Bari, Judi
Earth Island Journal (IEIJ), v9 n3, p40-41
Summer 1994
Earth Island Institute, 300 Broadway, Suite 28, San Francisco, CA 94133
ABSTRACT: An Earth First! member relates how she and Darryl Cherney were framed by the FBI for a car bombing that nearly killed them. The frame-up was one of a long series of events in the FBI's campaign against the environmental movement.
It has been four years since Darryl Cherney and I were nearly killed in a 1990 car-bomb assassination attempt, then arrested for possession of the bomb. Our names were smeared all over the country, as the national media trumpeted the incredible story, told by the FBI and Oakland Police, of the supposed "Earth First! terrorists who blew themselves up with their own bomb." While the police were eventually forced to drop the charges against us for lack of evidence, the trauma of this ordeal and the damage to our reputations has not been repaired.
In light of this unconstitutional treatment by the FBI and Oakland police, Darryl and I filed a civil rights lawsuit against the agencies in May 1991. As a result of our lawsuit, we have gained access to police reports, bomb-scene photos and FBI files. As we peel back the layers of deception surrounding the bombing; we have uncovered an FBI scandal that goes far beyond Earth First!, encompassing sweeping civil rights abuses against the environmental movement, reminiscent of the discredited tactics that J. Edgar Hoover used to disrupt the activities of anti-war and social-justice organizations in the 1960s and 1970s.
FBI Frame-up
The bombing occurred on the eve of the 1990 Redwood Summer, an Earth First! campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience to protest the corporate strip-logging of the Northern California redwood ecosystem. Earth First!'s influence in the region had grown rapidly, as we sponsored tree-sits, chained ourselves to log trucks, built alliances with timber workers and publicly renounced tree-spiking. But as our call for activists to join Redwood Summer gained national attention, we suffered increasing harassment that included written death threats. The worst of these was a photo of me with a rifle scope and cross-hairs superimposed on my face. Shortly afterwards, the bomb exploded in my car.
Our lawsuit charges that the FBI knew from the outset that Darryl and I were innocent and that we were, in fact, victims of a brutal attack. Yet, the agency arrested us for the bombing and conducted a slanderous press campaign against us as part of a plan to discredit Earth First! and disrupt Redwood Summer. In January 1994, the US Court of Appeals turned down the FBI's third and last attempt to get this case thrown out of court. The court upheld our right to file charges of false arrest, illegal search and seizure, and a variety of civil rights violations (including the FBI's underlying motive to discredit Earth First!), based on the strength of the evidence we have collected so far.
Photos taken by the Oakland Police are the most dramatic evidence. The decision to arrest Darryl and me for the bombing was based on the statements of the FBI's bomb expert, who was quoted in our arrest warrant as saying that the bomb was located "on the floorboard behind the driver's seat," where we allegedly would have seen it and therefore known we were carrying it. Thus, they concluded, it must have been our bomb. But the photos of the bomb scene show clearly that the bomb was hidden under the driver's seat, and designed to kill.
Within minutes of the blast, however, the FBI Terrorist Squad had arrived on the scene and prejudiced the police before they even looked at the car. "They told us that these were the types of people who would be involved in carrying a bomb," said Oakland Police Sgt. Sitterud in his sworn deposition. "They told us that these people, in fact, qualified as terrorists." Within three hours of the bombing I was placed under arrest while still in surgery. Darryl was arrested 12 hours later.
Since the FBI and the Oakland Police considered us the sole suspects in the bombing, their only investigation consisted of raiding our houses; confiscating tools, papers and household items; and trying to match them to the bomb. It soon became apparent, though, that the police had a problem. None of the items seized from our houses linked us to the bomb. Furthermore, the bomb turned out to be an antipersonnel device, wrapped with nails for shrapnel-effect and triggered by the motion of my car. In other words, it was a booby trap bomb that nobody would knowingly carry under their car seat.
The Oakland Police went to court three times in its efforts to prosecute us, and each time they asked for a delay in order to compile more evidence. The police and the DA's office assured the court and the press that we were still the only suspects, prolonging the appearance of our guilt. Finally, after eight weeks, when they could still produce no evidence, the district attorney declined to press charges against us.
Targeting Environmentalists
When it became clear that he FBI and the City of Oakland did not have a case, a coalition of 50 environmental, labor and women's groups, including Earth Island Institute, Greenpeace, Sierra Club and the National Organization of Women, demanded a congressional investigation. The FBI received letters from all over the world demanding that it stop blaming the victims and start looking for the bomber.
In response to this public pressure, the FBI then began its supposed bombing investigation. But the 5000 pages of FBI files that I have seen on our case reveal that no legitimate search for the bomber was ever conducted. Rather than investigate the bombing, the FBI used this case as an excuse to conduct a sweeping campaign of surveillance of environmentalists, both locally and nationally.
Under the guise of investigating the bombing, the FBI asked North Coast California newspapers for access to their letters-to-the-editor files. Only the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, the largest and most urban paper in our area, refused, citing the chilling effect it would have on free speech if people knew their letters were being turned over to the FBI. But in the rural areas of the redwood region, ten small-town newspaper editors, flattered (or intimidated) by the FBI's attention, let the agents look through their files and confiscate letters from environmentalists. Most of these were simply added to the FBI's database. But one letter, a poem about the Earth with no imaginable connection to the bombing, was singled out and sent to a lab for fingerprinting, handwriting analysis and behavioral analysis.
The Press Democrat may have avoided the letters sweep, but its actions left the appearance of cooperation with the FBI. In one memo, San Francisco FBI director Richard Held complained about an article written by Press Democrat reporter Mike Geniella. In that article, Geniella documented the FBI's targeting of Earth First! in Arizona, Montana and California. Held stated in his memo that he intended to complain to the Press Democrat's editors about Geniella's reporting and suggested that FBI chief William Sessions also complain to the Press Democrat's parent newspaper, The New York Times. A few weeks later, Geniella was disciplined by the Press Democrat, and removed from his position as timber reporter, despite his award-winning coverage of the issue.
In addition to the newspapers, the FBI interviewed local police in Northern California's timber region, asking them to name "prominent environmentalists" in their areas. Small-town police readily cooperated, supplying names and addresses of mainstream environmentalists as well as Earth First!ers. Local sheriffs gave the FBI a list of "individuals suspected of being a core group capable of engaging in violent activity." The list consisted entirely of non-violent Earth First! activists. Names of timber supporters, who had committed many well-documented assaults on environmentalists in the region, were not solicited by the FBI or included on any police lists.
In an even more obvious display of its bias, the FBI interviewed management personnel from the timber companies and anti-environmental groups. They were asked to turn over any information about environmentalists, as well as any leaflets or printed materials from the environmental movement. Along with their malicious speculation about environmentalists, these timber supporters turned in leaflets with such incriminating messages as "Come to the Air Quality Hearing" and "Hemp Awareness Day: Music, Teach-In and Festival."
This "bombing investigation" went on for six weeks (until early September, 1990), as the FBI collected names of about 150 local environmentalists. Still the FBI found nothing to link any of us to the bombing or any other crime. But, instead of giving up the presumption that the bombing was the work of an environmentalist rather than a pro-timber assassin, the FBI expanded its investigation nationally. The agency came up with a list of 634 out-of-state phone calls that Earth First!ers had made about the time of the bombing and proceeded to investigate each one of them. The information collected included names, addresses, employment particulars, physical descriptions, criminal records and political associates of people who merely received a phone call from an Earth First!er.
This national investigation went on for ten months, until October 1992, when the FBI quietly closed the case, saying that it had run out of leads to follow. The agency never looked at the real leads, including, for example, the written death threats that I received before the bombing, which were listed only as "possible evidence." The FBI neither sent them to a lab nor conducted any other investigation of them. Four years later, the bomber remains at large.
Despite this tremendous effort to terrorize and discredit us, Northern California Earth First! has continued its nonviolent actions in defense of the Earth. During the 1990 Redwood Summer, 3000 people stood up to hatred and violence with courage and nonviolence. As a result, our actions played a principal role in sparing the 2000-year-old trees of Headwaters Forest, now slated for governmental acquisition in a bill before Congress.
Earth First! has also mounted many other successful campaigns, including the ongoing Cove-Mallard action in Idaho that is defending the largest roadless area in the US by once again confronting timber industry terror with nonviolent civil disobedience. Similar Earth First! campaigns are also active in many other communities in the US, Canada and England. The FBI's behavior in our bombing case seems too incredible to be true. However, the way the FBI has treated Earth First! is consistent with the way it has approached social-justice activists for decades. As we continue to expose the FBI's actions in our bombing case, we call on all environmentalists to join us in demanding an end to these repressive tactics.
Copyright © 1994 Earth Island Journal