The arrest of the non-violent activists set off a chain of events that would once again demonstrate the FBI’s complicity in violence aimed US activists for exercising their constitutionally protected right of protest.
I spent the summer of 1990 “hiding out” at my parents’ modest home in western Sonoma County. At twenty-nine years old I’d landed back at the family abode after my two closest colleagues had been violently attacked and almost killed for attempting to protect redwood forests.
No matter the countless assaults and death threats against us, I don’t recall a single instance of a police officer making an arrest or even investigating. When a logger assaulted a woman in front of thirty witnesses, breaking her nose, then threatened those thirty witnesses by firing a shotgun in the air, Mendocino County sheriff’s deputies refused to arrest the assailant or even take statements from the victims.
I also asked the reporters to pay greater attention to “the ongoing and often illegal harassment, incarceration, and violence wielded by the state, in partnership with private companies, against activists who are exercising their constitutionally protected rights of free speech such as demonstrations and direct action.
The activists and their attorneys would eventually come to believe that both answers were correct, a view widely shared in U.S. environmental and activist communities. Revered environmentalist David Brower, former executive director of the Sierra Club, said of the bombing, “We’ve seen, in the operation of our own government, all sorts of acts that make it almost impossible to believe our government. As they can fund death squads in El Salvador, they can fund death squads in the United States.
The FBI moved with remarkable speed to link Bari and Cherney with the bomb. Later the activists’ lawyer, famed civil rights attorney Dennis Cunningham, said, “They cooked [an affidavit] up and presented it to a judge at 2:00 in the morning, got a search warrant, searched the homes of Darryl and Judi overnight. The next day, the news was there. It was all on the news. They took several of [Judi and Darryl’s] friends into custody, and then they went ahead with this case.
Wilson continued, “Within an hour of the Oakland explosion, none other than Special Agent Doyle, the bomb school instructor, was taking charge of the bomb scene investigation. Since he was the FBI’s top Bay Area bomb expert, the other FBI and Oakland bomb investigators first at the scene, some of whom had been his students, deferred to his assertions about the evidence.
No matter the evidence, FBI and Oakland Police fed state and national media with streams of fabrications to further discredit Earth First! and convict Bari and Cherney in the press.
Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney filed their lawsuit against the FBI on Tuesday, May 21, 1991. Three days later, on the first anniversary of the bombing, Bari addressed two hundred supporters gathered outside the federal building in San Francisco. In her trenchant fashion, Bari laid out the basis of her suit.
“As plaintiffs have constantly tried to get the Court to see, and accept, the gravamen of their case is that defendants’ plot against them, the unconscionable and illegal acts and omissions by defendants, and the blatant lies told and now to be told again in furtherance of it, was born of the unholy, anti-constitutional mission of political repression set for the FBI by J.
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