[sixties-l] Patty Hearst speaks before SLA trial (fwd)

From: sixties@lists.village.virginia.edu
Date: Sun Jan 27 2002 - 16:45:02 EST

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    ---------- Forwarded message ----------
    Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 21:30:58 -0800
    From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
    Subject: Patty Hearst speaks before SLA trial

    Patty Hearst speaks before SLA trial

    Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
    Thursday January 24, 2002
    The Guardian

    Patty Hearst, the newspaper heiress who was kidnapped by Symbionese
    Liberation Army urban guerrillas in 1974, said yesterday that the group had
    had their "own little jihad" against the United States.

    Ms Hearst, who later joined the group and was convicted of taking part in
    an SLA robbery, is to be the chief prosecution witness against four alleged
    members charged with murder committed during another robbery.

    Ms Hearst used the Larry King show on CNN to make a damaging attack on the
    people she claims took part in a 1975 robbery in Carmichael, California, in
    which a bank customer was shot dead. Ms Hearst, who has been given
    immunity, drove the getaway car.

    "This was not a robbery," she said, explaining that the group saw it as
    part of a war against the US.

    "It was an expropriation. It was a combat operation." She described the
    shooting as a "violent, senseless, evil act".

    Of the SLA she said: "It was a very strange group of people bound by the
    SLA codes of war and they followed them very religiously. It really was
    their own little jihad."

    Lawyers for the four people charged with the robbery and murder have
    suggested that Ms Hearst, 47, is an unreliable witness who has already been
    convicted of taking part in another robbery and who has her own motives for
    giving evidence.

    She served nearly two years but was pardoned by President Clinton last year.

    "I've lived my entire life haunted by what happened," said Ms Hearst, who
    is married to Bernard Shaw, her former bodyguard and plays parts in small
    independent films. They live with their two children in Connecticut.

    She described how, after she was kidnapped, she was tortured and
    brainwashed by the SLA so that she would take part in the robberies. In
    consequence she had felt "guilt and self-loathing and despair and pain".

    Ms Hearst wrote a book about her experiences in 1982 but apart from a
    magazine interview in 2000 she declined to discuss her past until the King
    interview.

    Sara Jane Olson, Bill and Emily Harris and Mike Bortin have pleaded not
    guilty to the murder. A fifth person charged, Jim Kilgore, has been missing
    for the past 25 years.

    Ms Hearst said: "There is a feeling of relief. Something is finally
    happening where these people are going to at least stand trial for their acts."



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