Campus Terrorism

BERKELEY-An ultra-conservative political group has asked the state attorney general and the Alameda County District Attorney's office to investigate its claim that international terrorism-including the recent kidnapping of Brig. Gen. James Dozier in Italy-can be linked to "radical networks" centered at the University of California at Berkeley.

The National Democratic Policy Committee, the group which sponsored Lyndon La Rouche's 1980 presidential bid, presented the attorney general's office with 50 pages of documents that purportedly link several scholars with terrorism, reported The High-lander. The University of California at Riverside campus newspaper.

The group claims that "since the late 1950s, the branches of the social sciences known as 'criminology,' international law and 'deviant studies' have been a thinly veiled cover for the training, recruiting and deploying of international terrorist organizations of both red (communist) and black (neo-fascist) varieties."

The committee's report charges that Giovanni Senzani, a purported Red Brigade terrorist whom Italian police have linked to the Dozier kidnapping, is being investigated for possible membership in terrorist networks associated with the Berkeley sociology and criminology departments.

Robert Belleh, chairman of Berkeley's sociology department, labeled the charges "nothing but a smear," adding that casting an academic department as terrorist without specifically naming anyone is "sounding off with nonsense."

Several suspected terrorists have visited and studied at Berkeley. Senzani attended the campus in 1972-73, and the Oakland Tribune reported last year that Iranian revolutionary leaders also studied there.