Let’s Have a DNA Party

A DUMB but inadvertently revealing story in last week's edition of the East Bay Express tells us that the Bari-Cherney legal team, as part of the discovery process during the decade-long, foot-dragging run-up to Bari-Cherney's phony lawsuit against the FBI and the Oakland Police Department, got together with their co-dependents at the FBI to do some DNA testing. The results? The Argus letter offering to notify the Ukiah Police Department when Judi Bari mailed marijuana, and a death threat also aimed at the late Bari, came up with matching male DNA: the same man licked the envelopes containing the threat and the offer to let the Ukiah cops know the next time Bari mailed pot to select friends. 

A FEMALE PERSON, DNA samples revealed, licked the envelope closed that contained the famous Lord's Avenger Letter. The Lord's Avenger tells us in his letter to Mike Geniella of the Press Democrat that he bombed Judi Bari. He also describes the device that did it in detail known only to the bomber. Match the DNA on the Lord's Avenger Letter to a female person and the case is solved.

BUT NEITHER THE FBI nor the Cherney version of  Earth First! wants the case solved. If we find out who bombed Judi Bari, Cherney and Company are out $20 million, the amount they're suing for. The FBI doesn't want to know who bombed Judi Bari because, it seems, they would somehow be embarrassed by finding out, as they often have been embarrassed by their own lethal bumbling in recent years. 

THE ROLLING BARI-CHERNEY SCAM'S DNA revelations beg obvious questions like, "How about all the persons connected even peripherally to the case offering up their DNA swabs to see if theirs matches those found on the case's crucial documents?"

THE BARI-CHERNEY PEOPLE seem reluctant to get DNA from the most likely suspects. And, so far, the likeliest suspects of all — Judi Bari's husband at the time she was blown up and his girl friend Meredyth Rinehart — haven't volunteered. 

AS SOON as I heard about the new DNA evidence, I called Darryl Cherney's answering machine to ask: "This is wonderful, Darryl. Congratulations to you and your hard-hitting legal team.. Now all you have to do is throw a DNA swab party for all of us and we'll seen know who bombed Judi Bari. If we don't find out who did it, we'll at least know who didn't do it? How 'bout it, kid? Certainly you, and Mike Sweeney, and Pam Davis, and Darlene Comingore, and Meredyth Rinehart, The Bari-Sweeney girls, and Glenda Anderson will give up DNA samples to match against the DNA identifiers you've got. Heck, we might be able to wrap this thing up without going to trial."

CHERNEY hasn't called back. Neither has Mike Sweeney. Or Meredyth Rinehart who, by the way, was quite indignant when I reached her at the county's Mental Health Department where she seems to function as some kind of drug and alcohol counselor. 

HELLO, MS. Rinehart, I began, going on to re-introduce myself, not having seen the old girl for 11 years or so, not that I'd recognize her if I did see her, having only a vague memory of her as Sweeney's sad sack consort at the time of the bombing. "How did you reach me?" Rinehart snarled. Oh, I got your name and number from the county's Personnel Department. You're a public employee, so it's not like secret information. How about a DNA sample so we can find out who bombed Judi Bari.  "Don't ever call me again," Sweeney's old girl friend and alibi double-snarled before hanging up.

I CAN UNDERSTAND a publicly-employed helping professional not wanting to discuss outside matters on the public's dime, but I had to wonder what such an angry, unhappy person had to offer in the way of psychic support for Mendocino County's walking wounded.

MS. RINEHART sits on the Redwood Summer Justice Project's board of directors. She's also on the government subpoena list for the phony case the government and the Bari-ites have again postponed for six months while we all gear up for war against the external Taliban, leaving the Taliban types of the Redwood Summer Justice Project to continue trying to conceal the fact that Mike Sweeney tried to murder Judi Bari with a motion-activated pipe bomb. I would say that Miss Rinehart, given her role as fund-raiser for the Bari-Cherney case has an obligation to talk to the media about the case, but.....

I WAS ABOUT TO SAY, "But Miss R. You were Mike Sweeney's girl friend at the time Judi Bari was bombed. He's told several different stories about where he was in the hours before his wife was bombed in Oakland, each of them quite vague and each contradicting the other even in their vagueness. They were still married, Ms. R, even though you and the bomber, a married man, were apparently fornicating. You, Ms. Rinehart would seem to be Sweeney's alibi. An alibi, Ms R. means someone reliably confirming the presence of another someone at a specific address at a specific time. Lover boy and his propagandists claim that Sweeney can't possibly be expected to remember where he was 11 years ago when his wife was bombed? Huh? His wife is bombed in the street outside Oakland High School and the guy can't remember where he was at the time? Was he with you? Do you know where he was if he wasn't with you? Did Mikey ask you to lick an envelope for him? Do some Old Testament research?"

SWEENEY seems to be absolute catnip to the ladies; he was also seeing Glenda Anderson of the Ukiah Daily Journal at the time he was said to be romantically entangled with Ms. Rinehart. And he was still married to Judi Bari! 

SWEENEY variously says he was with Rinehart; or at work; or in Ukiah, or looking after his daughters, or at home both the day before the bombing and the day the device he used in an attempt to permanently recycle his wife exploded beneath her car seat in Oakland. Sweeney doesn't tell us exactly where he was or who he was with. Meredyth Rinehart may know. Which is why Sweeney got her placed on the Redwood Summer Justice Project's board of directors, compromising and shutting her up at the same time. 

IF THIS DISCOURAGING crew of liars and cover-up artists aren't compelled to give up DNA or manage to forever elude answering questions about who bombed Judi Bari it means that a very dangerous man will get away with murder. It ought to concern everyone because we're talking about a guy who kills without regard to "collateral damage." The Judi Bari bomb could have gone off on a freeway and killed lots of other people other than the intended target. As it was, the thing exploded in the street outside a high school. The prior Sweeney bomb, the ignition device he used to explode gasoline to blow up the hangar at the old Navy air strip southwest of Santa Rosa in 1980, was set off while a young guy, the night watchman, slept in a small trailer inside one of the hangars. The kid had to haul ass out of the flames to save himself. If the second device had worked as Sweeney had intended, the kid would have died because a just filled, 20,000 gallon underground fuel tank would have gone up too, and the 22-year-old night watchman would have been a goner. The second device did not work as Sweeney intended.

THE BARI BOMB, the airport devices, the failed device at LP's Cloverdale office a month before the Bari bomb in Oakland, are all said to have what bomb experts call "signature" features, meaning it is likely the same person constructed all of them.

AND AMERICA'S premier documents analyst, Professor Foster, who has given classes in analysis to the FBI, has said if he can get access to the Lord's Avenger Letter he is confident he can match the typewriter its author used to write to other typewritten communiqués from Guess Who?

AND NOW DNA. What the hell is this? Why isn't Mendocino County's Musama bin Bomb at least asked a question or two?

LAW ENFORCEMENT doesn't care about finding out who bombed Judi Bari? They better care because this is a dangerous guy; he'll knock you or anybody else off if he thinks it's to his advantage, and he may take out a city block of people doing it.

BUT WHAT are the Cherney-Bari people doing? They're still trying to pin the bombing on Irv Sutley who, by the way, is willing to give up his DNA along with the rest of the suspects.

THE BARI-ITES had apparently been following Sutley around Santa Rosa until they were able to buy a fork Sutley had used to consume a meal at a Rose City restaurant. Way back in this ongoing farce the Bari-ites claimed they couldn't find Sutley, a resident of Sonoma County most of his adult life, to serve him with a subpoena. He's never been asked a question by either the FBI or the Bari-ites although the Bari-ites and their media regularly tag him as the bad guy. It seems to simplify things for the Bari-ites not to compel Sutley and other key witnesses in their forever pending federal suit not to compel any of them to talk, which is why they put in a lot of  time reducing their fraud of federal case in a way that neither side can ask, Who Bombed Judi Bari? 

SO The Bari-ites got a sample of Sutley's DNA from the restaurant fork; they bought the fork from the waiter for a couple of bucks, a precedent which will now probably cause the area's numerous paranoids to tote their own cutlery whenever they leave home. Unfortunately for the Bari-ites, Sutley, the Bari-ites' preferred villain, had not licked any of the envelopes. His DNA did not match the DNA taken from any of the three tested envelopes.

NOT THAT THE DNA evidence has stopped the Bari-ites from hammering Sutley as primo suspect in the Bari bombing. They now say the DNA evidence shows three hundred-to-one odds that there's a chance that either Sutley's dead father or his Minnesota brother licked both the Argus letter and the death threat letter! Sutley's father being unavailable for envelope duty at the time and his brother confined to a wheel chair in Minnesota, I'd say the odds against them licking incriminating envelopes are a lot longer than 300-1. 

SEVERAL WEEKS AGO, Darryl Cherney took his and the FBI's DNA findings to the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department, requesting that the local cops open, or re-open the case with Sutley as primary suspect in the 1990 Bari bombing. 

CHERNEY knows that the feds have jurisdiction over the case. Mendocino County, in my experience with both the present DA and the Sheriff's Department under Tony Craver, isn't interested in the matter. Neither is the Oakland Police Department, the FBI or the local "activist community," although the last is certainly interested in cashing in on the case, lying about it, protecting the man who did it, and preventing discussion of it wherever the stalwart Ghandian defenders of all life on earth gather to smoke pot, beat on drums and tell each other how wonderful and brave they all are. 

CHERNEY wasted no time pedaling his new evidence on his three Northcoast tax-exempt, free speech radio stations, KMUD, KPFA and KZYX, where he and the rest of the Bari Bomb Investment Team get carte blanche access to tax-subsidized air time while skeptics are described as FBI agents, cointelpro operatives, enemies of Judi Bari, and liars without being allowed any time at all to respond. 

At KZYX, Alicia Littletree, a regular on the KZYX news and a paid member of the Bari-Cherney legal team, said the DNA evidence pointed at Sutley. I got a few seconds to say it didn't. As soon as I was off, Annie Esposito, came on the air to say it was 99% certain that Sutley was responsible for the death threat and the Argus letter, which is not at all what the evidence indicates.

AT FREE SPEECH KPFA last week, Noelle Hanrahan, interviewed Cherney on the new evidence on KPFA's Flashpoints program. Hanrahan is the love interest of Tanya Brannan of the Redwood Summer Justice Project; she also sits on the Redwood Summer Justice Project's board of directors. She got money from Redwood Summer Justice for a Mumia-related project, i.e., herself, and assists the utterly corrupt Dennis Bernstein relay lies and propaganda about the Bari case from their tax-exempt audio fortress at KPFA in Berkeley.

THE REDWOOD SUMMER JUSTICE PROJECT ostensibly raises money for the pending Bari-Cherney case; less ostensibly, it supports Hanrahan, Brannan (who has dipped into the million-plus dollars falsely raised over the years to remodel part of her Forestville house as an office), Alicia Littletree, and a shifting team of shiftless lawyers and alleged researchers. The DNA testing is the first good thing these crooks have done, and they did that for the wrong reasons. The Redwood Summer Justice Project is, of course, organized as a tax-exempt charity.

HOW DO THEY get over? Who couldn't get over on the Northcoast? We've got thousands of people who think they can talk to trees! We're talking droolers here. Dummies. Wackos. Out patients. Acid casualties. Illiterates. Judi Bari always knew exactly who she was dealing with, and Sweeney knows even better, which is why he starts throwing around law suit threats whenever a smart person comes along and says, "Do you mean to tell me the husband isn't even a suspect?"

OUT OF AN OBVIOUS DESIRE to both conceal the truth about the famous Bari bombing and to profit from it, a small group of people directed by the bomber, Mike Sweeney, Bari's former husband, has gone to extravagant lengths to promote a version of Judi Bari's life that does not come within shouting distance of the facts. (The most preposterous of all is an hagiographic audio tribute to Bari narrated by, of all people, Ruby Dee. This thing plays on pseudo-public radio stations across the country. The Bari-ites have also rented air time from Amy Goodman to play the maudlin, hour-long tribute to a Bari who never existed in real life. When I wrote to Goodman asking her what the hell — that it might be good for her reputation as a reporter to check the bona fides of people she sub-lets her program time to, I got back silence. Nor have I heard from any of the other great speakers-of-truth-to-power whom I've asked to explain their support of the ongoing Bari-Cjherney fraud.) 

THE FEDERAL CASE about the Bari Bombing? It has been postponed for another six months. The Bari-Cherney lawyers went to Judge Wilken and said in light of recent polls that say the American public overwhelmingly supports the FBI, we can't bring our particular lies about the incompetent blunderers into court at this time because a jury is likely to think they are incapable of framing a couple of eco-heroes like Bari and Cherney. In other words, because of the Taliban, we can't trust a federal jury to hear our case. Judge Wilken, as always seeing it pretty much the Bari-ite way, postponed the case for six months. Thanks to her history of rulings in the case — Wilken is a Clinton appointee, of course — and thanks to the long-standing mutual regard of the Bari-ites and the FBI, when the case is heard, there still won't be any mention of who bombed Judi Bari. 

THE BARI-ITES and the FBI are co-dependent. Neither can afford to talk about who did it because, it seems more and more obvious, Mike Sweeney did it, and Mike Sweeney enjoys a unique dual exemption: the feds have no interest in him, the Bari-ites say he's in the clear because Judi Bari herself said he "couldn't have done it and looked me in the eye afterwards," as if men haven't been looking women straight in the face for all of recorded history as they removed their faces and the heads the faces appear on. The Bari-ites say the FBI bombed Judi Bari because they literally live off that myth, they and their cynical cadre of "movement" lawyers having dipped into the million-plus dollars raised by the bogus Redwood Summer Justice Project for ten years now. The FBI is happy to narrow the focus of the case to exclude consideration of who did it because, and this is the only way to account for Mike Sweeney's 11-year exemption from primo suspect status, Sweeney is federally protected by them as a long-time employee or snitch. 

THE FBI, now globally synonymous with lethal incompetence, claims they never could adequately investigate the Bari Bombing because no one would talk to them! And they never did get around to talking to Judi Bari's ex-husband. Right. Nobody will talk. Case closed. O yea, o yea.

PS. As it happens, right here in Anderson Valley resides Mr. DNA himself, a Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Kerry Mullis who got the prize for his breakthrough DNA work. Heck of a nice guy, impeccable credentials. And in Ukiah we happen to have Jeff Thoma, also a nationally renowned DNA guy of the legal expert type. Thoma is Mendocino County Public Defender. He gives classes to lawyers all over the country on DNA cases. So let's have our DNA party out at Tony Craver's office on Low Gap Road. All the suspects, all the cops, the Nobel Prize Winner, and the Public Defender.