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THE MICHIGAN GAILY

P0ge S~x THE M!CHIGAN DAILY


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charges dropped
in CIA bombing

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By ROSE SUE BERSTEIN
and JIM KENTCH
Three Rainbow People's Party
(RPP) members were freed
late last July from charges in-
volving the bombing of the Ann
Arbor Central Intelligence Ag-
ency (CIA) office in August,
1968.
Freed were Pun Plamondon
who, faced charges of "destruc-
tion of government property
with the use of explosives," and
;John Sinclair and Jack Forrest
who faced conspiracy charges.
Plamondon was released on
$50,000 bond late last June from
the federal penitentiary in Terre
Haute, Ind.
Prior to a Supreme Court
ruling earlier that month which
struck down the government's
practice of wiretapping suspect-
ed political " subversives.," Pla-
mondon had been ineligible for
release under bond.I
The government had been di-
rected by U.S. District Judge
Damon Keith of Detroit to either

"We were never engag-
ed in criminal activity. We
were just viciously -perse-
cuted. Some actual crimin-
als we reIlly want to deal
with are those who run the
correctional institutions."
-John Sinclair
R.P.P.
disclose evidence against Pla-
mondon gathered by wiretap-
ping or drop the charges.
Ralph Guy, U.S. attorney for
the eastern district of Michi-
gan, said that logs of the elec-
tronic surveillance couldn't be
revealed in the interest of na-
tional security.
Plamondon offered another ex-
planation for the government's

Thursdoy, Sdptember 7, 1972
action. "They don't want to set
a precedent by releasing wire-
tap logs, because then they'd be
forced to release their logs of
othe~r people."
"They knew they didn't have
a case in the first place," he
continued. "It was part of their
campaign to discredit us and
the whole radical and progres-
sive mnovement."
Oddly enough, Plamondon
claimed that his phone had not
been tapped, but that the gov-
ernment had listened to his con-
versations with the Detroit Black
Panthers, whose phone had been
tapped.
Plamondon further claimed
that it would have been diffi-
cult for the government to prove
that the bombed CIA office, lo-
cated at the corner of Main and
Jefferson, was actually govern-
ment property. "We didn't even
know there was a CIA office in
Ann Arbor," he saide
"We were never engaged in
criminal activity," Sinclair ex-
plained. "We were just viciously
persecuted. Some actual crimi-
nals we really want to deal with
are those who run the correc-
tional institutions."
Our record," he continued, "of
calling people criminals and
then proving our case is pretty
good."
Although the news was a great
relief to Plamondon, the for-
mer member of the FBI's "ten
most wanted" list still faces
another felony charge of car-
rying a concealed weapon.

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