Judi Bari bombed 20 years ago

[Keith Millea]

http://mediafilter.org/MFF/S37/S37cointelpro.html
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This photo, taken by the Oakland Police Department, clearly showsthat the bomb was under the left front seat and not on orbelow the rear seat, which is virtually undamaged.


JUDY BARI SUIT AGAINST FBI REVEALS:
COINTELPRO AGAINST EARTH FIRST!

By Bill Weinberg A lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation by a Northern California Earth First! activist is revealing that, 20 years after the FBI's Counter-Intelligence Program (or COINTELPRO) was unleashed against the Black Panthers and American Indian Movement, some of the same men are now using the same dirty tricks in the Pacific Coast timber wars. On May 24, 1990, a bomb exploded in the car in which Earth First! activists and folksingers Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were driving in Oakland CA. Bari and Cherney were in Oakland to promote Redwood Summer, a national civil disobedience campaign to halt the logging of the last remaining old-growth redwood
forest. The actions were to take place in Humboldt and Mendocino counties, where timber companies like Pacific Lumber, Louisiana Pacific, and Georgia Pacific dominate the local economy. Bari, a mother of two, woke up in the hospital to find that she might never walk again--and that both she and Cherney (who was only slightly injured) were being charged by the FBI with blowing themselves up. The bomb charge was eventually dropped for lack of evidence, but five years later the perpetrators are still at large--and Bari charges that the FBI has failed to investigate the numerous death threats and attempts on her life by right-wing paramilitary groups tied to the timber industry. Now, evidence reveals that the very FBI men assigned to the case are linked to both COINTELPRO and the Big Timber political machine which runs California's north coast.

In May 1991, one year after the bombing, Bari filed suit in San Francisco's Ninth Circuit Federal Court against the FBI and the Oakland, Mendocino County and Humboldt County police. The judge dismissed the case against the police forces, but the case against the FBI is still pending. Bari is suing the FBI for false arrest and civil rights violations, including conspiracy to violate her First Amendment rights, and using COINTELPRO tactics after they had been banned by Congress. The case is called Bari vs. Held. Richard W. Held, the FBI San Francisco director who headed up the investigation into the bombing, is son of bureau warhorse Richard G. Held. Both men were involved in COINTELPRO activities against AIM, the Black Panthers and other radical groups. Richard G. Held, who would eventually become Associate Director of the FBI, was a mastermind of the GOONs, a private paramilitary group organized by the FBI which instrumented a reign of
terror against AIM activists on South Dakota's Pine Ridge and Rosebud Sioux reservations in the 1970s. Richard G. also orchestrated the cover-up of FBI involvement in the 1969 killings of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by Chicago police. That same year, Richard W. Held orchestrated the frame-up of Panther leader Geronimo Pratt on murder charges. Despite numerous appeals, Pratt remains in California's San Quentin prison today. The younger Held was also involved in the COINTELPRO "black propaganda" campaign--complete with forged letters and documents--to foment a split between Panther leaders Pratt, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. Working out of the FBI's Los Angeles office at the time, he also oversaw the creation of the Secret Army Organization, a paramilitary group which terrorized student anti-war protestors, and was responsible for the 1972 assassination of San Diego State University economics professor Peter Bohmer. Richard W. would in the 1980s be assigned to San Juan, Puerto Rico--where he organized warrantless raids and illegal wiretapping of independence activists.


COINTELPRO was ostensibly disbanded in the 1970s. But the discovery process in Bari vs. Held has revealed a web of interlocking connections that smell suspiciously familiar to those familiar with the FBI dirty tricks of yesterdecade.
Bari vs. Held has revealed that the FBI ran a "bomb school" at Eureka College of the Redwoods in April 1990 for both FBI agents and local police, just one month before Bari's car was blown up. Classes at the school included blowing up cars with pipe bombs, ostensibly to demonstrate tactics used by terrorists. FBI Special Agent Frank Doyle was the teacher at the bomb school. One month later, he was the FBI "expert" who showed up at the bomb scene in Oakland and supervised the collecting of evidence. Students at the bomb school included at least four of the FBI agents and Oakland police officers who worked under Doyle at the scene. A warrant for Bari and Cherney was issued within three hours of the blast.
This warrant has now been released. It quotes Doyle saying the nails in the bomb are "identical" to nails found in Bari's car. But Bari says they aren't. The bomb nails were finishing nails--the car nails were roofing nails. Land near Eureka was loaned to the bomb school to demonstrate car bombs by the local timber baron Louisiana Pacific. This makes the bomb school a link between the FBI, local law enforcement, big timber--and possibly paramilitary groups linked to the timber companies and the anti-environmental "Wise Use" movement. These paramilitary groups are generally made up of reactionary loggers opposed to Judi Bari's redwood crusading and her efforts to organize an Industrial Workers of the World local at the timber mills. Before the bombing, Bari had received death threats from one such group called the Sahara Club, which she believes operated with the connivance or encouragement of timber company management. On one occasion, Bari--with her kids in the car--was run off the road by a logging truck.

"We still haven't found out who bombed me," says Bari,who, contrary to doctors' predictions, is walking again."And the FBI makes sure that doesn't happen."

The multi-million dollar public relations industry also seems to have learned a few tricks from the FBI. In the prelude to Redwood Summer, forged Earth First! press releases full of extremist rhetoric were distributed to the media. The discovery process in Pacific Lumber's SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) against Earth First! tree-sitters had already determined that Pacific Lumber knew that these were forgeries when they were distributed to the press in 1990, one month before the bombing. A memo to that effect had been cc'ed to the Hill & Knowlton rep handling the Pacific Lumber account.Hill & Knowlton, the high-powered PR firm hired by the Kuwait regime to press Congress for Operation Desert Storm, was contracted that same year by Pacific Lumber for spin control during Redwood Summer. The discovery process in Bari vs. Held has now revealed that the FBI had determined one author of the forged press releases. The FBI was apparently informed of the forgery by one Paula Langager, who had worked with the Sahara Club in a "dirty tricks" workshop (and was thanked in the Sahara Club newsletter) in August 1990, during Redwood Summer--the same month that a phony bomb was planted in the EF! office in Arcata. Langager told the FBI that month that Dave Cruzan, the editor of the now-defunct Wise Use Advocate in Fortuna, was an author of the phony press releases.

Meanwhile, the campaign to save the fast-disappearing redwoods continues. On September 15, over 200 Earth First!ers were arrested in a civil disobedience over the Headwaters Grove, the last remaining stand of 1,000-year-old virgin growth on the land of Pacific Lumber in Humboldt. Bought out in a junk bond-funded hostile take-over by the sprawling Maxxam Group in 1985, Pacific Lumber's breakneck liquidation of old growth timber helped galvanize the movement. The September action was aimed at halting logging at Headwaters, a spotted owl habitat, until an injunction could be brought under the Endangered Species Act. At press time, an injunction remains in place. "The Headwaters Action was a victory over COINTELPRO," says Judi Bari. "Hundreds of protestors followed me over the PL property line. They didn't destroy Earth First! We had 2,000 people at the Headwaters action. The counterprotestors had 50."