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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/armstrong05072009.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/armstrong05072009.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">May 7,
2009<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>What Would
Warren Harding Do? <br><br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
Freeing Leonard Peltier
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By JEFF
ARMSTRONG <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">B</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>arack 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<b>Jeff Armstrong</b> is a longtime writer on Native affairs, a graduate
student in history, and a volunteer with the
<a href="http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info">Leonard Peltier Defense
Offense Committee</a>. He can be reached at:
<a href="mailto:armstrong@plainsfolk.com">armstrong@plainsfolk.com</a><br>
<br>
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