[Ppnews] Local Attourneys Seek Federal Leonard Peltier Documents

[Political Prisoner News]

Local Attourneys Seek Federal Leonard Peltier Documents



by George Sax

http://artvoice.com/issues/v11n6/week_in_review/attourneys_seek_peltier_docs

Attorney Michael Kuzma addresses a rally in front 
of Buffalo's federal courthouse on Saturday, 
February 4, the day after he filed a suit against 
the US Department of Justice for failure to 
answer his FOIA requests for information regarding the case of Leonard Peltier.

On May 13, 2004, Buffalo attorney Michael Kuzma 
filed an application with the US Department of 
Justice for all records in its possession 
relating to one Frank Black Horse. Kuzma 
represented Leonard Peltier, a federal prisoner 
since 1976, convicted of killing two FBI agents 
on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South 
Dakota on June 26, 1975, during a siege of a 
reservation ranch by federal agents.

Last Friday, on Kuzma’s behalf, local attorneys 
Peter A. Reese and Daire Brian Irwin filed a suit 
in the US District Court in Buffalo seeking an 
order directing the Justice Department to release 
the requested records of Black Horse. (Reese has 
represented both Artvoice and one of its staffers.)

Black Horse, whose real name is Leonard Deluca 
and who is no Indian despite his alias, has been 
a resident of Canada since 1973 when, under 
federal indictment, he fled this country after 
shooting and wounding an FBI agent at Wounded 
Knee, South Dakota. He and Peltier were both 
arrested in Hinton, Alberta on February 15, 1976, 
but only Peltier, a leader of the American Indian 
Movement (AIM), was extradited to the States to 
stand trial. Despite the federal indictment 
against him, Black Horse has remained free across 
the border ever since. Peltier’s supporters, 
legal counsel and a number of independent 
observers have regarded this shadowy figure as 
someone who could shed light on what they regard 
as a concerted effort by federal authorities to 
railroad Peltier for crimes he didn’t commit. 
Hence, Kuzma’s long, dedicated, and tortuous 
attempt to obtain the Justice Department’s records on Black Horse.

The paper filed in federal court by Reese and 
Irwin included a list of events, turns and 
turnarounds in Kuzma’s unsuccessful over 
seven-and-a-half-year-long quest, accompanied by 
21 copies of correspondence between him and 
either Justice or the FBI. Reese and Irwin’s suit 
alleges that Kuzma “has exhausted the applicable 
administrative remedies with respect to his FOIA 
(Freedom of Information Act) request,” and that 
the government “has wrongfully withheld the 
requested records from the plaintiff.”

Very early in his tangled negotiation with the 
federal government, Kuzma agreed to accept only 
those “public-source” records in the government’s 
possession­such as news reports­and not seek any 
documents whose release could invade the privacy 
of third parties. These public-source documents, 
he explained in an interview Tuesday in his 
office, are very difficult or impossible to track 
down today because of their obscurity, age, and 
lack of availability on the Internet. The fact 
that the FBI collected them may be significant in 
explaining what its goals and methods were in this case.

And on November 14, 2008, after a number of 
delays and dead ends, an FBI official, David M. 
Hardy, wrote Kuzma informing him the bureau had 
“located approximately 927 pages which are 
potentially responsive to your request.” Hardy 
even provided an estimate of the cost to 
duplicate them: $82.70. But after Kuzma promptly 
remitted that sum, it was returned, with no 
explanation. In response to his puzzled inquiry, 
the bureau eventually told him that it had no 
public-source records it could share with him, 
after all. Despite several subsequent twists, 
including backing off from and then reinstating 
this position, Justice and the FBI have continued 
to deny Kuzma’s applications. (In a brief 
telephone interview, US Attorney William Hochul 
said he was unaware of the suit, but doubted that 
Justice would have any comment. Maureen Dempsey, 
a press representative at the FBI’s Buffalo 
office, said it knew of the action but could not 
make any statement about a pending civil suit.)

Peltier’s arrest, conviction, and imprisonment 
have long been regarded by many people as a 
product of the FBI’s illicit COINTELPRO 
(counter-intelligence program) that was secretly 
operated from the 1950s through the 1970s, all 
too often in violation of the law and federal 
court decisions. The Reverend Martin Luther King, 
Jr. was a targeted victim of the FBI’s spying and 
character assassination, as depicted in Clint 
Eastwood’s recent movie, J. Edgar. In his A 
People’s History of the United States, the late 
Boston University historian Howard Zinn described 
the government’s massive response with over 200 
heavily armed federal agents when AIM occupied 
the reservation village of Wounded Knee in 1973 
to protest the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ 
miserable treatment of Native Americans. This was 
the political backdrop to the charges against Peltier.

Kuzma said that “the FBI set the wheels in motion 
that got its agents killed.” It had apparently 
infiltrated AIM with informants, including the 
bogus and violent Black Horse. Kuzma cites a 
document, previously obtained by Peltier’s 
defense, from January 15, 1976, in which Deputy 
General M. S. Sexsmith of the Canadian Security 
Services wrote to a colleague about Black Horse’s 
surreptitious provision of information from inside AIM.

Kuzma says it’s his hope that a federal 
magistrate judge will review the withheld 
material and say it should be released. Under 
FOIA, he said, “disclosure, not secrecy, is the focus.”

Tuesday, one of Kuzma’s lawyers, Irwin, said his 
goal is “to discover why it’s so important to the 
government to keep [Peltier] in prison,” and keep 
their documents secret. “What are they hiding?”

Nelson Mandela and 55 members of the US Congress, 
among others, have called for Peltier’s release.

Read more: 
<http://artvoice.com/issues/v11n6/week_in_review/attourneys_seek_peltier_docs#ixzz1ltp95gPe>http://artvoice.com/issues/v11n6/week_in_review/attourneys_seek_peltier_docs#ixzz1ltp95gPe




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