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It is far more believable that the FBI, which had targeted AIM members and sympathizers as part of its notorious COINTELPRO program, was using any cover story, no matter how flimsy or incredible, as an excuse to enter the Pine Ridge reservation--where the FBI normally would have no jurisdiction--to monitor, harass, and intimidate a group that had been labeled "subversive". This latter explanation is supported by the fact that, although literally dozens of Native Americans had been murdered or killed under suspicious circumstances on the reservation during the very time period that the FBI was sparing no expense to "neutralize" AIM, the FBI never deigned to investigate any of these killings. Murder may be a crime, but, to the fed mind, not of the caliber of theft of footwear.
But selective enforcement of the law by the feds and the local authorities was not unusual on the reservation; nor was trying to make the "facts" fit a preconceived notion of how events must have occurred-one of the most glaring examples of which was the FBI's almost comical attempt to morph the red pick-up into Peltier's red-and-white van in order to make their theory of Peltier's guilt more plausible. Another notorious, and illustrative, instance of coordinated government malfeasance and indifference-even hostility-toward the lives and rights of reservation Indians involved the case of the suspicious death of Anna Mae Aquash.
Aquash, a woman who had been an AIM member, was found dead in a remote area of the reservation in early 1976. Although it was later determined that there were no drugs or alcohol in her system, the coroner--who could not fathom all this commotion over something so "awfully routine": "So they found an Indian body," he shrugged--declared that Aquash had died from exposure after falling down, probably while intoxicated, and hitting her head. A second autopsy, which the victim's family insisted on, performed by a competent doctor, revealed that the wound in the back of the victim's head was an obvious gunshot wound. (Incredibly, the first doctor continued to maintain that the gunshot wound, which he had missed, was still not a factor--Aquash had died of natural causes...coincidentally, while being shot in the head.) The FBI's probing of Aquash's death and possible rape was limited to desecrating the dead woman's body by cutting off her hands (to facilitate identification, it was said), and not investigating the murder, possibly because an FBI agent may very well have been involved in it.
In many other cases, the killings on the reservation were carried out by goons, the FBI-trained and -funded enforcers of the reservation's corrupt Tribal Council, a puppet government that was at the time--and not coincidentally--busy signing away, illegally, the Indians' rights to land that just happened to be extremely mineral-rich and, hence, worth an almost incalculable amount of money to various corporations. Reservation goons were allowed to get away, quite literally, with murder. Dick Wilson, the leader of the council, made no secret of the fact that he was only too happy to use violence against anyone who stood in his way, and he did not feel it was necessary to confine his Gestapo tactics to AIM members and sympathizers alone. It was not unusual, on the Pine Ridge reservation, for goons (who proudly co-opted the term "goons", claiming it stood for Guardians of the Oglala Nation, which, needless to say, is decidedly not the reason others on the reservation called them goons) to go about at night shooting indiscriminately into people's homes; to assault men and women, unprovoked; and to file charges with the Bureau of Indian Affairs police against any person presumptuous enough to fight back against the goons' unprovoked attacks-especially if the defender managed to get the better of the goons. Since many goons were themselves BIA police, their complaints usually fell on sympathetic ears. The treatment by the BIA, the goons and the FBI of the traditional Indians on the Pine Ridge reservation was so bad, the chance for any sort of fairness or justice from those quarters was so shamefully remote, that the Traditional Elders invited AIM onto the reservation to protect them from these agents of persecution.
The treatment of Indians off the reservation, it should be noted, was not much better: it was not unknown for Indian men to be charged with, and convicted of, interfering with an officer in the performing of his duties for attempting to stop policemen from beating them. For an Indian, self-defense was considered a felony.
It was exactly this type of treatment of, and attitude toward, Native Americans that the American Indian Movement was formed to protest and to bring to the consciousness, and conscience, of the American public. AIM was guilty of spreading the word to fellow Indians that their Native American heritage was something they should be proud of, something they should attempt to reconnect with--and this message, coupled with the group's constant emphasis on the fact that the US government had, throughout its history, violated every agreement it had struck with Native Americans, was enough to warrant AIM's being put on the COINTELPRO hitlist.
Whatever the two FBI agents' actual reason for being on the reservation on June 26, 1975, they ended up in a fire fight with members of AIM who were, at the time, encamped on the property of a Native American couple named Jumping Bull. The agents were killed at close range under circumstances that remain unclear and under dispute to this day. (It is not known, for instance, who fired the first shot in the gunfight or why.) There is, however, little doubt that the agents were intentionally murdered, ruthlessly executed at close range while wounded and helpless. Also killed, at long range, was an AIM member by the name of Joe Killsright Stuntz who was involved in the gun battle that day. Stuntz's death was never investigated.
What was, however, pretty apparent from the beginning, and has become increasingly obvious in the intervening years, is the pattern of deceit and illegality on the part of the FBI and other authorities involved in the "investigations" prior and subsequent to the "ResMurs", as the Oglala killings became known. The FBI was, for instance, not above supplying convenient last minute "witnesses" to testify at the trials of AIM members when it looked as though the accused might be acquitted for lack of evidence. On at least two occasions before the ResMurs trials, the FBI employed this tactic: once in an attempt to secure a conviction against Dennis Banks and Russell Means for their part in the occupation of Wounded Knee, which resulted in the FBI's being reprimanded by the judge in the case for such an obvious act of bad faith and suborning of perjury; and again, less than two years later, when the same FBI agent, David Price, supplied another last-minute "witness" in a case involving AIM leader Dick Marshall-this time resulting in a conviction for murder based on evidence that it would be charitable to describe as questionable.
But since this strategy of supplying false witnesses and testimony had worked once, the FBI, in short order, also provided doubtful "eye-witnesses" in the ResMurs trial of Butler and Robideau as well as a perjured affidavit to get Leonard Peltier extradited from Canada. Peltier was extradited from Canada on the strength of this affidavit supplied by a woman who claimed to have seen him shoot the two FBI agents. What the FBI did not tell the Canadian court was that the same woman had, in her first affidavit--which was suppressed by the FBI-claimed to have left the Jumping Bull property days before the shoot-out. The FBI had merely kept after her until she supplied them with a version of events that would serve to expedite Peltier's extradition. (The woman, Myrtle Poor Bear, was so utterly unbelievable in her testimony that the prosecution in the Peltier case decided not to call her as a witness. When she recanted her affidavit testimony--explaining how the FBI coerced it with threats and other intimidation tactics--the judge in Peltier's trial ruled her testimony irrelevant and refused to allow the jury to hear it.)
The government dropped its case against one man accused in the ResMurs case for lack of evidence; and found, to its dismay, that its heavy-handed tactics in the trial of the two other accused, Dino Butler and Bob Robideau, had backfired. The trial was held in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and the FBI, in a flight of paranoid fancy that makes Ronald Reagan's fairy tale about Libyan hit squads roaming the US in the 1980s seem almost rational, deluged the area, and, indeed, the country, with false stories about an army of AIM-trained Indian "Dog Soldier" hitmen who were spreading out across the country with the mission of committing assassinations to disrupt the US's Bicentennial celebrations. The good people of Cedar Rapids were left in little doubt that they would be targeted since their town was hosting the trial of the two AIM members Butler and Robideau. The Dog Soldiers never materialized. Groups of polite, well-behaved Indian supporters of Butler and Robideau did, however. When the people of Cedar Rapids saw firsthand that the Indians were not the blood-thirsty terrorists that the FBI had depicted; and when they heard testimony at the trial as to the FBI's illegal and unconscionable police-state tactics against activist Indians (only some of which have been adumbrated in this essay), they applauded along with the AIM supporters when Butler and Robideau were found not guilty of all charges by reason of self-defense.
Having failed to railroad Butler and Robideau, and having dropped the charges against the fourth suspect, the government felt that it had to convict Peltier. The FBI once again made certain to let the Peltier trial jury members-and the people of Fargo, where the trial was held-know that their lives were in imminent danger. The people of Fargo were, evidently, more receptive to this fiction, even though those perennial no-shows, the mythical Dog Soldiers, failed, yet again, to make an appearance. The government managed to have Peltier's trial presided over by an overtly biased judge who ruled, essentially, that the incident on June 26, 1975, must be ripped from the meaningful context in which it occurred: no evidence describing the police state atmosphere at the Pine Ridge reservation would be allowed; all evidence indicating that the AIM members at Oglala had acted in self-defense would not be allowed; evidence of the FBI's pattern of suborning perjury in order to obtain convictions would not be allowed. In short, the judge managed to rule out as "irrelevant" just about every scrap of evidence that might tend to prove Peltier's innocence or that might show a pattern of FBI behavior that amounted to nothing less than a conspiracy against AIM members in general and Peltier in particular--including prosecution witnesses (Myrtle Poor Bear was not the only one) who were willing to testify that their affidavits against Peltier were coerced by the FBI agents who used threats and intimidation to get the "witnesses" to say what the FBI needed to get a conviction. Yet at the same time, the judge allowed gross misstatements of fact by the prosecution to go not merely unpunished, but uncorrected. One example: Peltier's previous felonies were continually trotted out and held against him to show he was a desperate and remorseless killer. The fact that Peltier had never previously been convicted of a felony was not sufficient reason for the judge to rule these repeated references inadmissible.
Under these grossly unfair conditions, the government was finally able to obtain a conviction in the ResMurs case.
After the jury convicted him but before his sentencing, Peltier, in a ringing indictment of the U.S. justice system and the orchestrated and unconscionable unfairness of the trial, quoted at length in In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, rightly and eloquently accused the judge of being nothing more or less than a tool of the FBI. Shortly thereafter, he was, as he predicted he would be in his address to the court, sentenced to two life terms running consecutively.
At about the same time, David Price, the very FBI agent with the uncanny ability repeatedly to turn up last minute "witnesses" to fill in, conveniently, the missing details in the government cases in the trials of AIM members, filed suit against Matthiessen and his publisher, Viking. It has been assumed, with good reason, that Price's suit was bankrolled by the FBI. Price's argument evidently boiled down to his objection to Matthiessen's having quoted sources who did not think that Price's special ability to "find" last minute witnesses was unremarkable-who, indeed, suspected that Price's talent for finding missing links was in reality exactly what it appeared to be: the result of a colossally lax attitude toward the suborning of perjury. And these sources said so.
But since the view of Price as a malefactor and a felon was given voice by "disreputable" AIM people, Price believed that the courts should punish Matthiessen for reporting it, and, perhaps, for believing it. Not content with having run roughshod over the people of Pine Ridge; with having almost certainly manufactured evidence against members of AIM on several occasions and having done it with impunity, Price evidently would not rest until it should be made illegal even to report the evidence that might lead a reasonable person to conclude that Price's probity and honesty were far from unimpeachable. But these are the wrong thoughts to have, so Price sued. Perhaps Price merely desired a formal ruling in favor of the FBI's right to act as thought police, which it was doing anyway.
Instances of government officials' so blithely filing $25 million lawsuits--and thereby managing to keep information as important and urgent as that contained in Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse off bookshelves and all but unavailable for over seven years--should send chills up the spines of all who value free speech. Matthiessen and Viking eventually prevailed, but at the cost of $2 million and seven years' worth of time and lost sales. It is difficult not to view the Matthiessen/Viking victory as a Pyrrhic one. For seven years, an eloquent voice in favor of indigenous peoples' rights was muted, virtually silenced. A unmistakable and frightening message was successfully transmitted to anyone who might dream of bringing a voice of dissent to a wider audience: Go ahead and try, but first ask yourself: is it worth $2 million? Is it worth spending years of your life in litigation? The answers to these questions may well be in the affirmative, but how many voices that emerge from outside the mainstream of America would be able to outlast an opponent who is being bankrolled by a source--the government--with virtually unlimited funds? How many could compete with an opponent who is more than willing to use the power inherent in his position as a public official to intimidate bookstores into engaging in preemptive self-censorship? Viking and Matthiessen were lucky: they had deep pockets and eventually prevailed. Many would have had to capitulate, regardless of the rightness of their cause, once the legal bills began to pile up. It is reasonable to assume that this was the hope of both Price and Janklow in the bringing of their suits-to outspend and outlast their opponents-since the suits themselves were devoid of any real legal merit.
On Saturday, June 27, 1998, I attended a demonstration, sponsored by the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee (LPDC), held outside the White House, protesting Peltier's continued imprisonment. After the rally, I decided to see if any of the major news media made mention of the event. Predictably, I could find no mention of it.
In a way, this is unsurprising for a very innocent reason: the demonstration was not really all that well attended. I would estimate attendance was no more than 500 people at its height; even one of the speakers expressed mild disappointment at the turnout.
But the turnout at the rally can itself be viewed as a testament to how well the mainstream media has kept the issue of American political prisoners off the agenda. Although the New York Times Magazine recently called Peltier "ubiquitous" in a slightly snide-of-tone article in which Peltier's name is mentioned in passing--lumped together with the likes of Charles Manson and John Gotti--it is certainly not the Times, or any of the other bastions of the mainstream, that has contributed to this alleged "ubiquity".
Despite the years of protest against Leonard Peltier's wrongful imprisonment; despite government officials' admissions in the intervening years that they have no idea who killed agents Williams and Coler; despite the overwhelming evidence of egregious FBI malfeasance and civil and human rights violations that was known about before the conviction of Peltier, and the mountains of evidence that have been revealed since-some having specifically to do with the ResMurs case; some having to do with the FBI's willingness to railroad other innocent people as part of its COINTELPRO program; and some having to do with general FBI incompetence in the handling and processing of evidence; despite the fact that the FBI continues to refuse to declassify thousands of pages of documents relating to the case--perhaps, it can reasonably be inferred, because they contain evidence that would be harmful to the official version of the incident; and despite the literally millions of signatures on petitions calling for the release of Peltier--despite all of this, Leonard Peltier, a man who is almost certainly innocent of the crime for which he was convicted and who unquestionably was stripped of his right to a fair and impartial trial, remains in prison to this day. And remains there, unquestionably, for political reasons. What would it take to qualify as a political prisoner in the United States?
To the mainstream press, this is not an outrage: to the Times, it seems, Peltier's is a name that is, and should be, mentioned in the same breath as Charles Manson's and John Gotti's--killers all who, inexplicably, have their groupies who would like to see them released.
But unlike Gotti and Manson, Leonard Peltier is something that the Times could never admit we have in the U.S.: a political prisoner-a species of animal that does not exists here.
If the New York Times actually cared about freedom of speech as an end in itself, its article on Matthiessen's triumph over Janklow might not have been buried on page C19 in a 2 paragraph exercise in minimalism that never even mentions Leonard Peltier's name. On October 31, 1990, Leonard Peltier managed to be not so ubiquitous-at least in the Times.
The bitter irony of the fact that on June 26, 1998--the twenty-third anniversary of the shoot-out at Oglala--Bill Clinton was in China lecturing President Jiang about human rights (for which the Chinese government, it goes without saying, does indeed deserve to be taken to task) was not lost on the people who gathered in DC to protest Peltier's continued imprisonment. Restoration of Leonard Peltier's human rights would be no more than one pen-stroke away for Clinton, who has the power to grant Peltier clemency, but who has, so far, refused to do so for years. Is it anything less than a form of slow torture that Peltier suffers in agony from a life-threatening jaw ailment that is a result, at least in part, of botched prison medical treatment while being refused his right to have the ailment treated by competent doctors (the Mayo Clinic, for one, has offered its services)? But it is still far easier to see the mote in the other's eye than the beam in one's own: China violates people's human rights; the United States does not. China locks people up for purely political reasons; the United States does not.
The New York Times, which, of course, reported the China debate, did not perceive the irony. Nor, as far as I know, did any other mainstream news source.