Judge orders gov't to submit Judi Bari bombing evidence for independent testing

March 21st, 2011 indybay.org

   Judge Larson orders gov't to submit Judi Bari bombing evidence for
independent testing, after FBI hoped to destroy it.

http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2011/03/21/order_grant_mo_preserv___testing_3-21-11.pdf

On March 21, 2011, Magistrate Judge James Larson issued this order
granting a motion for preservation and independent testing of the bomb
remnants (including potential DNA evidence, along with fingerprint
evidence) in the case of the bombing of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney.

Last year, the bombing victims' attorneys received word that the FBI
intended to destroy this evidence, even though the FBI never conducted an
honest investigation in trying to determine who bombed Judi and Darryl,
and never so much as subjected this evidence, including duct tape
contained in the nearly intact Cloverdale bomb (which misfired, and which
the FBI itself acknowledges was built by the same bomber(s) as the car
bomb which ripped through Judi Bari's Subaru car seat and up into her body
on May 24, 1990) to forensic examination.

In 1990, bombers did not know to cover their DNA tracks. There is every
reason to believe that these bomb components may contain forensic evidence
which will finally answer the question, who bombed Judi Bari. The FBI,
apparently, has never sought DNA testing of this evidence, and has never
so much as compared the usable fingerprints it lifted. Furthermore, given
the history of this case, the victims cannot trust the FBI to do this
sincerely on its own. For this reason, their lawyers sought both
preservation and independent examination.

In keeping with its long and continuing tradition of targeting and framing
left wing political activists (a pattern which continues into the present
under Obama's FBI, evident in the abhorrent and terrorizing recent raids
in Chicago, the Twin Cities, and other locales on above board peace
activists and supporters of Palestinian self-determination, and their
families), the FBI and the DOJ set out in 1990 to frame Judi and Darryl,
and to discredit the environmental movement Earth First!, by accusing them
of transporting the assassin's car bomb which nearly killed them.

To try to make their political frame-up case, FBI supervisors and senior
agents flagrantly and extensively lied about the physical evidence, events
leading up to the bombing, and Earth First!'s history, to other responding
law enforcement agencies, including the Oakland police, and to its own
agents. Judi and Darryls' legal team finally undressed these lies in a
federal civil rights trial against the FBI and the Oakland Police in 2002,
in which a jury found not only that authorities had falsely arrested and
accused Bari and Cherney in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights,
but that they had done so for the insidious purpose of trying to discredit
their environmental movement, in violation of their First Amendment
rights. The jury awarded a total of $4.4 million to Bari's estate (Bari
died of Breast cancer in 1997) and Cherney against various responsible FBI
agents and Oakland police officers.

The civil case helped expose the fact that FBI dirty tricks continue into
the present, notwithstanding the scrutiny of the Church Committee and its
condemnation of J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO progam in the 1970s, and it
stands as a monument in the continuing struggle to stop the FBI from
working to disrupt the supposedly free political assembly and expression
of people on the left.

The FBI's refusal to subject the bombing evidence to the most rudimentary
physical analysis demonstrates plainly that its only interest in the case
was to blame and frame the victims, not to solve the heinous crime against
them. Judge Larson's order clears the way for Darryl Cherney, on his own
behalf and on behalf of the late Judi Bari, to work, finally, to solve the
bombing, after the FBI has completely abdicated that responsibility and
only ever interefered.