WHO BOMBED JUDI BARI? Don’t tell the FBI or their co-dependents clustered around Darryl Cherney and his new movie, but I think I know who did it. Steve Talbot of Frontline, the influential PBS television series, is pretty certain he knows, too. He made a documentary film also called ‘Who Bombed Judi Bari?’ back in 1990. When I talked with Talbot the other day by e-mail he hadn’t heard about the new Who Bombed Judi Bari? movie, but he joked that maybe he should have copyrighted the question. Cherney has now produced his version of these events. It will be shown in San Francisco this Friday night in a tiny theater on Post Street just large enough to seat a cult-sized audience partial to the Kim Il Sung school of history. Cherney’s film, unlike Talbot’s 1990 investigation of the bombing, will not be about who did it but about how Darryl and Judi saved the redwoods before the FBI and Big Timber and Christian crazy men, and men generally, singly or in concert, got together to place a car bomb in Judi Bari’s Subaru, hoping to kill her so they could cut the rest of the trees down without gaggles of hippies hassling their logging crews. Talbot’s investigation tried to find out who was behind the bombing; Cherney’s film doesn’t dare ask that question. Pretending not to know who bombed Judi Bari has made Cherney financially secure and has provided a nice bit of side money for people like Karen Pickett and the “movement” attorney, Dennis Cunningham. Not knowing who bombed Judi Bari is also a recurrent subject on KPFA where, late Tuesday afternoon, I heard the Bari cultists, among them self-certified investigative journalist Dennis Bernstein and the inevitable Pickett, burbling about Darryl’s new movie in the usual Kim Il Sung-ish superlatives. At one point, Darryl even said, “Lots of Hollywood people wanted to make this movie but, well, frankly, they were pretty sleazy.” I almost swerved off 101 at that one. Darryl Cherney, that rock of integrity, had to produce his own Who Bombed Judi Bari? to get it right! Only a KPFA (or KZYX) audience would buy that one, having bought the attendant mythology for two decades now. When Bari died in 1997, Talbot appeared on Belva Davis’s KQED news show called “This Week In Northern California” to say that Bari had told him that she was certain her ex-husband, Mike Sweeney, had tried to kill her with the 1990 car bomb. Talbot said he would have reported that fact earlier but Bari had told him in confidence. Talbot’s film, however, points at Sweeney, but includes a clip of Bari, looking awfully evasive herself, saying in effect, “If my husband had done it he couldn’t have looked me in the eye.” Sweeney, by the way, is a former Maoist since reinvented in Mendocino County as a garbage bureaucrat. But Cherney and Company, way back, hoping to link a third person to the bomb, and desperate to protect Sweeney, tested the DNA found on the confession letter written by a person calling himself (or herself, if it was co-authored, which it may have been), “The Lord’s Avenger.” That DNA test by a licensed Berkeley lab found male and female DNA on the Avenger’s envelope. If its results, which can be found on the AVA’s website along with the essential case documents and related discussions, were to be matched against the DNA of, say, a dozen likely persons, ex-husband Sweeney foremost among them, we might know Who Bombed Judi Bari. Law enforcement never has been interested in finding out, but then they, like Cherney and Co., also can’t afford to find out because if they did, those findings, at this point, would be more explosive than the bomb that exploded in Oakland in May of 1990.
DANIEL MINTZ, long-time reporter on Humboldt County affairs, writes: “Pot Impacts Shock State Lawmakers — The watershed impacts of marijuana growing were described as being highly destructive at a state hearing and legislators have vowed to take action. The effects of marijuana cultivation on watersheds and fish were part of a February 22 Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture Hearing in Sacramento. Committee Chairman Wes Chesbro paid heed to the North Coast’s cultural acceptance of marijuana but called attention to its worst aspects. “This not an anti-marijuana discussion – this is about how to protect the environment from the irresponsible growing of marijuana,” he said. The impacts are being seen statewide and John Baker, a state Department of Fish and Game enforcement officer, told committee members that he’s seen drastic impacts in the central valley from large-scale use of pesticides, fertilizer and water diversion. Baker’s presentation mostly focused on grows in Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and national parks lands. Greg Giusti, Mendocino County’s UC Extension forest advisor, related his experience in the North Coast region and said massive grading and earth-moving is being done on private property. “These are not being purchased and moved around by the elusive ‘cartel,’ whoever that is,” he continued, showing a photo of grading and creek damming in Trinity County. “This excavation work and tractor work is being done by contractors throughout the North Coast.” Giusti’s presentation also included a photo of an “illegal reservoir” supplying a large commercial-scale grow downstream. Seeing it, Chesbro reacted strongly and told Giusti, “I have to say – that’s brazen, the scale of that is just astonishing.” Scott Greacen of Friends of the Eel River said there’s been a “boom” in marijuana production since the legalization of medical marijuana and negative impacts compound the legacy effects of liquidation logging. In the Eel River system, low flows intensify the effects of grow-related pollution and sedimentation from grading and road building. Water diversion and diesel contamination are also problems, Greacen continued, and he linked them to marijuana’s status as an illegal drug. “The failed prohibition policy has given birth to some of the worst practices,” he said, adding that “conscientious growers” and non-profits have shown that marijuana can be grown sustainably. After the presentations, Chesbro said that legalizing and regulating marijuana production and gaining federal cooperation would help. But absent that, he said he wants to “continue to dialogue” with environmentalists, law enforcement and state and federal agencies on advocacy and “enforcement strategies.” The outcome of the discussions will be new legislation, Chesbro said. “This is as much of a threat as forestland practices that are destructive to the environment and practices that lead to conversion of timberlands for development,” he added. Committee Member Jared Huffman emphasized the seriousness of the impacts, saying that if any regulated industry was shown to be guilty of them, “The unified outcry would be deafening but it’s not, with this, and we need to change that.” That led Chesbro to “issue a challenge” to environmental groups across the state. He asked them to “join the North Coast environmental community in focusing on this as a serious issue, every bit as serious as the other threats to the forest that they focus on.” Chesbro acknowledged that illegal marijuana growers are not easily-defined targets but he said the assistance of environmental groups is needed to “educate the public and the legislature about the need to take steps.”
ODD DEBATE at the Tuesday meeting of the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors before the Supes voted 3-2 to co-sponsor “Take Back Our Forests,” a forum about trespass marijuana grows. This event, presented by the Jere Melo Foundation, is scheduled for 6pm on Friday, March 30th at Cotton Auditorium in Fort Bragg. Melo was a Fort Bragg City councilman shot to death last summer by Aaron Bassler, a deranged mountain man who managed to hide in the woods north of Fort Bragg for a month until he was shot and killed by a Sacramento swat team. Melo was shot by Bassler when Bassler confronted Melo at a small opium garden Bassler was maintaining on timberland managed by Melo. Supervisors Hamburg and Pinches voted against the County co-sponsoring the Melo forum. They made the usual — and irrefutable — argument that the “war on drugs” is a massive and costly failure. “What happened last fall was not about illegal marijuana grows,” Hamburg said. “It was about the inability of the county's mental health system to respond to a family that did everything that they could to identify the fact that they had a son who was in very bad trouble.” Supervisor McCowen responded that his two colleagues were “confusing the issue,” that the event was really intended to honor Melo’s memory.
LOCAL POLS want to focus on pot
Because they think that we’ve all forgot
That both pot and wine
Are way outtaline
They’re narcotics whether legal or not.
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