Earth First! vs. FBI: Civil Rights Lawsuit in Court

Friday, July 27--Final Pretrial Hearings before October 1 Trial. Motions from both sides heard at 10am, Status Conference at 1pm. Oakland Federal Courthouse, 1301 Clay Street, Oakland. Judge Claudia Wilkens courtroom.



October 1-November 9--Jury Trial at Oakland Federal Courthouse.



OAKLAND, CA--Today the FBI is awash in scandal, from the failure to turn over thousands of pages of files to lawyers for Timothy McVeigh, to hiding evidence in the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham by the KKK that killed four young black women.



The first FBI scandal of the 1990's was the false arrest and illegal frame-up of nonviolent Earth First! activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, after they were car-bombed in Oakland. A federal civil rights lawsuit against the FBI and Oakland Police filed in 1991 comes to trial on October 1, 2001. But you wont find this case, or any of the well-documented examples of FBI abuses against political activists, on the agenda for reformers on Capitol Hill.



Since the 1990 Bari bombing, additional FBI scandals have included the shootings at Ruby Ridge, the siege at Waco, exposure of systematic FBI lab fraud, the imprisonment of Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee on grossly inflated charges, the Robert Hanssen spy scandal, murders by FBI informants in Boston that went unprosecuted, and the "disappearance" of hundreds of weapons and laptop computers--the list goes on and on. Notably, the Bureau was exposed for the framing of Black Panther Geronimo jiJaga Pratt, who was released in 1997 after 27 years in prison. The agent in charge of Pratts case was Special Agent Richard W. Held, the same man in charge of the Bari bombing "investigation."



On June 20, the Senate Judiciary Committee held the first in a series of hearings to explore oversight for the FBI. Upcoming confirmation hearings for Robert Mueller, President Bushs nominee for the new head of the FBI, will keep the FBI scandals in the spotlight.



As lead attorney Dennis Cunningham declared at rally in May marking the 11th anniversary of the bombing, "Its a good time to go to trial against the FBI!" The bombing case comes to trial just as the FBI faces intense national scrutiny. The upcoming trial is sure to draw national attention to continuing FBI rights abuses against activists like American Indian Movement political prisoner Leonard Peltier and many others, case which have so far been absent from the drumbeat for reform in Washington.



Background: On May 24, 1990, Earth First! organizers Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were the victims of a motion-triggered car bomb as they drove through Oakland on a tour to promote a campaign of nonviolent logging protests called Redwood Summer. The FBI and Oakland Police showed up at the scene within minutes and quickly had the pair arrested for transporting the bomb, despite a total lack of evidence to justify the charge and ample evidence showing Judi Bari was the intended target. The Alameda County DA ultimately refused to file charges against the pair. No real investigation of the bombing was ever done, and the bombers remain at large to this day.



In 1991, Bari and Cherney sued the FBI and OPD for false arrest, illegal search and seizure, and--by falsely associating the activists with terrorism--conspiracy to violate their First Amendment rights. They charge the FBI with continuing to use the tactics of the notorious "COINTELPRO" Counterintelligence Program, J. Edgar Hoovers campaign to disrupt and "neutralize" political dissidents. Bari died of breast cancer in 1997, but the case survives and is scheduled for trial October 1, 2001.