Jules Boykoff (American University)
Limiting Dissent: the Mechanisms of Suppression in the United States
For the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Portland, Oregon,
March 2004.
2
story, transmitting the police’s assertion that the bomb belonged to Bari and Cherney and that it
detonated inadvertently (Bishop 1990; Taylor 1990; Congbalay 1990). Two months later, lacking
any credible evidence, these charges were dropped. The FBI assured the victims that it would
pursue the case, but no arrests have ever been made. Six years later, after a vertiginous whirl of
civil litigation, Bari learned that before the bombing, she and Cherney were being investigated
by the FBI as suspected terrorists (Helvarg 1994: 331-334; Cole and Dempsey 2002: 56-60).
But the FBI’s interest in Earth First!—and environmentalists more generally—did not
begin with Judi Bari and Daryl Cherney. In 1970, the Bureau sent agents to surveil Earth Day
rallies in more than forty U.S. cities. A decade later, in 1980, it opened a file on Earth First!,
soon after the group was established (Helvarg 1994: 393, 397). In 1989, the FBI arrested Earth
First! founder Dave Foreman as the culmination of a two and a half year investigation that cost
more than $2 million and involved between fifty and a hundred Bureau agents (Foreman 1991:
128; Helvarg 1994: 395). The arrest was facilitated by extensive surveillance through wiretaps as
well as the infiltration of an agent provocateur who was working for the FBI, Michael Fain
(Helvarg 1994: 395; Balser 1997: 206).
1
Once, while being taped, Fain inadvertently, though
clearly, pronounced the Bureau’s goals to other FBI agents in his company: “This [Foreman]
isn’t really the guy we need to pop, I mean in terms of an actual perpetrator. This is the guy we
need to pop to send a message. And that’s all we’re really doing” (Helvarg 1994: 396). By the
early 1990s, considering his own safety, Dave Foreman decided to cease engaging in
environmental “monkeywrenching” as a way of expressing his dissent (Foreman 1991).
2
1
Over sixty phone taps were put on people who were in communication with Foreman.
Incidentally, one of those people was Judi Bari (Helvarg 1994: 396).
2
“Monkeywrenching” is a term that encompasses a wide range of activities, from the removal of
surveyor stakes from logging roads to the destruction of logging and mining equipment to the
Convention