Death Squads And The Price Of Justice In America  

February 17, 2024

By Mark Adams

Leonard Peltier is the crown jewel of American injustice. He is 79 years old and has been locked in prison for almost 50 years for crimes which the government admits it cannot prove he committed. Today he is afflicted with diabetes and a worrisome aortic aneurysm. As an advocate for the American Indian Movement (AIM) Peltier was well known to the FBI in the early 1970s.

Following a controversial trial Peltier was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of two FBI agents (Ron Williams and Jack Coler) in a June 26, 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

AIM was founded in Minneapolis in 1968, its activism reached an apex on February 27, 1973 when approximately 200 AIM followers seized and took control of the town Wounded Knee, S.D. From the onset the FBI, vehemently opposed to the AIM, chose to use a paramilitary group of vigilantes known as the GOON squad as a proxy to wage internecine warfare on the AIM members, their supporters, and relatives. It turns out that the vigilante right-wing paramilitary GOON squad was in fact funded by the U.S. government.

http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/LEGAL/uploads/2016clemencyapp.pdf – Page 16

In the wake of Wounded Knee the GOON squad did its grisly work with total impunity including ambush murders, fire bombings and extremely violent physical assaults using baseball bats and tire irons. “More than 50 AIM members and allies died through violence – bodies were found along roadsides or deposited in areas immediately adjacent to the Reservation.”

http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/LEGAL/uploads/2016clemencyapp.pdf Pages 18-19

FBI agents had supplied GOONs with armor-piercing bullets, grenades, and even plastic explosives to use against the AIM members.

https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/7738/10_3YaleJL_Lib83_1992_.pdf Page 91

Between March 1, 1973 and March 1, 1976, the per capita murder rate on Pine Ridge was 170 per 100,000. By comparison, Detroit, Michigan (at the time, considered the murder capital of the United States) had a rate of 20.2 per 100,000. For that period of time Pine Ridge most likely was the murder capital of the entire world.

http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/LEGAL/uploads/2016clemencyapp.pdf Page 18

Against this background of inflamed violence the FBI was increasing manpower in the region not to help or protect the AIM members but to be prepared to engage in an all out paramilitary assault against them. Among the outrageous lies publicized by the FBI was that various AIM centers were fortified with hardened bunkers.

On June 5, 1975, three weeks before the firefight, an FBI Document titled “Law Enforcement on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation” described “[P]ockets of Indian population which consist almost exclusively of AIM members … It is significant that in some of these AIM centers the residents have built bunkers which would literally require military assault forces if it were necessary to overcome resistance emanating from the bunkers.”

http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/LEGAL/uploads/2016clemencyapp.pdf Page 19 (Emphasis added.)

On July 9,1975 William Muldrow of the United States Commission on Civil Rights issued a memorandum declaring that the “bunkers” were nothing more than aged root cellars and that the “trench fortifications described by the FBI to the press did not exist.”

http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/LEGAL/uploads/2016clemencyapp.pdf Page 20 (Emphasis added.)

Ten days before the firefight erupted the FBI was vastly increasing personnel in the region. “On June 16, 1975, the FBI increased its manpower by ordering additional Special Agents into South Dakota for a temporary 60-day period. This build up and the presence of SWAT units that appeared to be collaborating with Wilson’s GOON Squad added to an already very tense situation. In this hostile environment, violent assaults, murders and drive-by shootings were common.”

http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/LEGAL/uploads/2016clemencyapp.pdf Page 20 (Emphasis added.)

As described by William Muldrow of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights the entire reservation, roughly the size of Connecticut – was a tinderbox about to explode. “It was in this climate of fear and tension in 1975 that the two FBI agents, in unmarked cars and clad in civilian clothes, we’re shot in a firefight.”

William Muldrow Director (Retired) Rocky Mountain Regional Office U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 11/1/1999

http://web.archive.org/web/20021113132433/www.freepeltier.org/peltier11.htm#top

To this day it is still disputed how the shooting started and who shot first. FBI media liaison Tom Coll wasted no time claiming that the agents were “lured” into a “‘carefully prepared ambush’ where they were ‘fired upon with automatic weapons’ from a ‘sophisticated bunker complex’, ‘riddled with fifteen to twenty bullets apiece’; ‘dragged from their cars’; and ‘stripped’; and – in one version – ‘scalped’.”

https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/7738/10_3YaleJL_Lib83_1992_.pdf Page 94

By the government’s own estimates there were over 40 Native Americans present at Pine Ridge during the firefight and many were shooting.

http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/LEGAL/uploads/2016clemencyapp.pdf Page 21

Four men — Leonard Peltier, James Eagle, Robert Robideau and Darelle Butler — were charged with killing the agents. In the summer of 1976, with Peltier seeking political asylum and fighting extradition from Canada, the government tried Butler and Robideau. If Peltier had not escaped to Canada but was tried together with Butler and Robideau he too would have been found not guilty.

“The jury agreed with the defense contention that an atmosphere of fear and violence exists on the reservation,” the jury foreman said, “and that the defendants arguably could have been shooting in self-defense.” https://famous-trials.com/leonardpeltier/748-home

Richard W. Held was Special Agent-in-Charge of the San Francisco FBI Office 1985-1993. Held’s work contributed to the framing of Leonard Peltier, and to covering up the truth about the agents’ deaths and the still unsolved killings of 70 AIM supporters on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Credit

Peltier who fled for Canada was captured and subsequently extradited to the United States, albeit illegally.

“Mr. Peltier’s extradition to the U.S. was achieved based on false affidavits—obtained by the government through coercion and deceit, and known by the government to be false. The false affidavits had been signed by Myrtle Poor Bear, a Native American woman known to have serious mental health problems.”

https://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/to-the-washington-times-et-al-leonard-peltier-was-wrongfully-convicted/

As later explained in a legal filing on behalf of Peltier, using the false testimony of Myrtle Poor Bear by the FBI was abusive:

“The use of the affidavits of Myrtle Poor Bear in the extradition proceedings was, to say the least, a clear abuse of the investigative process by the F.B.I.” — Hon. Donald Ross, in conjunction with United States v. Peltier, 585 F.2d 314, 335 n.18 (8th Cir. 1978).

http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/LEGAL/uploads/2016clemencyapp.pdf Page 1

Peltier’s murder trial was typical of the Stalin show trials of the 1930s. For instance, a damaged AR-15 (allegedly Peltier’s) was “matched” to a bullet casing supposedly found in the trunk of Coler’s car. Four years later, the FBI released a cache of documents including a teletype describing a more conclusive ballistics test that determined Peltier’s AR-15 could not have fired the fatal shots. Prosecutors called the .223 shell casing the “most critical” piece of evidence against Peltier and urged the jury to conclude that the matching shell casing proved that Peltier fired the fatal shots into the heads of the two federal agents – in “cold blood”

http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/LEGAL/uploads/2016clemencyapp.pdf Page 31

So there you have it, the government’s “most critical” evidence was a total fabrication and without it its impossible to prove who killed FBI agents Coler and Williams.

“Judge Gerald Heaney reminded [Assistant U.S. Attorney Lynn] Crooks that in his summation at the Fargo trial he had pointed at Peltier as ‘the man who came down and killed those agents in cold blood.’ Pressed on this point by Judge Donald Ross, Crooks blurted in frustration, “But we can’t prove who shot those agents!”

Peter Mattheissen author of In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/07/20/united-states-v-leonard-peltier/ (Emphasis added.)

In April 2022 the FBI released a statement regarding Leonard Peltier:

“The FBI remains resolute against the commutation of Leonard Peltier’s sentence for murdering FBI Special Agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. We must never forget or put aside that Peltier intentionally and mercilessly murdered these two young men and has never expressed remorse for his ruthless actions.”

“Peltier’s conviction, rightly and fairly obtained …”

The FBI stated this outrageous lie in a letter to the Huffington Post which they published in an article subtitled “The imprisoned Native American rights activist ‘intentionally and mercilessly murdered’ FBI agents, the bureau told Huffington Post. Except that’s not true.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fbi-leonard-peltier-clemency-biden_n_62473d07e4b0587dee695e6e

In 2000 former FBI Director Louie Freeh wrote, “There is no dissent within our agency, only the widespread belief that the criminal justice system of the United States rightly convicted and repeatedly affirmed that Peltier was nothing other than a cold-blooded killer.”

https://www.argusleader.com/story/blogs/jonathanellis/2016/07/27/fbi-leader-thanked-janklow-peltier-matter/87626144/ (Emphasis added.)

In 2017 the Chicago Tribune published an editorial titled “Clemency for Leonard Peltier? Never.” In response to that editorial, James Reynolds, the United States attorney who supervised the prosecution of Leonard Peltier penned his response stating in part: “It is a gross overstatement to label Peltier a ‘cold-blooded murderer.’”

https://www.b12partners.net/wp/2017/01/18/leonard-peltier-should-be-released-in-the-interest-of-justice/

Former U.S. Attorney James Reynolds speaks on behalf of Leonard Peltier at the American Indian Movement’s Grand Governing Council’s Walk to Freedom on Sunday, November 13 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Darren Thompson for Native News Online). Credit

In July 2021 Reynolds wrote a letter to President Biden stating in part: “We were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense on the Pine Ridge Reservation.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/leonard-peltier-prison-clemency-biden_n_618049f3e4b059d0bfc19e5c

For over 50 years Leonard Peltier has steadfastly denied accusations that he killed the two FBI agents. By all appearances, the FBI out of pure spite and revenge wants Leonard Peltier to die in prison while serving two life sentences for crimes they admit they cannot prove he committed.

Top image credit: Flickr/ Sheila Steele

Source:   https://www.activistpost.com/2024/02/death-squads-and-the-price-of-justice-in-america.html

It's All Playing Out In Front Of Our Eyes

It's All Playing Out In Front Of Our Eyes

By Russell Means

"On and on in history the same mistakes over and over again"

Russell Means was an Oglala Lakota and one of the most vocal activists for the rights of the Indigenous People of America. He was also an actor and the first director of the American Indian Movement. This recording from 2011 perfectly portrays what is playing out in America

 

Source:  informationclearinghouse.info

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Native Activist Leonard Peltier Calls for Clemency Support

 

July 1, 2016

By Derrick Broze

On the 40th anniversary of the gunfight at the Pine Ridge Reservation, imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier is calling on President Obama to grant him clemency before the end of his presidency.

On June 26, 1975, members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) were involved in a gun fight with agents of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. When the exchange of gunfire was finished three men were dead – Special Agents Jack R. Coler and Ronald A. Williams of the FBI and Joe Stuntz, a member of AIM.

On February 6, 1976, AIM member Leonard Peltier would be arrested and extradited from Canada after being accused of being the one who fired the shots that killed Coler and Williams. Peltier was born on September 12, 1944 in Grand Forks, North Dakota. He is a Turtle Mountain Chippewa on his father’s side, and a Dakota Sioux on his mother’s. Peltier spent his childhood on the Turtle Mountain reservation near Belcourt, North Dakota before moving to Seattle, Washington. In the 1970s he would get involved in Native activism and join the American Indian Movement.

For the last 50 years, AIM has led the charge in the “Red Power” movement that calls attention to the injustices and oppression taking place against Native communities. AIM established itself as a force to be reckoned with through a series of protests and occupations during the late 1960s and 1970s. These actions included the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island, the 1972 “Trail of Broken Treaties” and occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building, the 1973 Wounded Knee Incident, the occupation of Mount Rushmore, the Longest Walk, and the gunfight on the Pine Ridge reservation.

Although Peltier was convicted of first degree murder in 1977, and subsequently sentenced to two consecutive life sentences, his role in the murders has been the subject of controversy since the very beginning. Special Agents Coler and Williams originally came to the Pine Ridge Reservation in search of a man named Jimmy Eagle who was wanted for questioning in an assault and robbery case. The two agents were driving separate unmarked vehicles while following a red pick-up truck which matched a description of Jimmy Eagle. Williams and Coler would later report that they were under fire from occupants of the truck and unable to return fire. The men radioed that they would likely be killed if reinforcements did not arrive.

Once the gunfight ended, the FBI began investigating and looking for someone to pin the murders on. Leonard Peltier was at the reservation but has always maintained that he was innocent. To be certain, over the years Peltier has given different alibis to different people. Peltier was reported to be driving a vehicle that was red and white and was wanted for questioning. After being added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives he went to live in Alberta, Canada.

On February 6, 1976, he was arrested and extradited from Canada. His arrest was conducted based on signed affidavits from Myrtle Poor Bear, a local woman from the Pine Ridge Reservation. In the affidavits Poor Bear claimed to have been dating Peltier at the time and also claimed to have witnessed the murders. In 2000, 25 years later, Myrtle Poor Bear admitted she had been forced to make the confessions.

“I was forced into this, and I feel very awful. I just wish that Leonard Peltier will get out of prison,” Myrtle Poor Bear confessed in 2000.

Now, on the 40th anniversary of the murders, Leonard Peltier has released a letter calling for support and asking President Obama to grant him clemency and release him from prison. He also spoke of his declining health and the need to act quick to get him proper treatment (see below for the full letter).

“My health issues still have not been thoroughly addressed, and I still have not gotten the results of the MRI done over a month ago for the abdominal aortic aneurysm,” Peltier writes. “As the last remaining months of President Obama’s term pass by, my anxiety increases. I believe that this President is my last hope for freedom, and I will surely die here if I am not released by January 20, 2017.”

In May 2016, Jasmine Heiss, senior campaigner for Amnesty International USA’s Individuals at Risk Campaign, asked “Is it time to free Native American activist Leonard Peltier?”.

“The long and complicated case history reveals a pattern of misconduct by the FBI, including the coercion of an alleged eyewitness, suppression of potentially exculpatory evidence and deep concerns about the agency’s political motivation for so zealously pursuing the case,” Heiss wrote. “The U.S. Parole Commission has acknowledged to Peltier the “lack of any direct evidence that you personally participated in the executions of two FBI agents.”

In Amnesty International’s 2010 annual report, Peltier’s case was also placed under the “Unfair Trials” category.

As of 2016, Leonard Peltier is incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary, Coleman in Florida. His next scheduled parole hearing will be in July 2024. Barring appeals, parole or presidential pardon, his projected release date is October 11, 2040.

Find out how you can help achieve Peltier’s freedom here whoisleonardpeltier.info

Letter from Leonard Peltier:

Sisters, brothers, friends and supporters:

June 26th marks 41 years since the long summer day when three young men were killed at the home of the Jumping Bull family, near Oglala, during a firefight in which I and dozens of others participated. While I did not shoot (and therefore did not kill) FBI agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, I nevertheless have great remorse for the loss of their young lives, the loss of my friend Joe Stuntz, and for the grieving of their loved ones. I would guess that, like me, many of my brothers and sisters who were there that day wish that somehow they could have done something to change what happened and avoid the tragic outcome of the shootout.

This is not something I have thought about casually and then moved on. It’s something I think about every day. As I look back, I remember the expressions of both fear and courage on the faces of my brothers and sisters as we were being attacked. We thought we were going to be killed! We defended our elders and children as they scattered for protection and to escape. Native people have experienced such assaults for centuries, and the historical trauma of the generations was carried by the people that day — and in the communities that suffered further trauma in the days that followed the shootout, as the authorities searched for those of us who had escaped the Jumping Bull property.

As the First Peoples of Turtle Island, we live with daily reminders of the centuries of efforts to terminate our nations, eliminate our cultures, and destroy our relatives and families. To this day, everywhere we go there are reminders — souvenirs and monuments of the near extermination of a glorious population of Indigenous Peoples. Native Peoples as mascots, the disproportionately high incarceration of our relatives, the appropriation of our culture, the never-ending efforts to take even more of Native Peoples’ land, and the poisoning of that land all serve as reminders of our history as survivors of a massive genocide. We live with this trauma every day. We breathe, eat and drink it. We pass it on to our children. And we struggle to overcome it.

Like so many Native children, I was ripped away from my family at the age of 9 or so and taken away to get the “Indian” out of me at a boarding school. At that time, Native Peoples were not able to speak our own languages for fear of being beaten or worse. Our men’s long hair, which is an important part of our spiritual life, was forcibly cut off in an effort to shame us. Our traditional names were replaced by new European-American names. These efforts to force our assimilation continue today. Not long ago, I remember, a Menominee girl was punished and banned from playing on the school’s basketball team because she taught a classmate how to say “hello” and “I love you” in her Native language. We hear stories all the time about athletes and graduates who face opposition to wearing their hair long or having a feather in their cap.

With this little bit of my personal history in mind, I think it is understandable that I would then, as a young person in the 1960’s and 70’s, be active in the Indigenous struggle to affirm our human, civil, and treaty rights. Our movement was a spiritual one to regain our ceremonies and traditions and to exercise our sovereignty as native or tribal nations. For over 100 years some of our most important ceremonies could not be held. We could not sing our songs or dance to our drum. When my contemporaries and I were activists, there were no known sun dances. Any ceremony that took place had to be hidden for fear of reprisals. One of our roles as activists for the welfare of our Peoples was to create space and protection for Native peoples who were trying to reconnect to our ancient cultures and spiritual life. This was dangerous and deadly. It meant putting our lives on the line because people who participated in these ceremonies, and people who stood up for our elders and our traditional way of life, were brutally beaten, killed or disappeared. Paramilitary groups and death squads ruled some reservations and each day was a battle. If an uninvited, unknown or unrecognized vehicle pulled up to your house, the first reaction was that you were being visited by someone who meant to do you harm in some way. This was learned behavior on the reservations. This was excruciatingly true in the 1970’s.

Hey, I don’t want to be all doom and gloom here. I see over the decades that in some important ways, life has improved for our Peoples. President Obama’s extraordinary efforts to forge a strong relationship with our Tribal Nations is good cause for a new sense of optimism that our sovereignty is more secure. By exercising our sovereignty, life for our people might improve. We might begin to heal and start the long journey to move past the trauma of the last 500 years. But what will we do if the next Administration rolls back those gains made over the past 8 years?

I often receive questions in letters from supporters about my health. Yes, this last year has been particularly stressful for me and my family. My health issues still have not been thoroughly addressed, and I still have not gotten the results of the MRI done over a month ago for the abdominal aortic aneurysm.

As the last remaining months of President Obama’s term pass by, my anxiety increases. I believe that this President is my last hope for freedom, and I will surely die here if I am not released by January 20, 2017. So I ask you all again, as this is the most crucial time in the campaign to gain my freedom, please continue to organize public support for my release, and always follow the lead of the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee.

Thank you for all you have done and continue to do on my behalf.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse…

Doksha,

Leonard Peltier

Derrick Broze is an investigative journalist and liberty activist. He is the Lead Investigative Reporter for ActivistPost.com and the founder of the TheConsciousResistance.com. Follow him on Twitter.

Derrick is available for interviews.

This article may be freely reposted in part or in full with author attribution and source link.

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