isn't it rather silly to bring people up on charges for crimes which took
place 27 years ago. perhaps we should reconsider the government's freedom to
pursue such cases?
----- Original Message -----
From: <sixties@lists.village.virginia.edu>
To: sixties-l <sixties-l@lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Monday, January 21, 2002 5:56 PM
Subject: [sixties-l] Soccer mum pays for terror past [SLA] (fwd)
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 13:54:27 -0800
> From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
> Subject: Soccer mum pays for terror past [SLA]
>
> Soccer mum pays for terror past
>
> Minnesota housewife Sara Jane Olson was once an armed fugitive along with
> heiress Patty Hearst. Now new murder charges are forcing America to
confront
> a nightmare from its past.
>
> Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
> Sunday January 20, 2002
> The Observer
>
> The slim, smiling woman at the counter of Midnight Special, a busy
left-wing
> bookshop in Santa Monica, California, just before Christmas had assembled
> around 20 thick books. She now has good reason for buying so many fat
> volumes since she will have plenty of time to read them during the decades
> of prison time that may now stretch in front of her.
>
> The woman was Sara Jane Olson, who, in her previous life as Kathleen
Soliah,
> was alleged to be a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, one of the
> most bizarre of the urban guerrilla groups of the Seventies. She had
already
> been convicted of placing a pipe bomb under a police car and was awaiting
> sentence - hence the book-buying - but now she and three of her alleged
> fellow-members are facing trial for the murder of a bank customer during a
> 1975 raid carried out by the SLA.
>
> Their surprise arrests last week have reopened a book in American life
that
> had long seemed closed. Not least among the many ironies in the case is
that
> those now accused of being home-grown terrorists had become the
industrious,
> civic-minded, middle-class members of society against whom the SLA once
> railed.
>
> In 1973 the SLA killed Marcus Foster, a popular black superintendent of
> education in Oakland who wanted to introduce student ID cards. But the SLA
> is best known for its kidnapping of Patricia Hearst, the newspaper heiress
> held for ransom in February 1974. By her account she was intimidated into
> becoming part of the group and robbing the Hibernia bank in San Francisco
> under her nomme de guerre of Tania before she and two of her kidnappers,
> Bill and Emily Harris, were arrested.
>
> Hearst was jailed for seven years for her part in the robbery but released
> after two when President Jimmy Carter issued a clemency order; she was
> pardoned by President Clinton as he left office last year. The hardcore of
> the SLA, including its leader, Donald 'Cinque' DeFreeze, had already died
in
> a Los Angeles house in May 1974 after a shoot-out with police.
>
> Hearst later married her bodyguard, Bernard Shaw, with whom she has two
> children. She has often said that she hoped her 'Tania' days were over but
> she is now likely to be the chief prosecution witness in the case.
>
> Hearst wrote her memoirs, Cecil B DeMented, in 1982, and it is a passage
in
> this book that implicates Olson, the Harrises, and two other radicals,
Mike
> Bortin and Jim Kilgore, as taking part in the $15,000 robbery of the
Crocker
> National Bank in Carmichael, California, in 1975.
>
> According to Hearst's version, a 42-year-old mother of four children,
Myrna
> Lee Opsahl, who was depositing her church's Sunday collection, was shot
> during the raid by Emily Harris. 'Oh, she's dead,' Hearst quotes Emily
> Harris as saying, 'but it doesn't really matter. She was a bourgeois pig
> anyway. Her husband is a doctor.'
>
> That remark was to act as a spur for Dr Jon Opsahl, one of the children of
> the murdered woman, who has attempted to keep the case alive, urging
> prosecutors to pursue the people named in the book and setting up a
website
> (www.myrnaopsahl.com) that contained the evidence.
>
> 'Those words have always haunted us,' Opsahl said after the arrests last
> week. 'She was a wonderful mother... and it was kind of the parallel life
> that [Sara Jane Olson] assumed which was disturbing, how she participated
in
> a crime that took a life and then kind of assumed [that lifestyle]. She
put
> on this soccer mom act and the public even came to her defence but I said
> "wait a minute, that is what my mom was".'
>
> Olson's new life has been, by all accounts, exemplary. Married to a
> Harvard-educated emergency room doctor, Fred, who has worked on
> Oxfam-related projects in Zimbabwe, she regularly read to the blind, was
> active in her Methodist church in St Paul, Minnesota, worked with torture
> victims, took part in charity runs and brought up three daughters Leile,
> Sophia and Emily.
>
> Bill and Emily Harris, who served eight years in jail, separated long ago
> and Bill became a private investigator and married a lawyer with whom he
has
> two sons; he was arrested last Wednesday driving them to school. Emily
> Harris became a computer programmer and moved to the LA area. Bortin, a
> former leading light in Students for a Democratic Soci ety, had married
> Olson's sister, Josephine, and the couple ran a hardwood flooring company
in
> Portland, Oregon.The fifth, Jim Kilgore, from San Rafael in Marin County,
> has never resurfaced. The FBI tried to tease him out after the arrest of
> Olson in 1999. He did not take the bait.
>
> Nothing could have illustrated better the passage of time between those
days
> of violent revolution than an event in that same Santa Monica bookshop
> towards the end of last year. One Sunday afternoon, a Chicago professor,
> Bill Ayers, well-known for his academic studies on the education of
> children, was talking about his new book to an audience of around 30
people.
>
> The book, Fugitive Days, was about Ayers's life as a member of the Weather
> Underground, another defunct urban guerrilla group. It had been published
on
> 10 September, hardly the most auspicious day for launching a book one
> chapter of which opens with the words 'Everything was absolutely ideal on
> the day I bombed the Pentagon.' (The 2lb bomb placed in a Pentagon women's
> lavatory caused no injuries or deaths.) After Ayers had read from his book
a
> member of the audience stood up and talked about her own case. She was
Sara
> Jane Olson.
>
> A quarter of a century ago, a meeting of members of the Weather
Underground
> and the SLA would have fuelled the FBI's wildest fantasies but what we had
> was a friendly conversation between a genial prof and a busy suburban
> mother.
>
> The next day, talking at a fund-raiser in Santa Monica, Olson said that
her
> heart had 'selfishly' sunk when she heard of the World Trade Centre
attacks.
> She felt that the climate had changed and her chances of a fair trial had
> lessened.
>
> Then Olson signed her own book, Serving Time, America's Most Wanted
Recipes,
> which she had written to raise funds for a defence case costing hundreds
of
> thousands of dollars.
>
> The book shows Olson on the cover in striped apron and holding a spatula
in
> one hand and a pair of handcuffs in the other. In the foreword, Olson
> confesses to membership of the Food Conspiracy in the 1970s, 'an umbrella
> group of neighbourhood food-buying clubs that brought organic food from
> rural farms and local distributors'. It is this larky nature of her
> fund-raising efforts that has puzzled some and alienated others.
>
> In November last year, after months of proclaiming her innocence, she
> pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge connected to the pipe bomb but
> immediately left the courtroom to say she had done so only because her
> lawyers had insisted she accept a plea bargain deal that would mean she
> spent only five years in jail. The following week a tetchy Judge Fidler
> required her to come back and reiterate her guilt. She did so. Then she
> changed her mind once more and sought to have her plea struck from the
> records asking that she now stand trial after all. The judge refused,
saying
> he had no doubt about her guilt. On Friday she was sentenced to 20 years,
a
> term which will become academic if she is convicted of murder.
>
> All of those charged last week have protested their innocence. But the
mood
> in the United States is an unforgiving one. When Olson was first arrested,
> there was some public sympathy for her, an idealistic woman who had become
> involved in the SLA after her closest friend had been burned alive in the
LA
> shoot-out. But 11 September has changed the rules: there is much greater
> support for the police and little sympathy for anyone associated with
> terrorism.
>
> A new chapter is about to be written in the book which everyone had
believed
> was closed and in which the SLA will have its final epitaph. Perhaps it
has
> already been uttered by the fugitive Jim Kilgore. In her book, Hearst
quoted
> him screaming furiously at the surviving members of the group as all their
> plans unravelled: 'What did the SLA ever accomplish? You killed a black
man,
> kidnapped a little teenage girl and robbed a bank. What the hell did that
> amount to?'
>
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