Bombing Judi Bari: FBI cover-up continues
Photo by Louie, Oakland TribuneThe story in last Thursday's Chronicle by Kevin Fagan (he wrote the fine series on homelessness years ago) on the ongoing saga of the unsolved Judi Bari bombing raises the question of the federal government's role in the bombing---and their non-investigation afterward.
True, some Northcoast radicals foolishly announced that they wouldn't cooperate with any investigation, but there really wasn't an investigation to cooperate with.
The fact that the gaping hole in the front floorboard under the driver's seat---of course Judi was driving, with Darryl Cherney in the passenger's seat---showed that the Oakland PD/FBI claim was ridiculous that Judi and Darryl were carrying their own bomb.
Bari was many things, but she wasn't stupid and wouldn't have put a bomb under her seat, especially when, as we learned later, it had a motion device as a trigger, set to go off as soon as Bari hit the brakes.
The Oakland PD and the FBI made an easily refuted claim about the location of the bomb in a lame attempt to pin the bombing on the victims of the assassination attempt.
They then didn't make a serious investigation to find out who really tried to kill Bari, the prime mover in the upcoming Redwood Summer demonstrations to prevent the timber companies from destroying the forests on the Northcoast. (Pinning the bombing on Bari and Cherney and Earth First! in the public's mind helped later that year to defeat Forests Forever, the timber reform measure on the state ballot.)
Now the Feds fight Darryl Cherney's attempt to keep the authorities from destroying the bomb fragments. Why destroy possible DNA evidence leading to the bomber? Why not instead work with Cherney to test the evidence?
The possible answer: the federal government has known all along who the bomber is, because he was one of their informants on the Northcoast. (Bari was convinced that at least one member of the Northcoast political community was in fact an FBI agent.)
And months before the attempted assassination of Bari, the FBI set up Earth First!'s Dave Foreman in Arizona in a COINTEL operation.
Hard to see why the Obama administration wants to destroy this potential evidence, since the bombing happened more than 20 years ago during old man Bush's administration.
Labels: Environment, Hate/Terrorism, History, Judi Bari, Mendoland, President Obama, SF Chronicle
posted by Rob Anderson @ 9:52 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Thanks for the photo credit, but it isn't my pic. I think it's from the Oakland Trib, and the photog's name is Louie.
Getting to the heart of the Bari bombing and frame-up, I think there's plenty of evidence it was part of a timber industry plan to defeat Prop. 130 on the November 1990 ballot. If the initiative passed it would have ruined the game for Georgia Pacific, Louisiana Pacific, and most of all for Charles Hurwitz's Pacific Lumber.
Billions of bucks were at stake for each of the three big redwood logging corporations, and no one had more to lose than Hurwitz. He was 3/4 of a billion in debt from the junk bond financed takeover of PL in 1986, and in 1990 he was only four years into a liquidation plan that took 19 more years to finish, when he drove PL into bankruptcy and walked away from hundreds of millions in remaining debt.
Since Prop. 130 would have banned clearcutting, required actual, measurable sustained yield and put a moratorium on cutting old-growth redwood, it would have been game-over for Charlie H.
The timber industry spent nearly $20 million to defeat Prop. 130, and they demonstrably used the Bari bombing and frame-up in their campaign. Barely 8 weeks after the May 24, 1990, bombing, they launched their Defeat the Earth First! Initiative; It's Too Extreme! campaign on July 21, 1990, coinciding with the big Redwood Summer rally and demonstration in Fort Bragg. They used Earth First's name in the ballot arguments at a time when the FBI and OPD had just spent two months filling the media with false charges and made-up evidence portraying Judi and EF! as "terrorists involved in the use of explosives."
If the timber cabal and their PR consultants didn't cook up the whole bomb-and-frame scheme to begin with -- and I think they did -- it's easy to prove that they took immediate advantage of it.
As a result of defeating Prop. 130, GP, LP, and Hurwitz each raked in at least $2 billion more before closing up shop and moving on once the forests were gone.
Would you like to be in between Charles Hurwitz and a $2 billion pile of money? I don't think so, and neither would I.
If anyone wants to refresh their memory about what Prop. 130 provided, and the arguments for and against it, you can read the archived 1990 official ballot guide at http://traynor.uchastings.edu/ballot_pdf/1990g.pdf
The Prop. 130 summary and arguments run from page 28 to page 31, and the full text of the proposed law is on pages 94 to 101.
(Continued from previous comment)
Since Prop. 130 would have banned clearcutting, required actual, measurable sustained yield and put a moratorium on cutting old-growth redwood, it would have been game-over for Charlie Hurwitz
The timber industry spent nearly $20 million to defeat Prop. 130, and they demonstrably used the Bari bombing and frame-up in their campaign. Barely 8 weeks after the May 24, 1990, bombing, they launched their Defeat the Earth First! Initiative; It's Too Extreme! campaign on July 21, 1990, coinciding with the big Redwood Summer rally and demonstration in Fort Bragg. They used Earth First's name in the ballot arguments at a time when the FBI and OPD had just spent two months filling the media with false charges and made-up evidence portraying Judi and EF! as "terrorists involved in the use of explosives."
If the timber cabal and their PR consultants didn't cook up the whole bomb-and-frame scheme to begin with -- and I think they did -- it's easy to prove that they took immediate advantage of it.
As a result of defeating Prop. 130, GP, LP, and Hurwitz each raked in at least $2 billion more before closing up shop and moving on once the forests were gone.
Would you like to be in between Charles Hurwitz and a $2 billion pile of money? I don't think so, and neither would I.
If anyone wants to refresh their memory about what Prop. 130 provided, and the arguments for and against it, you can read the archived 1990 official ballot guide at http://traynor.uchastings.edu/ballot_pdf/1990g.pdf
The Prop. 130 summary and arguments run from page 28 to page 31, and the full text of the proposed law is on pages 94 to 101.
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