-Caveat Lector-
http://www.judibari.org/bomb-school.html
FBI Bomb School, and Other Atrocities
by Judi Bari
October 19, 1994
For the past ten months, I've been spending a lot of
time down in the city sitting across the table from
Oakland cops and FBI agents, questioning them under
oath in depositions to gather testimony for our false
arrest lawsuit against them. This has been, to say the
least, an interesting experience. These guys are
professional liars, who have raised selective memory
loss to an art form. There is also a draconian set of
rules about what we're allowed to ask and how we're
allowed to ask it. Nonetheless, between the police
photos and written reports, the FBI files, and the
sworn testimony of these cops and FBI agents, we have
managed to gather quite a bit of information to begin
to piece together what really happened when I was
bombed on May 24, 1990.
Of course the most dramatic of the information we have
uncovered, and the one that has caused so much stir in
the pages of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, is the
FBI Bomb School. Four weeks before I was car-bombed,
according to both the testimony and the written files,
the FBI sponsored a Bomb Investigators' training
course at the College of the Redwoods in Eureka, in
the heart of the redwood region, on the eve of Redwood
Summer. During this week-long course, which was open
to law enforcement only, the FBI actually blew up cars
with pipe bombs to practice responding. The place
where they blew up these cars was (where else?) at a
Louisiana- Pacific logging site north of Eureka
The teacher at Bomb School was Special Agent Frank
Doyle, the FBI Terrorist Squad bomb expert who showed
up at the scene when I was bombed in Oakland, and
directed the collection of evidence. It was Frank
Doyle who concocted the lie that the bomb was on the
back seat floorboard, where we would have seen it.
Among the students at Bomb School were several of the
responding Oakland Police officers and FBI agents who
collected the evidence under Frank Doyle's supervision
at the Oakland bomb scene. The FBI claims that they
have lost the roster of students in the class, even
though the FBI Bomb School memo that we received from
them refers to this roster and says it is attached.
But even without this roster, from the documents that
we have, I have been able to place at least four 1990
Bomb School participants as being among the first
responding to the Oakland bombing. They are, Special
Agent (SA) Frank Doyle, Supervisory Special Agent
(SSA) Patrick Webb, SA John F. Holford, and Oakland
Police Sgt. Myron Hanson. In addition, SA Stockton
Buck, who played a key role at the Oakland bombing
scene, has testified that he attended Bomb School in
Eureka, where they blew up cars with Frank Doyle, but
he doesn't recall if it was 1990 or one of the years
before. Stockton Buck also testified that he found the
assignment of collecting evidence at the Oakland bomb
scene pleasant, because it was a nice day and they had
pavement under their feet. Which makes me think he may
have been contrasting it to the dust and mud of the
L-P clearcut where they had blown up the cars in Bomb
School.
Of course the FBI claims that Bomb School is merely
routine police training, and this is all just a
bizarre coincidence. But the more we have learned
about Bomb School, the more bizarre the coincidence
has become. Oakland Police Sgt. Hanson has testified
that they were told at Bomb School that it is unusual
for a car-bomber to place the bomb inside the
passenger compartment of his victim's car, because of
the supposed difficulty of breaking into a locked car.
Instead, he said, they were told that bombers normally
place their bombs under the car frame or in the engine
compartment. However, Hanson also testified that
several of the cars that were blown up in Bomb
School (and, according to the FBI memo, there were
only three cars in all) did indeed have the bomb
placed in the passenger compartment. In other words,
at the 1990 Bomb School, they created virtually the
same crime scene that was about to happen in Oakland,
and practiced responding to it. Further, they were
told that this scenario was unlikely to represent a
case where the person in the car was the target of the
bombing. In fact, Sgt. Hanson testified that one of
the reasons he says he believed the bomb in my car
belonged to me was that it was in the passenger
compartment.
So even if you can swallow that this was all
coincidental, it definitely had the effect of
prejudicing the respondents to the Oakland bombing.
When we asked Sgt. Hanson how he could have thought
the bomb in my car was in the back seat, considering
that the hole was blown in the front seat, Hanson
replied that he deferred to Frank Doyle because Doyle
was his instructor in Bomb School. If he was my
instructor, said Sgt. Hanson, I don't think I'd sit
there and tell him that much.
According to Frank Doyle's testimony, Bomb School was
held once a year in Eureka for nine or ten
