From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Sat Jun 15 2002 - 19:55:07 MDT
Damien Broderick asks about:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/12/national/12FRAM.html
Daniel replies:
> My view: the FBI deserved much worse treatment here AND this should be a
> warning about giving it even more power. If a so called defanged
> intelligence agency can do this sort of thing -- not even to add in
> Waco, the Randy Weaver thingy, and all the stuff throughouts its long
> and sordid history -- then what would be expected of one with sharp,
> bloody ones? For it to play patty cake while standing up for individual
> liberties?
I don't really understand what the FBI is supposed to have done here.
As I read the article, the two Earth Firsters had a home-made bomb blow
up in their car. They were arrested and charged with transporting the
bomb with intention to use it for ecological sabotage. However the
charges were dropped six weeks later. The Earth Firsters later sued
the FBI and Oakland police, and won on the basis that law enforcement
had violated their First Amendment and civil rights by defaming them
and casting a pall over their plans to protest logging.
Is this an accurate summary? If so, I don't see the police activities
as rising to the level of villainy that Daniel suggests. They may have
been wrong to cast aspersions on the Earth First people without any
better evidence than that a homemade bomb blew up in their car. But it
is not an altogether unreasonable inference to draw. Someone had to
put the bomb there, and given these people's plan to protest logging,
and the fact that protestors sometimes use pipe bombs, and that this
was a homemade pipe bomb, logic does point in a particular direction.
The real lesson seems to me that the police should be very careful about
what they say until they know they can prove the case. Smart police
are circumspect. If you're going to call people bombers, you better
be sure the evidence will stick. You can't drop the charges without
expecting some repercussions.
The big unanswered question in this story, that no one seems too concerned
about, is WHO PUT THE PIPE BOMB THERE? Is the implication that the
FBI planted it? If so then they certainly deserve Dan's villification.
But just as the FBI should not have bandied such charges about without
evidence, neither should Dan or anyone else.
Maybe some eco-terrorist planted it so that these guys would unknowingly
transport it for him. Maybe it was planted by a rival in order to
embarrass them. Maybe it really was an extreme case of law enforcement
planting evidence. Or maybe the Earth Firsters were actually carrying
it intentionally as was claimed at the beginning.
In evaluating this story, it seems to me that how you see it will depend
crucially on how you think the pipe bomb got into the trunk of that car.
>From what I see here, no one is likely ever to know.
Hal
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