Mendocino County Today, January 4, 2012

THE DESCENT OF A NATION

Compare the 1912 Elections with the 2012 Elections

By Ralph Nader

Before the electoral year of 2012 slinks into history, it is worth a comparative glance back to the electoral year of 1912 to give us some jolting perspective on how degraded our contemporary elections, voter performance and election expectations have become.

One hundred years ago, workers were marching, picketing and forming unions. Eugene Debs, the great labor leader and presidential candidate that year, spoke to outdoor labor rallies of 100,000 to 200,000 workers and their families gathered to protest low wages and working conditions.

Farmers were flexing their muscle with vibrant political activity in progressive parties and organizing farm cooperatives, through their granges, and pushing for proper regulation of the banks and railroads.

On the presidential ballot were Republican incumbent William Howard Taft, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party’s choice former president Theodore Roosevelt. Taft would be repudiated for being far too populist and too critical of corporations by today’s Republican Party. He favored national, not state, charters for “national corporations.”

The Democrats were committed to their platform of 1908 which asked “Shall the people rule? Is the overshadowing issue which manifests itself in all the questions now under discussion.” The context was shaped by the giant corporations (called “the trusts”) and their lobbies in Washington, which had to be curbed. The Supreme Court in 1911 had just ruled to break up the giant Standard Oil trust.

Women’s suffrage, abolition of child labor, workers’ compensation; states adopting the initiative, referendum, and recall; the eight-hour work day, minimum wage laws (Massachusetts was the first in 1912), taxing corporate profits and the “inheritance of fortunes,” were some of the many hot issues of 1912.

Taft, Wilson and Roosevelt fought over who was the most progressive. Theodore Roosevelt in an August 1912 speech declared that “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”

While Wilson repeatedly said that the country’s “salvation required the dissolution of the evil partnership between the government and the trusts.”

Apart from how deeply these candidates believed in what they said, they repeated their campaign pledges again and again because the people were rising and breathing down their necks with demands.

Fast forward to 2012 to the far greater grip of big business on government and elections. So much so that both major parties offer no solution to the “too big to fail” perch of the giant banks and additional corporate behemoths, other than to continue bailing them out with taxpayer dollars and under-regulating them to boot.

Entrepreneur, lawyer, shareholder advocate, and author, Robert A. Monks wrote recently that “American corporations today enjoy an absolute reign. They and they alone have the power to control the rules under which they function. Corporations, and the most powerful CEOs acting through them, have effectively seized authority over the United States without assuming any of the responsibilities of dominion.”

Was corporate domination the theme of the recent Republican and Democratic conventions? Only to the extent to which hospitality parties put on by the drug, banking, insurance, energy and other industries had the best booze, food and other allurements.

The Conventions, and their scripted speeches off the PAC-greased election trails, were congealed, b.s.

The leader of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, was trotted out for a few minutes before a nationwide television audience to ignore mentioning both his own priority of legislating “the card check” for union organizing and the needs of 30 million American workers making less than workers made in 1968, inflation-adjusted, due to a frozen minimum wage. Eugene Debs, one of Trumka’s heroes, not only made establishing the minimum wage one of his clarion calls, but he indefatigably ran for president in 1912 on the Socialist Party ticket garnering 900,000 votes (equal to about 5 million votes today) and pushing the major candidates and parties from the grass roots.

In 2012, third-party candidates were blocked from the debates, given virtually no media, obstructed from access to the ballots and otherwise harassed by officialdom.

The two major parties were like corporate lapdogs fed daily with corporate cash to shut up about corporate crime, corporate tax evasion, corporate control of government, corporate abuses of consumers, toxic chemicals and fossil fuels jeopardizing air, water, soil and the climate, corporate abandonment of American labor to fascist and communist regimes abroad, facilitated by the global trade agreements, drafted by their corporate lawyers, corporate corruption of electoral campaigns integrity, corporate fine-print contract servitude, corporate closing of courtroom doors to individuals wrongfully harmed, and the draining corporate-bred military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address.

The Democrats from Obama to the Congressional leadership and candidates took corporate oaths, they wouldn’t even raise the minimum wage issue to “catch up to 1968” for 30 million Americans and their impoverished families laboring for Walmart, McDonald’s and other low-wage companies.

Meanwhile, the clenched teeth Republicans with their vacuumed brains nominated Mitt Romney who, for years, led the Bain Consulting Group to, in Monk’s words, “reap untold millions in profits by using borrowed capital to buy companies, then sucking them dry, leaving the remains for bankruptcy referees to sort through, and stashing vast profits in off-shore tax havens.”

In 1912, such an aspiring oligarch would have been laughed away.

Let’s face it, our country is in crisis and wallowing in disgust, discouragement and despair won’t turn it around. Nor will apathy, accepted powerlessness or preoccupation with those weapons of mass distraction we hold in our hands or watch on our screens just about everywhere.

Only together can we make the difference, with far better modes of communication and transportation than our poor forebears, who still managed to rise up and show up more than 100 years ago to make their country better for them and us. (See www.seventeensolutions.com for my take on this patriotic mission of immediate renewal as well as respect for future generations.)

(Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition.)

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AS PREDICTED, Mendocino County's federal subpoena hearing has been put over until Tuesday, the 29th of January. It had been scheduled for today, Friday the 4th. The postponed hearing and the one to come will be held in an indefensibly lavish federal courtroom at 450 Golden Gate, San Francisco or whenever Judge Wilkins finds it convenient or she's back from Barbados or it doesn't interfere with her tennis lessons or her collide with her husband's golf weekend in Scotland.

IF YOU CAME IN LATE, the feds have subpoened all records having to do with Mendocino County's attempt to bring some order to, and revenue from, the County's number one ag product, marijuana. A few weeks later Mendocino County filed a motion to have the subpoena quashed on grounds that it was too broad and to general.

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THE FOLLOWING wasn't sent to us, natch, but to the Humboldt Sentinel where I had been unaware that the discussion was underway. It's brave of the Sentinel to even broach the dread subject because it is sure to elicit a ton of abuse on that fine (and essential) independent voice on a matter which cannot be discussed wherever those intrepid speakers-of-truth-to-power recite their daily catechisms, specifically KMUD; KZYX; KPFA; any and all print newspapers up and down the Northcoast; Democracy Now; and, surprisingly, the late Alexander Cockburn's CounterPunch where my latest piece on the Bari Bombing was rejected without explanation. Cockburn was a good friend of mine whose views on the Bari case were identical to mine. If he were alive it would have appeared on his website or, if he thought it needed tweeking, he would have called me up and told me in what way it was unacceptable. But Cockburn is gone, as is dissent on a whole range of issues that he used to welcome.

I WROTE the following short response to the Sentinel in a minimal answer to Cherney and then will go through his self-serving bushwah para by para for the handful of persons even interested in the case:

“One doesn’t have to be a particularly close reader to see that Cherney, as always, simply vilifies persons who don’t buy the nonsense he’s parlayed into a handsome living for himself going on 23 years now. He and his allies could have obtained bomb fragments years ago to test its DNA. Why now? And why not demand that either the FBI or the Mendocino County DA subpoena DNA from likely perps — maybe a dozen persons — to match against the known DNA from the famous Lord’s Avenger Letter, essentially a confession written soon after the bombing? Also please note that Cherney fails to mention Steve Talbot’s appearance on This Week In California where Talbot stated that Bari told him she was certain her ex-husband had bombed her. Cherney’s unhinged and highly debatable remarks of course don’t mention the extraordinary lengths he and his financially self-interested allies have gone to to shut down dissent on the case, going so far as to call bookstores prior to my appearances to urge them to withdraw their invitations. These people have raised thousands of dollars, won a federal lawsuit worth several million more all on their promise to do something for the environment. The money went to Cherney, Bari’s two already wealthy daughters and a few so-called “movement” lawyers. I’m grateful to the Sentinel for reprinting my story on this ongoing swindle.”

* * *

Darryl Cherney: Well, I’m glad the Humboldt Sentinel “welcomes” us to respond to its Cointelpro special edition by Bruce Anderson, self-proclaimed aider, abettor, and apologist for the FBI. The fact is that Bruce Anderson has not attempted to see the movie nor interview the people he accuses of a never-ending litany of wrongdoings. Of course, I would be reluctant to be interviewed because Bruce has a long, sordid history of making up interviews and/or statements within interviews–even altering letters to the editor! So how can one be sure one’s interview or even letter be printed accurately by the man known by many as the “Bully of Booneville.” Bruce is a well-established, deliberate liar discernible to all with but a cursory glance.

Boonville only contains one 'e.' And please cite specific lies. I made lots of public appearances to discuss the case, and I've always been willing to argue it. But those appearances were disrupted by your friends, or they attempted to disrupt them, and none of you, including your lawyers, would ever appear to debate one on one.

 

Cherney: The history and corrections needed are so sordid and lengthy, that Bruce counts on the reader glazing over at any rebuttal. In 1990 Bruce told the FBI that he thought one of his staff writers, Mike Koepf, was the bomber. In the mid nineteen nineties, he wrote a long piece about how Irv Sutley, the primary source for his faux-theory, was an agent and a suspect. In fact, Sutley family DNA appears on both a death threat and a police informant letter, though Bruce lies in another article and states the DNA belongs to Judi’s ex-husband. He wrote an article about Ms. Bari 3 weeks after she was bombed entitled: “Traction Sex” in which he fantasized having relations with Ms. Bari immediately following the bombing. This is not a stable, honest or consistent man we’re talking about here. After literally hundreds of thousands of words written by Bruce on the subject in his paper for the last 18 years, it is literally (and literally literally) impossible to keep up with Bruce’s ever shifting sands of prevarication.

Mike Koepf is a friend of mine. I did not tell the FBI he was the bomber. One of their bumbling agents asked me if I thought Koepf was the bomber. I said I had no idea (at the time) who'd done it. Judi then told the Press Democrat that the Mendo media had fully cooperated in letting the FBI rummage their files, which was untrue. I told them they could not look at my files, as did Jim Shields of the Laytonville paper. If Sutley's DNA is linked to the bombing why hasn't he been arrested?

 

Cherney: So let’s take a ride down Bruce’s Fantasy Lane on the Badjacket Express and talk about Bruce’s lies in this here hit piece #1038. I might have missed some of these 1000 to 3000 word missives, but this is Bruce’s cottage industry. Let’s investigate how this qualifies as “Independent Media” as opposed to being a well-place Counter-intelligence piece of disinformation. Some of the untruths are from plain ignorance; others are blatant lies, conjured by Bruce to satisfy his inner demons of his pathological lying compulsion that has haunted him, according to his brother, since he was a boy. To quote Bruce’s dad: “You know it’s funny, but Bruce would rather lie than tell the truth.”

My father said that? Well, I'll be darned. First I've heard of it.

 

Cherney: Oh, and let me, in advance provide Bruce’s response to all of this: Either: 1) I’m just a liar, with no evidence presented or even a list of the lies or 2) Bruce will invent new lies to keep the “conversation” going. It’s rare that I respond to this charlatan, so read on if you really the accurate side of the story. And trust me, the truth is not found by averaging out both “sides, “ if one is a complete fabrication. Bruce is here to muddy the issue, cover the tracks of the bomber for the government agency he loves to defend—the FBI, and to sell papers.

In fact, Cherney and Co. joined with the FBI to write the Bari-Cherney federal libel suit, both sides specifically agreeing in a private hearing to which I was not invited to agree that I and, as I recall, five other skeptics, would not be allowed to testify. If we had been allowed to testify we all would have said something along the lines of, “Hey! Why are we here? How come no one is allowed to ask who did it?” Sell papers? O yea. Mention of Cherney and this bombing case has always sent us running to the printer for more papers.

 

Cherney: Remember, Bruce constantly laments that there is no left, no real left, no honest debate. Never forget he is talking about himself. Forgive typos and grammatical errors. I don’t have the time for this, really. But nevertheless, here we go:

Whole books have been written on the subject of the death of the American left. I'm hardly alone in that opinion.

 

Cherney: Non-truth #1: “Both Bari and Cherney would have been killed if the bomb had exploded as designed.”

Truth: The bomb did, in fact, explode as designed. Three videotaped, simulated tests by the FBI proved this. If Bruce had watched the movie or attended a single day of the trial, he would know this. Not the most important correction, but I’m taking them in order.

One end cap blew off slightly before the other causing much of the blast to move laterally and upward beneath Bari's seat. There was enough explosive in it to blow up the entire vehicle.

 

Cherney: Non-truth #2: “The FBI and the Oakland Police had prematurely arrested Bari and Cherney on the presumption they had knowingly transported the device that almost killed them.”

Truth: The authorities arrested us deliberately in attempt to silence us, a violation of freedom of speech–there was nothing “premature” about it. They showed up within 5 to 20 minutes and proclaimed us guilty. This was proven in a court of law after an exhaustive trial in 2002 that took 12 years of research and motions to bring to court. Bruce’s selection of the word “premature” implies that we should/could have been rightfully arrested later.

The bombing and your arrest made you famous for at least the brief weeks until the first Iraq War began.

 

Cherney: Non-truths #3 & 4: “In the few years left to her, Bari, and a handful of acolytes, including Cherney, raised large amounts of money for a winning federal libel lawsuit against the FBI and the Oakland Police Department in 2002. Bari’s daughters, Cherney and several left attorneys walked away with several million dollars, having worked closely with the feds to draft the suit to exclude all mention of whose bomb set the suit in motion.”

Truth: The lawsuit did everything within it’s legal civic trial power to solve the bombing case, and it did, in fact, turn up Bruce’s BFF Irv Sutley as having family DNA on two key pieces of evidence. DNA we got from the stamp and envelope on the letter taking credit for the bombing was that of an unknown female–certainly not the ex-husband. An unusable trace amount of DNA on the letter was male, attributed to the postman or reporter who received it. No one walked away with a million dollars. Four million dollars divided after 40% attorneys fees (after 12 years), income taxes, Judi splitting her money three ways (2 daughters and a non-profit), comes out to net just over half a million for myself, less for all the lawyers, and Judi’s $1.8 million (gross) shared. No one became a millionaire or even close.

Why not, then, lean on the FBI to match the known female DNA? Cherney got somewhere between $7 and $800,000 enough to buy himself a nice piece of property in Southern Humboldt. And you will note here that he doesn't name the “non-profit.” Fact is, they raised lots of money on the promise to do good for the forests. The forests didn't get a dime, wealthy people — Cherney, the Bari daughters — got wealthier.

 

Cherney: Non-truth #5: “…the FBI, always a dependable villain among the left…”

Truth: Bruce continues his apologies and excuses for the FBI, knowing full well that the FBI actually really is a “dependable villain among the left.” His sarcastic and caustic use of this phrase is disingenuous, as the FBI’s long history of going after labor unions, civil rights leaders, anti-war protestors, environmentalists, etc. is not only well documented, but pretty much its raison-d’être… and a damned good reason to look at the role the FBI played in the bombing of Judi and myself. Facilitating such incidents is what they do and have done for nearly 100 years of documented history (see Congressional Record).

The FBI is a convenient foil for the idiot sectors of “the left.” No one who knows the history of the agency, as I've often written, thinks of it as anything but incompetent and/or malign.

 

Cherney: Non-truth #6: “Talbot appeared on a San Francisco-based television program called “This Week In Northern California” to say that Bari had told him she was certain her ex-husband had bombed her…”

Truth: I have this clip and Talbot says no such thing. In fact, Judi did consider her husband to be a suspect and then, before 1990 was over and after much research/investigation, determined he was not. She was never “certain” about anyone. However, Talbot’s documentary determined the most likely suspect was the source of this disinformation campaign in the first place: Irv Sutley, who clearly helped write a police informant letter (DNA and typewriter evidence) that came with a photo of Judi with Sutley’s Uzi (taken presumably as a joke album cover) that only Sutley, myself (Sutley sent me three photos) and his landlady (Judi’s close friend) had access to. Sutley admitted rummaging through the photos and sending one (a photo of Judi with Sutley’s Uzi) to Bruce Anderson, who published it.

I also have the clip of that show; Talbot says that Judi Bari told him she was certain her ex-husband attacked her. I published that photo well before the bombing to make sure people knew it was a joke, an extremely stupid one which is why Cherney thought it was funny. It was taken in the run-up to Redwood Summer as the timber corporations worked overtime to paint Earth First! as committed to a violent defense of the forests. I told Judi at the time that taking photos like that was (1) not funny (2) certain to be seized upon by the police and the corps as confirmation of EF! commitment to industrial sabotage. Which it was. And when it was Judi and I could point to the joke photo in the AVA as evidence that it was indeed a joke, albeit one sure to be misunderstood. There is no evidence that Sutley wrote the letter Cherney refers to here, the so-called Argus Letter. It was sent to the Ukiah cops as an offer to snitch Judi off for sending dope by mail to some of her friends. Sutley lived in Santa Rosa. He was not in position to snitch unless he was on her Redwood Valley property somehow monitoring her actions and movements. Which he wasn't. Judi's ex, the man Cherney and Co. have worked overtime for years to protect, not only shared the Redwood Valley property with Judi, they lived within literal inches of each other.

 

Cherney: Sutley is a 4 decade-long Peace and Freedom Party member and well documented disrupter (narked on two party members and had them convicted of using an out of district address), gun enthusiast, 8=year Marine veteran in the 60′s who never went to Viet Nam, a physical abuser of at least one woman according to the Press Democrat (a Peace and Freedom Party Candidate), writer of many menacing letters, a known police informant, a candidate for Sheriff, a Communist Party member, and a guy in his 60′s with no known street address for longer than a few months. The latter tidbit is particularly interesting as Sutley runs for office regularly and one is required to provide a street address to run. Sutley got an “exemption” because he claimed, as the Sonoma County elections office told me, he feared the “Troskyites” were out to kill him. He achieved national prominence for legally challenging and removing the star and angels off the Sonoma County Courthouse Christmas tree in 2010, becoming Fox News’ and the New York Times’ face of “The War Against Christmas.” This is one of Bruce’s primary sources of information.

My primary source of information has been Cherney and Co's preposterous statements on the case, and I've relied heavily on Steve Talbot's findings. And you will note here that Cherney and the rest of them never challenge Talbot's bona fides, which include PBS's Frontline series.

 

Cherney: Untruth #7: “He belonged to Professor H. Bruce Franklin’s Maoist posse at Stanford in the late 1960s.”

Truth: Please provide evidence of this, not that it matters.

Please see the Bari stuff on my website at www.theava.com. That's all a matter of record, and Franklin himself has said that he was always suspicious of Sweeney.

 

Cherney: Untruth #8:”[Sweeney] and Bari met at a labor organizing event, married and moved to Santa Rosa where a hangar on the mostly abandoned airfield next door mysteriously blew up one night… The airfield was home to weekend pilots who annoyed the Sweeney-Bari household with their overflights… Police suspected Sweeney and Bari — they had no other suspects.”

Truth #9: Police never questioned Bari or Sweeney about the airport arson, strange if they were the “only suspects.” But more importantly, this illogical accusation goes to the heart of Bruce’s accusation: because Mike Sweeney, Judi’s ex, is an alleged suspect in an act of sabotage in defense of his neighborhood (albeit pretty radical sabotage in the form of arson), he is therefore both technically and mentally capable of murder. Well by that logic, anyone who ever wired his or her own home or got in a fist fight (like Bruce has more than once–understandably–with the subjects of his vitriolic writing) could be a suspect. The fact is that Judi’s ex didn’t have the opportunity to put the bomb in the car given the nature of its timing devise [sic]. The theory that the timer malfunctioned for 48 hours is not likely. And even if Sweeney had bombed Judi Bari, one has to go through the giant leap of logic that he has the entire FBI and Oakland Police force at his back to arrest his victim on site. Bruce has explained this by stating that Sweeney was an FBI informant–thereby going completely counter to his own meanderings. If Sweeney worked for or with the FBI then the FBI was behind the bombing. Further, Sweeney didn’t have a motive, at least not to the degree the timber industry did with Judi Bari unionizing and organizing against it en masse. Sutley and Anderson would have us believe that Judi was trying to kill her ex by hiring Sutley through a third party as a hit man and so therefore Sweeney tried to kill her first, as opposed to turning her into the cops. Judi did joke once about killing her ex, which she readily admitted. Further, if there is any evidence on anyone in this case, I urge people to take it to a law enforcement agency with jurisdiction–they are the ones to handle dangerous people and illegal matters, presumably.

Good gawd. The bombing of the hangar at the old Navy air station west of Santa Rosa nearly killed a guy asleep in a trailer on the property, and the police could not definitively link Bari and Sweeney to the bombs (one didn't ignite), but I'm pretty sure they were questioned because they had been trying to shut the air field down. Cherney only parrots what Judi told him about that interlude. We have a compelling statement from the owner of the hangar on our website that makes a strong case that Sweeney and Bari together did it.

 

Cherney: Non-truth #10: “… it can be solved via the known DNA lifted from the Lord’s Avenger Letter. No one seems interested, but that DNA exists and has been found to be primarily female, placed there in 1990, just before DNA became the slam-dunk investigative tool it has since become.

Truth: Well it was yours truly who organized and ascertained that DNA Bruce claims we are not interested in. And the FBI and Oakland Police were completely disinterested. We, however are very interested. We are currently in a suit with the FBI to test one of the two bombs (yes, the bomber made two) and the first bomb, which partially detonated at an L-P sawmill, contains about 8 feet of duct tape which could contain hair samples, skin flakes, fingerprints, etc. Bruce has publicly come out against such testing, stating that we don’t need to do it to find out who the bomber is, as he states above. So Bruce doesn’t want to test the bomber’s DNA on the bomb itself. That speaks volumes.

I'm all for testing everything, and it's true that Cherney and Co got together with their FBI pals who lent the Cherney forces the original of the Lord's Avenger Letter and its envelope to test for DNA. So? Why didn't Cherney and Co and their federal buddies try to find out who the female DNA they found belonged to? To repeat: I'm all for testing the bomb DNA although I'm not as confident as Cherney is on the sanctity of the FBI's evidence lockers. But then he has a close relationship with them, I don't.

 

Cherney: Untruth #11: It [our movie] is also called, “Who Bombed Judi Bari?” a nice piece of cynicism that might make it appear that the honest film of the same title by Steve Talbot didn’t pre-date Cherney’s film by twenty-one years.

Truth: Who Bombed Judi Bari? Is a song I wrote in July 1990 that predated Talbot’s documentary for PBS by almost a year. Talbot used the name of my copyrighted song, which I sang in his piece, for the title of his doc. I own that title and gave an audio CD I produced of Judi’s speeches in 1997 the same name. In other words, the first person to come up with that name and most importantly, to ask that question loudly, is me.

Sorry. Gee, I hope Talbot got your permission.

 

Cherney: Untruth #12: “The even larger mystery of Who Bombed Judi Bari is this: why isn’t what passes for a left media in this country demanding that the Bari case be solved? Why did Susan Faludi suddenly abandon her book on Bari after getting a large publisher’s advance to write it? Why has Judi Bari’s famous sister, Gina Kolata of the New York Times, never written about her sister’s sad fate? And why has Bari’s family never publicly demanded the case be solved?”

Truth: I have sent out hundreds of press releases to the left media and gotten less response than from the mainstream media by a lot. I’d suggest that Bruce call the left press and ask them this question. Judi’s famous sister, Gina Kolata, didn’t write about it for the NY Times because she is a science writer and wouldn’t be allowed to write about a family matter if she wanted to. Again, he should ask her. Further, Kolata is a right wing apologist for Dow Chemical and many toxic corporations and didn’t speak to Judi for years. As far as Faludi’s book not being finished, that is a question I’ve asked Susan many times and in turn gotten many poor responses. As for the “family,” where should a family turn for answers? Her parents are dead, she didn’t along with her sisters, and even so, how would this proclaiming be made. Bruce, in classic paranoid conspiratorial fashion implies the whole family is in on it, along with author Faludi, myself, the entire legal team, etc. And what does any of this have to do with hard evidence?

Gina Kolata has written two best sellers apart from her duties at the NYT. Newspapers don't tell their writers what they can write about on their own time. Ms. Kolata is not an apologist for Dow Chemical. For reasons apparently convenient to Cherney, he maligns her as casually as he does everyone else who doesn't buy his threadbare version of these events. Judi Bari's parents were alive and well at the time she was bombed. She got along just fine with her younger sister. I think Ms. Kolata and the Bari family knew, or at least suspected, the truth about what happened and just hoped it would all go away.

 

Cherney: Conclusion — We have a pretty good idea of who Bombed Judi Bari? It was a plan engineered by L-P and the FBI made while they were blowing up cars at bomb school in Eureka 30 days before the bombing on an L-P clearcut. The L-P sawmill was bombed 2 weeks after that and two weeks after that Judi’s car was bombed on May 24, 1990. The head of the FBI’s SF division was a long time Hoover Cointelpro political operative, Richard W. Held. The bomber, probably a low-level snitch/asset—no one we know–the typical M.O. for the FBI. One doesn’t need to twist oneself into an ugly pretzel, as Bruce has done ad nauseum, to see where the evidence leads.

The bomb classes at College of the Redwoods, as a phone call to the school might still confirm, were held every couple of years by the FBI for cops from all over. The bombs were exploded on L-P property. You mean to say the FBI blew up things out in the woods in front of a bunch of cops and whoever else then went down to Oakland and blew Cherney up? Wow, that is suspicious! (If the feds wanted Judi Bari dead she would have died they day she was blown up. Instead, she died seven years later, and I say the bomb killed her in slow motion. I see her as a tragic figure. I think she did what she felt she had to do to avoid losing custody of her children and going to jail for a long time. I also think she died alone and without a friend in the world.)

 

Cherney: I have one question for Bruce Anderson: if we find DNA on the bomb that is not Mike Sweeney’s and further find out who the actual bomber is, would you, Bruce, plan any restitution to the near two decades of accusations against Sweeney? An apology? Giving up your “writing” career? Because after 18 years of false stories and accusations, and with the genuine possibility we might still learn the truth with the latest round of DNA testing, Mr. Anderson should begin thinking about eating that huge serving of crow he’s been cooking up for himself.

No, because I think you and your friends are contemptible, but I wish you and your friends at the FBI all the best in your test of fragments now 23 years old. One more time: If the feds or the Mendocino County DA will subpoena the DNA of likely suspects to compare with the KNOWN DNA from the Lord's Avenger Letter, we would all know Who Bombed Judi Bari. Cherney can't afford to know.

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CELEBRATE THE BIRTHDAY OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. at a Dance Party on Saturday, January 19, 2013 At 8pm At Angelina's Bar & Grill (formerly Tradewinds Bar & Restaurant), 400 South Main Street, Fort Bragg, CA 95437. The party starts at 8pm and features exciting music mixed by DJ Aline and DJ Sister Yasmin playing Hip Hop, Funk, Latin, World Music, Reggae, Soul, R&B, Oldies, Music of the Civil Rights Movement, and other grooving rhythms for dancing and enjoying. Angelina's Bar serves Navarro Wines and has Organic Beers on tap. Angelina's Grill next door serves delicious food (Mexican, Italian, salads, vegetarian, burgers) until 9pm, so come early for a delicious meal before the show. Angelina's Grill is open daily from 7am until 9pm. This is a 21 and over event and there is no cover charge. Join us for a night of great music and dancing to celebrate Dr. King's life, message and dream! DJ Aline and DJ Sister Yasmin will Rock The House! Information at: 707-964-1700 or 884-4703.