By Richard Johnson – Mendocino Country Environmentalist, May 29, 1990
Over the Memorial Day weekend, leadership of the Mendocino Environmental Center—along with defense attorneys trying to free the prisoners—urged caution in speculating about law enforcement involvement in the blast that could have killed Earth First! activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney on May 24. But many veterans of the movement strongly suspect just that.
“This is typical of the FBI,” said IWW organizer Anna Marie Stenberg at a Redwood Summer rally in Fort Bragg on Friday night. “They did this to Martin Luther King in the 1960’s. It’s appalling they would put the blame on Darryl and Judi. There’s just no way they would have done it,” she said. On Saturday, May 26, Redwood Summer supporters rallied in Santa Rosa carrying signs that “said “Framed,” “Remember Karen Silkwood.” and “Investigate the FBI.”
Any theory about possible police conspiracies would try to show how the activities of a presumed agent who planted the bomb in Bari’s car could be coordinated with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, along with provocateurs working in Mendocino County and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Circumstantial evidence for such a plot includes the rapid agreement between Oakland police and the FBI to blame the victims for the crime, a long series of clandestine death threats and disinformation measures here prior to the attack and the consistent refusal of all law enforcement agencies to protect Judi Bari’s civil rights.
While a government conspiracy to frame Bari and Cherney would be risky for the careers of the officials involved, there are some obvious motives. These include providing police an excuse to search homes and offices associated with the environmental movement in Mendocino County and the Bay Area, removing two of the most high-profile organizers challenging corporate power in California, and contaminating the public image—not only of Redwood Summer, but also of the Forest Forever Initiative and the environmental movement in general with the stigma of violence and lawlessness.
Since plans for Redwood Summer had become public, Bari and Cherney had received over four dozen death threats, and several phony manifestos printed under the EF! logo urging violence against both property and human lives were widely distributed in local lumber mills.
Hours after the attack, police told reporters they surmised the device responsible for the Oakland blast had been a gunpowder pipe bomb two inches in diameter by twelve inches long with a timing device attached. Their evidence for suspecting Bari and Cherney consisted of a presumption that the activists must have known that an object that big was in the car.
The Santa Rosa Press Democrat said that FBI officials were trying to link Bari and Cherney with a pipe bomb that had gone off outside the Cloverdale LP mill on May 10. as well as with sabotage of PG&E transmission lines in Santa Cruz county on April 23.
In his public statements about Redwood Summer, Mendocino County sheriff Tim Shea repeatedly said he would call on other departments such as the Oakland Police and Alameda County sheriffs through mutual aid agreements if his department could not handle the protests. To what extent had Shea already coordinated a response to Redwood Summer with Bay Area police and the FBI?
“I believe that police leapt to their conclusion very shortly after that bomb went off,” defense attorney Susan B. Jordan told reporters. “I don’t think they’ve done their homework.” Jordan told movement leaders she hoped to get the national level of the FBI to take over the investigation and pursue the real criminal.
FBI Targets EF!
But in a front-page story in the Press Democrat, EF! founder Dave Foreman pointed to the similarities between his own federal criminal case and the Oakland bombing.[1] He said that the “speed and efficiency” with which all levels of law enforcement had agreed that Bari and Cherney were responsible for blowing themselves up made him suspicious that the government had known in advance of the bombing.
Foreman is awaiting trial with three other activists for allegedly plotting to destroy transmission lines in the Arizona desert. In that case, an undercover FBI agent named Larry Fain had gained the confidence of the inner circle of EF! over a lengthy period of time, and repeatedly urged activists to plan the simultaneous demolition of power standards from Diablo Canyon to the Colorado River.
Foreman is coauthor of the venerable EF! publication Eco-Defense, a Guide to Monkey Wrenching, which illustrates sabotage techniques ranging from pulling up survey stakes to tree-spiking and damaging heavy equipment.
EF! groups in three counties here formally abandoned all forms of violence this April in order to build the Redwood Summer movement. Bari and Cherney supported this move, and took considerable heat from other EF! members who wanted to continue advocating property destruction. EF! is moved by a reverence for all life, and violence against any animal, even human, is repugnant to the creed of the movement.
Explosives never have been part of the Earth First! repertoire. Foreman himself repudiates the use of dynamite, as well as violence against people. “I’ve always discouraged the use of explosives and guns.” Foreman said. “That’s in an entirely different realm than pulling up survey stakes.”
Police Malpractice
Just the day before the explosion, Judi Bari had spoken at an announcement of a lawsuit filed by environmentalist Mem Hill of Piercy over an incident last year in which a drunken logger punched her in the face and broke her nose as she was demonstrating against his logging practices. One purpose of the action filed in county superior court on May 23 is to force county officials to grant demonstrators equal protection under the law during Redwood Summer.
Attorney Rod Jones of Mendocino said the suit is intended to send a message to law enforcement that people who express their concern about logging practices are not to be treated as second class citizens, and that timber companies can’t push the environment around.
He said that the suit was filed in time to affect the county’s response to Redwood Summer.
“Everyone participating in this summer’s activities is to take a pledge of nonviolence he said. “And we expect reciprocity from law enforcement. We expect them to uphold the law as rigidly as they would anywhere else, and if there is violence to make arrests and prosecute as required. That did not occur in this case.” And it certainly did not occur when Oakland police and federal agents tried to frame Bari and Cherney in the wake of the May 24 car bomb blast that could have killed them.
The suit charges members of the Lancaster logging family with battery, infliction of emotional distress, and negligence, as well as the counties of Humboldt and Mendocino with police malpractice. It also charges individual officers and Susan Massini—the district attorney of Mendocino county—with misrepresentation, failure to provide police protection, abuse of discretion, and violations of federal and state civil rights laws.
Then, just days after the Whitethorn incident, EFl organizer Judi Bari was on her way to a Save the Forest demonstration at the Fort Bragg GP mill with two other adults and three children in the car. As she slowed down on the rural highway through the logging town of Philo, her car was rammed from behind by a Redwood Coast log truck driven by Donnie Blake.
The victims were taken to the hospital and treated for shock and minor concussions. Bari’s car was a total loss.
At the time, everyone assumed the collision was an accident. But just months ago Bari produced photographs that clearly show that Blake and his truck had been blocked at a log road access to highway just west of Philo only the day before by EF! picketers.
This would provide a motive for an assault, whether unconscious or premeditated. Witnesses say that Blake never slowed his truck as he barreled up on the protestors from behind.
In this incident, county sheriffs and the CHP declined to prosecute Blake. Their only investigation consisted of testing Bari’s demolished vehicle in an apparent attempt to show that her brake lights did not work.
DA Massini—who is running unopposed for a second term this June—declined to reopen the case, even after Bari produced the photographic evidence that Blake had a motive for vehicular assault.
“Environmentalists are increasingly being shut out from the protection of the law,” said Bari. She cited the fact that Shea’s sheriffs’ department had refused to investigate the growing series of death threats that she and other EF! organizers have been getting. “We don’t have the manpower to investigate death threats,” said lieutenant Satterwhite. “If you wind up dead, then we’ll investigate.”
The Cops are the Criminals:
It is preposterous for the authorities to blame Bari and Cherney for the bomb that could have killed them. These highly-visible leaders had taken a pledge of nonviolence and were touring college campuses in the Bay Area to perform music in public.
If the police did not themselves cause that bomb to be planted, then they took advantage of it to a criminal degree, falsely arresting two injured and innocent victims in order to advance a reactionary political agenda. What is worse, by focusing all their efforts on proving Darryl and Judi guilty of their own assault, they allowed the real assailant to go free—perhaps to strike again.
“By arresting me,” said Cherney in a press interview from jail, “the police and the district attorney are revealing that they are incapable of going after the real would-be assassin. This whole thing reeks of an FBI operation.”
Notes:
[1] See “First! Founder Warns of Plot”, by Mike Geniella, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, May 27, 1990.