According to his FOIA files which Edward Abbey requested from the FBI, and which the Moab Canyon County Zephyr is releasing serially, Abbey first came to the agency's attention as editor of the University of New Mexico's campus literary magazine The Thunderbird, when fellow students could not dissuade him from printing on its March 1951 cover: "Man Will Never Be Free Until the Last King Is Strangled With the Entrails of the Last Priest. --LOUISA MAY ALCOTT" Wrote friend and colleague Jack Loeffler in Adventures with ED: "The campus went wild. Ed wouldn't rescind the issue or apologize, and his tenure as editor was terminated." According to an unnamed informant at UNM, Abbey showed "less sense than his fellow students." Actually, Abbey's FBI file opens with his 1947 public letter calling for students to burn their draft cards. Most of the rest of his fed investigation attempts to separate fact from his fictional MONKEYWRENCH GANG, which inspired Earth First! When Edward Abbey died in 1989, there followed a rapid disintegration of Earth First, and the attempted car-bomb assassination and frame-up of organizer Judi Bari.
Tag: Judi Bari
Judi Bari’s gentle lesson in nonviolence
A couple years ago some Colorado Springs activist organizations had a chance to host a public screening of a documentary about Judi Bari and her posthumus court victory against the FBI. It turned out the Feds had planted the bomb with which they tried to discredit her, and kill her too. Judi recovered but died of cancer before she could hear a jury award 4.4 million dollars for the FBI's trying to rob her and the Earth First movement of their First Amendment voice. Well, the locals activists hadn't yet seen the documentary, or hadn't understood the headlines, and so remembered Judi according to the FBI's slander. The locals thought Judi Bari might be a poor example for nonviolence advocates and they all but scuttled the event. Utah Phillips recalls driving with Judi Bari the day before the bomb struck, and recounts this advice she offered him about why she believed in nonviolence. Judi Bari on nonviolence, as told to Utah Phillips Talking about the non-violence, Judy Barry said: The man, and I mean THE MAN, can escalate the violence from a cop on the beat with a handgun all the way up to a hydrogen bomb and everything in between. He's always saying "come up that road, come up that road of armed struggle because I own that road. Come up that road and it'll kill you." We don't use that road. She said You got to take a road he doesn't own, a road he doesn't know anything about, that road of non-violence, of nonviolent direct action. Nonviolence is not a tactic, it's not a strategy, it is a way of life, it is a practical, practical necessity.
COINTELPRO report presented to UN
Report presented to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in September 2001. Authored by Paul Wolf. COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story By Paul Wolf with contributions from Robert Boyle, Bob Brown, Tom Burghardt, Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill, Kathleen Cleaver, Bruce Ellison, Cynthia McKinney, Nkechi Taifa, Laura Whitehorn, Nicholas Wilson, and Howard Zinn. Presented to U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa by the members of the Congressional Black Caucus attending the conference: Donna Christianson, John Conyers, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Barbara Lee, Sheila Jackson Lee, Cynthia McKinney, and Diane Watson, September 1, 2001. Table of Contents Overview Victimization COINTELPRO Techniques Murder and Assassination Agents Provocateurs The Ku Klux Klan The Secret Army Organization Snitch Jacketing The Subversion of the Press Political Prisoners Leonard Peltier Mumia Abu Jamal Geronimo ji Jaga Pratt Dhoruba Bin Wahad Marshall Eddie Conway Justice Hangs in the Balance Appendix: The Legacy of COINTELPRO CISPES The Judi Bari Bombing Bibliography Overview We're here to talk about the FBI and U.S. democracy because here we have this peculiar situation that we live in a democratic country - everybody knows that, everybody says it, it's repeated, it's dinned into our ears a thousand times, you grow up, you pledge allegiance, you salute the flag, you hail democracy, you look at the totalitarian states, you read the history of tyrannies, and here is the beacon light of democracy. And, of course, there's some truth to that. There are things you can do in the United States that you can't do many other places without being put in jail. But the United States is a very complex system. It's very hard to describe because, yes, there are elements of democracy; there are things that you're grateful for, that you're not in front of the death squads in El Salvador. On the other hand, it's not quite a democracy. And one of the things that makes it not quite a democracy is the existence of outfits like the FBI and the CIA. Democracy is based on openness, and the existence of a secret policy, secret lists of dissident citizens, violates the spirit of democracy. Despite its carefully contrived image as the nation's premier crime fighting agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has always functioned primarily as America's political police. This role includes not only the collection of intelligence on the activities of political dissidents and groups, but often times, counterintelligence operations to thwart