[Ppnews] Freeing Leonard Peltier
Political Prisoner News
ppnews at freedomarchives.org
Thu May 7 12:27:17 EDT 2009
http://www.counterpunch.org/armstrong05072009.html
May 7, 2009
What Would Warren Harding Do?
Freeing Leonard Peltier
By JEFF ARMSTRONG
Barack Obama plainly aspires to join the select ranks of United
States presidents who led the nation through national crises with
relative wisdom and resolve. Obama and his supporters often invoke
Lincoln, Kennedy, and FDR as historical exemplars. But in one
important respect, Obama need reach no higher than to emulate the
precedent set by Republican president Warren Harding.
Rightly reviled as one of the worst presidents in American history
for the corruption and mendacity of his cabinet (known, for good
reason, as the Ohio Gang), Harding should nevertheless be
acknowledged for freeing 24 political prisoners (excluding, of
course, most IWW activists) in his first year of taking office in
1921. Among the beneficiaries of Harding's conciliatory gesture was
Eugene V. Debs, the socialist party candidate for president who
polled nearly one million votes in the 1920 election from behind
federal prison walls. Perhaps due to his unique status, Debs was
granted special dispensation to leave prison unsupervised to meet
with attorney general Harry Daugherty.
Debs, to his credit, spurned the attorney general's request that he
renounce his revolutionary views in return for a full pardon Yet
Harding commuted Debs' sentence and released him and other political
prisoners less than one year into his term and two and one-half years
into Debs' 10-year sentence, which he landed for speaking out against
then-President Woodrow Wilson and the military draft at a socialist
party convention shortly before the conclusion of what was then known
as the Great War.
At first glance, Harding's call for a return to "normalcy" and
Obama's ringing but amorphous promise of change would seem to have
little in common. Yet both campaign slogans signified a sharp break
from the immediate past, in the case of the former from the imperious
and imperial presidency of Wilson and in the latter from the reckless
and lawless regime of George Bush II. Like Harding before him, Obama
has sought to reach out to his ideological opponents in the spirit of
reconciliation and to bring the office of the presidency back down to
earth. Harding went so far as to meet personally with Debs after
liberating him from captivity to the cheers of his guards and fellow
inmates alike.
Instead of extending his hand to the unresponsive GOP, however, Obama
should be reaching out to Leonard Peltier and apologizing for two
centuries of violence, oppression, and empty promises to the
indigenous peoples of the United States. If ever there was a sphere
in which change, and one might even say a return to normality (in
terms of normalized relations with Americans), is needed, it is in
Indian Country. Reservation Natives live in something of a parallel
legal universe in which they are the only racial group victimized in
a majority of criminal assaults by members of other races, yet tribal
police are granted no criminal jurisdiction over non-Natives.
When it comes to civil rights, tribal governments, which again with
limited exceptions have jurisdiction only over Indians, are virtually
beyond the reach of not only the United States constitution but even
their own tribal constitutions. With rare exceptions, tribal courts
are subordinate arms of tribal councils, unable or unwilling to
uphold any semblance of civil rights and liberties. As if by cruel
joke, that great guardian of civil liberties, the FBI, is responsible
for upholding the civil rights of tribal members.
Likewise, individual voting rights on reservations have no protection
under federal law, nor are there any reporting requirements on
campaign contributions in tribal elections. This allows not only for
electoral fraud and dictatorial governance, but also opens to door to
external influence through unreported contributions to pliable
candidates. Thus, while the U.S. has no qualms about critically
evaluating elections throughout the world, even imposing sanctions on
Haiti for failing to conduct runoff elections in two legislative
races, it routinely turns a blind eye to vote fraud on reservations.
Yet despite this elevated deference to tribal sovereignty, one of the
unchallenged premises of federal Indian law is that Congress (in
which indigenous nations have no formal or informal representation)
has the unilateral authority to limit or obliterate tribal
sovereignty without the consent of affected peoples. This happened
most recently in the wake of World War II under Truman and
Eisenhower, when the federal government embarked on the termination
program, which sought to achieve the original American dream of
extinguishing tribes as such and negating indigenous identity.
It is little wonder that Leonard Peltier's generation, which grew up
in the shadow of termination in boarding schools, white foster homes,
racist schools, and penal institutions, rose up in the turmoil of the
Vietnam War and civil rights era to demand sovereignty and
recognition under international law. The American Indian Movement,
led by urban Natives seeking to return to their traditional roots,
came to the aid of tribal members against state and federal
discrimination, but soon found to its chagrin that tribal government
was more often than not part of the problem.
On Pine Ridge reservation in the 1970s, tribal chairman Dick Wilson
was Richard Nixon's right hand man. Wilson denounced AIM after its
takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Washington DC at
the culmination of the Trail of Tears march in November of 1972. He
banned AIM members, including reservation enrollees, from meetings on
the reservation and created with federal funds a private security
force known to all as the goon squad. Led by officers of the official
BIA reservation police, the goons terrorized Wilson's opponents,
shooting up and burning down houses, beating, raping, and killing
untold numbers of Oglala people with benefit of FBI ammunition,
training, and protection. At the same time, the FBI was engaged in an
intensive COINTELPRO operation against AIM tin an effort to create
and exploit differences within the loosely-organized movement through
various tactics, including infiltration and snitch-jacketing of activists.
Contrary to its media image, AIM did not respond with violence or
retaliation. Its credo was armed self-defense of individuals and of
tribal sovereignty, and it was never accused of shooting up houses or
targeting goons or BIA police. Even the best-known FBI informant and
provocateur, Douglass Durham, admitted publicly that AIM was
non-violent and community oriented, though he later found profit by
regurgitating the commie-terrorist hype on the John Birch Society
lecture circuit. In the best tradition of guerilla resistance, AIM
activists on Pine Ridge attempted to provide the space for people to
develop community organizations that reflected their own traditions
and served their needs. By no stretch of the imagination did a camp
of a few dozen activists intend to engage in a shootout with the FBI
on June 26, 1975, much less precipitate what was initially claimed as
an ambush by the FBI. Unlike his codefendants, Bob Robideau and Dino
Butler, Peltier was never allowed to present a self-defense argument,
and the government withheld exculpatory evidence that only surfaced
due to FOIA litigation that continues to this day. The 8th Circuit
recently held that the F BI is allowed to suppress more than 10,000
pages of documents relating to Peltier's case, which has never been
retried despite ample evidence of investigative, prosecutorial, and
judicial bias and misconduct.
Executive clemency for Leonard Peltier is but a small first step that
the Obama administration might take toward repairing relations with
indigenous peoples, but it is an essential one. Many anticipated some
action on the Peltier case in his vaunted first 100 days, but Obama
is evidently no modern-day FDR. He can, however, still aspire to the
more modest historical stature of Warren G. Harding.
Jeff Armstrong is a longtime writer on Native affairs, a graduate
student in history, and a volunteer with the
<http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info>Leonard Peltier Defense Offense
Committee. He can be reached at:
<mailto:armstrong at plainsfolk.com>armstrong at plainsfolk.com
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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