Meanwhile, it’s hard to imagine less-favorable conditions for the defendants’ day in court. They’re up against time, mistakes, and the awesome, all-consuming power of the T-word. Although the prosecutors claim existing physical evidence has become more useful with the help of new technology, people close to the case say that in fact it is the same evidence that Sacramento prosecutors have had for years.
The defendants are people who have long since left the SLA part of their pasts behind. "I am a friend of Bill Harris," Lubin tells me, "and I don’t justify the killing in the bank robbery at all. But the Bill Harris who I’ve known, who’s been there for me as a friend, and who I care about a lot, well, I can’t believe the state went ahead with this. And for God’s sake, Sara Jane Olson is a respected person in her community."
It’s tough to blame the Opsahl son who lost his mother in the shooting. But public opinion post–September 11 has taken a turn so aggressively reactionary that it recalls the red-baiting inquisitions of Joseph McCarthy. Let’s face it: 2002 is a bad time to be labeled a terrorist. The onetime SLA members and their associates have paid for at least some of their sins, and all have forged new, productive lives. The turn of events is a kind of worst-case scenario for everybody.
Recently my cousin and long-time pal Sharon and I were talking about the past — back when we hung out with the same people and had the same politics. "I’ve had people ask me if I regretted all the time I spent as an activist and all that," Sharon said, rolling her eyes. "I can’t believe it. The fact is that I don’t regret a thing; those years were great."
Non-’60s people (the world breaks down into us and everyone else, of course) hate hearing ’60s people rhapsodize, so I won’t do it other than to say this: the ’60s were full of challenge, and although I’m not a revolutionary now, in my heart, I’m still a revolutionary then. You believed you could change the world and yourself in the process, and that was liberating. The politics were confusing, we made mistakes, but at the end of the day, the fact is that we were right and the other side — racists, politicians, corporate vultures, and the rest — were wrong. It was a great time to be young. You could never tell what was going to happen next. Something could fall on you from a tree or come loping through your front door with a gun aimed at your heart. That’s how it was during my first unforgettable brush with the FBI.
It was September 1970, and my best friend, who was attracted to the Maoist Revolutionary Union, and I, who hung out with former Weathermen, moved from Berkeley to Richmond, bringing with us two dogs and a 19-year-old postal worker named Sarah whose political activities were limited to driving a truck painted like an American flag. One morning several weeks later, a large squad of FBI agents with guns drawn and a pack of reporters in tow came charging up to our house and entered.
They were after a fugitive Weatherwoman who, they were sure, was living in the small room behind our garage. A beefy posse of agents exchanged glances and heavily trotted down the driveway and into the back yard — liberating both dogs, who then raced into the yard of our next-door neighbor, an elderly Lithuanian. She looked sweet, but she hated the dogs, and as was her habit, she began to curse them. The pups liked to do their business in her garden, and she wasn’t happy about it — which is, I should add, critical information with respect to this story.
The FBI agents, believing they were about to nail a Maoist-Weatherman conspiracy, kicked in the back door, waking Sarah, who promptly burst into tears. They dragged her, handcuffed and wearing a nightgown, out front. A few agents ransacked our house — they found guns, drugs, and money and left them all behind, which meant they were after something else that wasn’t there. The real action, however, was building outside. An agent flashed a picture of the fugitive to curious neighbors, and then they pointed to Sarah, which elicited no response. Finally they produced our Lithuanian neighbor — who was not the nice, albeit high-strung, lady I’d thought her, but a first-class fink and provocateur.
"She is definitely the one," the old woman cried, pointing a crooked finger in Sarah’s direction. Cameras started to flash, and the ghost of a satisfied smile graced the face of the agent in charge. He shoved Sarah out in front of him, and the crowd leaned closer. "Is she the one?" he asked. "Are you sure?" The old lady was sure, and to prove it, she pointed at the dogs, who were pulling a small wire fence from the border surrounding some tulips. "She is the one," the woman hollered in broken English, shaking her head violently. "She is the one with the dogs, look, those dogs. She is the one."
Our neighbor stared venomously at the big shot, who, sweating nervously, stepped back to huddle with a sidekick. They talked, compared Sarah with the photo, looked around, and left. The same journalists later showed up for our press conference, which was the first item on the 11 o’clock news. I celebrated by taking LSD.
I CAME ACROSS an article in a recent San Francisco Chronicle reporting that President George W. Bush and several cabinet members were casually exploring a timeline to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq. Most extraordinary was the headline, which noted that this time the "US would have to go it alone." The piece was followed a few days later by the news that Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon had publicly considered in much the same offhand fashion whether or not, in 1982, a sniper shadowing Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat should have just killed him. Truth be told, things don’t look good in the world. They don’t look good for the four ex-radicals, either. It’s not clear when the Carmichael trial will begin, but get ready for a roomful of ghosts — and the possibility that a jury will ignore the lack of evidence, buy into the war on terrorism, and send the defendants to jail for life.
If the SLA members killed a woman in a bank robbery, the passage of time and the political context will never justify their actions. But it’s hardly fair. The SLA members, most of them, anyway, were sucked into a political shit storm started by others. Robert McNamara, William Westmoreland, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger (to name a few) were guilty of sending 50,000 American kids to their deaths and laying waste to Vietnam, a country that was lovely, except where it was nothing but craters and rubble. The men responsible for those crimes have never had to answer for them. Nobody is in jail for the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. Nobody is in jail for setting up Geronimo Pratt, fabricating evidence that sent an innocent man to jail for more than 20 years. Nobody is paying for all the police beatings, police shootings, FBI harassment and surveillance, domestic-counterintelligence-program (COINTELPRO) operations, and dirty tricks that were part of life in the 1960s. In fact, nobody’s even talking about those crimes.
It’s time that United States stopped blocking the UN from establishing a new mechanism to bring those responsible for war crimes to trial. Of course, that would mean that people like Henry Kissinger (and so many others) would have to take responsibility for their actions. But it’s time to settle the score. Fair is fair: if Kissinger has to answer for his deeds, then the onetime activists charged in the Carmichael case should do the same. We need closure — something that can be entered into history and, settled, left behind. This would, I think, be just — and when all is said and done, justice is what the ’60s was about.
J.H. Tompkins fought the war and the law during the late ’60s and early ’70s. He wrote about his experiences for various outlets in the underground press. This article was originally published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
