The United States Department of Justice has once
again made a mockery of its lofty and pretentious
title.
After releasing an original and continuing disciple
of death cult leader Charles Manson who attempted to
shoot President Gerald Ford, an admitted Croatian
terrorist, and another attempted assassin of
President Ford under the mandatory 30-year parole
law, the U.S. Parole Commission deemed that my
release would “promote disrespect for the law.”
If only the federal government would have respected
its own laws, not to mention the treaties that are,
under the U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of the
land, I would never have been convicted nor forced
to spend more than half my life in captivity. Not to
mention the fact that every law in this country was
created without the consent of Native peoples and is
applied unequally at our expense. If nothing else,
my experience should raise serious questions about
the FBI's supposed jurisdiction in Indian Country.
The parole commission's phrase was lifted from
soon-to-be former U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley, who
apparently hopes to ride with the FBI cavalry into
the office of North Dakota governor. In this Wrigley
is following in the footsteps of William Janklow,
who built his political career on his reputation as
an Indian fighter, moving on up from tribal attorney
(and alleged rapist of a Native minor) to state
attorney general, South Dakota governor, and U.S.
Congressman. Some might recall that Janklow claimed
responsibility for dissuading President Clinton from
pardoning me before he was convicted of
manslaughter. Janklow's historical predecessor,
George Armstrong Custer, similarly hoped that a
glorious massacre of the Sioux would propel him to
the White House, and we all know what happened to
him.
Unlike the barbarians that bay for my blood in the
corridors of power, however, Native people are true
humanitarians who pray for our enemies. Yet we must
be realistic enough to organize for our own freedom
and equality as nations. We constitute 5% of the
population of North Dakota and 10% of South Dakota
and we could utilize that influence to promote our
own power on the reservations, where our focus
should be. If we organized as a voting bloc, we
could defeat the entire premise of the competition
between the Dakotas as to which is the most racist.
In the 1970s we were forced to take up arms to
affirm our right to survival and self-defense, but
today the war is one of ideas. We must now stand up
to armed oppression and colonization with our bodies
and our minds. International law is on our side.
Given the complexion of the three recent federal
parolees, it might seem that my greatest crime was
being Indian. But the truth is that my gravest
offense is my innocence. In Iran, political
prisoners are occasionally released if they confess
to the ridiculous charges on which they are dragged
into court, in order to discredit and intimidate
them and other like-minded citizens. The FBI and its
mouthpieces have suggested the same, as did the
parole commission in 1993, when it ruled that my
refusal to confess was grounds for denial of parole.
To claim innocence is to suggest that the government
is wrong, if not guilty itself. The American
judicial system is set up so that the defendant is
not punished for the crime itself, but for refusing
to accept whatever plea arrangement is offered and
for daring to compel the judicial system to grant
the accused the right to right to rebut the charges
leveled by the state in an actual trial. Such
insolence is punished invariably with prosecution
requests for the steepest possible sentence, if not
an upward departure from sentencing guidelines that
are being gradually discarded, along with the
possibility of parole.
As much as non-Natives might hate Indians, we are
all in the same boat. To attempt to emulate this
system in tribal government is pitiful, to say the
least.
It was only this year, in the Troy Davis, case, that
the U.S. Supreme Court recognized innocence as a
legitimate legal defense. Like the witnesses that
were coerced into testifying against me, those that
testified against Davis renounced their statements,
yet Davis was very nearly put to death. I might have
been executed myself by now, had not the government
of Canada required a waiver of the death penalty as
a condition of extradition.
The old order is aptly represented by Supreme Court
Justice Antonin Scalia, who stated in his dissenting
opinion in the Davis case, “This Court has never
held that the Constitution forbids the execution of
a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair
trial but is later able to convince a habeas court
that he is 'actually' innocent. Quite to the
contrary, we have repeatedly left that question
unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that
any claim based on alleged 'actual innocence' is
constitutionally cognizable.”
The esteemed Senator from North Dakota, Byron Dorgan,
who is now the chairman of the Senate Committee on
Indian Affairs, used much the same reasoning in
writing that “our legal system has found Leonard
Peltier guilty of the crime for which he was
charged. I have reviewed the material from the
trial, and I believe the verdict was fair and just.”
It is a bizarre and incomprehensible statement to
Natives, as well it should be, that innocence and
guilt is a mere legal status, not necessarily rooted
in material fact. It is a truism that all political
prisoners were convicted of the crimes for which
they were charged.
The truth is the government wants me to falsely
confess in order to validate a rather sloppy
frame-up operation, one whose exposure would open
the door to an investigation of the United States'
role in training and equipping goon squads to
suppress a grassroots movement on Pine Ridge against
a puppet dictatorship.
In America, there can by definition be no political
prisoners, only those duly judged guilty in a court
of law. It is deemed too controversial to even
publicly contemplate that the federal government
might fabricate and suppress evidence to defeat
those deemed political enemies. But it is a
demonstrable fact at every stage of my case.
I am Barack Obama's political prisoner now, and I
hope and pray that he will adhere to the ideals that
impelled him to run for president. But as Obama
himself would acknowledge, if we are expecting him
to solve our problems, we missed the point of his
campaign. Only by organizing in our own communities
and pressuring our supposed leaders can we bring
about the changes that we all so desperately need.
Please support the
Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee
in our
effort to hold the United States government to its
own words.
I thank you all who have stood by me all these
years, but to name anyone would be to exclude many
more. We must never lose hope in our struggle for
freedom.
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,
Leonard Peltier
Leonard Peltier #89637-132
USP-Lewisburg
US Penitentiary
PO Box 1000
Lewisburg, PA 17837
For more information on Leonard Peltier visit the
Leonard Peltier Defense-Offense Committee website.
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