A ‘Bomb-Making Clinic,’ or a Dud of a Case?

Comrades! Plot is foiled! Plan to destroy heart of capitalism lies in ruins!

Lackey judge and running-dog district attorney keep out of trial of former Symbionese Liberation Army comrade Sara Jane Olson the TV cameras, by which we hoped to learn to make the pipe bombs. Plan to sit in proletarian den and find how to build bomb from wide-screen CNN cannot now come to pass. Comrades must go to Plan B: Give capitalist pigs Bill Gates and Donald Trump hotfoot.

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Rule 980 of the California Rules of Courts lists 19 factors to consider in letting TV in a courtroom. For the trial of People vs. Olson (the former Kathleen Soliah, the SLA sympathizer accused of putting pipe bombs under two police cars in 1974), the Los Angeles district attorney’s office checked off all but five of them.

The D.A. argues that “the sensitive nature of the central focus of the evidence--the design, construction and terrorist use of explosive devices--makes this trial particularly inappropriate for live television coverage.” To air it, the D.A. contends, would be as irresponsible as airing pornography.

That’s a very high threshold for testimony about two pipe bombs that didn’t go off. Just as high is the presumption that anyone in this short attention-span culture will endure days of legal shuttlecock for what prosecutors say will be “essentially a clinic on how to make bombs, with visual demonstrations.”

Why, when only mouse-clicks away is no dearth of how-to information? In two days of desultory looking, I:

* Stopped by Vroman’s books in Pasadena to order the notorious classic “The Anarchist Cookbook,” which carries more disclaimers than Marlboros. I had to pay the $25 in advance, but opted against $15 extra for a rush order.

* Found data online from fringe groups, from a micro-publisher with 36 books and videos--labeled “for academic study only”--and from a university’s marketing study of soybean oil citing its usefulness as a blasting agent.

* Consulted Helen Haskell of the Los Angeles Public Library, who found nearly 100 years of relevant volumes, some military, some high-tech, some relying on kitchen measuring cups. A few are on open shelves, more are behind the counter. Patrons must leave an ID to consult them because, like UFO books, so many get stolen.

* Rummaged through Amazon.comland’s many books and CD-ROMs on the subject.

* Turned up a Justice Department study on the availability of bomb-making information, some of it on the shelves of the Library of Congress.

I didn’t check on e-Bay for plutonium, but in this world, everything’s for sale.

It was no pleasure to read all this, but nobody has to watch CNN for the recipes. The Unabomber didn’t even own a TV. If trial TV amounts to an extension course in crime, then couch potatoes could be offing parents a la Menendez, getting rich by sticking it to the masses like Charles Keating, or learning from the Simpson case how to cut a throat.

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The LAPD is understandably twitchy. Its bomb expert in 1975 was Arleigh McCree, a man of worldwide renown. His father was a coal mine dynamiter, his grandfather an Irish freedom fighter who fled to the U.S. with a reputation as a top IRA explosives man.

I met McCree at the 1984 Olympics, after a disturbed cop planted a fake bomb so he could “defuse” it and be acclaimed as a hero. McCree’s death in 1986, from a booby-trapped pipe bomb, was a grievous loss to the LAPD, whose present bomb experts have “legitimate concerns,” prosecutors said, about a televised trial.

Yet for the judge, a key consideration in ruling against TV was witness Patricia Hearst, kidnapped by the SLA and then convicted of helping them to rob a bank. Her own book revealed rape and abuse at her captors’ hands. The judge ruled that he could not put her on the stand with “the whole country hanging on everything that comes from her lips.”

(This is not the first instance of official concern. After the 1974 SLA shootout, both the coroner and the mayor phoned publishing magnate Randolph Hearst to tell him his daughter was not among the dead. The names of those who were dead were announced on TV.)

One reason is not listed among the D.A.’s 14. It is, I suspect--and not without sympathy--a big one. This is an old case, tricky to prosecute, and hung like an albatross around the neck of a D.A.’s office already bruised and beaten up over high-profile cases. The last thing it needs after a long, tough day on Court TV is to go home to the nightly lampooning of Leno and Letterman.

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.