holdings of several large timber corporations, became embroiled when his office sent out a draft of an April 24 speech. The speech was given on the first anniversary of the death of the Unabomber's final victim, Gilbert Murray of the California Forestry Association. In the version faxed to timber interests and leaked to the Northcoast Environmental Center in Arcata, California, the speech said, "Like other extreme environmentalists whose warped view of technology and back to nature lifestyle cause them to live life on the fringes of our society, the Unabomber viewed the forestry industry as his enemy and targeted their employees for assassination. We must not forget that individuals like the Unabomber and groups like Earth First (sic) do not represent the majority of peace loving Americans."
Riggs' staffers at first called the speech "a fabrication," but, faced with his letterhead and fax header on the page, Riggs acknowledged it was "prepared by a junior staff member," according to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat April 26. Riggs said he realized how inflammatory the speech was, and delivered a milder version on the House floor, not mentioning EF! by name. The Press Democrat article said timber interests had been urging Riggs to make a strong connection between the Unabomber's environmental beliefs and those of radical environmental groups. Tim McKay of the Northcoast Environmental Center called Riggs efforts "consciously crafted character assassination."
In an April 12 message to the Internet newsgroups talk.environment and alt.org.earth-first, under the heading "Re: Unabomber Connection Nonexistent," David Orr (DavidOrr@aol.com) wrote: "The campaign was begun in the late '80s to discredit EF! Some evidence exists to suggest that the FBI worked closely with timber industry and other so-called "wise use" elements in manipulating public opinion against environmental activists. This latest round of allegations -- all unfounded -- is just an effort by the industry to destroy the personal reputations of honest environmental activists with nothing to hide. No connection between Unabomber and EF! has EVER been shown, but that hasn't stopped industry from repeating the same old lies and distortions. The facts are there for all to see, but you won't see them on ABC News."
Internet sources for more information:
Greenpeace fact sheet on Barry Clausen: ftp://alternatives.com/library/envattak/clafacts.txt:
Clausen's speech to the CFA: ftp://alternatives.com/library/envattak/clausen.txt
(Note: An earlier version of this article appeared in the Albion Monitor, April 15, 1996. The Monitor is a progressive paperless twice-monthly newspaper distributed only on the Internet's World Wide Web (http://www.monitor.net/monitor). It is based in Sebastopol, Sonoma County, California, and has subscribers world wide. It is available by subscription, but always has free articles available without subscription.)
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 1997
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited