In 1990, a pipe bomb went off under the seat of legendary Earth First! activist Judi Bari as she drove to a demonstration to stop timber companies from clearcutting old-growth redwood trees. Bari was almost killed. After the incident, the FBI arrested Bari and her passenger, Darryl Cherney, for building the bombs themselves, but the pair later sued the FBI and won more than $4 million in damages. To this day, the question remains: Who bombed Judi Bari? That’s the title of a new documentary produced by Cherney, who joins us to discuss Bari’s passionate activism and the history of death threats against her. Bari died from cancer in 1997, but the legal case continues with an ongoing lawsuit against the FBI to prevent it from destroying evidence that could contain the bomber’s DNA.
After the incident, Judi Bari and her passenger, Darryl Cherney, both with the environmental group Earth First!, were charged with transporting explosives themselves. In the end, the charges were never pursued. And to this day, the question remains: who bombed Judi Bari? That’s also the title of a new documentary that played last night in Oakland and screens today on Los Angeles at the Monica Laemmle Theater.
Darryl Cherney talking:
the world was pretty much turned upside down. My head was ringing. Judi was calling out in pain. I just kept telling her I loved her and that she was going to live. I was taken to the hospital, where the FBI walked in and just said to me, “This was your bomb, so why don’t you confess, make it easy on all of us, and get it over with?” And it was at that moment I thought of Leonard Peltier of the American Indian Movement and Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt of the Black Panthers and realized that the FBI had now turned its attention, its COINTELPRO operation, toward Earth First! That was back in 1990.
Judi Bari and I sued the FBI primarily for violations of the First Amendment, that they deliberately and knowingly lied, that they knew we were innocent, but they lied and said we were guilty in order to shut us up. That is, in fact, a violation of the First Amendment. The lawsuit dragged on for 12 years because the FBI kept appealing different things. In the process, Judi Bari passed away from cancer after living her last seven years in pretty serious pain. But her lawyers, her estate and myself took them to trial in Oakland in 2002. And a jury, after hearing six weeks of pretty unbelievable testimony, literally unbelievable testimony from the FBI and the Oakland police, awarded us $4.4 million.
we know that the FBI held a bomb school just 30 days before we were bombed. They were blowing up cars in Eureka, California, where I live, or near where I live. And they were doing it on a Louisiana-Pacific Lumber Company clearcut. Two weeks after that, a bomb went off at a Louisiana-Pacific sawmill, that eventually they tried to pin that on Judi and myself, too. And then two weeks after the sawmill was bombed, Judi Bari’s car was bombed by the exact same bomber, who took credit for this in a letter that was sent to the newspapers. So, there seems to be a thread between the lumber companies and the FBI, and then all the way to the bombed car.
We are now in court to try to get the first bomb, that didn’t go off quite well—not the one in Judi’s car, but the one at the lumber mill. We believe there’s DNA evidence on that. There’s about six feet of duct tape that remains on that bomb. We think there could be fingerprints, duct tape hair samples. And as part of getting our money, we took less money, but in exchange for that, we demanded the evidence be returned to us. The FBI is now appealing that, saying they don’t want to turn over those bomb remnants to a independent forensics laboratory. We’re trying to get a DNA sample to see if we can identify who the bomber is.
The bomb itself had a motion trigger. It was only going to go off in a moving car. It was placed underneath Judi’s seat. It was designed to kill her, only when the car was moving. So she had to be in the vehicle for the bomb to go off. It was so obvious. The police knew that at the time. They found the ball bearing that had to roll around and touch a positive and negative wire for the bomb to explode. So—and they even wrote “booby trap” on the first police reports. So they knew it was a victim-operated device, and yet they blamed us pretty much instantaneously.
Judi Bari brought a unique combination of labor activism, environmentalism and feminism, all together in a unique package that was combined with brilliant oratory. She had a razor-sharp wit. She was the funniest person I know. She played the fiddle. She was a carpenter. And she was the mother of two children. And she was able to bring loggers and environmentalists together in a way that had never been done before and which the timber industry was really fearing. She was actually organizing timber workers into the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World labor union, with—wearing an Earth First! shirt. The woman had the gift of gab like nobody else.
Judi and I were on a musical roadshow, giving speeches, showing slides. She played the fiddle. I played the guitar. And we were touring universities. We were actually on our way to UC Santa Cruz. And we had received many, many death threats. And in fact, because we had received so many death threats, we scheduled this college tour to both organize kids to come up to the redwoods to defend them during Redwood Summer and also to get out of Dodge, to get away from the timber communities that were threatening us so badly. So when we left Oakland, basically heading for UC Santa Cruz, on May 24th, 1990, we thought we were out of the danger zone. But a bomb blew up in her car with myself in the passenger seat. The bomb was directly underneath her. It shattered her pelvis, dislocated permanently two of her vertebrae, intestinal damage. She was impaled on a car seat spring. And really, within five minutes, the FBI showed up, instructed the Oakland police that we were to be arrested for transportation of an explosive device, that we had essentially bombed ourselves.
There was never an investigation by law enforcement as to who bombed Judi Bari. There was a sham investigation. You know, they said that nails in the back of Judi’s car matched nails that were strapped to the bomb, but Judi’s—the nails in Judi’s car were finishing nails. She was a professional carpenter. She called herself a foreman, which she was, at California Yurts up in Hopland, California. She led a construction crew. She had carpentry tools in the back of her car. So her finishing nails were for her roofing job of her own house that she was moving into. So, to say that these finishing nails matched the roofing nails in the back of her car was like saying a Volkswagen and a Rolls Royce are identical because they’re both cars. Yet the FBI said that. They said the bomb was in the back seat, where we should have seen it. And yet, the back seat was perfectly intact, whereas the bomb was actually under her seat, and there was a big hole under the driver’s seat, as well as a big hole in the floorboard underneath it. So, the FBI knowingly lied. It wasn’t that they botched the investigation; it’s that they lied and basically attempted to frame us. And you have to wonder, why were they doing it so quickly right after the bombing?
the FBI files on Earth First! go all the way back to 1981, when Earth First! was conducting civil disobedience against the secretary of the interior to stop some oil drilling leases, and they’ve—had been following us. They did a sting operation on Earth First! in 1988. The FBI tried to get Earth Firsters to literally blow up three nuclear power plants. They failed, because they realized that Earth Firsters would not associate themselves with bombs. And yet, it seems very clear that the FBI was intent on associating Earth First! with bombs, and that’s exactly what happened in our case. So they had a history of trying to discredit Earth First! really right out of the box.
I traveled from Midtown Manhattan to Garberville, California, back in 1985. I saw that the Maxxam Corporation had taken over Pacific Lumber Company, a venerable logging company that never clearcut, had been logging sustainably for 118 years. And this Wall Street takeover, which involved Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky and all that insider trading scandal stuff from the 1980s, was well in play, involving the takeover of Pacific Lumber Company.
Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky went to jail. But Charles Hurwitz, the CEO of Maxxam Corporation, who benefited from the takeover of Pacific Lumber, he was never prosecuted for the insider trading scandal. And being there in Garberville right when the whole thing happened, a man named Greg King and I started an Earth First! chapter specifically to take on the Maxxam Corporation, who was logging ancient redwoods, 2,000 years old, 350 feet high, 15 feet wide, at a really accelerated rate, a tripled cut, in order to pay off a $750 million junk bond debt, thanks to Wall Street.
why these redwoods, these old-growth trees, were so important to you and to Judi Bari.
they house the spotted owl and the red tree vole, and they shade the salmon that swim up and down the streams. But they’re also just the most magnificent beings to be in front of. They give a calm and a sense of really something greater than ourselves. So the redwoods fulfill both an ecologic role and a spiritual role for human beings and many, many species on this planet.
Judi Bari and I were—and Pam Davis and four children, very young, all under the age of eight, were driving to a demonstration, a public rally in Fort Bragg, California, when all of a sudden the car was just flying in the air. There was this giant boom, and we were airborne. We crashed into a parked pickup truck in the town of Philo. By some miracle, nobody was badly hurt. But as I got out of the car to pull the children out, the log truck driver came running toward us, and he said, “I didn’t see the children. I didn’t see the children,” as if he wouldn’t have hit us deliberately if he had realized there was four children in the car. That’s what happened that day.
As part of the final settlement, after the jury awarded us $4.4 million, we took a little bit less money, but in exchange for that, we got the city council of Oakland to make May 24th, the day we were bombed, Judi Bari Day in the city of Oakland. Better than an apology.
the whole bombing was done in the interest of the timber industry. There was a ballot initiative in 1990 called Forests Forever that would have banned clearcutting and reformed forestry practices. It was the 20th anniversary of Earth Day, and environmental interest was just piquing like never before. So the timber industry, with this election looming on the horizon, had every interest in the world to discredit environmentalists. And I believe that it was the timber industry, in conjunction with the FBI, because a lot of us have experienced that law enforcement defends the status quo, defends the 1 percent, that it was a combination of those two who conspired to bomb Judi Bari. And we believe it was done at bomb school 30 days earlier, when the head of Louisiana-Pacific security was hosting the FBI in a bomb tech course, in which they were blowing up cars with pipe bombs just 30 days before we were bombed in a car in Oakland.
we’re trying to get some evidence back from them to have it tested for DNA and fingerprints, and the FBI is basically saying that they don’t want to turn any evidence over to me and my attorneys—actually, not over to me, but over to an independent laboratory—none of us will touch this evidence—because we don’t have standing, because we actually want an unexploded or a partially exploded bomb that was made by the same bomber. It has a lot of duct tape on it. We want to test it for DNA and fingerprints. And they say they don’t want to return this bomb or give this bomb to Darryl Cherney, because it’s an explosive device, it’s contraband. But we’re not asking for the bomb to be given to any of us. We’re asking for it to be turned over to an independent forensic laboratory. And the judge, in 2010 and ’11, ruled that—in our favor, ruled that we can test this material through an independent lab. The FBI is appealing that ruling. And on April 12th, just a couple weeks from now, Thursday, April 12th at 2:00, we are in federal court with the FBI again, like a big reunion, to get this evidence sent over to a laboratory to have it tested. And Judge Wilken, Judge Claudia Wilken, the same judge who heard our case back in 2002, when the jury awarded us $4.4 million, the same judge is going to hear that and rule whether we can test this evidence to see if we can learn who bombed Judi Bari. It would be very nice if the police did this, but it looks like the citizens are going to have to do this ourselves.
The Lord’s Avenger was a very peculiar letter, because it described the bomb in Judi Bari’s car accurately, took full credit for it. It also described a bomb that had been set off two weeks earlier at a Louisiana-Pacific mill, the same lumber company that had hosted bomb school with the FBI. So the Lord’s Avenger—and he described both bombs accurately, which presumably made the Lord’s Avenger the bomber. Only we tested that letter for DNA, and it came out as that of an unknown female, which makes you wonder, did the Lord’s Avenger have a secretary? So, we want to test the actual bomb remnants to see if the DNA on the bomb matches the DNA on the Lord’s Avenger letter. But the Lord’s Avenger letter took this pseudo-Christian rant that Judi Bari was leading the loggers into a pagan way, a pagan lifestyle. And the fact is, is that the letter, while describing the bombs accurately, had a certain disingenuousness to us. It seemed like it was a COINTELPRO letter, a red herring spread across the road to steer people away from the actual bomber.
Discussion with Darryl Cherney.
Darryl Cherney, longtime Earth First! activist and producer of the new documentary, Who Bombed Judi Bari? It plays tonight and tomorrow in Santa Monica, California. For a full schedule, visit the film’s website, WhoBombed JudiBari.com.
– source democracynow.org, democracynow.org