Albion Monitor /Features
Interview Index
The FBI Bomb School Connection
[... Every single FBI agent and Oakland police officer at that scene -- even though they could see with their own eyes that he was lying -- went along with Frank Doyle ...]


NEW SETTLER: Emperor's clothes -- why? It's not until several years later that you pick up another piece of evidence to indicate why a seasoned Oakland homicide detective as well as the other members of the Terrorist squad either went along with this hoax, or simply did not believe what they were seeing with their own eyes...

JUDI: Before I do that, I want to do one more piece: When we were arrested, we were arrested based on two physical pieces of evidence. The first, as it says in the search warrant: "the bomb is in the back seat, therefore, they should have seen it and knew they were carrying it." And that's attributed to Frank Doyle. And then Frank Doyle says, in the same document:" And we found a bag of nails in the car that is identical to the nails in the bomb." (The bomb was wrapped with nails for shrapnel effect.)

I have seen this bag of nails now: the nails in the bomb are finishing nails; the nails in the bag that they found separately in the car -- there's two bags of nails in the car: one of them was roofing nails, and the other one was 8 pound sinkers, vinyl-coated. Framing nails.

And you were carrying them because?

JUDI: I was a carpenter. I worked as a commercial carpenter for California Yurts, and I had been given a leave of absence for Redwood Summer, so I wasn't working for pay as a carpenter right then, but I had just rented the place where I live now, and it was all run down, and I had rented it in exchange for the labor of fixing it up. And, as a matter of fact, I was in the middle of putting a new roof on when I got bombed, and when it poured down rain for days, this place got soaked, because the roof was half off. They were tools that I was working with!

The teacher of bomb school was the supervising agent at the bomb scene
So both of those were blatant lies. Not only were the nails not identical. They didn't even resemble each other. And not only was the bomb not in the back seat, it was clearly hidden under the front. But, every one went along with it.

Was there evidence of a motion device on site, at that point?

JUDI: Yes. When they collected the bomb parts -- which they did within hours -- one of the things they found was a ball bearing, a big ball bearing a half inch across (it surprised me when I saw how big it was). It was covered with bomb residue. And they also found a piece of looped, heavy-gage wire.

Now as a bomb expert with Frank Doyle's training certainly must have known -- because we learned this from the FBI bomb expert from the lab -- these are components of a motion device. And what these meant was that the bomb was triggered by the motion of the car. The ball bearing sits in a hole that's drilled in the plywood (if you want an easy-to-trigger motion device, you drill and small hole; for a hard-to-trigger motion device you drill a large hole, and it has to be dislodged from this hole, and roll, to connect itself to this looped wire -- copper wire -- and that would complete the circuit, and that's what triggers the bomb.)

There was also a clock. There was both. The clock was a delay mechanism, so that the bomber could get away from the bomb before it exploded. So, the clock had to expire, and the motion device had to connect, before the bomb went off. The point is, they had in their hand, within hours of the bombing, this ball bearing. They knew the bomb was triggered by a motion device. They knew it was hidden under my car seat.

There's another thing -- and we don't have to hire experts because the FBI's own bomb expert from the lab is who told us all this stuff. When they eventually came out and examined it, he wasn't willing to go along with Frank Doyle's lie.

The other thing the bomb expert said was that it was very clear where the bomb was, because of the "end cap impact points". That told him not only where it was placed, but which direction it was sitting. Because when a bomb explodes, the first thing that happens is the end caps blow off.

I've now seen the car, and I've seen the end cap impact points as he described them to us. I went and looked for them and they were very clear. There's a round indentation on one side near where the gear shift is, and the door -- and you can't see this in any of the photos, but in person it's really obvious -- the whole door is bent out. There is like a fist-size hole in the lower part of the door where the end cap blew through the door, and the whole door is distorted. It's pushed out where the end cap blew through is. Any idiot could have seen that. You didn't have to be a bomb expert to know where this bomb was placed.

But here's this guy who's one of the most highly trained people in the country, and he's an instructor, and he's saying he didn't see any of this stuff. Bull shit.

And everybody goes along. The question is why?

JUDI: One of the reasons, it turns out, which we didn't find out until three years later (which is how long it took us to get a judge to say we can continue with this case and start this process known as depositions and requests for documents) is that four weeks before the bombing, the FBI had conducted what they call "Bomb School" in Eureka California at the College of the Redwoods on a Louisiana-Pacific clearcut. And in this bomb school, which they say is routine training, Frank Doyle was the instructor, and among the students and some of the sub-instructors below him, were at least four (and I believe more) of the people who responded to the bombing -- including the Oakland cop.

So, the teacher of bomb school was the supervising agent at the bomb scene, and the students at bomb school were the people who worked under him. One of these people, Sgt. Hanson from the Oakland police, when we said: "Look at these pictures. How can you say the bomb was in the back seat?" He testified: "Well, I deferred to Frank Doyle. If he was my instructor, I wasn't about to tell him anything different."

The FBI practiced blowing up cars on an L-P clearcut
Doyle used his position as instructor to influence them. And he also used this information -- "these are terrorists, these are the type of people who carry bombs" -- to get people, with just a wink and a nod, to go along with it. What they did at bomb school is significant, also. . . .

Before we go further, Judi, there is a tape made at the site of the bombing -- rather, where your car finally comes to a halt, where you can overhear two of the officers talking. One says to the other...

JUDI: Let me tell what happened at bomb school first and come back to that, because it will make more sense . . . Bomb school was this week-long course at the College of the Redwoods in Eureka, open to police only. First they had a briefing on terrorism and terrorist threats. Bomb school took place the week that the Santa Cruz power lines went down, which was considered a terrorist act in the FBI files. You can be sure that that briefing included the Santa Cruz power lines, which, I believe, was falsely blamed on Earth First!

It was also the same week that Earth First! climbed the Golden Gate bridge. It was right on the eve of Redwood Summer. And although they all claim they don't remember the content of the briefing, I think we can safely assume that the briefing on terrorism included descriptions of Earth First! and Redwood Summer.

After they did the briefing on the terrorist threats, they showed them slides of different kinds of bombs; then they took them out to an L-P clearcut. where they blew up cars with pipe bombs and practiced responding.

They blew up three cars. Each using different explosives and different methods so that the people could learn to respond to a bombing.

Now in the Bomb school, according to the testimony we've gotten so far, the instructor (and they don't remember who -- although they've said elsewhere the instructor was Frank Doyle, so we can surmise this is Frank Doyle here), told the class that when people bomb each other, they very rarely place the bomb inside the passenger compartment -- because it's allegedly so hard to break into a car (tell that to the manufacturers of car stereos!), so bombers strap the bomb underneath the car, or place it in the engine compartment.

So they described the scenario of a bomb inside a car as not being consistent with the victim of a car bombing, but being consistent with somebody transporting a bomb.

And then they blew up these cars.

So even after they've taught people that this is a very rare scenario, for a bomb to be inside a car, two of the three cars that they blew up at bomb school in 1990 had the bombs inside the car.

Where?

JUDI: Nobody remembers where. We said: "Was it under the front seat?"

"I don't recall."

"I don't recall."

What we've gotten out of them is that two-out-of-the-three cars that they blew up, they did place the bomb inside the passenger compartment -- creating virtually the same crime scene that was about to happen in Oakland a month later, and practicing responding to it, and telling them that this crime scene was not consistent with the victim of a bombing -- right after they had briefed them on the terrorist threat of Earth First!

The bomb school buddies, the FBI and the Oakland police, are standing around waiting to be allowed to process the car, and they're yucking it up
Whether bomb school is routine or not is debatable -- they certainly had other bomb schools both before and after. But what they did in bomb school was prepare people in their minds -- whether this was done intentionally or not, I can not prove; but I can say that the effect of what happened in bomb school was to have people see this very bomb scene and then come and respond to it after they have already been prejudiced as to what it means.

And we have the FBI video of the crime scene, and on this videotape you can hear them: they're standing around, waiting to be cleared to be allowed to process it. (The experts had to go in and make sure there weren't any more bombs). So the bomb school buddies, the FBI and the Oakland police, are standing around waiting to be allowed to process the car, and they're yucking it up -- they're laughing -- presumably about terrorists blowing themselves up -- and at one point you can hear somebody saying: "This is it, don't you think? This was it: this was the final exam." -- clearly, a reference to bomb school; and I will add, a reference to the fact that they had practiced responding to this very crime scene in that context.

So I think that all those things were used to prejudice the respondents, and to influence them -- like you say, with the Emperor's clothes -- to go along with this clear and obvious lie that the bomb was in the back seat, that the nails match, to ignore the existence of the motion device, to ignore the end cap impact points -- all of those things were done, because Frank Doyle had created a context in which these lies could be floated and gone along with.

Who bombed Judi Bari? Lets address some of the old suppositions: Is it possible that that bomb was placed in your car in Willits while you were meeting gyppo loggers trying to desensitize them to the smell -- get rid of the feral barrier.

JUDI: No. Absolutely not... I said the bomb contained both a motion device and a timing device. The timing device consisted of a stop watch with the minute hand broken off, and a screw drilled in the clock face that was attached to a wire, so that the hour hand had to tick down until it touched the screw.

Now this was not an accidental explosion. It was a wind-up pocket watch, so it had to have been set, consciously wound, and expire. I believe that the screw was in the nine. So the most hours it could have taken for that thing to expire would have been twelve. More likely, the hour-hand started at the twelve and it took nine hours.

The intention of the bomb was to kill me
So there was a timer on the bomb that had to be set and expire that could not have taken more than twelve hours, so the bomb must have been set within twelve hours of explosion, and I was in Oakland -- possibly in Berkeley, but more likely, in Oakland. My car was parked on a quiet street, in front of Dave Kemnitzer's house in Oakland at the time when the bomb was set. And the bomb was set: it was armed, it was set; it wasn't just placed in there and accidentally exploded. It was very conscious: the clock was wound, and the time expired. And once the time expired, the motion device was deployed.


Now the motion device is very important. Because they didn't want this bomb to explode and blow up my car; that would bring sympathy to me. They wanted me to be in the car. The intention of the bomb was to kill me.

The FBI expert from the lab has expressed incredulity that I survived it. And when I first looked at the pictures, I was pretty incredulous too. I don't know how or why I survived that bomb. When I look at what it did to the floor of my car -- the hole in the floor of the car is three feet by five feet. It's huge. I don't know why I survived that bomb. Maybe I survived it so I can find out the answer to that question: Who Bombed Judi Bari?

NEXT: The Lord's Avenger
Entire Judi Bari interview © New Settler Interview


The New Settler Interview
POB 702 Mendocino, CA 95460
(707) 937-5703
$15 per year (12 issues)


Comments? Send a letter to the editor.

Albion Monitor January 13, 1997 (http://www.monitor.net/monitor)

Front Page