How The FBI Uses Local Police And The Media To Overtly Attack Those Americans Whom They Target

The following, is a letter written by a member of the Redwood Summer Justice Project, regarding the FBI's use of the media and Oakland, CA Police to attack environmental activists in a criminal campaign to smear their reputations. There was no due process of law in this instance and numerous violations of the US Constitution took place at the direction of the FBI and the Oakland Police Department.

I have long been targeted by the FBI, NSA and The Department Of Homeland Security for the same despicable tactics, and violations of due process of law, as have myriad others whom these fascist organizations were unable to legally arrest -- despite their use of COINTELPRO entrapment tactics. While Homeland Security has only been around since the 9-11 attacks, they have quickly established a reputation for the use of intimidation tactics and shown a propensity towards violating civil rights.

All of the aforementioned government agencies are so wicked in the ways in which they violate both civil and human rights, that the accounts of those targeted for them need to be retold over and over again, until the American people understand that these agencies simply do not belong in a country that purports to respect the civil liberties of all its citizens -- something that the FBI, NSA and Homeland Security clearly do not! And their "broken record" cry of violating civil rights as a result of the war on terror is now beginning to fall on deaf ears, as the American people continue to learn of the Bush Adminstration's betrayal of them in its attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon September 11th, 2001.

To those who say that something like this could never happen, may I remind you of Adolf Hitler's attack on the German Reichstag Building which he blamed on the Russians and then used to defend his rational for declaring war on Russia.

With war mongers like Hitler and George W. Bush there are always "methods to their madness." The fact that they are quite mad is what should be of concern to all people. George W. Bush, like Adolf Hitler, General Franco, Benito Musolini, and Joseph Stalin, is quite obviously criminally insane, with the deaths of more than 650,000 people on his hands as of early 2007.

The following letter illustrates the FBI's use of the Oakland, CA Police Department and US Media to mislead the public in regard to ecological activists Judi Bari and Daryl Cherney, both of whom were seriously injured back in 1990 when a bomb that the FBI planted in their station wagon exploded. Judi and Daryl sued the FBI claiming that this organization had conspired to destroy the Earth First! movement, and won a 4.4 million dollar judgement against the FBI. Judi had died prior to witnessing her victory, but her name lives on in immortality as the Mother of the Earth First! movement; something that given their vicious attempts to destroy her, must truly stick in the FBI's craw.


"Dear Friends and Supporters,

Since our last mailing to you, we learned of a spate of violent attacks and attempted frame-ups of environmental activists around the country. As we talked with the targeted activists, we couldn’t escape the feeling that it was exactly this atmosphere of stepped-up violence, threats of violence and law enforcement complicity that had led up to the car bomb attack on Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney in 1990.

We need to alert you to the attacks on these courageous environmental activists as they continue to stand up against increasingly violent attempts to scare them off and to neutralize effective grassroots environmental protection movements nationwide. (See "The REAL Eco-Terrorism," linked from home page.) Equally important, we have much progress to report on Judi and Darryl’s lawsuit against the FBI— the civil rights case you have so steadfastly supported at every turn. We think you’ll agree that recent events are stunning. Your support for the case is more important now that ever.


The Appellate Court Hearing

After languishing in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for nearly a year, on April 15th we had our day in court to refute the Oakland Police Department’s appeal of Judge Claudia Wilken’s qualified immunity ruling. Wilken’s October, 1997 decision had swept away the Oakland Police claims to immunity from prosecution and cleared our way to trial.

The three-judge appellate panel showed no patience with Oakland’s assertion that police had the right to act on the basis of FBI lies despite overwhelming physical evidence to the contrary. Oakland hardly even defended their position, underlining the fact that the appeal was only a procedural delaying tactic with no hope or basis for success. Once the appeal is resolved, Judge Wilken will set a date for trial.


Mystery of the Missing Documents: The Plot Thickens

While waiting for the appeals court hearing, we fought for and won the right to continue discovery against the FBI. One of many suspicious anomalies in the FBI’s main bombing file is that the numbers on most of the documents have been crossed out and new numbers written in. With whole blocks of numbers missing, this renumbering has caused us to suspect that the FBI is hiding documents from us."

Jim Marino Speaking Here:

The aforementioned is important because it documents how the FBI will routinely lie to local police and media in efforts to illegally target a person or group whom the FBI cannot legally arrest. It's clear that this is what the FBI did in efforts to destroy the Earth First! movement and activist Judi Bari. Even more concerning were the despicable tactics that the FBI used in its attempt to obfuscate the situation, in efforts to prevent Judi and her team of lawyers from building their case against the FBI.

Feeding false information to the Oakland PD and local media was clearly a desperate tactic on the part of the FBI, who was well aware of its guilt in this situation, and looking to misdirect attention away from themselves. Below is further evidence that the FBI will also obstruct justice in a case in which it finds itself the defendant by either destroying evidence, or misplacing it so that the prosecution will never have access to it.

The FBI is also notorious for excluding exculpatory evidence in federal cases that they are involved in, in what can only be seen as a deliberate attempt to obstruct justice by preventing a jury from hearing information that would help to exonerate a defendant.

Perhaps the most disturbing illustration of this concerns a Native American man by the name of Leonard Peltier. Peltier was the head of the AIM movement (American Indian Movement) in the 1970's and targeted by the FBI for its COINTELPRO operations, in efforts to destroy the AIM movement. The FBI is no stranger to these types of tactics, having used them on numerous other civil rights groups including the Socialist Worker's Party, the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, and the Black Panther Party.

Peltier was framed for the murders of two FBI agents at the Wounded Knee Indian Reservation, in the early 1970's. His trial was merely a formality, since the FBI deliberately held back more than 6000 pages of information that Peltier's defense team believes would have exonerated him.

As the case against Peltier became mainstream news, and questions about FBI impropriety surfaced, the Bureau in an attempt to justify what it had done, took out full page ads in newspapers claiming that Leonard Peltier was a murderer who had killed two of their own colleagues. However, the add was seen as exactly what it was -- a pathetic attempt by the FBI to coverup its COINTELPRO operations against the American Indian Movement and obvious frameup of Leonard Peltier.

Even the ballistics report was falsified in the case of Peltier, which to this day his legal team claims never proved that Peltier had fired the gun which killed the two agents. And the FBI has never acknowledged why it held back the thousands of pages of information that Peltier's defense team requested during the discovery stages of the trial. It's clear that if the FBI had furnished Peltier's defense team with this information their case against him would unraveled faster than a cheap piece of twine.

As it stands, Peltier is an innocent man, wrongly convicted and imprisoned for a crime that he did not commit. More than 30 years after his bogus conviction, Leonard Peltier is still behind bars, having been denied the right to live his life.

The FBI's attack on Judy Bari, Darryl Cherney and the Earth First! movement is yet another example of what this fascist agency really is -- a covert terrorist and enforcer of the United States Military/Industrial Complex's status quo.

In this particular situation, rather than admitting to its culpability, the FBI instead chose to destroy the reputations of two innocent people and an entire group of environmental activists. This is just further evidence of the complete fraud that the FBI has become (if in fact it was ever anything but the covert terrorist political arm of the US Shadow Government that it is today).

Tanya Brannon's letter regarding Judi Bari and Earth First! continues below:

" In May, we were finally able to depose the FBI file clerks who had worked on the bombing file. None of the clerks we questioned was able to account for the renumbering. In fact, one explained, there are only two situations that would call for documents to be renumbered, neither of which applied in our case. Moreover, both of the clerks testified that they personally had not changed the numbers on the documents.

Besides the "renumbering" hanky-panky, the FBI also claims that certain documents are simply and inexplicably "missing" from the file. In depositions an FBI file supervisor let slip that the procedure is that two copies of all documents are kept in the file. This unexpected revelation makes the disappearance of the documents all the more suspicious; one copy might somehow be misplaced, but the likelihood of both copies dematerializing is virtually nil. Hopefully, these important admissions will move the court to demand that the FBI quit lying and cough up what are likely key and incriminating documents in our case.

... And on Other Fronts

As always, just as we were making significant progress on the legal front, the disruption and disinformation intensified. An all-out campaign was unleashed, attempting nothing less than to rewrite the theory of the bombing case on the eve of our hearing in the Court of Appeals. It began with the clever use of local media to hype a wild news story from a smalltown fringe conspiracy magazine speculating that Judi was bombed by a personal associate with no connection to her political organizing.

By far the most offensive tactic was a media event staged on May 24th, the ninth anniversary of the bombing. The group presented the Mendocino County district attorney with a bogus "petition" demanding he open a new investigation into one of Judi’s personal associates as a suspect in the Oakland bombing. They then made a photo-op presentation to the DA of the "evidence"; i.e., the conspiracy article he’d already read and rejected as "unsubstantiated conjecture, speculation and innuendo." Obviously, the real target of the petition was not the DA at all, but the press.

Difficult as it has been at times, we have refused to be drawn off course, but have continued the real work of developing the case against the FBI, consulting with activists who are being similarly targeted, and continuing our grassroots organizing to stop both the corporate destruction of the earth and the cynical attempts to under-mine that opposition.

To that end, we have launched a petition to newly inaugurated Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, a longtime supporter of the case and of the fight to save the Headwaters Forest. The petition (enclosed) is a call for full disclosure of police investigative materials, an independent investigation of the bombing, and disciplinary action against officers who acted improperly in the investigation of Bari, Cherney and Earth First! Please distribute and circulate this call for justice in the bombing case.

We have also formed a Redwood Summer Justice Project advisory board, listed on the first page of this letter, to guide us as we get closer to a victory in the court. We are frankly awed at the level of commitment and experience we can now call on as we fight the good fight against government repression of dissent.

You know that all of this work is incredibly expensive. The most recent round of depositions alone cost almost $6,000. Once again we ask you to stand with us, just as you always have, in our pursuit of justice for Judi Bari — for Darryl Cherney and Earth First! — for all activists everywhere who dare to risk their lives to preserve our rights.

Please send your tax deductible donation today. We’re counting on you.


¡Que viva Judi Bari!

Tanya Brannan"