"THIS BOMB HAD MY NAME ON IT"
Rosen, Rebecca
"This Bomb had my Name On it" Judi Bari talks about Redwood Sumer BY REBECCA ROSEN The posters plastered to the walls of Judi Bari's hospital room are captioned eco-terrorism and depict barren...
...During his campaign, Azevedo made it known that he believed no mass extermination of Jews occurred in Nazi Germany...
...It's just a little too convenient," said Cherney...
...R.R...
...Cherney, who had sustained minor injuries, was taken from Oakland's Highland Hospital to the Alameda County Jail...
...members and other environmentalists turned to outrage when police arrested Bari and Cherney, charging them with transporting an explosive device...
...Damn right there was no Holocaust," said one man...
...Just as young people had flocked to the South to protest segregation, Bari hoped to mobilize environmentalists to converge on northern California in a massive drive against the timber industry's destruction of old-growth forests...
...District Attorney Carpenter announced on July 17 that because of insufficient evidence, his office would not be bringing charges against Bari and Cherney...
...Bruce Anderson, who edits the freewheeling Anderson Valley Advertiser in Mendocino County, says police in redwood country have shown more interest in defending the interests of the local "old-boy" network than in protecting the environmentalists, whom they regard as "outside agitators...
...Bari gained adherents for Earth First...
...The movement was founded, she says, by men who saw environmental issues as beyond the scope and experience of working people—an assumption she set out to change...
...Georgia Pacific executives poured thousands of dollars into his campaign, and other firms' officials also made generous contributions...
...The Diary of Anne Frank, he said, was a postwar forgery...
...As word of the bombing spread, the horror felt by Earth First...
...Earth First...
...The men do like to get their faces on camera," she says, chuckling, "but this is increasingly becoming a women's movement...
...That's all we're really doing," the agent said—suddenly adding, "We don't need that on tape...
...They lied to us," said Ron Atkinson, a ten-year millwright for the company...
...Doubts about the Oakland car bombing deepened when a letter signed "The Lord's avenger" arrived at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat...
...Confronted with this contradiction, Oakland Police Captain Jim Hahn, who is in charge of the investigation, said, "The nails are only one facet of a very large investigation...
...See Page 33...
...It put the attention on an anti-abortionist, and they have been known to set bombs...
...members often begin, "Dear Lesbian...
...I guess this kind of thing doesn't happen very often...
...Tactics have included blockades, demonstrations, and guerrilla theater—for example, placing a huge plastic "crack" across the Glen Canyon Dam to demonstrate the danger of environmental damage...
...The company called it "an unfortunate accident...
...Liz Henry, who defeated Azevedo with almost 70 per cent of the vote, "has not always acted in the best interests of the timber-dependent community," Odgers says, adding that the firm will continue to resist "anything that affects our ability to grow trees in a way that allows us to provide a good return to our investors...
...we will carry no weapons...
...Menacing messages have also come from a fringe motorcycle group that calls itself the Sahara Club...
...members out of the trees...
...At one Earth First...
...Strong-willed, intelligent, and funny, Bari has recently emerged as Earth FirstJ's leading strategist and thinker...
...Supervisor Liz Henry, who favors putting more forest lands under state control, also regularly receives threatening calls...
...Otherwise, why would all these damn Jews be trying to take over America...
...I just kept begging them to put me out," Bari recalls, but massive internal bleeding made it impossible for physicians to give her a general anaesthetic...
...As Bari's reputation as a workers' advocate spread, employees at other mills began asking for her help...
...She parked right outside the window...
...Her strategies earned the respect of mainstream environmentalists...
...saboteurs have made it a point to notify the press of tree-spiking operations and to flag the trees to avert injury to chain-saw-wielding loggers, Bari opposed spiking as dangerous—and potentially harmful to Earth First!'s public image...
...Timber companies are cutting three times what they're planting...
...I can't feel anything...
...This may sound a little flippant, but I wasn't concerned about the police or the FBI...
...She was taken to Oakland police headquarters for questioning...
...Redwood Summer was to be one of the group's most ambitious undertakings...
...Judi Bari," it read, "Get out and go back to where you came from...
...I had PCBs on my boots...
...The "Lord's avenger" letter focused on a demonstration outside a Mendocino County Planned Parenthood clinic earlier in the spring—one of a series mounted by anti-abortionists...
...Among, them were workers at the sprawling Georgia Pacific plant in Fort Bragg who had been exposed to a massive spill of hundreds of gallons of oil laced with deadly PCBs which company officials insisted, at first, was harmless mineral oil...
...There's no way to describe the feeling of being bombed," she says...
...We know every thing...
...Detectives asked "whether I'd like to be a suspect or a witness," refused to tell her whether they were charging her, and did not let her call a lawyer...
...Earth First!-ers say Bari, an outspoken woman, upset the long-standing macho order in the logging communities...
...I felt the heat rush up on my face," Marr recalled the next day...
...brief attempts to sit or stand bring instant, painful swelling...
...Her circulation is still impaired...
...Georgia Pacific spokesman Dave Odg-ers reserved comment on the bombing but alluded to the possibility of future conflict: "While [Earth First!] is talking about nonviolence, our sense is that they will instigate an episode that will bring national news-media attention," he said...
...Shannon Marr, a nineteen-year-old Seeds of Peace member, had stayed up late the night before, talking with Bari...
...And we're supposed to say, 'Whew, are we relieved!' 'The Lord's avenger' forgot that a note was found at the Cloverdale mill...
...Things were really moving along...
...The letter contained precise descriptions of the two bombs—details police say only the bomber would know...
...For Bari, the issue took on major significance when a worker named Fortunato Reyes was killed...
...A Sergeant Sitterud came in and asked me if my conscience was bothering me yet...
...The only violence has been against Earth First!-ers...
...They said the close collaboration of FBI agents and Oakland police was reminiscent of the COINTELPRO program conducted by the FBI in the 1960s and 1970s to disrupt radical organizations...
...Don Nelson, the official union chief at the plant whose 69 per cent pay increase in one year was publicized by Bari, says, "She Redwoods and the Right When Jack Azevedo ran for the Board of Supervisors in Mendocino County, California, two years ago, he enjoyed the full backing of the timber barons...
...Equipment was unsafe, and it was kept running when safety considerations demanded a shutdown...
...Richard Ingram, one of the attorneys representing Bari and Cherney, says, "It is my understanding that Chris Carpenter is just disgusted with these guys...
...campaigns—National Week of Outrage and National Tree-Sit—drew to a close, a logger whose truck had been blockaded by the activists the day before followed Bari into the town of Philo and rammed her car, which flew through the air and smashed into a parked truck...
...as it became clear that the industry was not interested in dialogue or negotiation...
...Even they were denied physical contact...
...Though such pro-industry organizations as Mothers' Watch and Yellow Ribbon regularly refer to Earth First...
...Local affiliates are free to chart their own course in interpreting Earth FirstPs slogan, No compromise in defense of Mother Earth...
...YOU WILL NOT GET A SECOND WARNING...
...An enraged Bari demanded official investigations and kept the case in the public eye...
...This Bomb had my Name On it" Judi Bari talks about Redwood Sumer BY REBECCA ROSEN The posters plastered to the walls of Judi Bari's hospital room are captioned eco-terrorism and depict barren landscapes devastated by the logging industry's clear-cuts...
...has been prominently involved in backing the Desert Protection Act, and opposition to desert motorcycle racing has enraged the bikers...
...Unwilling to submit to further humiliation, Reyes climbed into the machinery while it was running and was crushed to death...
...The most recent warning received by Bari before the car bombing arrived April 10...
...Said Meca Wawona, who sits on the County's Forest Advisory Committee, "I'd be the last to condemn Earth First!, because the system has failed miserably...
...In a break with past Earth First...
...I was thinking that maybe it was like being in a war-except that this bomb had my name on it...
...Until the statute of limitation expires in three years, Bari and Cherney will face the possibility of prosecution...
...Soon, some mill workers were calling themselves Wobblies...
...More recently, Azevedo has been campaigning against Earth First...
...Participants in Redwood Summer were to be required to undergo two days of nonviolence training, and the recruiting flier proclaimed, "We will use no violence, verbal or physical, towards any person...
...He has done recruiting for the Posse Comitatus and once spoke at a Los Angeles "Patriotic Leadership Conference" that also featured a talk by Robert Shelton, head of the United Klans of America...
...Marr returned home to the Seeds of Peace house in Berkeley almost eight hours later, exhausted, only to be denied admission by police who had ransacked the house—at first, without benefit of a search warrant...
...It's not really a time to celebrate," said an unusually subdued Cherney the following day...
...We just don't want anyone to get hurt...
...The Deputy Sheriffs Association of Mendocino endorsed his candidacy...
...She folds down the bedcovers to survey the damage...
...Darryl was bleeding...
...In a request for an emergency search warrant filed at 2 a.m...
...demonstration outside a Louisiana Pacific mill...
...A group of high school students who picketed Azevedo's campaign office say the candidate's supporters accused them of being AIDS carriers and communists...
...The letter-writer claimed responsibility for the bombing and for a fizzled bomb-attempt on May 9 at a Louisiana Pacific mill in Cloverdale...
...Alameda County District Attorney Chris Carpenter, who had sought the repeated court postponements on grounds that the review of evidence against Bari and Cherney was not yet complete, declined to comment on police claims regarding the nails...
...Betty Ball, a local activist and friend of Bari, remembers the day she arrived for work at the Mendocino Environmental Center in Ukiah and found, affixed to the front door, a blow-up of a newspaper photo of Bari with rifle-sight crosshairs drawn over her face...
...press releases calling for violence turned up in timber-mill employee lounges and automatic laundries...
...I tried to think of something to hang on to, so I tried picturing my children's faces—and I couldn't...
...She does not know when or whether she will walk again...
...She said, 'I can't breathe...
...Bari, a forty-year-old activist with the environmental group Earth First!, is telling a visitor how it felt when a bomb went off in her auto last May 24...
...They're sending x-rays of my pelvis to some super expert in Sacramento," she says...
...on the morning after the bombing, Sergeant Robert Chenault said he believed Bari and Cherney were members of a "violent terrorist group engaged in the placing of explosive devices," though he offered no basis for that allegation...
...Dave Odgers, a Georgia Pacific spokesman, says the company's support of Azevedo's unsuccessful campaign is "a moot point...
...I didn't pull over, I just stopped the car and ran to them...
...Timber industry executives were swift to decry the bombing...
...On the morning of the bombing, Bari and Cherney, a former child actor and publicist, set out from Berkeley with their musical instruments for Santa Cruz, where they planned to sing their anti-industry songs and enlist support for Redwood Summer...
...It is important to understand what is happening," she says...
...The bomb that blew up the car carrying Bari and Cherney was not their first encounter with violence...
...was committed to nonviolence...
...In both instances, police declined to make arrests...
...I was concerned about the nut case that's out there, the nut case that's still on the loose...
...Kathleen Mahoney, a spokeswoman for the FBI, said the Bureau is following up on tips...
...needed a martyr" when her car was bombed...
...She feels well enough to regale a reporter with "LP-O," a flamenco-style song she and Cherney wrote lampooning Louisiana Pacific President Harry Merlo...
...A note left with the May 9 bomb had charged, "Louisiana Pacific screws millworkers...
...co-founder Dave Foreman (who is accused of conspiring to sabotage government equipment) reveal an FBI agent identifying Foreman as "the one we need to pop to send a message...
...You're in deep shit," said the note, which was signed "Earth First Stompers...
...But after Georgia Pacific was cited for "willful exposure of employees" to PCBs, Atkinson was fired...
...After Supervisor Norm deValle met with Bari and Cherney in a cafe to discuss the eminent-domain idea, he found a taped message waiting for him at home: "You will be killed...
...She remembers being impaled on a car-seat spring, the metal piercing her flesh to the bone...
...with a six-pack of beer and an ax-handle...
...Earth Firstl's founders have also endorsed such "monkey-wrenching" tactics as pouring sand into the gas tanks of bulldozers and spiking redwood trees to strip them of their value as timber...
...is a loose-knit organization—some members prefer to call it a commitment—dedicated to preserving wilderness areas and natural resources...
...That was the turning point," she says...
...Though Earth First...
...President Harry Merlo of Louisiana Pacific outraged mainstream environmentalists by proclaiming, "We log to infinity—because it's ours, it's out there, and we want it all now...
...Rebecca Rosen is a free-lance writer in the San Francisco Bay Area...
...Her face breaks into a broad grin at the mention of her daughters...
...in their literature as a "violent terrorist group," Henry says the opposite is true...
...The woman who crafted Redwood Summer is now, of necessity, a spectator...
...Sheriff Tim Shea proposed what became known as the "stick ordinance," mandating that sticks on Redwood Summer picket signs be no thicker than one-quarter of an inch...
...A message left for Redwood Summer participants at Wages Creek campground on May 16 contained a sketch of a father and son in hunting attire shooting Earth First...
...At another rally, a woman in Earth First...
...On a radio talk show, he told listeners that Redwood Summer would mean "50,000 drug-crazed hippies defecating on our lawns...
...Mill officials started surrounding the plants with barbed wire...
...Bari recalled that the logger frantically insisted, "I didn't see the kids, I didn't see the kids," as her bloodied, crying children clung to her...
...suffered a broken nose...
...greeted the "Lord's avenger" letter with skepticism...
...To some Mendocino County residents, Azevedo explained that his list consisted of communist sympathizers affiliated with Central America support groups...
...It added, "Clubbers will be issued walking sticks the size of baseball bats...
...we will not damage any property...
...The Lord's avenger' sure doesn't sound like the guy who wrote, 'LP screws millworkers.'" The letter-writer claimed to have placed the bomb in Bari's car "whilst she was at the meeting with the loggers...
...In the weeks following the arrests of Bari and Cherney, while prosecutors sought and received a series of postponements in the scheduled arraignment of the Redwood Summer activists, police told the press that a sack of finishing nails found in Bari's car matched nails found in the bomb...
...Atkinson and Anna Marie Stenberg of Earth First!, who ran the day-care center, called in occupational safety officials— and Judi Bari, who showed workers how to document hazards, file complaints, and, in her words, "cut through the bureaucracy...
...But outside police headquarters in Oakland, participants in a rainy three-day vigil insisted that Bari and Cherney had been targets of a murder attempt and speculated on the possibility of a police frame-up...
...Raised on the glory days of the Wobblies and the Almanac Singers, she had done labor organizing among postal employees and blue-collar workers...
...But Bari was making inroads of her own on industry turf...
...His supervisor had ridiculed him and called him a sissy for shutting down the green chain," a crude saw, to clean it, Bari says...
...Members of the co-op say police also removed batteries from flashlights as "evidence...
...In northern California, Bari succeeded in saving public lands in the Cahto Wilderness Area that the Bureau of Land Management had decided to sell to the timber industry...
...had achieved something of value whenever it made the evening TV news...
...The company had previously announced it would close the mill and transfer its operations to a Mexico plant, where workers would be paid $2 an hour...
...On a second search of Bari's Wil-lits home, they pried nails from her window sills...
...practice, she began forming alliances with mill workers—a strategy the timber companies may regard as the most threatening aspect of Redwood Summer...
...Police maintain that they have no personnel to look into such threats...
...Weeks after the pipe bomb exploded under the seat of her white Subaru in Oakland, California, ripping through her pelvis and injuring her fellow Earth First...
...I had to lie on that spot for six weeks in traction," she says, grimacing...
...The mills, she found, were dangerous work places where employees were prodded to speed up production even at the risk of personal injury...
...She also set out to revise the notion that Earth First...
...The day before the district attorney made his announcement, Supervisor deVall drove to San Francisco to join Representative Ron Dellums and environmental leaders in asking U.S...
...I can't feel my leg.' I touched her leg and said, 'Can you feel that?' She said, 'It hurts.'" When police arrived at the scene, Man-started toward a telephone to call the Seeds of Peace house, but an officer stopped her, she recalls, and told her, "You're not allowed to make a call...
...can make you very angry in a very short time...
...Said Anna Marie Stenberg, a member of Earth First...
...Bari, a carpenter by trade, had built her own house...
...But Captain Hahn said the investigation would continue: "No one has been eliminated from or added to the list of suspects...
...The day before the bombing, Bari and Cherney had driven from their rural homes in Mendocino County to Berkeley, to talk to the pacifist Seeds of Peace Collective about Earth First!'s Redwood Summer project, patterned on the Mississippi Summer campaign conducted by civil-rights leaders in the 1960s...
...Friends of Bari, Cherney, and Earth First...
...None of these supporters seemed troubled by Azevedo's long and close association with the ultra-Right...
...Hoo boy...
...Medication does not relieve the acute pain that shoots through her legs for hours at a time...
...They left the Berkeley house at the same time, with Marr in the car ahead of Bari's...
...and Redwood Summer...
...member, thirty-three-year-old Darryl Cherney, Bari is still in almost constant agony...
...demonstration, a man ran through the crowd revving a chain saw and knocked down one protester who tried to speak to him...
...At the beginning," she says, "I just wanted to die, it hurt so bad...
...Letters to men "are more graphic, really vulgar," says Ball...
...Officers called it an accident...
...who attended the meeting, "No one could have gotten into Judi's car without being seen by fifteen to twenty people...
...Though Sergeant Sitterud told reporters he had traced all of the nails to a single batch of 200 to 800, nail manufacturers and distributors said nails are not sold in "batches" but in lots of at least 40,000...
...Judi was slumped down in the car...
...One day, Bari led a group of counterdemonstrators who confounded the "right-to-life" group by singing Bari's words—"Shall the Fetus Be Aborted...
...It was Bari who had denounced tree-spiking at an Earth First...
...They said it seemed to be the work of an educated person attempting to appear semiliterate...
...Their letters to female Earth First...
...When she concluded that the union representing workers at the plant—the International Association of Woodworkers-was failing to stand up for their interests, Bari organized a local of the Industrial Workers of the World...
...be it spiking trees, blowing up power lines, or bombing cars"—implying that the eco-activists were themselves responsible for the bombing...
...But that meeting—one of many at which Bari brought loggers together with environmentalists—took place at a Willits restaurant in front of a plate-glass window that faced the police station across the street...
...The Mendocino County sheriff's office did not respond to inquiries...
...At the same time, she helped workers file Occupational Safety and Health complaints that resulted in fines against Louisiana Pacific...
...Bari remained, under police custody, in Highland's intensive-care unit, where only members of her family were allowed to see her...
...A statement issued by Pacific Lumber deplored violence "be it directed toward humans or equipment...
...As news cameras rolled outside the Seeds of Peace house, police dragged out two boxes of what turned out to be tape cassettes and "detonated" them on the lawn...
...Bari's abdomen protrudes, distended from her injuries and subsequent surgery...
...Bari says she struck the deepest corporate nerves when she proposed to the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors that it use the power of eminent domain to seize acreage held by the timber companies—and the idea met with a favorable response...
...Then the Anderson Valley Advertiser disclosed that Azevedo kept a list of "suspects" in his computer—Jewish residents and organizations, employees of local social agencies, members of such groups as Big Brothers of America and Amnesty International...
...He is one of those who accuse Bari of "making up" the death threats against her, and he says Earth First...
...She reported the threat to Ukiah police who, she says, declined to investigate and "expressed no interest in having the original...
...And he added, "We know how to handle them...
...Earth First...
...They put me in a room with just a table in it and left me alone there for two hours," she said the following day...
...I never lost consciousness...
...But wiretaps obtained in preparation for the Arizona trial this fall of Earth First...
...Azevedo also received wide support from law-enforcement officials...
...others were told it was a list of individuals who might know about child abuse...
...It would really be a case of shooting yourself in the foot...
...And it was Bari who came, with Cherney, to persuade Seeds of Peace members in Berkeley that Earth First...
...scum if they resist a citizen's arrest" during Redwood Summer...
...I went to pick up my little boy at his day-care center, and I walked all over the carpet where the kids play...
...In August 1989, as two Earth First...
...A recent Sahara Club bulletin called for members willing to "subdue Earth First...
...Susan Zakin provided consulting services for this article...
...Oakland police had detained Marr for hours after the blast...
...Stacks of phony Earth First...
...Law-enforcement officials have emphatically denied any political motive for their charges against Bari and Cherney...
...I know Judi did not carry a bomb...
...Senate and House judiciary committees, as well as Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, to investigate the Oakland police department's handling of the case...
...to the tune of "Shall the Circle Be Unbroken...
...I could smell sulphur...
...We're talking about the kind of people whose idea of fun is to get drunk and shoot a tree," said one long-time resident...
...Bari says her two daughters, aged nine and four, were barred by police from hugging their mother...
Vol. 54 • September 1991 • No. 9
