Peltier’s lawyers seek hidden FBI files

[seemslikeadream]

BUFFALO, N.Y. — An attorney for imprisoned Native American Indian activist Leonard Peltier accused the government Sept. 13 of withholding documents in the case to cover up its own misconduct 30 years ago.

Michael Kuzma asked a federal judge to order the release of all documents from the FBI’s Buffalo field office as part of the larger effort to free Peltier, 60, who is serving consecutive life sentences for the shooting deaths of two FBI agents during a 1975 standoff on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Earlier this year, the FBI released 797 of the 812 pages compiled by Buffalo investigators but withheld 15 pages, citing national security and foreign relations concerns. The Buffalo files were sought by Peltier’s lawyers in the wake of their discovery, through a related Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, of a heavily excised 1975 Teletype message from the Buffalo office to then-FBI Director Clarence M. Kelley. The message pointed to a government informant’s efforts to infiltrate Peltier’s defense team.

The Buffalo material is among tens of thousands of pages generated by FBI field offices nationwide and being sought by Peltier supporters seeking to have his conviction overturned.

At the time of the 1977 trial, the government turned over roughly 3,500 pages of material to defense attorneys, claiming that this was the full extent of their files. Subsequent FOIA requests by Peltier’s attorneys to the FBI over the past two decades, however, have revealed that over 142,000 pages of material were improperly concealed from Peltier and his lawyers. The Minneapolis field office alone has 90,000 pages on the case that Peltier’s lawyers have never seen.
more
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/5823/1/233

[Zorra]

1. Leonard Peltier is innocent, the FBI knows it.

It was GOON that shot and killed those agents.

[Warpy]

3. I think Peltier will have to wait for those old bastards to retire

if not die. They've built their careers on railroading him into prison, and they'll fight tooth and nail to keep him there.

I was hoping Clinton would have the guts to free him, since the case that convicted him was so obviously bogus, but Clinton turned out to be a gutless wonder at the end.

I'm glad they're finally suing for those files. Let's hope he gets out of prison while he's still got some quality of life left.

[hlthe2b]

2. I've followed this case for years....hoping for some breakthrough/pardon

I love the "Big Dog" but he severely depressed me when he bowed to FBI pressure not to pardon Peltier.

Thanks for posting this....

[seemslikeadream]

6. Dedicated to Leonard Peltier, Anna Mae Aquash, Joseph Stuntz

BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE
Buffy Sainte-Marie


When people ask, "What happened to the North American Indians in the 1880s?", you can pretty much point to the robber barons of the time who needed to make a fortune in oil, gold and other precious metals. Simple greed in the hands of a powerful few who manipulated the media and politicians. When people ask, "What happened to the Indian movement of the sixties and seventies?", you can pretty much point to the same motives a hundred years later, with uranium added to the list in very big print.
The shocking information in this song is not new, but strung together; the events tell a story that most non-Indian people don't know. Dedicated to Leonard Peltier, the memory of Anna Mae Aquash and Joseph Stuntz.

INTRO:
Indian legislation on the desk of a do-right Congressman
Now, he don't know much about the issue
so he picks up the phone and he asks advice from the
Senator out in Indian country
A darling of the energy companies who are
ripping off what’s left of the reservations. Huh.

I learned a safety rule
I don’t know who to thank
Don't stand between the reservation and the
corporate bank
They send in federal tanks
It isn’t nice but it’s reality

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Deep in the Earth
Cover me with pretty lies
bury my heart at Wounded Knee. Huh.

They got these energy companies that want the land
and they’ve got churches by the dozen who want to
guide our hands
and sign Mother Earth over to pollution, war and
greed
Get rich... get rich quick.

We got the federal marshals
We got the covert spies
We got the liars by the fire
We got the FBIs
They lie in court and get nailed
and still Peltier goes off to jail


My girlfriend Annie Mae talked about uranium
Her head was filled with bullets and her body dumped
The FBI cut off her hands and told us she’d died of
exposure
Loo loo loo loo loo

We had the Goldrush Wars
Aw, didn’t we learn to crawl and still our history gets
written in a liar’s scrawl
They tell ‘ya “Honey, you can still be an Indian
d-d-down at the ‘Y’
on Saturday nights”

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Deep in the Earth
Cover me with pretty lies
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee. Huh!

http://www.creative-native.com/albums/coin.htm

:hi: hlthe2b

[hlthe2b]

7. Thanks, SeemslikeaDream

great piece..... :toast: (to Leonard's ultimate release and vindication)

[ThomCat]

4. I will never be in a position to prove his innocense

But I firmly, strongly believe he was set up and railroaded. He was innocent. He was a good man standing up for a good cause, and our government destroyed his life for petty, political power and bigotry.

What we have done to Native American's since the beginning, and what we still continue to their money that we supposedly hold in trust is disgusting.

This is a deep shame upon all of us as Americans because it happened in our names.

[NVMojo]

5. you got that right

it's time for us to quit making museums of Indian's lives and FREE PELTIER as the first step in the right direction!!!!

[knowbody0]

8. buried my heart at wounded knee

i will fight no more forever

[struggle4progress]

9. kick for the continuing crimes of Nixon. eom

[sandnsea]

10. Bring him back to Oregon

Try him for attempting to murder the cop here and sentence him to life in Oregon. Everybody's happy.

[tkmorris]

11. Oh?

I suppose you mean the two police officers who shot at him as he fled, then claimed that he actually did the shooting? The charges that were dropped? Oh, ok.

[sandnsea]

13. Poor poor Leonard

Everybody all over the country shooting at him for no particular reason. It's amazing how many people were shooting at poor innocent Leonard who never did a mean thing in his life. Good grief. Charges were dropped, charges can be brought again. People know a whole lot more about Leonard Peltier now then they did then. If he wants a new trial, let him have one. In Oregon. Get it all out, once and for all.

[seemslikeadream]

24. Yes, by all means let's get it all out once and for all.

What about a trial for the U S Government?

Whole civilizations were driven into extinction and entire races of peoples, such as the Beothuk and Mohegan, disappeared from the face of Mother Earth.

[Zorra]

16. Yuh. Everybody's happy.

"one of the things we have got to do, we can’t just claim to be American Indian Movement members and we’re concerned about people and every thing else. We have to really start doing stuff- build community gardens, chop wood, hauling water. Whatever they needed doing because that’s what you responsibility is. Not just prancing around with a gun in your hand and thinking you’re showing everybody your tough. In our society that’s not a warrior role."

-Leonard Peltier, Chippewa/Sioux

"The violent rap that got laid on us. It was all out people. You don’t see a long list of feds, death squad members or any of those other people, you don’t see a long list of their dead, you see a long list of our dead and you look at that list and beside it is an Indian name almost exclusively.”

-John Trudell, Santee

You know, sandandsea, I get the distinct impression you are a white man or woman.

Not that there is anything wrong with that, it just often seems to, from my humble and often erroneous point of view, predispose some folks to a real lack of understanding about what it is like to not be a white in America.

[sandnsea]

17. You'd be wrong

In any event, thugs are thugs. This guy's a thug, plain and simple. Nobody ends up in this many shoot outs on accident. I've read everything on Leonard Peltier, so you can spare me. He's guilty, that's all.

[Charlie Brown]

19. I've heard the same kind of arguments about Martin Luther King

but I guess one person's agitator is another's hero.

[sandnsea]

20. He shot cops, did he? Sure. lol. n/t

[Charlie Brown]

21. No, but many people accused him

of inciting riots and violence. I don't believe that, but it was not an uncommon perspective.

From a book by Louis Waldman (Black Labor lawyer):

On the same day that members of the Supreme Court delivered their verdict against King's inflammatory escapades, riots were raging. In Tampa, Florida; Montgomery, Alabama; Los Angeles, California; and Cincinnati, Ohio, the riots were particularly intense.50 Giving the impression that he was righteous and the Supreme Court was wrong, King said that the Supreme Court's decision would “encourage riots and violence, in the sense that it all but said that Negroes cannot redress their grievances through peaceful measures without facing the kind of decision we face.”51 How he figured that the “measures” he took were “peaceful” is something the world will never know; what is known is that the rioting to which he referred took the lives of a few people and ransacked the city of Birmingham. Of course, King's diatribe was stated four years after the Birmingham riots, which was brought to the attention of the Supreme Court; and he probably figured that everyone had a short-term memory and would not remember.
Whenever police were sent to stop the random violence that King's followers caused, King would scream police brutality. It was a simple two-step process: 1.) King would provoke riots by his comments; 2.) When the police came to stop the ensuing violence, his followers would resist and then blame any injuries on the police. King's methodology was very similar to what Fidel Castro used initially to take control of Cuba. Senator James Martin of Alabama stated a distinct similarity between King's and Castro's methods:

“In a memorandum circulated in Cuba before the communist revolution, the first point in the formula was to `discredit the police in every way by causing incidents which will lead to arrest and then charging police brutality.' The program now being carried on in the United States by Martin Luther King and others is following this formula to the letter, whether King and those who constantly criticize the police know it or not. The shameful riots in Los Angeles in which screaming mobs burned, robbed, and murdered had not even ended before Martin King was charging police brutality and demanding the firing of the nation's finest police chiefs.”52

King claimed that there were problems in Montgomery, Alabama. He asked President Eisenhower to stop-what King called-“a reign of terror.”53 The city's police commissioner dismissed King's claim, suggesting that it was merely “the rantings of a rabble-rousing agitator.”

[sandnsea]

22. That's not murder

It's not the same thing at all. To even put a murdering thug like Leonard Peltier in the same class as Martin Luther King is a disgrace. He's no martyr. He's a criminal. George Bush stands up and uses Christianity as a cover for his crimes, Peltier uses the Indian Nation. Both thugs who care about nothing but themselves.

[seemslikeadream]

25. In Washington they call it assimilation

"In Washington they call it assimilation.
In Ottawa Indian Progress.
In Quebec Francization.
We who are the victims call it genocide!"



Washington may castigate the regimes of other countries for invading their neighbours, yet the United States itself has been entirely stolen from its rightful owners. Modern America is built on the blood of the Native American Indian, whose lands were possessed illegally, while virtually every treaty signed by the white man was broken. Democracy, equality, liberty and justice - the supposed values of the United States - have been denied to America's original inhabitants.

[seemslikeadream]

23. Nobody ends up in this many shoot outs on accident?

You could be talking about the U S Federal Government.

GENOCIDE

Why aren't you as upset with the perpetrators of genocide.

[seemslikeadream]

12. 112 million - today, fewer than two million survive in the U.S.

In the entire history of colonisation, no people has been subjected to a more ruthless regime of land-seizure, economic exploitation and genocide than have the original inhabitants of North America.

At the time the present-day United States was settled by Europeans, it was abundantly populated by scores of separate nations with diverse civilisations and cultures -- from the Cheyenne and the Navajo in the west and the Sioux and Arapahoe in the north to the Seminole and Choctaw of the South and the Cherokee and Mohawk of the east. Their numbers were never accurately recorded, but one major American encyclopedia estimates that the territory's pre-settlement population may have been as high as 112 million.

Today, fewer than two million survive in the U.S. (a mere 1.4 million according to the 1980 census), and many of their ancient languages and cultures have been lost except for the names given to towns, rivers and other landmarks.

....

DESPITE COMPLAINTS BY HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS
ABOUT FORCED STERILIZATIONS AND LACK OF
INFORMED CONSENT, THE `INDIAN' POPULATION
CONTROL PROGRAM IS STILL IN FORCE. AND SOME
FAMILY PLANNING GROUPS ARE NOW SAYING THERE
NEVER WAS ANY GENOCIDE....


Sterilization Abuse

Several studies and reports indicate that minority women in the United States, including Native American women, are at least twice as likely to be sterilized as are their white counterparts. S. B. Ruzek, in a 1978 book about women's health issues, revealed that only seven percent of all married white women in the U.S. have been sterilized, whereas 14 percent of indigenous American women and fully 20 percent of African-American women have undergone the procedure. Ruzek added that despite political protest against involuntary sterilizations, a survey of doctors in four cities found that 94 percent of gynecologists favored mandatory sterilization of welfare recipients under certain circumstances. (The Women's Health Movement: Feminist Alternatives to Medical Control, New York, Praeger, 1978).

In 1977, a Native American physician, Dr. Constance Redbird Uri, published even more alarming findings. Uri interviewed one thousand Native women who had been sterilized, and concluded that only one of them had freely decided to forego childbearing. In her report, which was published in the Medical Tribune of August 24, 1977, Dr. Uri stated that she had became involved in the issue of sterilization abuse 1972, after learning that the government was conducting large numbers of permanent sterilization procedures on relatively young Native American women. She reported that thousands of sterilizations had been done in just four Indian Health Service (IHS) regions between 1973 and 1976, and projected that at least 20 percent of all Native women in the U.S. have had the operation. Dr. Uri warned that if the coercive sterilizations continued at the same rate, all pureblood Indian races would be eliminated in only 15 years.

more
http://www.africa2000.com/BNDX/BAO320.htm



“I did not know how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream...”

— Black Elk
Oglala Holy Man
on the aftermath of the Massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota
December, 1890
the United States Army Seventh Cavalry used gattling guns
to slaughter 300 helpless Lakota children, men and women

[sattahipdeep]

26. Osceola's Head

After defeating the U.S. in the early battles of the Second Seminole War,
Seminole leader Osceola was captured by the United States on Oct. 20, 1837,
when U.S. troops said they wanted a truce to talk peace.
http://www.indigenouspeople.net/osceola.htm

This event remains today one of the blackest marks in American military history.



Seminole chief Osceola led the vastly outnumbered resistance
during the Second Seminole War. Approximately 4,000 Indian
warriors effectively employed hit-and-run guerrilla tactics
with devastating effect against over 200,000 United States Army troops
for many years. Osceola was arrested when he came under a flag of truce
to negotiations in 1837. He died in jail? less than a year later.

http://www.archaeology.org/0401/abstracts/osceola.html

:hi: seemslikeadream

[seemslikeadream]

27. Crow is an omen of change

Crow is an omen of change. Crow lives in the void and has no sense of time. The Ancient Chiefs tell us that Crow sees simultaneously the three fates--- past, present, and future. Crow merges light and darkness, seeing both inner and outer reality.

If Crow medicine appears in ones life, you must pause and reflect on how you see the laws of the Great Spirit in relation to the laws of humanity. Crow medicine signifies a firsthand knowledge of a higher order of right and wrong than that indicated by the laws created in human culture. With Crow medicine, you speak in a powerful voice when addressing issues that for you seem out of harmony, out of balance, out of whack, or unjust.

Remember that Crow looks at the world with first one eye, and then the other--- cross-eyed. In the Mayan culture, cross-eyeds had the privilege and duty of looking into the future. You must put aside your fear of being a voice in the wilderness.

As you learn to allow your *personal integrity* to be your guide, your sense of feeling alone will vanish. Your *personal will* can then emerge so that you will stand in your truth. The prime path of true Crow people says to be mindful of your opinions and actions. Be willing to walk your talk, speak your truth, know your life's mission, and balance past, present, and future in the now. Shape shift that old reality and become your future self. Allow the bending of physical laws to aid in creating the shape shifted world of peace.

Peace sattahipdeep :hi:

[sattahipdeep]

28. Yes, yes, yes "Peace"

First one eye, and then the other....

[Charlie Brown]

14. Isn't Peltier the Presidential candidate?

for the Peace and Freedom Party?

[seemslikeadream]

15. Yes Charlie Brown, he is

Leonard Peltier for President
LEONARD PELTIER
#89637-132
P.O. BOX 1000
LEAVENWORTH, KS 66048

Leonard Peltier's campaign coordinator is one of his lawyers:
Barry A. Bachrach
Bowditch & Dewey
P.O. Box 15156
Worcester, MA 01608

Statement by Leonard Peltier
I am a Native American who has suffered nearly 28 years in prison, even though government attorneys and courts acknowledge that the government withheld evidence, fabricated evidence, and coerced witnesses to fraudulently convict me. But the courts say they have no power to correct the wrongs of our government. If the Courts do not, who does? I will ensure that all peoples receive justice. Environmental protection is paramount for our survival. The earth is our sacred Mother who nourishes us. Our government is destroying the earth by allowing its usurpation for greedy purposes. I will protect the environment. All minorities must be allowed to maintain their languages and traditions with dignity. I personally suffered the indignity of being deprived of speaking my native tongue and following Lakota traditions. This country has engaged in genocidal policies to exterminate virtually every minority, especially those who express dissent and seek equal justice. Now is the time to end the continuing injustices of this government and ensure liberty and equal health care to all. Luther Standing Bear, a Sioux Chief, stated: "Out of the Indian approach to life became a great freedom -- an intense and absorbing love for nature; a respect for life; enriching in a supreme power; and principals of truth, honesty, generosity, equity, and brotherhood as a guard to mundane relations." That statement exemplifies the basic truths of life. I will represent all people, not the entrepreneurs who care only how much money can be stuffed into their pockets.
http://www.peaceandfreedom2004.org/lpeltier/

[burrowowl]

18. I hope Peltier

gets out of prison and those FBI guys get their asses in prison. But under A$$KKKroft, will it happen?
And yes, I was DAMN DISAPPOINTED IN CLINTON!