Web-publishing The Last Statement of the SLA in my Presslord.com sure isn't on par with publishing it in Hearst newspapers but in keeping with tradition I am publishing it in full. This document was not kind to my scanner and OCR program so my editing stresses readability. No effort has been made to alter or edit the original content, just make it readable. It is true to the original but not exact. Some but not much may be lost in the translation, mostly grammar and spelling details. That said this is a fascinating and important document. Save it!

Russ: Russel Little, Red since R is the first letter of his name.

Bill: Bill Harris, Brown (actually a dark red) since B is the first letter of his name.

Emily: Emily Harris, Purple or violet

Joe Remiro: Green

They didn't take the classical Marxist-Leninist approach to revolutionary struggle. The people who made up the SLA were influenced by the interplay between Marxism, revolutionary nationalism and revolutionary feminism. The SLA was based on the need to develop a guerrilla front with the above ground political organizing educates and mobilizes people in support of revolution, and on the belief that we don't need to wait for a vanguard party to lead us. The SLA saw the idea of federation among many diverse, autonomous groups as an alternative form of organizing to the party.

Violence in this country isn't unique to the revolutionary underground. There's been state initiated and sanctioned violence against people in the United States ever since this country was first colonized, and people have been forced to turn to their own forms of violence to counter that. Revolutionary violence is simply a response- -an extreme measure to counter extreme conditions. But I don't think that people will fully accept the use of violence until they've seen, through their own experience, the nature of the forces against them, and realize there's something we can do-about.

Emily: Cin's escape from Soledad on March 5, 1973, was really the catalyst for the SLA. Bill and I did not know Cin at the time but Russ and Willie had known him at Vacaville. Cin escaped alone and on foot- a guard who was supposed to be watching him while he worked on the heating system got lazy and Cin saw the opportunity he'd been waiting for. He jumped over a barbed-wire and chain link fence and ran 13 or 14 miles at a slow jog. Every time he'd hear a car coming or spotted it's lights in the distance, he'd jump into the brush at. the side of Highway 101. By daylight he had gotten to Gonza1ès where some stranger gave him clothes and food. Willie drove down and brought., him back to Oakland. That spring, Willie was living in a loose commune on Chabot Road with Russ Little and some other' people, and was afraid the house might be hot because several of them had known Gin in prison so he arranged for Gin to move into Mizmoon's apartment. She had been active in the Bay Area women's movement but wasn't mixed up with the prisons, so Willie figured the police wouldn't be likely' to look there for an escaped con.

Emily. Cin was like a lot of men who haven't had much exposure to conscious women, but he was open to struggling around his attitudes. One of the first things he said when I met him later was that I should challenge him on his sexism. And he certainly wasn't dominant in political discussions. The only time he'd get excited is when he thought someone hadn't really internalized some aspect of racism. He usually talked less than anyone else.

I think he felt like he'd missed out on a lot of things being in prison, so he put in more time listening to other people. He was in a hurry. He felt like 30 years of his life were gone and now he was going to do it. In a way, impatience was one of the biggest problems for all of us, but Cin wouldn't even sleep--always thinking, writing, plotting. He was a really committed person.

After Cin's escape, he shared his ideas with Willie and Mizmoon. He wanted to form an underground group that could carry out clandestine operations against the state. I didn't know him then, but I do remember seeing him at a meeting around Wounded Knee. He was slowly getting to know people and make contacts. One of these folks was Nancy Ling Perry.

I did not get to know either Nancy or Mizmoon well until after Russ and Joe got busted, and then we never talked about their back-rounds much because we were struggling to survive. But I do know that Nancy felt a lot of solidarity with the black liberation struggle. She had lived with Gilbert Perry, a black jazz pianist and composer, and had visited several brothers in prison. Mizmoon worked as a janitor at the Berkeley Public Library and had done a lot of organizing with the city employees to get more women hired to city jobs. Willie had been on the periphery of Venceremos* like Bill and me, organizing around community issues, teaching self-defense classes and participating in study groups. His main political work was in the prisons, providing a link between progressive convicts and the movement on the streets.

Camilla Hall did not join the original group until after the Foster assassination. She was a beautiful artist and a poet and a close friend and lover of Mizmoon. Because Camilla was a lesbian, I think a lot of women wonder why she would join a group like the SLA that was made up of men as well as women, but Camilla was not a separatist. She enjoyed working with women and she felt that the methods of the women's struggle had to be expanded. She didn't feel that working with men on that level would interfere with her lesbian-feminist ideals because she believed that women's oppression did not exist in isolation from the oppression of other people.

Emily: The conviction of Joe Remiro and Russell Little for the killing of Marcus Foster was a total frame-up. Neither Joe, Russ, Angela, Bill nor I was even in the SLA at the time of the Foster assassination. We first heard of the Foster shooting from reading daily newspaper accounts, but after Joe and Russ' capture, members of the SLA. told us what had happened. It was the first public action by the SLA. Marcus Foster and Robert Blackburn were chosen as targets because they were the main proponents of a Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA.) pilot program to link up educational institutions with police agencies. It involved police units patrolling the Oakland schools with shotguns; a photo ID program where students would be required to present their ID's on request and could be detained for questioning if they refused; and a biographical-dossier program where information on students could be fed into national computer banks in an attempt to predict categorize and remove any "troublemakers." The lives and well being of the students were at stake- - the program was really a means of herding "problem kids" out of the schools and into the prisons. No matter how you look at it, an armed presence in the schools is just the beginning in teaching conditioned acceptance to the occupation of whole communities.

Russ: The program was supposed to be implemented by setting up an extensive spy system at each of seven pilot schools under the command of a former police sergeant. The system was to be coordinated with a probation department, youth authority (youth prison), juvenile hail and the Oakland Police Department- -all of which had a hand in training these informants (they called them monitors) at each school and in sharing and contributing to the bio-dossiers (composite files) of each student. In the LEAA documents that we saw at our trial, these agencies, along with the schools themselves, are euphemistically called "youth-serving agencies" and it was explained that "centralization and coordination is necessary" in order to maintain control.

Joe: At first I felt very supportive about the whole thing, and from what I found out during Russ' and my trial, the Foster program was far more vicious than the SLA. had even indicated in their communiqué. Killing Foster put a quick stop to the intended program, but, in effect, it subverted the spontaneous opposition of students, parents and teachers to the program. There had been student strikes, petitions, leaflets and a lot of hell'.raising at school board meetings. At our trial, there was testimony that the program was being pushed through regardless of all the community opposition. Even though the action taken by the SLA temporarily stopped the program, it didn't aid in building more opposition or in drawing more attention to what was coming down; the action scared people away. People were not ready to support something like that. Those who had been publicly calling Foster a fascist pig started making statements about what a good guy he had been, not because they believed it but because they were afraid of being identified with the people who shot him.

Before and during our trial, neither Russ nor I wanted to publicly criticize the action. The SLA was being attacked by people on the Left who saw a chance to legitimize themselves in the eyes of the state. We didn't care to legitimize ourselves or in any way be identified with those fools on the Left - - we certainly didn't want to be used by them to attack the SLA. No one was making any objective criticisms of the action at the time. We threw people out of the visiting room at the jail who wanted us to denounce the assassination as a condition for supporting our defense. We knew that we could have filled the courtroom with these jive leftists if we were willing to mimic their opportunistic politics, but we were much happier With guerrilla support and a few strong folks in the courtroom. We were innocent of the charges without attacking the SLA and only accepted support on that basis.

Russ: I think one of the main problems that became clear with the Foster killing was the "vanguard" mentality of the SLA: the idea that revolutionaries have to take action for people - -lead them- - whether people understand it or not. It's a paternalistic attitude. People in the SLA knew that Foster's program was a prototype and figured they could stop it by killing Foster and Blackburn and scaring the school board. But it would have been better in the long run to have slowly intensified action starting with broken office windows, spray-painting the walls, firebombing the school board offices and then bombing the local LEAA office.

After cross examining John Lenser - - the local LEAA pig who tried to defend it on the witness stand - - 'I think U anyone needed to be offed, he would" have been the best choice, but only after a protracted guerrilla campaign. It's a question of the underground complementing existing struggles as opposed to completely taking the initiative away from them. I think that white Leftists who denounced the action solely because a black man was killed showed themselves to be suffering from, severe case of 60's liberal hang over.

Joe: It is important to point out that although we have criticisms of the Foster assassination, we no way intend for this to be interpreted as a denunciation of politcal assassinations as a valid revolutionary tactic. We are primarily criticizing the timing of the Foster action, but we can see many other situations where such an action would be both necessary and correct.

We started seeing each other often after that- -usually at Venceremos-sponsored political events or at events centered around the prison movement- -and eventually we got together and formed a prison collective to coordinate the work we were doing in the prisons.

Joe: I started taking a self-defense class with Venceremos and realized I knew more about weapons than the guy who was teaching- - I was constantly contradicting him around ideas he must have gotten from the movies. So people started encouraging me to teach some classes myself. I began studying all the laws around the buying of guns, the ownership and transportation of guns. The idea was to familiarize people with the safe and legal use of weapons. I wouldn't have anything to do with weapons that I didn't consider self-defense weapons- -like high powered rifles-- because defending yourself doesn't mean jeopardizing other people's lives. We'd start with the laws, go on emergency first aid- -how to stop bleeding. Then we got into safe handling of weapons. Finally the class would go out to the range.

Emily: The six of us, Willie, Angela, Joe, Bill Russ and me, formed the prison collective in the late summer/early fall of 1973 after Venceremos fell apart due to police harrassment and infiltration I was during this time that we first began to feel each other out around clandestine-type activities. It started kind of slowly when Willie asked us if we'd ever consider helping someone escape, even if it just meant hiding them out. (This was triggered by Cin's escape, although we didn't know it at the time.) Each of us had to consider what we were really committed to doing. We went target shooting a lot on weekends and when we weren't working; and we shared our ideas on urban guerrilla warfare and the underground in this country.

Bill: We were never into prison reform because we couldn't see the point of reforming fascist dungeon Our goal was to act as a communication and support channel for locked-down comrades. You know you can talk about revolution and about revolutionary actions forever, but if you never translate all that talk, those ideas, into actual acts, then the talk don't mean shit. I mean, if some escaped con needed help were we gonna say, "Well sorry, brother, there's really too much heat around our pad. I don't think we should see each other. Good luck-- see how you can do on your own?" Hell no! All of us wanted to be more prepared so we decided to rent a cheap apartment that we could keep cool for such emergencies. We also decided to get some California driver's licenses in fake names so we rented another apartment to use as a mailing address.

After Willie had gotten a sense from Emily, Angela, Russ, Joe and me that we wanted to move in the same general direction as the SLA and that we supported the Foster action, he brought us the SLA documents about the federation to read and discuss. Then he asked us if we wanted to meet with the SLA. He didn't say, "I'm in the SLA." He just said, "I'm in contact with the SLA." It wasn't till later that we learned he was a member. We were really kind of surprised because before this Willie had never let on about anything. I can even remember asking him if he had read the Foster communiqué and he answered me in such a way that suggested he was as surprised by the whole thing as we were.

Joe: There were these SLA members - - Cin, Nancy and Mizmoon (Willie had gone back East to see his family) at the initial meeting and we were asked to think about how we wanted to participate. We basically considered two alternatives - - to continue as an above-ground collective and provide money, technical support and criticism to the SLA; or we could form another combat unit. We talked about it a lot and decide to form another combat unit.

Bill: I remember feeling a combination of excitement, anxiety and nervousness before we went into the house - - you know, wondering what kind of people we'd be meeting. I half expected the SLA members to come on real heavy, but as we walked in from the garage they were all standing there smiling and they embraced each of us warmly. That was something I really hadn't expected. It was kind of like they had known me all along - - like we were old friends.

Emily: One thing that impressed us about the meeting was that no one person seemed to dominate - -it was a very collective process. Later at another meeting the women talked about how we all felt about the possibility of engaging in armed actions -- the fears we had about doing things we had never done before and the sense of pride that we had about ourselves - -that our decision was a total negation of the whole passive feminine indoctrination.

Joe: Our last full SLA meeting was on New Year's Eve. We sat around drinking beer and wine, talking one-to-one, listening to records and just generally, getting to know one another. The next day we had a serious discussion about our plans. Before coming to the meeting, we had decided amongst ourselves it would be best for our unit to move out of Oakland and use the ID's we had gotten to change our identities completely. We thought San Jose might be a good place to go.

Russ: Between that meeting and Joe's and my bust on January 10, 1974, we were making plans to split. Bill and Emily were still working at the time. Emily was a secretary and Bill worked in the post office. They were making good money - - about $900 a month so Angela and Joe were going to make the move first. We wanted to rent a house with a garage because Joe was a mechanic and he wanted to work on cars out of the garage - - you know, kind of a "people's" repair service. When they had everything set up Bill, Emily and I would go down an join them.

Joe: Russ and I were going back to the house in Concord to tell the other folks our final plans. They had showed us all a carbine that had been converted into a fully automatic machine gun, and they were going to give us drawings and an explanation of how to do that. When I got in the van, Russ told me to reach in the back and check out what was there. I pulled out a bag with leaflets in it, multicolored SLA leaflets. We had talked about how if we were going to be two autonomous units, we needed something to identify ourselves besides a name. We decided we'd have a leaflet made up that could not be easily duplicated that we would use for authentication of our actions.

Russ: There was no excuse for the bust. The SLA should never have had a safehouse in Concord, because we didn't fit into that middle-class suburban community. There were nosy neighbors with nine to five jobs who were really suspicious of anyone who wasn't exactly like them. The thought that went into getting a house there was wrong - - people figured that with all the drug raids and police harassment in places like Berkeley and Oakland, a community like Concord would be safer.

Joe and I had never lived in the suburbs, so we didn't realize that driving around at 1:30 a. m. on a week night would look suspicious - -in the city we were used to coming home late. The cop who stopped us wasn't particularly looking for the SLA, he just like to fuck with young, hip-looking people. The lights and everything on the car were in proper working order, and the irony of the whole thing is that in our trial the cop said that was why he pulled us over - - it was suspicious that everything on a van that old would be working! After he checked our licenses, the cop ordered Joe out of the van. He started to pull his gun as Joe was getting out, so Joe pulled his too. The cop got off the first two shots but luckily Joe wasn't hit and was able to fire back.

Joe: After our bust the Concord house was set on fire because Cin, Nancy and Mizmoon were worried that someone would connect the van with the house before they had time to move everything out. They poured gasoline over everything, but the ventilation was so bad that the fire went out. The fire department report we saw at our trial says that if one window had been left open the house would have been destroyed in minutes.

The biggest mistake was having all that written material laying around the house in the first place. Operating with the idea that a certain house will never be found is foolish. Places like that should be kept as clean as if the Man was going to come busting in at any minute; important things should be memorized. The SLA made a major security error by not destroying the surveillance material and the original communiqué on the Foster action.

BILL: Also there was a parallel being drawn - - Patricia Hearst was seen as a POW just as Russ and Joe were POW's and warnings were put out that her condition was going to correspond to their conditions of incarceration. The implication, of course, was that if the goons at San Quentin messed with Russ and Joe then Patricia Hearst's safety would be endangered.

Emily: Russ and Joe's capture put the SLA on the defensive and nearly eliminated the support infrastructure they had been in the process of building. They never really recovered from this setback. The Hearst kidnapping was intended to win back the initiative - - the offensive - -and then create the conditions of popular support so they could rebuild a strong base. Even though the action itself and the food program did succeed in bringing the SLA a lot of spontaneous support, many problems resulted - - the SLA underestimated the all-out reaction of the police. Their impatience pushed them to a premature action--premature in the sense that they were unprepared to coordinate and bring together and organize the spontaneous momentum sparked by their actions. The isolation that resulted led to some of the other errors. The SLA really suffered from a lack of feedback from outside the group.

Joe: If they had just hidden out and kept track of what was happening for a few months, they would have realized that the whole SLA support infrastructure was still secure and together. Things had been growing rapidly from right after the Foster assassination until we got busted. They could have rebuilt their ties with the federation, gotten some new ID's and safe houses and had things back together in six months time.

Emily: Members of the SLA stood in the food lines to find out the reaction and effects of the program. Most people there were amazed at how many other folks actually needed food. Even though they needed it themselves, they hadn't realized how many others were in a similar situation- -they weren't alone in their problems. It really emphasized certain contradictions; that in this society, which is supposed to be so plentiful, thousands of people are hungry enough that they'll stand in long lines for only small amounts of food. They couldn't even be sure they would get the food 'cause a lot of times the food ran out. Everybody there was hip to the contradiction that at the drop of a hat this rich family could feed all of them, but wouldn't do it unless they were forced.

Bill: People were angry at the quality of the food they were getting. One woman had a can of food that said "hominy" or something on the outside; when she opened it up, it was like dog food. They were bugged about the media, too, seeing the guys with the TV cameras. They'd say stuff like: "If those fools come up here, I'm gonna break that goddamn thing- - the SLA said they didn't want no damned cameras around here".

EMILY: There was a high level of consciousness and solidarity among the folks standing in the food lines. They didn't see it as charity or "blood money". They were proud and felt like they deserved the food. I think it's unfortunate that a lot of white people seemed embarrassed to go. A lot of initial food distribution centers were in predominantly black communities and the Hearst propaganda tried to develop a racist pride in white people that they were "too good to get that food" or to admit that they were poor and hungry too. There were just as many white people as any other race that needed the food. The SLA thought it was important that there be food distribution centers in a wide variety of places so that people wouldn't have to leave the community they lived in and felt comfortable in; that they should be able to stand in line with people from their community.

Emily: "Conversion" is really a bad word. It's been used so many times, I catch myself using it. It wasn't an overnight process because change just doesn't happen like that. With Patty, the process began, I'm convinced, even before the kidnap. She had been very dissatisfied with her life.

Bill: Let's face it--so many people, no matter what their class position, are demoralized by the quality of their life based on the myth of true happiness- - their projection of the American Dream. I think it's clear that Patty was a very unhappy person. Within a few days after her kidnapping she started to raise questions about the SLA's perspective on her family as a ruling-class enemy.

Emily: After the first few days she had the opportunity to talk with anyone she wanted to, if they weren't busy with something else. Willie would read a lot to her and rap about his experiences with revolutionary prisoners. She heard all the news on TV and radio and when the SLA realized how disturbing and demoralizing it was for her, they tried to explain what was happening and why. The event that terrified her most was a raid on a house in Oakland. The police suspected that they had found the SLA hideout so they surrounded it and rushed it with a SWAT team. Patty began to feel that her life was in danger because of the irresponsibility of the police and wondered why her parents were taking so long to comply with the demands It was clear to her that her father had the resources to meet the SLA 's demand for $6 million worth of food, but it was a real shock for her to consider that there were corporate interests that were far more important to him than the safe return of his daughter. She was amazed that he would risk her safety just so he could keep the American people in the dark about the extent of wealth at his fingertips. She heard Randolph on TV saying he just couldn't do any more, like he was helpless or something. She'd say, "That's not like him, someone else is writing it for him- - it just doesn't sound like him." She was more hip than anyone to the whole propaganda campaign.

Joe: Letting Hearst stay was an example of the media effect taking precedence over more important considerations. Everyone realize her decision was a real propaganda coup for the SLA- -here she was joining all these so-called terrorists who had kidnapped her out of the arms of her lover. But we remembered when we had joined- -the SLA was real careful about how solid our political commitment was.

There were a lot of people who would have joined the SLA if we had approached them--people whom we met through the aboveground political work we were doing, but we knew they were flaky (they've proved it since our bust). The SLA would go to great pains to make sure someone's commitment was not based on romanticism or adventurism- -we had talked about that a lot. You'd have to look a long way to find any more dedicated folks.

Emily: The main reason expropriations are important to revolutionaries, and the main reason the SLA did the Hibernia bank robbery, was to obtain needed resources. They needed a large amount of money to survive on and at that time no one in the SLA was able to work. The second reason was to verify that Tania had indeed stayed of her own free will.

• Bill: The SLA members who planned and carried out the expropriation thought that if they were going to have problems it wouldn't be with the customers, and in fact no money was taken from anyone who came in there. But-as it turned out; the person who had responsibility for covering the door wasn't in a good spot, and the two men were able. to run out before she was able to get between them and the exit In the excitement, the two men were fired on - a very serious mistake.

Emily~ Everyone was shaken up 'that two people were unnecessarily shot. We see now that it was, an overreaction to thë situation, but it was a split- second decision. Two men-walked in the front door of the bank and were told to lie on the floor with everyone else, and when they turned around and ran out they were fired on--and both were wounded.

Revolutionaries who are involved in armed actions have to take as many precautions to assure the, safety of innocent bystanders as they do to insure their own safety. With uncooperative-people they have to make split-second decisions, but the basic premise of those decisions must be to use the minimum force necessary to still maintain control. Sometimes there's going to be overreaction: sometimes you have to quickly analyze if someone is a curious but innocent bystander, a John Wayne type who wants to be a hero, or an armed plainclothes cop. The decision has to be based on who you think the person is and what they could do to you, and the indecisiveness can easily result in revolutionaries being killed or injured themselves.

After it came out in the papers who the injured people were, the "SLA really felt badly. In retrospect I think that something should have been put out explaining why the mistake was made and also saying that the SLA was sorry that it happened. It's important for revolutionaries to do that. I think a lot of times the SLA was callous about things; they'd say, "Well, it's too bad. that innocent people have to get hurt sometimes, without explaining why it happens or how it makes you feel, or cop to the criticism that it was a careless mistake.

Bill: It was a serious blemish on something that was otherwise extremely well done. And it was the 'first time those folks had ever done something like that, which was another reason for the overreaction.

Bill: We couldn't contact anyone after the Mel's incident 'cause there was no phone in the 84th Street house. We were afraid that to drive there would potentially lead the police to everyone. The only thing we could do was go to a drive-in that had been selected as a pre-arranged meeting place if anything went down while we were out that day. Unfortunately it turned out to be in the immediate area of Mel's and the other folks never showed up. Our assumption was that they decided not to risk it. We never saw them again.

Bill: Yeah, police agencies didn't know that the SLA was in the LA area until Mel's. Knowing that makes all the other things seem unimportant and the psychological burden of that had been really incredible for me- - I mean how can you describe what it's like to watch the six people you love most in the world being killed? I couldn't sleep that night. It was like there was a record continually going over in my head, "If we just hadn't done this, or if we had just moved faster." My brain was in a turmoil and my heart felt about as big as a trash can. The next day we got the Times and there was a whole page of pictures- - one was of a body that was burnt beyond recognition. But we knew who it was- - the pigs couldn't identify it- - but we knew. It was Willie. We could tell by a belt buckle he had on.

Emily: In terms of numbers, don't think we broke it down so expected 500 police to surround our house. But in terms of the going all-out to kill members o the SLA- -we knew that they had done that right from the very beginning.

There was even a working phone in that house and there wa never any attempt made to communicate with the folks inside. In fact, it's possible that Nancy and Camilla were trying to surrender after the fire caught in the house. They were both shot by snipers as soon as they came out of the house.

I know all of them were afraid but I feel a lot of pride for the courage they showed. Cin could have even walked away from the whole thing- - police interviews of witnesses in the neighborhood show that he had drifted unnoticed through the crowds that afternoon when the police started surrounding the house. He could have just kept walking- -he knew what was happening but he didn't want to split on his comrades.

Joe: We were principled and comradely, but we had to point out that although we loved them, we were revolutionaries before we were members of the SLA. What we saw bothered us because it was leading in a direction that we had seen destroy other groups in the past. What was maybe the most self-destructive error made by the SLA was that although they initially meant to use the media for revolutionary ends, they underestimated its controlling power and eventually became so completely tied up by it that they lost all contact with reality outside of an artificially staged media context. Working within the context of the corporate media can be as overpowering and destructive as working within the system. The media subtly turned the SLA into a performing act that could be depended upon for regular bits of sensationalism. They got to the point of performing with less and less regard for political content or personal safety.

Russ: We felt the whole taped Communiqué #8--the one where Hearst announced that she was joining showed an unbelievable amount of arrogance. It really bothered us much more than we let on- -we felt it was the culmination of a lot of negative trends that had developed and hoped our criticisms would bring them back to reality. We knew they were temporarily high off Patty's decision to join, but we were hoping they would just kick back and reflect.

The SLA wanted to project what a relatively small group of people can do- that we are not as powerless as we are led to believe. The impact of SLA actions proved this point, but it would have been driven home even more if the whole mystique of the SLA had been deal with. The SLA was not an army, but they chose that name because they anticipated the need to build the nucleus of a future people's army. Things like that should have been explained and put into perspective. If there was no people's court, then the SLA shouldn't have referred to one. The SLA should have placed the underground in its proper context as one facet of a protracted struggle waged on many levels, legal and illegal where all forms of struggle are developed harmoniously around the axis of armed struggle.

The SLA also started directing too much: of their language at. The pigs and the left. Distinctions were not clearly made, so a couple of times white folks in general were denounced when in fact the SLA meant to direct their criticism at the opportunistic whites in the left.

Bill: That whole business with death warrants that came out that tape was totally screwed The worst thing about it was the SLA called Robyn Steiner a police agent based on some misinformation, when in fact she hadn't done anything and she actually knew nothing to give away. anyway. There just wasn't any investigation before putting out something as serious as that, an that was inexcusable, considering that a woman's life was put in. jeopardy. And even after Russ and Joe criticized the SLA for this serious error, the charge was never publicly retracted- -another mistake. People should be denounced as police agents unless it have been proven conclusively.

The SLA has been criticized for making a poor attempt at Marxist-Leninist politics when in fact the attempt was consciouly away from these politics. As members of the SLA we took up the philosophy of revolutionary direct action as a tactic to provide the initiative and incentive we felt was necessary to get people out of the stagnant dogma and practice so characteristic of the "New Left".

Originally posted July 01, 2001

Last updated August 25, 2002

(Minor correction in color coding, spelling and spacing and changed email link to currently used. No substantive changes)