America's Human Rights Hypocrisy:

The Leonard Peltier Story

In the late 1960's and early 1970's, the FBI sought to wipe out civil rights and other social change movements, using their covert & illegal COINTELPRO program. During this time, the American Indian Movement (AIM) was formed to protest against inhumane U.S. government policies (forced sterilizations of thousands of Indian women; laws prohibiting Indian religious ceremonies; removal of thousands of Indian children to non-Indian foster homes & involuntary adoptions; poisoning of Indian drinking water supplies with radioactive wastes, etc). The FBI responded to AIM' s protests by harassing and intimidating AIM leaders, releasing false public information to discredit them, and swamping them with frivolous ; yet costly lawsuits. After AIM's dramatic occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, the FBI retaliated by providing high-tech weaponry to GOON squads on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. During a 3-year reign of terror, these FBI-sponsored death squads attacked hundreds of AIM members and sympathizers, murdering at least 61 of them, and critically injuring hundreds more. In desperation, the tribal elders asked AIM activists to come defend them from the continual attacks; Leonard Peltier was one of those who came to Pine Ridge to provide protection in 1975. Shortly thereafter, an internal FBI memo outlined options for a massive assault on the AIM camps at Pine Ridge....

June 25-26th: On the day before the shootout, two FBI agents went to the Jumping Bull property (near the town of Oglala) where Peltier's camp was located. Under the pretense of supposedly looking for a suspect who had taken his friend's cowboy boots, they inquired about which AIM leaders, and how many, were living in the camp of tents down in the woods nearby. During the next 24 hours, residents were alarmed to see a paramilitary force quietly amassing in the area. The next day, around 9:00 a.m., a nurse at the Pine Ridge Hospital glanced out a window, and was startled to see a caravan of troops heading down the highway toward Oglala. Minutes later she was told that all nurses were being put on emergency standby, and that they should expect bodybags. Then shortly before noon, two FBI agents suddenly stormed into the area of the AIM camp, and exchanged gunfire with a handful of AIM members. Although the camp was located in the middle of nowhere, SWAT teams "just happened to be on maneuvers" within a few hundred yards; FBI radio transcripts show other FBI agents were already present at the scene, in hiding. Within minutes, the FBI unleashed a massive paramilitary assault (numbering hundreds of officers) against about 20 Indians, including women and children. Two FBI agents and one Indian,were killed in the ensuing siege; the other Indians somehow managed to escape, and fled.

Two Indians were originally tried for the murders of the FBI agents, but the jury acquitted them, ruling that even if they had admitted to shooting the agents, they would still be innocent by reason of self-defense!. Furious at the result, and determined to make someone pay, FBI officials issued an internal memo instructing agents "to develop evidence to lock Peltier into this case." With the collusion of Justice Department prosecutors, the FBI orchestrated a bogus trial guaranteed to obtain a conviction. Here's a brief account of how they raped the U.S. judicial system:

1. The FBI arranged for a handpicked, puppet judge to bias the trial. The Justice Department mysteriously switched the jurisdiction of the case from the originally scheduled judge (Edward McManus) to Judge Paul Benson widely known to be an anti-Indian racist, and who had a history of railroading other FBI targets. After conducting improper pretrial meetings with the FBI and prosecution, Judge Benson biased the trial proceedings with rulings that had been outlined beforehand in a secret FBI memo. In all, 80% of the defense's evidence & testimony was disallowed by Judge Benson. When this unfair trial was later appealed, the appeal unbelievably! fell to Judge Benson again (who had been "promoted").

2. FBI agents gave perjured testimony at the trial, which not only contradicted the account they had given in the earlier trial of the two acquitted defendants, but also directly contradicted their own official written reports (which they had illegally withheld from Peltier's trial). When the agents were caught lying at the appeals, they continually changed their stories, and claimed their official reports were wrong due to "transcription error."

3. The FBI coerced witnesses to commit perjury and produce false affidavits. Even the government prosecutors now publicly admit that the affidavits used to extradite Peltier from Canada were completely fraudulent, and have characterized the testimony of their only purported eyewitness as "utterly impossible." Even the circumstancial witnesses for the prosecution later recanted, testifying that they had been threatened by FBI agents.

4. Evidence in Peltier's favor was illegally withheld by the FBI. This was discovered many years after the trial when Peltier's attorneys won a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) lawsuit, forcing the FBI to release 12,000 pages of evidence that, by law, they were obligated to have disclosed to defense attorneys "before" the trial. (Even today, the recalcitrant FBI still refuses to release another 6,000 pages of evidence on Peltier, in open defiance of FoIA laws.) Many of these withheld FBI documents disproved the key elements of the prosecution's case : especially:

5. The FBI's own lab evidence indicates Peltier was not the shooter! All three FBI lab reports of firing pin tests stated conclusively that "none" of the shells used to kill the agents matched Peltier's gun. However, these lab reports exonerating Peltier were withheld from the trial, so that the FBI ballistics expert could claim (falsely) that they had been unable to perform "any" firing-pin tests on Peltier's gun. Having made this claim, the prosecution could conveniently base their case on less reliable extractor mark tests on one single shell, that could never even be tied to the scene.

6. The FBI manufactured false evidence against Peltier. Many months after all the ballistics evidence from the scene had been examined, a single bullet cartridge mysteriously appeared at the FBI lab, without any of the standard evidentiary documentation to link it to the scene (i.e., manifests detailing where, when, and by whom it was found). This highly suspicious cartridge, upon which the prosecution's "entire" case was based, was almost certainly fabricated and planted, according to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals Judges (a conclusion shared by Amnesty International).

SO WHY HASN'T PELTIER'S CONVICTION BEEN OVERTURNED?

At the appeals, when the government's prosecutor (Lynn Crooks) was confronted with the formerly withheld evidence proving someone else shot the agents, Crooks finally admitted that they did "not" prove Peltier shot the agents, nor did they even know who did but stubbornly insisted that Peltier should remain imprisoned anyway! In their decision, the Appeals Court judges harshly criticized the FBI and the Justice Department prosecutors for their many violations and abuses in the Peltier case yet amazingly, the court declined to overturn Peltier's conviction. (In the years since the appeal, the presiding Judge of that court, Gerald Heaney, has publicly urged that the President release Peltier.) Ignoring the international outrage, in 1993 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to even review the case.

The death of the Indian man like the 60 others murdered by GOONs and federal BIA police using FBI weaponry was never even investigated.