[sixties-l] Blankfort interviews SLA member

From: radman (resist@best.com)
Date: Wed Jul 05 2000 - 21:46:30 CUT

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    Sarah Olson Ungagged! Special Program-"What's Goin On?" this Friday
            with Jeffrey Blankfort

    Sara Jane Olson is the object of a vicious prosecutorial campaign being
    waged by the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office-the same boffo folks
    that brought you the frame up of former Black Panther leader Geronimo ji
    Jaga (Pratt).

    Last Saturday night Olson spoke at a benefit in San Francisco, along
    with attorney Stuart Hanlon, about her case and the 1970s-era Symbionese
    Liberation Army (SLA), of which she is alleged to have been a member.

    The program was recorded by SFLR DJ Jeffrey Blankfort and will air in a
    special 90-minute edition of Jeffrey's program, "What's Goin On?" this
    Friday, July 7, beginning at 4 p.m. A one-on-one interview with Olson
    taped by Blankfort earlier in the day will also air.

    Olson, formerly known as Kathleen Soliah, is charged with conspiring to
    place a pipe bomb under a parked cop car 24 years ago. No bomb ever went
    off.

    At the time of her arrest last year, Olson had settled in St. Paul,
    Minnesota, where she was active in church affairs and local politics.
    She is the mother of three teenage daughters.

    The SLA gained nationwide attention following its kidnapping of
    newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.

    In April this year Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James Ideman imposed
    a gag order-over the strenuous objections of Olson's attorneys-upon all
    parties in the case.

    However, the gag order was flagrantly violated by DA Gil Garcetti (who
    discussed the case in an interview on National Public Radio) as well as
    by Garcetti's chief witness, Hearst.

    Theoretically, Garcetti and Hearst should have been jailed for violating
    a court order, but of course THAT did not happen. (This is, after all,
    America-where the rich and powerful get broadcast licenses instead of
    jail sentences.) So Ideman did the next best thing: he dissolved the gag
    order.

    Last Saturday's event was Olson's first public appearance since the
    lifting of the gag order.

    In her interview with Blankfort, Olson compared the attacks on the MOVE
    house in Philadelphia in 1985, and the Branch Davidians in Waco in
    1993-with that against the SLA house in Los Angeles in 1974.

    "These kind of things do happen in this country and there's always some
    kind of reason for why it was necessary for the police to do it, and it
    never involves at any time the political actions of the people that were
    killed. And this is hard to believe and I don't think most people do.
    But I don't consider these things a matter of conspiracy. I consider
    them business as usual, and that makes it more frightening, because if
    this is business as usual, it could happen to anybody,"
    she said.

    In his own remarks to the crowd Saturday night, Hanlon commented:

    "Patti Hearst will be drawn in there and she will make a mockery of
    herself and the truth just like everybody else whoever listened to her
    story [thought] in 1975."

    Tune in for the entire program. "What's Goin On?" normally airs from 4 -
    5 p.m. on Fridays, however, this week's program will offer an extended
    edition, airing 4 till 5:30.

    Listen at 93.7 FM in western San Francisco, or at
    http://interzone.org/radio over the Web.

    The Sara Olson Defense Committee maintains a Web site at
    http://www.saraolsondefense.org.



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