Deep Politics Forum

http://www.judibari.org/
Judi Bari bombed 20 years ago
Events: May 23-24, 2010

The 20th anniversary of the pipe bomb attack on Judi Bari, Darryl Cherney
and Earth First! on May 24, 1990 will be recognized in events in the
San Francisco Bay Area over the course of two days

http://www.judibari.org/
Jury's message to feds in $4.4 million verdict for Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney
(revised 6/19/02)

http://mediafilter.org/MFF/S37/S37cointelpro.html
________________________________________________________________________________
This photo, taken by the Oakland Police Department, clearly showsthat the bomb was under the left front seat and not on orbelow the rear seat, which is virtually undamaged.


JUDY BARI SUIT AGAINST FBI REVEALS:
COINTELPRO AGAINST EARTH FIRST!

By Bill Weinberg A lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation by a Northern California Earth First! activist is revealing that, 20 years after the FBI's Counter-Intelligence Program (or COINTELPRO) was unleashed against the Black Panthers and American Indian Movement, some of the same men are now using the same dirty tricks in the Pacific Coast timber wars. On May 24, 1990, a bomb exploded in the car in which Earth First! activists and folksingers Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were driving in Oakland CA. Bari and Cherney were in Oakland to promote Redwood Summer, a national civil disobedience campaign to halt the logging of the last remaining old-growth redwood
forest. The actions were to take place in Humboldt and Mendocino counties, where timber companies like Pacific Lumber, Louisiana Pacific, and Georgia Pacific dominate the local economy. Bari, a mother of two, woke up in the hospital to find that she might never walk again--and that both she and Cherney (who was only slightly injured) were being charged by the FBI with blowing themselves up. The bomb charge was eventually dropped for lack of evidence, but five years later the perpetrators are still at large--and Bari charges that the FBI has failed to investigate the numerous death threats and attempts on her life by right-wing paramilitary groups tied to the timber industry. Now, evidence reveals that the very FBI men assigned to the case are linked to both COINTELPRO and the Big Timber political machine which runs California's north coast.

In May 1991, one year after the bombing, Bari filed suit in San Francisco's Ninth Circuit Federal Court against the FBI and the Oakland, Mendocino County and Humboldt County police. The judge dismissed the case against the police forces, but the case against the FBI is still pending. Bari is suing the FBI for false arrest and civil rights violations, including conspiracy to violate her First Amendment rights, and using COINTELPRO tactics after they had been banned by Congress. The case is called Bari vs. Held. Richard W. Held, the FBI San Francisco director who headed up the investigation into the bombing, is son of bureau warhorse Richard G. Held. Both men were involved in COINTELPRO activities against AIM, the Black Panthers and other radical groups. Richard G. Held, who would eventually become Associate Director of the FBI, was a mastermind of the GOONs, a private paramilitary group organized by the FBI which instrumented a reign of
terror against AIM activists on South Dakota's Pine Ridge and Rosebud Sioux reservations in the 1970s. Richard G. also orchestrated the cover-up of FBI involvement in the 1969 killings of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by Chicago police. That same year, Richard W. Held orchestrated the frame-up of Panther leader Geronimo Pratt on murder charges. Despite numerous appeals, Pratt remains in California's San Quentin prison today. The younger Held was also involved in the COINTELPRO "black propaganda" campaign--complete with forged letters and documents--to foment a split between Panther leaders Pratt, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. Working out of the FBI's Los Angeles office at the time, he also oversaw the creation of the Secret Army Organization, a paramilitary group which terrorized student anti-war protestors, and was responsible for the 1972 assassination of San Diego State University economics professor Peter Bohmer. Richard W. would in the 1980s be assigned to San Juan, Puerto Rico--where he organized warrantless raids and illegal wiretapping of independence activists.


COINTELPRO was ostensibly disbanded in the 1970s. But the discovery process in Bari vs. Held has revealed a web of interlocking connections that smell suspiciously familiar to those familiar with the FBI dirty tricks of yesterdecade.
Bari vs. Held has revealed that the FBI ran a "bomb school" at Eureka College of the Redwoods in April 1990 for both FBI agents and local police, just one month before Bari's car was blown up. Classes at the school included blowing up cars with pipe bombs, ostensibly to demonstrate tactics used by terrorists. FBI Special Agent Frank Doyle was the teacher at the bomb school. One month later, he was the FBI "expert" who showed up at the bomb scene in Oakland and supervised the collecting of evidence. Students at the bomb school included at least four of the FBI agents and Oakland police officers who worked under Doyle at the scene. A warrant for Bari and Cherney was issued within three hours of the blast.
This warrant has now been released. It quotes Doyle saying the nails in the bomb are "identical" to nails found in Bari's car. But Bari says they aren't. The bomb nails were finishing nails--the car nails were roofing nails. Land near Eureka was loaned to the bomb school to demonstrate car bombs by the local timber baron Louisiana Pacific. This makes the bomb school a link between the FBI, local law enforcement, big timber--and possibly paramilitary groups linked to the timber companies and the anti-environmental "Wise Use" movement. These paramilitary groups are generally made up of reactionary loggers opposed to Judi Bari's redwood crusading and her efforts to organize an Industrial Workers of the World local at the timber mills. Before the bombing, Bari had received death threats from one such group called the Sahara Club, which she believes operated with the connivance or encouragement of timber company management. On one occasion, Bari--with her kids in the car--was run off the road by a logging truck.
The multi-million dollar public relations industry also seems to have learned a few tricks from the FBI. In the prelude to Redwood Summer, forged Earth First! press releases full of extremist rhetoric were distributed to the media. The discovery process in Pacific Lumber's SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) against Earth First! tree-sitters had already determined that Pacific Lumber knew that these were forgeries when they were distributed to the press in 1990, one month before the bombing. A memo to that effect had been cc'ed to the Hill & Knowlton rep handling the Pacific Lumber account.Hill & Knowlton, the high-powered PR firm hired by the Kuwait regime to press Congress for Operation Desert Storm, was contracted that same year by Pacific Lumber for spin control during Redwood Summer. The discovery process in Bari vs. Held has now revealed that the FBI had determined one author of the forged press releases. The FBI was apparently informed of the forgery by one Paula Langager, who had worked with the Sahara Club in a "dirty tricks" workshop (and was thanked in the Sahara Club newsletter) in August 1990, during Redwood Summer--the same month that a phony bomb was planted in the EF! office in Arcata. Langager told the FBI that month that Dave Cruzan, the editor of the now-defunct Wise Use Advocate in Fortuna, was an author of the phony press releases.

The Judi Bari case is turning out to be similar to the Annie Mae Aquash Story.All the players end up pointing fingers at each other,and the crime never gets solved.The FBI,and the COINTELPRO
operations have been an overwhelming success in the virtual demise of groups such as:
Earth First!
American Indian Movement
Black Panthers
Too Many Others

Here is an article written by Bruce Anderson of the Alexander Valley Advertiser.He has a number of excellent articles on the Judi Bari case(link below).

http://theava.com/bari.html



WHILE WE'RE TALKING unpunished crime and compulsions (long-time readers are excused from reading further because you know the Bari Bombing Case is coming), the $4 million more or less awarded Darryl Cherney and the two daughters of the late Judi Bari by the City of Oakland and the federal government last week is based on a series of lies and collusions breathtaking in their boldness. If it weren't for the spiritual Stalinists comprising what passes for a left in this doomed country the Bari Bombing would have been solved years ago and Oakland and the feds could find some other way to squander the public's money.

THE MYSTERY of who bombed Judi Bari shouldn't be a mystery. The case is solvable, but powerful interests don't want it solved. To solve the case and thereby unravel the apparatus of hustlers and liars who've lived off not solving it for 13 years, requires the simple task of matching the known DNA results from key case documents against the DNA of no more than a dozen possible perps, including the late Bari herself, and certainly including her ex-husband Mike Sweeney.

GET OUT THE SWABS AND THE SUBPOENAS for Sweeney, his girl friend at the time of the 1990 event, Meredyth Rinehard, and close Bari associates like Cherney, Pam Davis, Darlene Commingore, Lisa and Jessica Bari, and Karen Pickett, and we'd know who did what and why.

HOW DOES LAW ENFORCEMENT go about obtaining DNA samples from materiel witnesses to a major felony? Subpoena them and ask each of them for a teensy sampling of their precious bodily fluids. If they refuse? Get out the cuffs and the tweezers. Why hasn't that happened? Beats me, but incest seems to be the major reason.

THIS IS WHAT I THINK. The FBI is famously reluctant to give up its snitches, and the FBI was actively involved in Redwood Summer. The last time I checked, the FBI's files for Mendocino County during the Bari interlude remain "lost," and whatever else they have on these events isn't yet available via Freedom of Information Act requests. Hell, for all I know, Redwood Summer was entirely an FBI enterprise. After all, their spokesperson told KQED's' Steve Talbot on camera that most FBI people are environmentalists. But I think the FBI subsidized the Mendocino Environment Center during that period, as the building's owner John McCowen would have to admit if he were subpoenaed to testify in the case. I also think the FBI had X number of persons connected to the MEC before, during and after Redwood Summer keeping tabs on the nut pies, er "activists," who wandered in from all over the country for the 1990 festivities. These are the primary reasons the FBI couldn't find the bomber. They knew Mike Sweeney, a man tied to bomb groups all the way back to his days as a Stanford Maoist, and the man who fire bombed the old Navy airport southwest of Santa Rosa in 1980, and the man most likely responsible for the attempt to fire bomb the L-P office at Cloverdale in 1990 a month before Judi Bari, his ex-wife, was bombed in Oakland. The only reason I can think of for Sweeney's exemption from number one perp status in the bombing of his ex is that he's an FBI snitch all the way back to Stanford when, as the old joke goes, about half the persons involved in "revolutionary" activity were FBI agents. (They were the ones who always wanted to kill someone or blow something up.)

BE ALL THIS as it probably is, we would all know for a fact who did what if the DNA results the Bari-Cherney legal team obtained from two pivotal letters -- one of them a confession of sorts and the originals of which are possessed by the FBI -- were matched against the DNA of likely bombers, all of whom are very much with us today. So, why don't we? The answer to that is a bigger mystery than the bombing.

THE FBI refused to allow the famous literary sleuth, Don Foster, access to the originals of the DNA-laden letters, but Foster's analysis of copies of them, especially his analysis of the faux-confession signed by a person calling himself The Lord's Avenger, concluded that not only had Mike Sweeney written the Avenger letter, he'd written it on the same typewriter he'd used to type letters and notes on unrelated matters. (Immediately after the bombing the MEC's typewriters disappeared and its telephones were replaced.) And the Bari Bomb itself was similar in certain design features to the devices found at the Santa Rosa bombing of 1980 and the Cloverdale bomb of 1990-- what bomb experts call "signature bombs." (Another signature feature of Sweeney's bombs is that they don't work as intended. Something always seems to go wrong.)

SWEENEY AND BARI, in the early days of their mutual infatuation, lived not far from the Santa Rosa air field and were leading the opposition to proposed development of the property. Sweeney was also annoyed by weekend air traffic flying to and from the air strip directly over the Sweeney-Bari love nest. So he blew half the place up, managing to ignite and destroy one of two hangars. The device that would have blown up the second hangar failed to ignite the fuel Sweeney used as his explosive. A young night watchman was asleep in the hangar that did explode; he had to run for his life to avoid immolation. Bari identified Sweeney as the perp to Steve Talbot of KQED ten years later. She claimed she wasn't involved but had watched hubbykins assemble the screwball devices at the couple's kitchen table. ("Golly, honey bunch, isn't this kind of extreme?" Shut up, he said, and hand me the detonators.) Having known her I find it hard to believe that Bari was not an eager co-participant in this, the couple's honeymoon adventure, but Bari always said Sweeney was "the smartest man I know." She said he was quite persuasive. (Saying anybody, let alone Sweeney, is "the smartest man I know" in the context of Mendocino County is like saying "My cat is smarter than your dog.") The point is, however, that Sweeney had to have known someone was asleep in the hangar he sent up in an explosion of flame, and what kind of nut places a motion-activated pipe bomb in a vehicle, as Sweeney did in Judi Bari's vehicle? The guy has no regard for collateral damage. Those kinds of people are generally regarded as dangerous. Sweeney's our very own Osama bin Laden. (He also looks and acts like a nut -- wound as tight as a preacher caught in a whorehouse, exploding at the slightest provocation. If you were casting a mad bomber movie, Sweeney would be your guy.)

SO A NATIONALLY KNOWN SCHOLAR is denied access to the identifying letters but the FBI lend the letters to their little tree buddy Cherney and his "movement" lawyers for DNA testing in the run-up to the rigged federal show trial in Oakland last year. Cherney and Co. had hoped the DNA found on the letters would incriminate their preferred villain, Irv Sutley. It didn't.

The Avenger Letter -- the other is a pre-bomb threat letter irrelevant to the bombing and its aftermath -- came up mostly female DNA and some male DNA, as if the female had sealed the envelope with her moisture while the male affixed the stamp to it with his. Who owns the female DNA on the Lord's Avenger Letter? Who owns the male DNA on the Lord's Avenger Letter? Why is the City of Oakland paying out $2 million for a claim based on a solvable crime that has been falsely brought? Why are the feds prepared to pay another $2 million while their FBI sits on the evidence that would unravel the whole scam?

CHERNEY'S recent claims that he intends to put up a hundred thousand bucks in reward money to find the bomber? Pure bullshit. Just like he and Bari and their propagandists, with mantra-like regularity, used to say, "We'd never settle with the FBI or the Oakland cops." Unless they make us millionaires. Better read the small print on any reward Cherney puts up. He says he'll ask the City of Oakland to put up most of the prize money for the bomber while he "fund raises" for the rest. Only on the Northern California coast could you find anyone who believes that Cherney, his lawyers and his co-swindlers at the tax-exempt bogus charity called the Redwood Summer Justice Project -- a Sonoma County mail drop -- have any interest in finding the bomber. I daresay that the bomber, Mike Sweeney, is perfectly positioned to take down a whole lot of people if he falls. (Sweeney is smarter than the doofuses comprising his de facto co-conspirators.) Redwood Summer Justice has raised more than a million documented dollars as of 1999 on the false claim that the FBI bombed Judi Bari, a claim they know to be untrue but one they know has cash value in the credulous circles they travel in. Tanya Brannan et al are in line for a nice share of the settlement money, too.

LOCALLY, and no surprise here, the Press Democrat's reporters aren't allowed to write about the Bari case from any perspective but the one that drools; the bomber's girl friend is the lead reporter at the Ukiah paper where the bomber's press releases on his triumphs as county recycler are often published on the front page as news; the KZYX happy talk news team of Haldane and Esposito have not only functioned as trustees of a Bari fund, they function at KZYX as the bomber's audio press agents and full-time Bari mythologizers; ditto for Estelle Fennell at KMUD, Amy Goodman at Democracy Now, and the self-certified investigative reporter at KPFA, Dennis Bernstein. Gotta hand it to the Bari-Cherney forces; they've not only got their media bases covered, they've apparently got law enforcement at all levels of government afraid of them.

BARI'S SISTER at the New York Times, Gina Kolata? One might expect Sis to have some curiosity about her sister's fate. Nope. Sis has just written a book about diet and exercise that begins with Sis gazing wistfully at the fit and slender forms of high school girls playing field hockey! (In the land of arrested development, look for this one to be another best seller for Kolata.)

ANYBODY OUT THERE who doesn't look like me -- aging beatnik, standard issue graybeardedly bland white guy face identical to those one sees at the wheels of ancient Volvos -- who is interested in making whatever money I can raise, and I'll sell both my vehicles and all my books to make sure it's more than five grand -- who thinks he or she can obtain certifiable DNA samples from a list of Bari Bombing suspects I will provide, let me know. You won't have to mug more than 12 (count 'em) individuals, few of them more than five feet tall, none of them except Sweeney likely to be armed.

Mary Moore is the editor of the Sonoma County Free Press,and a long time activist in the County(I can remember her from the seventies,when I lived in SC).She and Bruce Anderson(article above)are very well respected writers,and are not stooges putting out Govt. disinformation.I put a lot of trust into what they say.Here is a link that has many good reports about the Judi Bari case.

http://www.sonomacountyfreepress.com/judi_bari/who.html

Who Bombed Judi Bari?MARY WRITES ABOUT JUDI

2/11/00
I met Judi Bari in early 1979 when she came from Baltimore to marry Mike Sweeney and live in Sonoma County, California. Mike was in my "affinity group" formed the year before as part of the Abalone Alliance--a statewide antinuclear coalition that was organizing protests at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant near San Luis Obispo. Our group had the silly name of the "Chuckleheads" a name that not all of us embraced and a name that definitely did not apply to Mike Sweeney. Mike had two small children from his first marriage that he often brought to meetings and potlucks. He was serious, quiet and very controlling.

At the time Mike was going with a young woman in our group named Whisper. He dumped her when Judi moved out here, and the women in our group were prepared to not like her out of loyalty to the dumpee who was our friend. When I met Judi I changed my mind. She was funny, smart, creative and most important to me her analysis of what was wrong in the world was not limited to nukes. Most of the people in my affinity group were young and pretty single issue in their analysis. That was hard for me at the time as I was older and often frustrated by what I felt was a limited viewpoint. Judi and I made a good connection on that basis and became friends. Later Judi jokingly commented that she considered changing her name to Shout!! She was definitely not a Whisper!!

Judi was a talented musician and organizer but she was also a very good artist--actually more of a cartoonist. When I first met her I was working with another group that was beginning to organize around Bohemian Grove in Sonoma County. A lot of the folks in our group didn't yet understand the significance of this good old boys network in our backyard but Judi did. She contributed some artwork to several of our flyers over the years and it was in the early 1980's--I think 1983--that I went by her house on Primrose Lane in Santa Rosa to pick up some of her work. The usually cheerful and strong Judi that I was used to was very upset and in tears. She told me that she had had a fight with Mike and he had been physically abusive to her. That was the first time she shared such a thing with me and I think it is because I caught her right after it had happened.

We talked a lot after that. The awareness about domestic abuse at that time was a little better than it was in the '60s or '70s but nothing like it is today. I knew of no shelters in our community and doubt that Judi would have gone if there had been one. I offered my home to her and her baby and would offer it several more times over the years. Once she had broken the ice she talked to me about the abuse in her marriage several more times while she lived in Sonoma County. She never took me up on my offer for shelter. She chose to tough it out. She also told me about Mike's involvement in the fire at the old Santa Rosa airport which she claimed she had no part in. I know he was a suspect at the time and I know I'm not the only person she told then and later. Nothing was ever proven.

Judi was also a friend to me. We connected because there was a lot of naiveté in our group and we were often at odds with some of the single issue folks. In fall of 1986 there was a C.A.M.P. helicopter raid in Cazadero with the cops coming down in full military gear, arresting people and taking their marijuana plants. I wrote about it in my column that was a regular feature at the time in the PEACE PRESS. It was censored on the grounds that it was "too controversial". Many of the people in our group did not want to make an issue of this but Judi did. She wrote a letter in my defense that did get printed even though my column never did. Shortly after that someone gave me $1000 to start another paper and that's how the SONOMA COUNTY FREE PRESS began. Judi was one of the people who encouraged me, even contributing her artwork for my Grandma Nudge column.

1986 was also the year that Judi and Mike moved from Sonoma County to Mendocino County. There was a financial settlement from a lawsuit they were involved in and they used it to buy land in Redwood Valley near Ukiah. They planned to build their own house. I had just returned from a trip to Nicaragua when they had a going away party at their house on Primrose. Judi was happy and excited and hadn't talked about abuse in the marriage for awhile so I thought perhaps things had worked out. I didn't think about it again until years later when I talked to a close woman friend of Judi's from Mendocino County. According to this woman the abuse had indeed continued after their move and both were in the process of leaving their abusive marriages at the time of the bombing. A lot of people don't seem to realize that Judi planned to move to Willits in June of 1990 and had already begun moving things. The bombing happened on May 24, one week before she and the girls were leaving Mike in Redwood Valley.

I remained in touch with Judi after her move north. Both of us were still doing organizing work in the Central America support movement as well as other things. Her involvement in the Redwoods actions came later. When she was bombed in 1990 I had someone take over my business and put in several months at the Mendocino Environmental Center mostly dealing with her finances. I also organized her first public appearance in front of FBI headquarters in San Francisco on August 14. I visited Judi at Highland Hospital three days after the bombing and her first words to me were about her fear that Mike would use the bombing as an excuse to get custody of their girls. She was terrified of this. I later visited her at the rehab place in Santa Rosa and at her "safe house" in Cazadero. As far as I know she was not friendly toward Mike during this time.

I think that at some point Judi realized that Mike might be involved in her bombing. They both had a lot of information on each other and I don't think Judi believed she could win in a custody suit. I broke away from Judi in the mid 90s when she wouldn't stop publicly accusing Irv Sutley of being an informer for the FBI and of setting her up for the "Tanya" photo. I knew that wasn't true as I had talked to Judi several days after those pictures were taken and she thought it was very funny and planned to use the pose as a cover for their new audio tape. In hindsight, all involved realize the photos were very stupid but Judi never took responsibility for her part in it.

I visited her at her home east of Willits in the winter of 1991 to see her "proof" regarding her allegations against Irv. There wasn't any. Kwazi Nkrumah went with me and they ended up in a shouting match with each over over her refusal to listen to his past experiences with this kind of public in fighting. He had worked with the Black Panthers in the '70s and remembered how damaging it could be with fellow activists trading accusations of being FBI informers. In those days people were getting killed from this stuff. My research into the methods of the FBI are that they prefer to use existing splits in the movement to turn people against each other. I wrote several pieces in the FREE PRESS about not feeding into this and asked Judi to stop her accusations against Irv and to try mediation so we could get to the bottom of it ourselves. She didn't and wouldn't.

Judi did not like my breaking with her publicly. I tried to do it with respect for what she had been through and because I truly did care for her. After the bombing Judi surrounded herself with people who never questioned or challenged her. I don't think it was a healthy situation. Some people have accused me of being her "enemy". That isn't true and what those people may not realize is that Judi and I talked several times during this period in an attempt to work it out. In one conversation that lasted over an hour it degenerated at one point into each of us defending a man--in her case Bruce Anderson who had with her encouragement been attacking Kwazi and me in the Anderson Valley Advertiser and me defending Kwazi and what he was trying to tell her. We were upset with each other but I think both of us saw the irony and humor in the fact that we were both "defending our guys". Judi could see the humor even in a situation like that.

When we would end one of these conversations where we could not agree, we always said "Little fingers touching" meaning we were trying to hold onto what had been a good friendship. As the years progressed and her allegations against Irv didn't stop I gave up trying and so did she. I wrote her a couple of letters after I heard about the cancer. In the last one I begged her to tell all she knew before she died. She never did and she never answered my letters.

Judi was a complex person. As stated before she was smart, funny, creative and sophisticated in her political analysis. She also had other qualities that are not so complimentary--just like every other human that walks the earth. I think people who see her as some kind of saint are doing both themselves and her a disservice. I wish people who make icons out of others would simply adapt in themselves those qualities they so admire. Icons can make mistakes and I think in Judi's case her biggest one was her inability to hear or accept any kind of criticism. I think Judi took a big secret to her grave to protect her children and her place in history. I still admire Judi for the good stuff and for her ability to get people to listen and learn and I think I was (and am) a damn good friend to her. I want this unsolved attempted murder investigated!!!
Little fingers touching......

Written for FLATLANDS MAGAZINE by Mary Moore 2/11/00

Keith - thank you for all these posts about Judi Bari and Cointelpro.

This is a most important subject, and the framing and maiming of Judi is an event which shines much light into dark and shadowy recesses.

Earth First! and splinter cells such as ELF (the Earth Liberation Front) were also heavily and spookily infiltrated in the UK.

Thanks Jan,
The two stories that I posted,(Anna Mae Aquash,Judi Bari)concerning FBI infiltration into radical groups ultimately are very frustrating.The main problem being everyone involved have plenty of skeletons in their own closet.There is a CYA tendency,and most people don't really want to tell the truth.I think it insightful though to see just how well placed informers were in these groups.In all cases informants reached into the highest levels of the radical movements.I will post my last bits below,sort of the "iceing on the cake" as you will see.


I also purchased a like new copy of Vineland a couple of weeks ago.I've only read some opening pages,but got hooked quickly as Pynchon mentions "Vato",and 'ese (Mexican slang).These are two phrases that I grew up with in school,and was only recently thinking about the slang 'ese,and wondering how a person would spell it.I was thinking in phonetics,(SA).Anyways,Vineland is in my turf,and I don't think I will even need Phils "Vineland for dummies" link.I can't get into it right now as I have to pack up my chit and move.My own Operation CHAOS.lol

Anderson Valley AdvertiserDecember 31, 2003
I Was a Communist for the FBI

by Mike Sweeney, as told to Bruce Anderson

I'm speaking out as a man about to be tossed overboard by a whole bunch of people who can no longer afford to protect me. Some of them might even be in more trouble than me, Mike Sweeney, but I'm the only person who knows the whole truth about the bombing of Judi Bari because I did it and I've orchestrated the cover-up for 14 long, long years. The other person who knows the whole truth is dead because I murdered her, albeit in slow motion. There are quite a few people who know parts of the truth about the bombing, and there are quite a few people who've lived off its mythology all these years — literally lived off it in some cases. Over the next few weeks, I'll name each of these mercenary frauds and explain how each was involved. Why? Because I'm not going to prison alone, and I know they are working overtime to figure out how they can get me without implicating themselves. Hah! I go, we all go.
I bombed Judi Bari in May of 1990. Like Judi, I'm a violent person. She may have been even more violent than me. She might have been crazy too, but all that baloney about "Gandhian non-violence" from her was belied by her real life behavior. She was Mike Tyson in female form.

Judi and I fire bombed the hangars at the old Naval air strip southwest of Santa Rosa back in 1980. We were just married. I guess you could say the 1980 bombs we did together in Santa Rosa were our version of a honeymoon to Niagara Falls. Before we did that one, which got a big play in the local newspapers, we did minor league sabs of my former wife's property out in Sebastopol. We wrecked her water pump one time, for instance. Judi loved those late-night sabotage forays; me too. We were true soulmates, and deeply in love.

At the time I hooked up with Judi Bari at a Maoist labor convention, we were both labor organizers, more or less, although neither one of us ever had a real job for more than a few weeks. My estranged first wife, Cynthia Denenholtz, whose water pump we'd sabbed, had restraining orders out on me for harassing her, and as much as I wanted to bomb Cynthia I'm pretty sure I would have got caught if I did it because she and I used to be Maoist bombers back at Stanford where we met in 1968. People still knew us, and they'd know I did it. But Cynthia, even when we broke up, never threatened to go to the cops about me like Judi did all the time after we moved to Redwood Valley. In Redwood Valley, Judi even accused me of a Michael Jackson with my youngest daughter. She would say anything if she thought it served her interests, and that's why I thought she was truly nuts.

We'd moved to Redwood Valley from Santa Rosa after we'd scammed Hewlett-Packard by threatening to sue them; the threat did it. H-P settled with us because it was cheaper for them. We used that money to buy a big piece of bare ground on Humphrey Lane in Redwood Valley. We built a spec house on that lot but we were no longer happy. She wanted more than her share of the money we had and she wanted to run around all the time with hippies and smoke dope and use speed. I wanted to be respectable. I didn't like hippies, and I still don't like hippies.

So I started writing recycling grants with some help from Richard Shoemaker, my pal and protector, who's now a Mendocino County Supervisor. Shoemaker got Wes Chesbro, now a state senator, who sat on the state's garbage board, to shove a half-million tax dollars my way. All I had to do then was shove a Fort Bragg lady named Carol O'Neal out of the way of the recycling operation she was running — which I did — and I was up and running, reborn, as the county's recycler. Shoemaker and Chesbro got me all set up in Ukiah even though Mendocino County already had a garbage agency of its own.

But here Judi Bari was running around in the woods with Cherney doing all kinds of crazy stuff to get her name in the paper while I stayed home with the kids or had to take them with me to my "office" at the Mendocino Environment Center in downtown Ukiah. When I complained about her hippie life style, she'd say, "Bleep you, Mike. I'll go to the cops and tell them everything." So I'd say, "Don't forget I've got a bleep load of felonies on you too, sweet thing."
Like I was supposed to live with this for the next fifty years?

Cynthia Denenholtz and I had two kids together before we split up and I married Judi Bari with whom I had two more kids. She didn't want to be a radical anymore. Or a snitch. I was both a radical and a snitch. My first two kids with Cynthia are grown now and Cynthia is a family court magistrate in Santa Rosa!

A judge! Can you believe it? This lady wanted to overthrow the government and now she is the government! There are lots of old sellout rads like us out there; not that I blame her for going straight. I tried to go straight myself but my big mouth wife wouldn't let me. She was always hanging the bombs we did together over my head. And other stuff, some of it worse.

Hard to believe I met ol' Cyn when she was a Maoist with me back at Stanford. All the people we knew then who survived the 60's went back to the upper middle-class privilege they'd come out of and now they all have big houses in the hills. Heck, my house on Running Springs Road, off Orr Springs Road west of Ukiah is pretty darn big on a pretty darn big 20 acres. If you didn't know I was a bomber and an FBI stoolie you'd think I was just like Dave Nelson and Dan Hamburg! Just another rich Stanford guy up in the big redwood solar house in the hills who's done real well for himself.

By the way, my house on Running Springs is the only one on the road that isn't numbered, and don't ever try to drop in on me because it's kinda dangerous, if you get my drift. Bruce Anderson and Kate Coleman were up here snooping around one day last winter and they don't know how close they came. I had both of them in my crosshairs; if either one of them had put one foot on my property — especially that lying sack of recycled super doo-doo Anderson — they'd have both been wherever my ex-wife is now, and wherever she is I doubt she can tune in K-MUD.

Way back in the late 1960's, as I've mentioned, I joined Venceremos, a Maoist-oriented college gang based at Stanford. As a kid in Santa Barbara I'd belonged to the Young Republicans. My dad was a lawyer who worked for Mobil Oil and then was an official in the Nixon Administration. I grew up in a nice house in Santa Barbara. (There are no not nice houses in Santa Barbara. You gotta have major dough to even drive through town.) I never was a liberal, and I certainly never was a real radical either. I was always for the government, but in college I joined the radicals so I could help the government destroy them.

There was another Venceremos sponsored by the CPUSA that went to Cuba for a couple of weeks every year to cut a few stalks of sugar cane and generally have a good time showing solidarity with Castro. Our Stanford group thought that Venceremos was a bunch of wimps. Besides which they were Stalinists while we were followers of The Great Helmsman, Mao Tse Tung, and practically memorized his Little Red Book.

Yes, we were that dumb. And natural fascists, a lot of us, as I will be the first to admit. A lot of rich kids who went to elite colleges in the 1960's played revolution for a while, and I was one of them. Sort of.

At Stanford, I snitched on the rads for the FBI at the same time as I committed crimes for the revolution, which partially explains why I haven't been arrested yet for bombing my ex-wife, Judi Bari, in 1990. Back in my Stanford days my little group of revolutionaries planted bombs all over the Bay Area. Our leader was an English professor named H. Bruce Franklin. He wore a lot of leather, slept with his 18 and 19-year-old students and strode around campus like he was a tough guy prole. Rich radicals who've never worked still act like this. They think it's "working-class." It's patronizing and stupid is what it is, but how smart do you have to be to get over on the Pacifica people?
H. Bruce got a lot of Stanford kids in deep trouble, and he got some off campus kids killed. But he landed on his feet, not in the pen where his jive ass should have gone for at least a few years so we could see how tough he really was. Instead of jail, H. Bruce landed in another English department without even breaking his tea cup! He's at Rutgers now where he writes scholarly papers on Moby Dick. Melville and who? But being a fake radical in 1969 was the in-thing to do. Until people started getting killed
Judi Bari always pretended to be from the "working-class," but she grew up in Silver Springs, Maryland, hardly a haven of wage workers. Her parents had been communists, but they weren't communists by the time Judi was born. They'd been scared straight by events of an earlier era. Very nice people, actually, and very successful. Mom was a math prof at Johns Hopkins, Dad a diamond cutter. I guess you could say, though, that Judi was a red diaper baby.

By the way, I knew another Mendo guy back at Stanford — Mike Koepf. He lives near Elk on Greenwood Road. He was just out of the Green Berets and back from Vietnam when he was around Stanford in the 1960's. Some of the young writers in Wallace Stegner's writing program — people like Max Crawford — were weekend radicals at the time. Koepf showed them how to wear camo and how to walk around in the woods looking like guerrillas. Koepf has always been a snitch, just like me. Woman beater like me, too, incidentally. Koepf hated Judi Bari; hated her maybe even more intensely than I hated her, but much as he enjoyed seeing her get blown up, Koepf wouldn't have had the cojones to do it himself in another 25 life times. He's afraid of the cops and even more afraid of jail. A real wuss, in other words.

Anyway, as you can already see we'll be jumping around a lot, chronologically speaking, as I tell my story over the coming weeks, but it's interesting how the '60's have come back to bite so many of us years after we all thought it was all finally over and everyone, even the cops, had closed the books on us.
Of course when you kill people it's never really over, is it?

And I killed Judi Bari in 1990 but she didn't die until 1997.

Mike Koepf's pal, Max Crawford, wrote a semi-famous book about all of us pretend-revolutionaries at Stanford. Crawford's opus was called "The Bad Communist," but that book was no novel. It was a prose documentary. Max was obviously at ground zero to have written that one because his purported novel tells in insider detail about the black guy who was offed up in the hills of Santa Cruz. And that poor dupe wasn't the only person offed in that period either, which is what happens when a bunch of college whack-offs like we were bring real life criminals into our political groups. The idea was that criminals — prison inmates — were the vanguard of the proletariat. Har de har, Professor H. Bruce. Got any more bright ideas? The vanguard we grouped with were the vanguard of sleep-with-the-naive-coeds-and-ripoff-the-rest-of-the-young-fools for their credit cards and whatever else they've got that I can use; that was that vanguard. Between the vanguard and the feds and the attention his book attracted, Crawford got so scared he took off for Paris to hide out for a couple of years.

A month before I tried to kill Judi Bari with the car bomb, I helped Judi and Darryl Cherney with the fire bomb at LP's office just south of Cloverdale in April of 1990. It didn't work the way it was supposed to, unfortunately, but it did start a small fire. Judi made a sign we leaned up against a tree facing 101 that said, "L-P Screws Millworkers." As if millworkers didn't know that, and as if a bunch of trust fund potheads in the hills were of any use to any working person anywhere anyway.

Worse than unfortunately for me, the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department still has most of the apparatus from the L-P bomb. I understand that it's been compared to the fire bombs Judi and I made in 1980 to get rid of the air strip hangars southwest of Santa Rosa. Only one of the hangar detonators worked the way it was supposed to work; the other one didn't go off. The cops have it, too. Signature bombs they call them. My signature. But so far they haven't made the link to me; or if they have they aren't saying.

The 1980 air strip bomb that didn't go off was supposed to ignite the 20,000 gallons of airplane fuel in the underground tanks outside the hangars. As it was, the kid asleep in the hangar that did explode the way it was supposed to had to run for his life. If the underground fuel had gone up that boy would have been a roasted marshmallow. Hey! Like I give a bleep? Judi and I thought the explosions were funny, and the Press Democrat's coverage even funnier. And we both knew the cops were way too dumb to pin it on us. Sure enough, they didn't.

But Bob Williams was no dummy. He leased the hangars. He knew we did it but he couldn't pin it on us either. Bob lives in Novato these days. I'm sure he's looking forward to testifying against me as soon as the cops get around to making the DNA link. They've got me on the DNA, but so far so good. They haven't subpoenaed any of us, and here we are material witnesses to big league felonies!

The problem I had with Judi was her big mouth. She had all this felony information on me and she just kept on bringing it up. If she talked, I'd go to the pen for a long time. But she'd go too because I had a lot of felony information on her. And I had the goods on Cherney and Pam Davis and Karen Pickett and Darlene Commie-Gore. And Tanya Brannan. And Utah Phillips. And Bill Simpich and Dennis Cunningham and Tony Serra and those obnoxious little pricks Ben Rosenfeld and Robert Bloom. I couldn't believe it when that dingbat juror in Oakland described fat ass Bob as "suave" and "debonair." He's about as suave as South State Street and about as debonair as a pig pen. I've even got the goods on low-level folks like Gary and Betty Ball and the MEC's landlord, John McCowen. Like I said, when I go all these people are going with me. And that's why I haven't gone to prison. Yet. The feds and the Oakland cops are trying to figure out how to take me out by myself so I can't rat off all of the above.

McCowen rented the MEC premises to the FBI all those years, which is one big reason why I got to have my "office" there at 106 Standley, Ukiah, back in the Redwood Summer days. I even had my own key to the front door, to which I tacked one of the so-called death threats Judi used to say she was getting all the time. (She either wrote them herself or I wrote them.) And of course I wrote the Argus letter to the Ukiah cops about Judi doing her mail order marijuana business. Because I lived literally inches from her at 9691 Humphrey Lane, Redwood Valley, even after we were separated, I knew all her movements and everything she was doing; I was the only person who could effectively snitch her off.

But snitching her off didn't work so I decided to kill her.

I put that last bomb — my most famous bomb — under the driver's seat of her car while her car was parked in front of the Mendocino Environment Center on West Standley Street in Ukiah on the north side of the Mendocino County Courthouse. I built it so it would explode far from Ukiah. Which it did. When Judi didn't die like she was supposed to, I had to write The Lord's Avenger Letter saying I, Mike Sweeney, aka The Lord's Avenger, put the bomb in her car in Willits two full days before it blew up. I had to say I put the bomb in her car in Willits because I was with Meredyth Rinehard that Tuesday night. I don't have an alibi for any part of the next day, Wednesday, or Wednesday night. Judi drove down to the Bay Area Wednesday afternoon with the bomb and Utah Phillips in her car. The bomb exploded just before noon on Thursday, May 20th, 1990.

But Judi survived it. And I had a big prob, hence the Lord's Avenger Letter.

Meredyth my alibi, my love, now works for the Mendocino County Health Department and, I can tell you, she is very unhappy to be involved in any of this after all these years. But she'll tell the truth that I was with her when the Lord's Avenger says he was putting the bomb in Judi Bari's car in Willits because she was with me and the Avenger both, so to speak, and so were her two kids.

Nobody was with me the next day. I have no alibi that fits the known facts. Which is why I'm screwed. And doubly screwed when the cops get around to the DNA party for the dozen or so material witnesses, including, it seems, poor old Meredyth and her kids.

Nobody, then, was with me on Put-The-Bomb-In-Judi's-Car Wednesday when I did what I had to do although I've made the mistake of placing myself, however vaguely, in three presumably different places that day. "With my kids; at work; at home." Which I was at different times. I was with my kids after Judi left Redwood Valley for Ukiah. I was at work in my office at the MEC with the bomb I'd made; and after I shoved the bomb under her seat with its timer and switch on I went back home to Redwood Valley.
But nobody can place me at any of these venues when I need to be placed at them!

My co-conspirators in the cover-up for all these years are right now getting their stories ready for court. They now say Utah Phillips was playing his guitar in the doorway of the MEC the day I put the bomb in Judi's car. He wasn't. Utah and the lawyers, who I'll take down with me too when I go because they're also in this up to their shifty, dollar sign eyebrows, are merely doing some legal site prep here by placing Utah in the MEC's doorway so he can say he never saw me there. In living fact, Judi was showing Utah off across the street in front of the Courthouse at her Redwood Summer press conference. He was kind of a trophy for her because a lot of the doofuses around here think Utah is a real deal famous person anarchist. He isn't that either. Which is about as impressive as saying you're the tallest guy in Philo. Like Bari and the rest of them, Utah Phillips is strictly a photo-op, cash-up-front "radical." Stalinist too. Big Bill would want no part of this guy.

I put the bomb in Judi's car from my office at the MEC because: (1) I knew our two little girls would definitely not be in the car because they were at Meredyth's house in Redwood Valley, (2) If I put the bomb in Judi's car out in Redwood Valley where we all lived together, the girls might have jumped in to go into Ukiah with their mother for some reason, and I didn't want to risk the thing going off with them in the car, (3) I was afraid that if I put the bomb in Judi's car in Redwood Valley real early Wednesday morning after she and Utah and Dakota Sid and Mrs. Utah and Mrs. Dakota finally fell asleep about two in the morning, the 12 hours on my timer might elapse and activate the bomb in Ukiah, thus focusing a whole lotta attention on me, (4) I had total access to Judi's Subaru at all times, just like I had total access to her garage-house inches from the trailer where we both lived out on Humphrey Lane in Redwood Valley.
And my "office" was at the MEC in downtown Ukiah in McCowen's dingy cave of a slummy structure opposite the Courthouse. Nobody would suspect anything peculiar if they saw me open Judi's car door and put something in her car. Which is what I did. I walked right out of the MEC with the thing wrapped in a towel and shoved it under Judi's seat. I put the bomb under her seat, having constructed it so it would be a perfectly snug fit. I snapped the On switch On, set the clock going and wished my little creation a happy trip south, far from me, the perp, the man who's made a lot of bombs but not a single known one that worked the way it was supposed to.

Sure enough. The bomb got all the way to Berkeley and Oakland without going off. Judi went to a meeting with Seeds of Peace (another group of lurks and murks) in Berkeley then drove to Oakland where she spent the night in the busy home of mega-creep, David Kemnitzer. All this time the bomb was silently ticking off the minutes. Some time between three and four in the morning the twelve hours on the clock had elapsed and my beautiful little bomb was live! All it would take now was the sudden movement of the vehicle — a sharp turn, sudden braking, even a lane change — to ignite it. Which is what happened only a few blocks from Kemnitzer's house in front of Oakland High School.

Ka-blooooooooey!

But I was still in Ukiah and Redwood Valley when my bomb went boom. I was shocked! Shocked, I tell you! And doubly shocked that Judi lived. One end cap blew off slightly before the other, thus diverting a lot of the device's power laterally instead of up. If it had exploded the way I built it to explode, Judi and Cherney both would have been hugging trees eternally, far, far from redwood country.

And if she and Cherney had died in the explosion I would have been home free. Everyone would have assumed she was knowingly transporting my creation and all my problems and potential problems would have been over. But because she didn't die my problems were just beginning, and now here I am 14 years later with two big books on the case coming up and a whole lot of people already giving me the perp look, people like Steve Talbot, for instance. Talbot made a whole movie implicating me in the bombing, and just last year he went on Belva Davis's KQED Television Show and said Judi Bari had told him I bombed her! And now DNA. There's DNA on three of the letters, including the Lord's Avenger Letter, that can be linked straight back to me. It's just a matter of time before everything comes apart.

As soon as I heard Judi had survived my bomb, I wrote the Lord's Avenger Letter, a fact Don Foster, currently at work on the Anthrax Case for the FBI, and the best documents analyst guy in the world has confirmed in such excruciating and truly exact detail all I can do is squirm and say, "Not me. I didn't do it."

Every smart person who's paid any attention to this case always points straight at me; I can't keep it in Mendocino County much longer, and the world outside isn't all Nick Wilsons and Gordy Blacks, or KMUD and KZYX, is it?

The idea of the Lord's Avenger Letter was to divert attention from me onto every other male in the Redwood Empire. I wrote it like I was a religious nut case of a logger who was particularly irate about Judi's performance at an anti-abortion rally in Ukiah.

She and Cherney walked right into the demonstrators, many of them visibly deranged, singing "Shall The Fetus Be Aborted," a grotesque insult and infuriating to the nut pies, many of whom were brandishing those tiny plastic fetuses and oola-ooling with their hands raised to the skies, talking in tongues to the objectively indifferent sky gods. Their leader was a huge guy who'd been an All-Pro defensive end with the Cleveland Browns, Bill Staley. If Mr. All-Pro had gone off there would have been some serious mayhem the length of Dora Street. Fortunately for Bari and Cherney and the rest of us, including me, Mike Sweeney, who was there taking photos for my bomb plot and for my buds at the FBI, Mr. Staley was in direct communication with God at the time and had failed to note the pests who'd invaded his flock.

The reason Utah Phillips is now saying 14 years later that he was in the doorway of the MEC playing his guitar while Judi Bari was across the street in front of the Mendocino County Courthouse for a "press conference" (a "press conference" in Mendocino County consists of two persons, one from the Press Democrat, one from the Ukiah Daily Journal and likely as not neither paper shows up) is that Darryl Cherney and my two daughters, Lisa and Jessica haven't got a cent of the $3.2 million they supposedly won in the phony federal defamation suit in Oakland last year. And the money is held up because the whole case is being "reconsidered." Which means I'm about to go down, and my fellow scammers are getting ready to go back into court to defend their roles in helping me elude justice.

(Progressives around the country, and Pacifica Network people, as credulous a group as we've got going, were told the suit was to keep the FBI in check or it was to save redwoods when all these years that Bari, Cherney, their parasitic lawyers, Tanya Brannan and the sociopathic Brannan's psychotic girl friend Noelle Hanrahan, the last a 205 pound former point guard on the Stanford women's basketball team, were living the good life off several million dollars thus falsely raised.)

Utah's buddy Dakota Sid wouldn't help us lie even a little bit, but Utah has been all the way on board from the start. Heck, Utah rode all the way from Ukiah to Berkeley with Judi and the bomb! Good thing I had a timer and an on/off switch on the thing or the old hundred-thou-a-year Wob might have wobbled off 14 years ago!

But something's up, and it looks like it's me. The cops are sniffing around and not one cent of the $3.2 million Darryl Cherney and my two daughters "won" in that phony federal suit has been paid out. I'm pretty sure this is the year I get arrested. But if I go I'm not going alone because a lot of people have helped cover up the truth about the bombing and I'm taking them down with me. Count on that. I'd like to get Anderson, Jim Martin, Ed Gehrman, Mary Moore, and Irv Sutley too, and if they lived closer together I'd give it a try, but they don't and I probably won't have time to take care of them before I go off to help with recycling programs in the federal prison at Lompoc.

I had a girl friend right away when Judi and I split the blanket or, if you prefer, tore up the Little Red Book. Her name was Meredyth Rinehard. I had her kids seal the Lord's Avenger letter I wrote in a big hurry as soon as I heard my bomb hadn't killed Judi. Her kids were little. Little kids will do whatever you ask them to do, and I asked them to seal the envelope and lick the stamp on it for me. DNA was just coming in as a criminal identifier in 1990, but just in case I didn't want DNA on the thing. Or Judi's DNA on it through our daughters. So I asked Meredyth's kids to do it.

When the subpoenas go out I know Meredyth's gonna be real quick to give me up. Pam Davis and Karen Pickett will rat me out, too, but I've got so much felony-quality stuff on all them, including their crumb bum "progressive" lawyers, and even more on that idiot Cherney, and on Utah Phillips and Brannan's Redwood Summer Justice Project Scam-a-rama, and even on Judge Yuppie Buns down there in Oakland, I'll be taking a whole lotta so-called "progressives" down with me when the feds indict me this year. No sir, I'm not going to jail alone. And you watch the snitch fest fireworks when the DNA subpoenas arrive at certain addresses in '04.

Who wants to go to jail at age 55?

And since Mike Sweeney didn't go to jail,because nobody wants to have the DNA on the letters verified,Mike now has his own webpage.

http://www.colemanhoax.info/index.shtml
Right wing puts out
hit-piece on Judi Bari

Quote;

Keith Millea Wrote:Thanks Jan,
The two stories that I posted,(Anna Mae Aquash,Judi Bari)concerning FBI infiltration into radical groups ultimately are very frustrating.The main problem being everyone involved have plenty of skeletons in their own closet.There is a CYA tendency,and most people don't really want to tell the truth.I think it insightful though to see just how well placed informers were in these groups.In all cases informants reached into the highest levels of the radical movements.I will post my last bits below,sort of the "iceing on the cake" as you will see.

Please keep the thread alive. I promise to contribute as and when I have something worth saying.

Keith Millea Wrote:I also purchased a like new copy of Vineland a couple of weeks ago.I've only read some opening pages,but got hooked quickly as Pynchon mentions "Vato",and 'ese (Mexican slang).These are two phrases that I grew up with in school,and was only recently thinking about the slang 'ese,and wondering how a person would spell it.I was thinking in phonetics,(SA).Anyways,Vineland is in my turf,and I don't think I will even need Phils "Vineland for dummies" link.I can't get into it right now as I have to pack up my chit and move.My own Operation CHAOS.lol

I'll be very interested in your thoughts on Vineland.

Pynchon dedicated Gravity's Rainbow to his friend and fellow counterculture artist Richard Farina, who was married to Mimi Baez. And of course Pynchon wrote that uniquely resonant novel between around 1964-72.

I don't buy the argument of post-modern academia that Pynchon's novels are self-reflexive and do not mean.

For me, Vineland is, in large part, an artistic exploration of Cointelpro as Symbol of the betrayal and corruption of American possiblities for Good. Written by a man who was part of the Counterculture.