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Institute for Public Accuracy
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Earth First! and the FBI: What the Verdict Means
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| WASHINGTON
- June 12 - Twelve years after Darryl Cherney and Judi Bari were arrested for
the bombing of their own car, a jury awarded them $4.4 million Tuesday in their
suit against the FBI and the Oakland Police for framing them.
DARRYL CHERNEY, DENNIS CUNNINGHAM,
littletree@pacific.net, www.judibari.org
In 1990, Cherney was injured in a car bombing along with fellow Earth First! activist
Judi Bari. The two were arrested when the FBI claimed that they had planted the
bomb. All charges against Bari and Cherney were later dropped. Cherney sued the
FBI. So did Bari, who later died of cancer. Dennis Cunningham, the lead counsel
in Bari vs. the FBI, has also represented the family of Black Panther leader
Fred Hampton, who was slain by Chicago police at the instigation of the FBI. Cunningham
said today: "In a legal victory of historic proportions against the FBI, the jury
found that six of the seven defendants violated the First and Fourth Amendments
of the Constitution by arresting the activists, conducting searches of their homes,
and carrying out a smear campaign in the press, calling Earth First! a terrorist
organization and calling the activists bombers in the aftermath of the explosion
of a bomb that was planted in Judi Bari's car in 1990. This verdict is a referendum
against the FBI's gross interference with people's right to dissent at a time
when Attorney General Ashcroft, FBI Director Mueller and the Bush administration
are arrogating huge power to themselves and the FBI to spy on legitimate groups
and organizers and infringe on Constitutional rights of the public."
NKECHI TAIFA,
ntaifa@law.howard.edu,
www.law.howard.edu/faculty/pages/ntaifa
Taifa is director of the Equal Justice Program at the Howard University School
of Law. She said today: "This jury verdict is yet another indication of what is
in store should Ashcroft's plans to loosen the longstanding Levi guidelines become
a reality. The guidelines were implemented to curb FBI abuses uncovered during
the Senate investigations of the mid-'70s. The 1990 Bari bomb fiasco occurred
despite the existence of these clear guidelines prohibiting such outrageous activity
by the FBI. What will be the limits of governmental abuse if there are no guidelines
in place?"
PAUL WOLF,
paulwolf@derechos.org, www.cointel.org
Principal author of the report "COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story," Wolf said
today: "Despite its carefully contrived image as the nation's premier crime-fighting
agency, the FBI has always functioned primarily as America's political police.
This role has included not only the collection of intelligence on the activities
of political dissidents and groups, but also counterintelligence operations to
thwart those activities.... There is no better example than the Judi Bari case
to show that the FBI kept on well into the 1990s using covert action tactics against
political movements and activists which they perceived as threats to the established
order.... In spite of knowing full well from their own expert's testimony that
Bari and Cherney were innocent victims, the FBI and Oakland police continued to
lie to the media ... saying they had plenty of evidence they were the bombers."
###
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