Bombing Judi Bari: FBI cover-up continues

Photo by Louie, Oakland Tribune

The 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.