Who Bombed Judi Bari? | |
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Directed by | Mary Liz Thomson |
Produced by | Darryl Cherney |
Edited by | Mary Liz Thomson |
Production company | hokey pokey productions |
Release date |
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Running time | 95 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Who Bombed Judi Bari? is an American historical documentary about an assassination attempt on the life of Judi Bari, an American environmental and labor activist, which occurred on May 24, 1990 via a pipe bomb in her car. [1] [2] It was directed by Mary Liz Thomson and produced by Darryl Cherney. He is also an environmental activist and was traveling with Bari that day, but was not as severely wounded.
While driving through Oakland, California on their way to a benefit concert for the Redwood Summer campaign to save California's coast redwood trees, activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were injured when a pipe bomb detonated under the driver's seat of Bari's car. [3] Bari, who was driving, was critically injured.
Oakland police and the FBI approached the explosion as a terrorist incident, and arrested Bari and Cherney. In their investigation, they tried to prove that the activists were transporting an explosive device that accidentally detonated. The two were never charged with a crime.
They filed a civil rights lawsuit in 1991 against these law enforcement organizations for violation of their constitutional rights. In 2002 they won the lawsuit (Bari had died of breast cancer in 1997). Cherney and the late Bari's estate were awarded $4.4 million, to be paid by the FBI and Oakland Police Department. [4] The authorities allegedly did not investigate any other suspects. Discovery during the lawsuit revealed crime scene photos that clearly showed the bomb was located under Bari's seat, not in the back seat as investigators had alleged. [1]
In 2012, a federal judge ordered the FBI not to destroy another pipe bomb that they had held as evidence after it partially detonated in May 1990 at a lumber mill in Cloverdale about a week before the car bombing. Investigators agreed the two bombs were built by the same person. Ben Rosenfeld, attorney for Darryl Cherney, had requested that an outside lab perform DNA testing on the Cloverdale bomb. The FBI said it had not conducted such testing, and the judge upheld Rosenfeld's request. [5]
The film premiered at the 2012 San Francisco Green Film Festival. [6] [7]
Judith Beatrice Bari was an American environmentalist, feminist, and labor leader, primarily active in Northern California after moving to the state in the mid-1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, she was the principal organizer of Earth First! campaigns against logging in the ancient redwood forests of Mendocino County and related areas. She also organized Industrial Workers of the World Local 1 in an effort to bring together timber workers and environmentalists of Earth First! in common cause.
Earth First! is a radical environmental advocacy group that originated in the Southwestern United States. It was founded in 1980 by Dave Foreman, Mike Roselle, Howie Wolke, Bart Koehler, and Ron Kezar. Today there are Earth First groups around the world including ones in Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, New Zealand, the Philippines, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Tree spiking involves hammering a metal rod, nail or other material into a tree trunk, either inserting it at the base of the trunk where a logger might be expected to cut into the tree, or higher up where it would affect the sawmill later processing the wood. Contact with the spike often damages saw blades, which can result in injuries, or death, to nearby workers. The spike can also lower the commercial value of the wood by causing discoloration, reducing the economic viability of logging in the long term, without threatening the life of the tree. It is illegal in the United States, and has been described as a form of eco-terrorism.
A pipe bomb is an improvised explosive device (IED) that uses a tightly sealed section of pipe filled with an explosive material. The containment provided by the pipe means that simple low explosives can be used to produce a relatively large explosion due to the containment causing increased pressure. The fragmentation of the pipe itself creates potentially lethal shrapnel.
The Centennial Olympic Park bombing was a domestic terrorist pipe bombing attack on Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, Georgia, on Saturday, July 27, 1996, during the Summer Olympics. The blast directly killed one person and injured 111 others; another person later died of a heart attack. It was the first of four bombings committed by Eric Rudolph in a terrorism campaign against the U.S. government which he accused of championing "the ideals of global socialism" and "abortion on demand". Security guard Richard Jewell discovered the bomb before detonation, notified Georgia Bureau of Investigation officers, and began clearing spectators out of the park along with other security guards.
Eco-terrorism is an act of violence which is committed in support of environmental causes, against people or property.
THERMCON was the code name of an FBI operation which was launched in response to the sabotage of the Arizona Snowbowl ski lift near Flagstaff, Arizona, in October 1987 by three people from Prescott, Arizona, Mark Davis, Margaret Millet and Marc Baker. In a November 1987 letter claiming responsibility, the group called themselves the "Evan Mecham Eco-Terrorist International Conspiracy" (EMETIC). The group named themselves after Evan Mecham, the then-Governor of Arizona. The Arizona Snowbowl spent $50,000 repairing the damage.
Viola Fauver Liuzzo was an American civil rights activist in Detroit, Michigan. She was known for going to Alabama in March 1965 to support the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. On March 25, 1965, she was shot dead by three Ku Klux Klan members while driving activists between the cities and transportation.
Joseph Tony Serra is an American criminal defense and civil rights attorney, political activist and tax resister from San Francisco.
The Pacific Lumber Company, officially abbreviated PALCO, and also commonly known as PL, was one of California's major logging and sawmill operations, located 28 miles (45 km) south of Eureka and 244 miles (393 km) north of San Francisco. Begun in 1863, PALCO was managed over most of the twentieth century by generations of the Simon J. Murphy, Sr. Family or managers chosen by the Murphys from 1905 through 1985. Primary operations existed in massive log storage and milling operations at the historic company town of Scotia, California, located adjacent to US 101 along the Eel River. Secondary mills were located in nearby Fortuna and Carlotta. PALCO had extensive timber holdings exceeding well over 200,000 acres (890 km²) in the Redwood and Douglas-Fir forests of Humboldt County. For generations, it was one of the largest private employers in the entire region, appropriately known as the Redwood Empire.
Richard Masato Aoki was an American educator and college counselor, best known as a civil rights activist and early member of the Black Panther Party. He joined the early Black Panther Party and was eventually promoted to the position of Field Marshal. Although there were several Asian Americans in the Black Panther Party, Aoki was the only one to have a formal leadership position. Following Aoki's death, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's records on him were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, showing that, over a period of 15 years, he had been an informant for the government.
Darryl Cherney is an American musician and environmental activist. He is a member of the Earth First! environmental movement. Born and raised in New York City, he lives in Humboldt County, California.
Stephen Henderson Talbot is a TV documentary producer, writer and reporter. Talbot directed and produced "The Movement and the 'Madman' " for the PBS series American Experience in 2023. He is a longtime contributor to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and worked for over 16 years for the series Frontline.
William Patrick Staley is a former American football player. He played five years as an AFL and NFL football player for a total of 49 games. Two seasons with the Cincinnati Bengals, three with the Chicago Bears
In the United States, a common definition of terrorism is the systematic or threatened use of violence in order to create a general climate of fear to intimidate a population or government and thereby effect political, religious, or ideological change. This article serves as a list and a compilation of acts of terrorism, attempts to commit acts of terrorism, and other such items which pertain to terrorist activities which are engaged in by non-state actors or spies who are acting in the interests of state actors or persons who are acting without the approval of foreign governments within the domestic borders of the United States.
Redwood Summer was a three-month movement in 1990 of environmental activism aimed at protecting old-growth redwood trees from logging by northern California timber companies and was part of the Timber Wars of the 1990s. Organized in 1990 by Earth First! and the Industrial Workers of the World, it was led by Judi Bari. A protest associated with Redwood Summer took place in June 1990 at the Louisiana Pacific export dock in Samoa, California. Before the protests officially started, the campaign gained international attention on May 24, 1990 when the campaign leader, Judi Bari, and a fellow activist, Darryl Cherney, were involved in a pipe bomb explosion that critically injured them while they were driving through Oakland, California. The explosion led to the FBI accusing Bari of manufacturing and transporting bombs. Due to the FBI not being able to adequately support their claims, she was eventually found innocent. The movement was also known to use many controversial techniques to disrupt the logging companies including tree spiking, symbolic protests, and disarming machinery. Though the protests were supposed to remain non-violent, many critics argue that Earth First! is a radical group and the techniques used in the protests are debated.
Seth Rosenfeld is an American journalist. He is the author of Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power, published in hardback in 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in paperback in 2013 by Picador. Subversives was a New York Times best-seller and won the 2013 Ridenhour Prize for books; PEN Center USA's Literary Award for Research Nonfiction; the National Society of Professional Journalists' Sunshine Award; and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
Josiah "Tink" Thompson is an American writer, retired professional private investigator, and former philosophy professor. In 1967, he published both The Lonely Labyrinth, a study of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works, and Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination. The culmination of his half-century-long Kennedy assassination project was published in early 2021 as Last Second in Dallas.
The history of Oakland, a city in the county of Alameda, California, can be traced back to the founding of a settlement by Horace Carpentier, Edson Adams, and Andrew Moon in the 19th century. The area now known as Oakland had seen human occupation for thousands of years, but significant growth in the settlements that are now incorporated into the city did not occur until the Industrial Revolution. Oakland was first incorporated as a town in 1852.
Greg King is an American journalist and environmental activist in Northern California. He is President and Executive Director of Siskiyou Land Conservancy, a non-profit land trust.