Why Leonard Peltier Must be Freed Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit ------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the November 20, 1997 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- CAMPAIGN FOR JUSTICE GROWS: WHY LEONARD PELTIER MUST BE FREED By Richard Becker San Francisco The campaign to free Native political prisoner and American Indian Movement activist Leon ard Peltier is taking on new momentum, with a major rally to be held here Nov. 16. Native communities, campuses and activists from up and down the West Coast are mobilizing for this event. Featured speakers will include AIM founder Dennis Banks, former U.S. Attorney General and Peltier's lead attorney Ramsey Clark, Native performing artists and activists Floyd Red Crow Westerman and John Trudell, and National People's Campaign organizer Gloria La Riva. This will be the first gathering in the Bay Area to also hear from Eugene Bear Lincoln, a Wailaki Indian recently acquitted of killing a Mendocino County sheriff's deputy. Lincoln's widely publicized case has many similarities to that of Peltier. Also speaking will be Cora Lee Simmons, chairperson of Round Valley Indians for Justice, a committee formed to defend Lincoln. Larry Holmes, a national leader of Workers World Party, will address the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Native activist Judy Talaugon, Rev. Dorsey Blake, and the Irish band Raglan Road will all be part of this outstanding program. THE FRAME-UP Peltier has been unjustly imprisoned for over 21 years. His conviction--for the killing of two FBI agents on Indian land in South Dakota--was the product of a secret government program designed to destroy AIM, the Black Panther Party and other progressive organizations in the 1960s and '70s. On June 26, 1975, the FBI launched a long-planned attack on an AIM encampment at the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. In the previous two years, more than 60 AIM members and traditionalist Indians living on the reservation had been killed. Most died at the hands of the government- supported and armed "Guardians of the Oglala Nation," who proudly referred to themselves as "goons." The leader of the "goons" was tribal president Dick Wilson, elected under the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs structure. Wilson was an extreme rightwinger. Others on the reservation said he was enriching himself and his associates by selling reservation mineral rights to mining corporations. Wilson's goons enforced an FBI-backed reign of terror against the traditional Oglala people and AIM, to whom the traditionals had appealed for support. None of the goon squad's killings, beatings, rapes and other acts of violence were ever seriously probed, much less solved. During the same period, virtually every AIM activist in South Dakota--and elsewhere--was indicted as part of the government strategy to destroy the organization. More than 200 accused AIM activists were under indictment in South Dakota alone by the spring of 1975. In the June 26 firefight, hundreds of rounds were fired-- by government agents and by Native American defenders of the Jumping Bull compound. When it ended, two FBI agents--Jack Coler and Ronald Williams--and AIM activist Joe Stuntz Killsright lay dead. The death of Stuntz was never investigated. But the FBI immediately launched a massive hunt for three AIM activists: Dino Butler, Bob Robideau and Leonard Peltier. Butler and Robideau were arrested and tried in 1976 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. They won acquittal on grounds of self- defense. Peltier was captured in Canada the same year. The FBI used an affidavit signed by Myrtle Poor Bear--extracted under a threat to put her "through a meat-grinder"--to persuade Canadian authorities to extradite him. Poor Bear, who later said she had never heard of Leonard Peltier before the FBI questioning, signed an affidavit saying she was Peltier's girlfriend and had seen him shoot the FBI agents. NORTH DAKOTA'S HANGING JUDGE Determined to avoid a repeat of the Cedar Rapids acquittal, the government arranged for Peltier to be tried before a "hanging judge" in Fargo, N.D. The judge refused to allow any background testimony on the atmosphere of violence and fear in 1973-75 created by the FBI/Wilson actions. Nor was the defense allowed to call Myrtle Poor Bear, who had now recanted her affidavit. The judge said her testimony would be "extremely prejudicial" to the government's case in the eyes of the jury. The FBI presented what were later proven to be falsified ballistics tests, supposedly proving that a gun said to be Peltier's was the murder weapon. Documents released years later showed that the results had been doctored in the FBI's infamous lab. To clinch the state's case, chief prosecutor Lynn Crooks dramatically "re-enacted" the deaths of agents Coler and Williams in the courtroom. He described one wounded agent holding up his hand and pleading for his life. According to Crooks' description, Leonard Peltier disregarded this plea and callously fired the fatal shots, first into the agent begging to be spared, and then into the other agent lying unconscious on the ground. In this kangaroo court, Leonard Peltier was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life terms in federal prison. In the years that followed, new evidence came to light, much of it from the government's own files. It showed that Leonard Peltier had been the victim of a government conspiracy and frame-up. The government is still holding over 6,000 pages of documentation related to the Peltier case. Time after time, his appeals for a new trial were turned down, until all his legal remedies were exhausted. Peltier's lead attorney, Ramsey Clark, stated in his petition for presidential clemency on Nov. 21, 1993: "Not only has the government found no evidence that Leonard Peltier killed the agents, the evidence it presented negates the contention that he did. No witness who testified he or she saw Leonard Peltier on the Jumping Bull property that day has suggested he fired the fatal shots.... It is clear beyond doubt that Leonard Peltier did not shoot the FBI agents." Just nine days earlier, on Nov. 12, 1993, prosecutor Crooks--who had "re-enacted" Peltier's alleged shooting of the FBI agents--made an astounding admission in St. Paul, Minn.: "We do not know who shot the two agents. We did not prove who did it." Under any real system of justice, Crooks would be tried for official misconduct, perjury and stealing 21 years of a person's life. Speaking to a Native American Journalists Association conference in Minneapolis this June, Clark said: "I think I can explain beyond serious doubt that Leonard Peltier has committed no crime whatsoever--but that if he had been guilty of firing a gun that killed an FBI agent, it was in defense of not just his people but the integrity of humanity, from domination and exploitation." NEW MOMENTUM TO FREE PELTIER In the 1980s, support for Leonard Peltier became a worldwide movement. Individuals like Nelson Mandela, Rigoberta Menchu, Jesse Jackson, 55 members of the U.S. Congress and hundreds of members of parliaments around the world called for Peltier to be released. Tens of millions in the former Soviet Union signed petitions demanding Peltier's freedom. Last year, Dennis Banks, a founder of the American Indian Movement and himself a victim of FBI frame-up and imprisonment, launched the Bring Peltier Home Campaign. That campaign, the Nov. 16 rally, the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee and other supporters are calling for President Bill Clinton to grant executive clemency and for a congressional inquiry into the FBI's secret war against AIM and other progressive organizations. Rally coordinator Gloria La Riva points out that "Great sympathy has been engendered by the media and in Congress for white supremacists like Randy Weaver, who clashed with the FBI at Ruby Ridge. But there has been no real congressional investigation since 1976 into COINTELPRO, the FBI, and all the thousands of progressive victims of their vicious programs of repression. "Like Geronimo Ji Jaga, released this year after 27 years in another case of a police frame-up, Leonard Peltier must be freed. Mumia Abu-Jamal must be freed. And as in Geronimo's case, it will be the persistent struggle of the people that will win their freedom." To get involved in the campaign to free Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal and all political prisoners, contact the National People's Campaign, 2489 Mission St., Rm. 28, San Francisco, CA 94110, 415-821-6545. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@workers.org. For subscription info send message to: info@workers.org. Web: http://workers.org) ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytrc-11.15.97-03:34:28-2053