By Bruce Anderson – Anderson Valley Advertiser, July 18, 1990
A jubilant Judi Bari called Tuesday morning to say that charges related to bomb transportation pending against her had been dropped by the Alameda County District Attorney. “We are going on the offensive now,” Bari promised as she prepared to hobble down the hospital hallway for another of an endless rehabilitation sessions designed to repair the damage done to her when, a person, or persons unknown placed, then caused a bomb to be detonated beneath the seat of her car in Oakland as she set out for an organizing session in Santa Cruz. Chris Carpenter, representing the Alameda County DA’s office, made the announcement that he wouldn’t pursue Bari and Darryl Cherney for the explosion that has permanently crippled Bari and put Cherney in fear for his life.
Within an hour of the attempt on their lives in Oakland on Thursday, May 24th about noon, Bari and Cherney were announced as suspects in their own immolation. The Oakland Police Department, working with the FBI, quickly announced that Earth First! was “a known terrorist organization” and that Bari and Cherney had undoubtedly been transporting the bomb when it detonated and blew them up. The Oakland PD and the FBI followed up their suspiciously prompt accusation with periodic press conferences over the month of June and the first week of July with vague claims of corroborative evidence in the form of matching nails and typewriter ribbons. The FBI made two separate visits to Bari’s Redwood Valley home to pull nails out of her window frames. But for all their obvious trying, the police agencies could not put together a case against the pair of talented activists, both of them long committed, incidentally, to Gandhian principles of nonviolent political protest.
From the start, the accusations against Bari and Cherney were denounced by a broad cross-section of prominent persons and organizations ranging from Wilson Riles Jr. and David Brower and Earth Island Institute. Bari and Cherney’s close friends and neighbors were outraged at the preposterous accusations brought by the authorities against them. The pursuit of not only the two victims but Earth First! as an organization was seen by many environmentalists as part conspiracy by the authorities to stop Redwood Summer and a measure of the depths of police incompetence as plumbed by the depths of their misreading of Earth First!. Occasional and rare industrial sabotage advocated by some persons in the non-organization of Earth First! does not equate bomb attacks on human targets. The police made it seem as if Earth First! were nothing more than an updated version of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Bari, meanwhile, vows to seek an outside investigation of the handling of her case. “The authorities in Oakland, the local FBI and the Mendocino County Sheriffs Department have shown themselves to be completely incapable of conducting an investigation into finding out who did this to me. Some of these people should be fired, some of them belong in jail themselves. The killers are still out there.” Bari fully expects to launch a large claim for damages against the Oakland Police Department and the FBI.
Saturday’s Coast Rally
Anywhere from two to five thousand persons are expected to show their support for Judi Bari and their contempt for the corporate rape of Mendocino County in Fort Bragg Saturday. The Contras or yellow ribbon people, funded and promoted by Georgia-Pacific, will rally a mile or so east of the Redwood Summer demonstration. Georgia-Pacific has opened an information office they claim is independent of the corporation in downtown Fort Bragg. This, office is staffed by a public relations man from San Francisco. He has been lying full-time since last Monday. Many of the County’s loggers say they will not participate in any rally sponsored or organized by either G-P or L-P. A pronounced split has rent the so-called timber industry. The split is between real loggers and those the real loggers call the “suit and tie” timber people