Cringing Wusses

THE FOLLOWING appeared in the April 24th issue of the LA Times. It's a lawyer-drafted response to the inevitable demand-for-a-retraction letter from Mike Sweeney of Keep Mendocino Beautiful, one of two Mendocino County garbage agencies. Sweeney had, as predicted here at the time, promptly threatened to sue the LA Times over quotes contained in a Times piece about two forthcoming books on Judi Bari, Sweeney's second wife. The following is the Times response to Sweeney's threat to sue: 

“JUDI BARI BOOKS — An April 14 Calendar article about two forthcoming books on late environmental activist Judi Bari quoted Berkeley writer Kate Coleman explaining that a central theme of her book was that Bari had been a victim of domestic abuse. The Times has no independent verification of the truth or falsehood of this allegation, which Coleman says is based primarily on a series of interviews with Bari's close friends and associates. Before her death from cancer in 1997, Bari publicly denied similar allegations. Bari's ex-husband, Mike Sweeney, also has repeatedly denied reports of spousal abuse that have appeared in other newspaper, radio and Internet news magazine accounts. In May 1999, a group of Bari's friends and local journalists presented Mendocino County District Attorney Norman Vroman with a petition calling for an official investigation into the unsolved 1990 bombing of Bari's car that cited “well-known domestic abuse and dissension in the marriage at the time of the bombing.” Interviewed recently, Vroman recalled receiving the petition but said he did not pursue an investigation. Sweeney has denied any involvement in the bombing, which left Bari severely injured.”

THE LA TIMES is setting the proof bar pretty high here; what do they want, home movies of Sweeney clipping Bari as they slugged it out in their Redwood Valley love nest 13 years ago?

NOR HAS SWEENEY “repeatedly denied” anything related to his late ex. He has threatened to sue a bunch of publications and KQED Television for any and all implications of him as Bari's bomber. According to Bari he also beat her up and raped her. Bari told lots of people, including me, that Sweeney had been her live-in batterer and twice her rapist. But she is conveniently dead because Sweeney killed her, albeit in slow motion, via the bomb he built that blew her up in Oakland in 1990. Did he also beat Judi Bari and rape her? It would seem to come with the package, wouldn't it?

BUT SWEENEY hasn't sued any media all the way back to his first toothless woof at KQED in 1990. Why? Because he did it, and if he sues he'll have to answer questions about how and why he did it, and his answers will put him in the federal pen where he should have gone, and would have gone, back in 1990 if the feds had pursued him with anything like the vigor they pursue, say, car thieves, or A-rabs. But the feds didn't pursue Sweeney, probably because they, too, had lots to hide about their role in Redwood Summer events and other Bari-related events. 

IF THE LA TIMES, and the media generally, weren't the cringing wusses they are, Sweeney long ago would have been tried and convicted of abbreviating Bari's life via the '90 car bomb. (She was healthy as a hemp-fattened organic hen prior to the bombing.) But the media don't hold up their end these days, and bad things go unreported and thus unpunished everywhere in America. 

HERE IN “PROGRESSIVE” Mendocino County, Sweeney is protected by the Ukiah Daily Journal where his girl friend Glenda Anderson is a long-time reporter; at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where journalo-cowardice is a way of life; and at free speech public radio stations KPFA, KZYX and KMUD whose staff and contributors grow bolder in direct ratio to the distance of the controversy from them — they'll take on Bush but not the scandals directly in front of their posturing pusses. Sweeney cannot be mentioned in connection with Bari at any of the above venues. And now he's got the LA Times backing off a harmless piece about a couple of books on the old girl that haven't even appeared! 

THE MENDO COUNTY DA? DA Vroman has never expressed any interest in the Bari case; in fact he blithely announced to the kept local media after the meeting referenced in the Times' mealy-mouthed retraction by saying of the petitioners, “All I got from them was a movie.” True, but the movie, by Steve Talbot of Frontline, then of KQED, was meant to serve Vroman only as an audio-visual crash course in the basics of the event, among them the obvious fact that the Bari Bombing originated here in Mendocino County where Vroman now happens to be the chief law enforcement officer. Vroman didn't ask us for additional info. What he later told me was that Mendocino County didn't have the resources to pursue the case; that the FBI was unlikely to share information; that the event was so remote as to be irrelevant. (Which is plausible but New Orleans DA Jim Garrison took on the whole country and its government when he went after the people and agencies he thought were behind the JFK assassination. Whatever one might think of Garrison's case against the CIA et al, the guy wasn't reluctant to give it a go.) 

BUT WHAT'S OUTRAGEOUS about the Bari case at this point is that solving it is now simply a matter of testing the existing DNA results from the bomber's confession letter against that of Sweeney, aka The Lord's Avenger; the late Bari herself or one or another of her daughters with Sweeney; Meredyth Rinehard, Sweeney's girl friend at the time of the bombing and today (of course) a helping professional with the County of Mendocino, against the DNA of the aforementioned and, perhaps, a half dozen more persons all closely associated with the late Bari and the present-day Sweeney in the creepy summer of 1990. One or more of these folks left their DNA on the confession letter.

MUCH OF THE RESISTANCE to justice in the Bari matter comes from entrenched, pseudo-left interests who've literally lived off Bari mythology for the last 13 years. The resistance also appears to come from the FBI; the late Bari's well-connected family (her sister is New York Times writer Gina Kolata); a gaggle of photo-op “movement” lawyers; and the lockstep legions of the idiot sectors of the left to whom the Bari myth has been marketed for years much as the Mumia myth has been marketed to the same chain gang.

AM I GOING to rant about the Bari case until I turn up my toes? No. I'll give it another year — max — to unravel itself. But if the forces of law and order remain inert and indifferent to the free range bomber and airport arsonist running loose in Ukiah, I'll prepare a big print list of particulars for the DA and make a citizen's arrest of Sweeney myself, deploying whatever force is necessary to effect it, and we'll see what we shall see.

[excerpt from Off the Record, May 7, 2003]