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Sunday, March 15, 2009

Guantanao Serving as a Model for Parole of Domestic Terrorists?

Calif. due to release '70s radical Olson - USATODAY.com:
"Sara Jane Olson, who was a fugitive for a quarter-century after attempting to kill Los Angeles police officers and participating in a deadly bank robbery near Sacramento as a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, is scheduled to be released from a California prison this week.

Former Los Angeles police officer John Hall was a target of one of two 1975 attempted bombings by the Symbionese Liberation Army, the urban guerrilla group most notorious for its kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. The pipe bombs were placed beneath two police cars.

One bomb, packed with nails, failed to explode as Hall and his partner drove away from a restaurant in Los Angeles' Hollywood Division on an August night. A similar unexploded device was found under another police car miles (kilometers) away.

"That bomb should have gone off that night," Hall said. "I would have been just one of many people that would have been dead. It just brings up a lot of anger knowing that she's going to be released."

Hall recalls that a girl about 8 years old was watching from the restaurant.

"That little girl was waving at us as we drove off. If that bomb would have gone off, she would have been killed along with her family," said Hall, who served 31 years with the department. "I haven't forgiven her (Olson) in the least for what she's done and what she could have done to many more innocent people."

In addition to the attempted bombings and the Hearst kidnapping, the SLA had a long list of high-profile crimes during the mid-1970s, including the assassination of an Oakland schools superintendent and the shotgun slaying of Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four who was depositing a church collection at a bank near Sacramento when the group robbed it.

Olson was in the bank during that 1975 heist, which netted the SLA $15,000.

Olson, then [going by her birthname] Soliah, was in her late 20s when she joined the SLA. The small band of mostly white, college-educated children of middle-class families was started in 1973 by an ex-convict named Donald DeFreeze. He died with five members of the group in a 1974 shootout with police at their Los Angeles hideout.

After the attempted bombings of the LAPD police cars, Olson fled to St. Paul, 1,900 miles (3,060 kilometers) away, where she acted in community theater, joined a church, taught English to immigrants, worked with senior citizens and raised the couple's three daughters"

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