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Sla Response

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Parent Issue
Day
14
Month
June
Year
1974
OCR Text

 

 

SLA Response

To the SUN:
Congratulations for having a collective head on your shoulders with regard to the SLA. I pretty much agreed with your editorial on them.

However, while I now consider the SLA to be a police organized, or at least a police instigated group. l felt your article was less airtight than it could have been The information presented was largely circumstantial, and I try to be extra-careful about believing people who call other people police agents.

In your recent series on the State's attempts to crush the Black Panther Party, what made the conspiracy story airtight was the inclusion of the FBI documents proving beyond any doubt that the United Snakes clearly intended to destroy the black liberation movement in this country by any means necessary.

But where are the documents, the real proof that this CRIC group claims to have? Who are they, anyway? Where are they coming from? Just as cops can go underground and call themselves Left, so too can cops organize "Citizen's Committees" to confuse the Left by calling legitimate left underground groups police agents.

I am very much inclined to support CRIC's conclusions about the SLA. Alter the murder of Marcus Foster, I assumed that the SLA had to be the creation of the burgeoning police State. It could only be to the police State's advantage to kill a guy like Foster: it would turn public opinion against the Left. convince people that "terrorism" was becoming more of a problem here, and therefore average Americans would support the creation of an even more overt police State. From what I understand. Marcus Foster was supported by the entire, multi-ethnic Third World community in Oakland. and significantly, by the Black Panther Party. Who else would kill him and label him a "fascist" but the Pig. And even if the SLA was not really the brainchild of the CIA, they might as well be when they pull shit like that.

Nonetheless. I would still like to hear more about CRIC. Why don't they publish their evidence along with their conclusions? I could understand some of the evidence being sensitive, but if I were in their position I would want to publish every document I had right away to bolster the analysis. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt that much of their evidence is not documentary but corroborative, they must have some hard evidence. Why haven't they released it? In this era of Watergate, failure to release documentary evidence at least implies that you have something to hide. I hope the SUN makes it a point to publish any and all real evidence that emerges as this bizarre thing unfolds. I would also appreciate more on CRIC; I really want to believe them.

I do have one point of disagreement with the SUN editorial. You said, "The US is not Bolivia, Brazil, or Vietnam where impoverished people recognize their real enemy and will support violent action." While it is true that the situation here is much different from conditions in the Third World, I got the impression that the SUN sees all underground activity in the US as senseless. If that's what you meant, I disagree. Somewhere along the line there will have to be a People's Army if we're serious about taking this country over, and that army will have to be organized underground. Furthermore, I even think there is a place for underground activity in the US today. The very existence of a left underground here and now (even though there are probably no more than 200 people in it, if that), is

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Letters

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living proof that the police State is not quite as together as it wants us to believe it is. It is definitely in the State's advantage to keep us all super-paranoid that they're everywhere, and that we can't possibly win against them. People underground are outwitting the Man right this minute, suggesting that the clamps are not as tight as they might be. I think this opens up some important psychological space. The day may well come when a lot more folks are forced underground, and I derive a certain amount of comfort in the knowledge that some people already seem to have this harrowing existence successfully figured out. My only regret is that the underground, and Weatherpeople in particular, have not kept in touch with the rest of us as much and as often as they might have. They should be sending tapes to Zodiac and LNS every week: Yes, we're all fine; yet, if you're careful you can avoid being infiltrated: the underground is alive and well. Weatherpeople have not done this for their own reasons, but I really wish they would. So: goodnight Bill and Bernardine, wherever you are!

The other thing that underground groups can do here and now is to pull off actions that are creative, and that a broad spectrum of the country will support, or at least some kind of action that won't earn them universal condemnation like the Foster murder. For instance, suppose a left underground group had kidnapped the President of Texaco in the middle of the oil and gas "shortage," then used the tremendous media play they would have certainly commanded to calmly and rationally discuss the oil ripoff. They might have demanded that Texaco immediately drop its price back to where it was a year ago. I believe that millions of Americans were really pissed off about the oil fraud and would have supported such an action.

Of course, the main problem with underground activity is that any group -- cop or real -- can go underground and call itself "Left." There's really no way of knowing who they are unless the members were openly and credibly active in a community before going underground, and unless it seems reasonably certain that the State forced them under, as in the recent case of Abbie Hoffman. The true guerilla knows his/her base, and has a base he/she can depend on. The SLA, as far as I can see, has no base, which makes them all the more suspect. However, I believe that credible underground activity is possible in the US, and even necessary as the police State tightens the noose.

 - Name withheld by request