US vs LEONARD PELTIER CLEMENCY,  WHAT HAPPENED?

Passing over Peltier/part 2 of 2:

Among the things Bill Clinton left behind are a broken promise and questions of a deal

{cont from part one}

FBI takes to the streets

As politicians and other Peltier supporters exerted their influence, many FBI agents exercised what they said was their First Amendment right -- the right to protest.

About 500 agents and 300 other FBI supporters -- a majority of them taking vacation time to be in Washington -- convened on Dec. 15 in front of the White House to send a message to Clinton.

FBI Special Agent John Sennett, president of the FBI Agents Association, led the rally. He admitted that the sight of FBI agents marching in front of the White House was unusual.

"We tend to be reserved and button-down," Sennett said.

"We tend not to make our feelings known in that kind of way. We tend not to be that demonstrative. ... The cause and the issue, in this case, overcame our instinctive reluctance to go public, physically."

Sennett said agents made their decision to protest in early December.

"When we did not hear any assurances from the White House that Peltier was not a viable candidate for clemency, we became concerned," Sennett said. "And then when we saw the amount of energy that the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee was putting into the effort, we didn't want to be out-hustled."

Burrus added that the FBI also campaigned from outside Washington, calling the White House and writing editorials to newspapers.
{Peltier pardon an affront to law officers}

"Mr. Sennett from the Agents Association, again an organization outside the official FBI, took a position on it also -- as did the former special agents, as did a whole lot of people that requested a lot of information from us to write letters of support, to call and so forth," Burrus said.

The FBI's protest provoked concern from Love.

"To have all those FBI agents marching around the building was a very unfortunate thing, and I think it was inappropriate," Love said. "It does not benefit the clemency process."
{ RALLY RESPONSE}

The protest also enraged some Peltier supporters on Capitol Hill. Faleomavaega said that while he respects the rights of individual agents to protest, "to do it collectively as an institution is wrong."

"Of course they say it was an association march, not the FBI -- I just think that it is very difficult to separate the two," Faleomavaega said.

He said he was also concerned about the larger message the rally sent to the public.

"The public's awareness is that the FBI is supposed to be a neutral working agency to seek the truth and to establish justice," Faleomavaega said. "The FBI's become a political arm of those who have a different political bent on the administration of justice. ... I'm troubled by it."

Moynihan, preparing to represent the LPDC in Washington, was also troubled.

"It clearly demonstrates that the FBI are in fact political police," Moynihan said. "They describe that this was merely constitutionally protected behavior on the part of individual agents who were taking vacation time to be there. And yet, the event itself was being promoted ... through the FBI's very own Washington, D.C., office. So it was formally organized by the FBI Agents Association, but it was the FBI's field office in D.C. that was doing the press work. It's alarming that the FBI is now outwardly involved in this kind of political activity."

Moynihan said he has seen FBI Agents Association faxes from the FBI's Washington office that contained information about the protest, and Goodman said she had such documents on file.

"When we called the FBI for an interview, they sent us faxes about their protest from an official office," Goodman said. Sennett denied any knowledge that the FBI faxed protest information from a government office.

"I don't know anything about that," Sennett said. "The Agents Association is a non-governmental agency supported and funded only by the dues of our members. We don't get any support of any kind from the FBI. I didn't get any moral support or financial support or physical support from the FBI."

Moynihan expressed concern over the effects the protest would have on Washington.

"It seemed for some reason their stunt, or rally they held, seems to have had a lot of legs," Moynihan said. "No one in the press questioned the validity of the FBI staging a rally in front of the White House. It's very alarming that these people are engaged in that kind of political activity.

Moynihan said the LPDC considered a counter-demonstration but concluded that it would be counter-productive.

"The tone we had to maintain was one of diplomacy," Moynihan said. "As far as being disruptive, it wouldn't have helped things -- people argue that point."

But the FBI and Peltier's supporters would soon converge for public debate.

Bruce Ellison, an attorney who has represented Peltier for 25 years, called the FBI attention to the Peltier matter "unusual."

"I've never heard of letters being written to the president and attorney general," Ellison said. "I've never heard of senior FBI officials getting authorization to do public radio debates throughout the country, making press statements and press releases and setting up a Web page."

Ellison said Clinton's remarks on WBAI changed strategies. Ellison wound up debating Burrus on the radio.

"We were clearly told for months that the best way to make this happen was to keep everything under the radar," Ellison said. "And had it not come into the radar screen, whether that would have made a difference or not, I don't know. Certainly, once it did in November, that gave (the FBI) the excuse to become very public about this."

Added Ellison, "Once the FBI began pushing things very publicly, there's no question that we did, too."
 

Clinton requests a Peltier clemency speech

Meanwhile, Peltier was so sure things were going his way, he was actually preparing to leave prison. He said he packed up his belongings and had made preparations to adjust to a normal life.

He wanted to hold his children and his grandchildren.

And even as the clemency campaign garnered great public attention, Peltier's supporters also continued to quietly work on the inside. Details about Janklow's meeting with Clinton did nothing to deter Peltier's supporters.

Jennifer Harbury, a long-time attorney for Peltier, had amended her client's clemency petition. She reiterated all the faulty evidence, Heaney's feelings and one other important factor -- worldwide support.

"The United Nations Commissioner on Human Rights was calling and writing letters, and Desmond Tutu was calling and writing letters in support," Chiala said. "Seven Nobel laureates were making phone calls and writing. It was incredible. We knew that Clinton was well aware of the case and that he announced that he would make a decision of yes or no. We also had some inside contacts telling us that there had been no official decision -- even when the press was saying that it doesn't look good. Our contacts were saying there's still a good chance."

Ellison was one of those contacts. He was part of a three-person stealth team that made a concerted last plea on Peltier's behalf at a Jan. 11 meeting inside the White House. Another member of the team was Peter Matthiessen, who had authored a book about Peltier, titled "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse." The book faced an eight-year libel suit filed by Janklow and an FBI agent that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which finally allowed the book to be published. Matthiessen's attorneys argued that libel laws were being used to muzzle freedom of the press.

The third member of the team was John Kilik, the Hollywood producer known for his work on films like "Dead Man Walking" and most of Spike Lee's movies, most recently "Bamboozled."

Coyote helped get the team inside.

Inside, Lindsey was joined by fellow White House counsel Mary Beth Nolan, and two additional White House lawyers, Matthiessen said.

Coyote said the pro-Peltier team was convincing.

"They basically turned Bruce Lindsey around on the legal issues -- that the president had been completely misinformed and the president's advisors completely misinformed," Coyote said. "They actually admitted that."

Ellison said it appeared that White House counsel was convinced Clinton should grant clemency, because they had requested more information.

"He was being seriously considered with an eye towards receiving it," Ellison said. "We were specifically asked to draft a ... speech. We were asked to draft a statement for Clinton."

If Clinton had granted clemency, he might have read portions that recognized a tragedy on both sides.

"The extreme violence directed against Agents Williams and Coler can unfortunately never be undone or excused," the speech read. "Nor can any action undo or make amends for the many deaths on all sides due to the 'Indian' wars tragically fought over hundreds of years of our history. The actions of our government have sometimes been less than honorable in this regard."

The speech also referred to poverty on Pine Ridge, and historical wounds.

"Within my Administration, we have felt the propriety of an apology for the wrongs committed by the United States government against our Native people," the speech read. "Since my visits to Pine Ridge Reservation, as well as the Navajo Nation, I have supported a number of economic and other initiatives which will hopefully begin to address the pressing needs of this minority community. ... It is time for the healing process to begin."

Ellison was under the impression that Clinton thought the Peltier issue was a priority.

"We know he cared about it," Ellison said. "We had very good information that Clinton spent a lot of time looking over documents in this case. We had information, as well, coming straight out of Bruce Lindsey's office, that Clinton even had come up with some evidentiary ideas that he thought still could be potentially addressed. So that shows a certain seriousness in looking at some of the record in this case." Matthiesson was equally optimistic.

"We had a very good meeting, indeed," Matthiessen said. "(Peltier's) chances went from zero to 50/50. We thought that he had the momentum to go the whole way because this whole legal group seemed very sympathetic, indeed. They spent a lot of time, asked a lot of good questions, and two or three were openly sympathetic."
 

The final countdown

Moynihan was organizing a potential press conference in Washington with several notable Peltier supporters that, among others, would have likely included Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii. The purpose of the press conference, which would have taken place at the National Press Club, was to make important Peltier supporters available at a moment's notice to thank Clinton for granting clemency, should he have chosen to do so.

"As each day went by, we got the sense that Clinton was going to put off the decision, as he did, until the absolute last minute to bury it in the news of the inauguration," Moynihan said.

But Moynihan said he had reason to be optimistic about Clinton's intentions.

"He had released an ... op-ed piece where he used some of the language that we were using in our campaign," Moynihan said. "He used language such as 'healing racial differences.' Reconciliation was a word that he brought in, which was a word that we were using quite a bit. The sense was that maybe he was putting this out as a preamble to clemency for Peltier. That was the hope."

In the op-ed, which ran in The New York Times on Dec. 15 -- the day of the FBI protest -- Clinton spoke about problems in the criminal justice system.

"There is perhaps no area today in which perceptions of fairness differ so greatly, depending on one's race, than the administration of criminal justice," Clinton wrote. "If you are white, you most likely believe the system is fair. If you belong to a minority group, you most likely feel the opposite. If we want to keep crime coming down, we need to instill trust in our criminal justice system."

Clinton also spoke on diversity and the differences of the past.

"If we make the most of our diversity, we will enhance our success in the global information age," Clinton wrote. "We have moved out of the epicenter of racial conflict that rocked our nation from the time of conquest through slavery, the Japanese internment and the tumultuous days of the civil rights era. But we still experience the aftershocks."

The evening of Jan. 19, Moynihan was staked out at a bar called Off the Record, in a hotel located near the White House, where Clinton's presidential press staffers frequently gathered. It was late in the day, the sun was going down, and word on pardons and clemencies -- especially Peltier's -- had yet to come.

"That was an interesting place just to be waiting," Moynihan said. "They were all waiting. All the reporters covering the White House beat were basically waiting for that decision."

He said White House spokesman Jake Seiwert was at the bar.

"That's how I knew no decision had come," Moynihan said.

He said he made contact with a female assistant press secretary who encouraged him to wait.

"Then it became public that the decision would be postponed," Moynihan said. "I asked at what hour of the morning we could expect it, and they said they had no idea. I didn't know if it would be 6 a.m. or 10 a.m. or 11 or whatever. So I didn't get much out of them."

Ellison's team thought it was getting better information. The team concluded that clemency was a possibility right up until Clinton left office.

"In fact, we had the impression that it was being discussed again on Friday night," Ellison said. "I had an early morning conversation Saturday morning (Jan. 20) with Bruce Lindsey by phone. What he told me was that the president was considering the clemencies, including Peltier ... up to the last minute, late the evening before."

However, Lindsey declined to give any indication as to what the decision would be, Ellison said.

By the next morning, Moynihan sought out the refuge of the Independent Media Center, an alternative news and opinion network, in Washington. That's where he found out that Peltier was not going to receive clemency.

He said his thoughts turned to Peltier.

"I was concerned about Leonard," Moynihan said. "Just that he was really looking forward to this day. And the tremendous sense of defeat he must have felt -- and his grandkids."
 

In the aftermath

Clinton refuses to comment on the clemency process.

"The former president is not going to comment on any clemencies that were not granted," Julia Payne, a spokeswoman in the former president's office, told the Colorado Daily.

Meanwhile, Peltier has words of kindness for his supporters and a sense of disappointment about being passed over.

He had the following message for his detractors: "If there was evidence showing I was guilty of anything and I had received a fair trial, I could understand it. I would have to accept it."

Love, the former pardon attorney, felt Peltier at least deserved an answer.

"His case has been pending for a number of years, and I think he's entitled to a decision," Love said.

Others said the answer was clear.

"Not getting it was a 'no,'" Keller said.

In the aftermath, Clinton's handling of pardons and clemencies has come under intense scrutiny. On Feb. 26, Time magazine said Clinton was bewildered over reactions to his handling of it all.

He was quick to point out that if he were in the business of trading pardons for cash, wouldn't he have helped out Geffen by granting clemency to Peltier?

"David Geffen will barely talk to me!" Clinton told Time.

Meanwhile, FBI agents, some biting back criticism of Clinton's overall handling of the pardons, thought he did the right thing in regards to Peltier.

Sennett, for example, said, "I think the evidence, the trial evidence and the evidence reviewed on appeal is sound."

He added that the controversy over Peltier is one created by his supporters.

"When I talk to the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, and when I listen to their rhetoric and when I read their material, they basically, inevitably come down to the conclusion or the assertion -- which, shockingly to me, they regard as self-evident -- that federal agents, FBI agents in particular, will routinely, regularly and without hesitation, corrupt a crime scene, fabricate evidence, contaminate evidence, do whatever is necessary to get the man we want," Sennett said.

"Their arguments don't hold up. The only way their arguments hold up is if you take it as a given that FBI agents are untrustworthy. If you assume that FBI agents are trustworthy and abide by the law -- if you start with the premise that we are just as inclined to break the law as to honor it -- then no case we put together has any credibility."

And on Feb. 2, at a regular Friday morning State House press conference in Pierre, S.D., Janklow made his only public statements regarding the meeting he had with Clinton about Peltier.

It wasn't South Dakota's regular press that brought up Peltier, however. It took more than a month and a journalism student from Washington High School in Sioux Falls. The class was visiting the State House, and Janklow gave a press conference, which has been archived by South Dakota Public Television.

The female high-school student asked about Peltier's file and if Bush should support clemency. She asked if Janklow would change his mind.

Janklow paused.

"You've asked me something that nobody else did," Janklow said. "I am probably the one that's responsible for Leonard Peltier not getting out."

Janklow said he knew Clinton and that he initiated a meeting between the two, which took place in late December. Had it not, "I think Leonard Peltier would have been turned loose," Janklow said.

"I spent an extended period of time with him in late December," Janklow elaborated. "It was supposed to be about 15 minutes. I spent a very lengthy period of time in the Oval Office at the end of the day."

Janklow said he had been involved with the Williams and Coler shootout as South Dakota's attorney general at the time.

"I was at Oglala the day those FBI agents were killed," Janklow said. "I was in the shootout. I was attorney general of South Dakota at that time, and when we received the call that the FBI agents were under fire, and they had injuries, I left the Capitol with another agent of mine. We rounded up the state's machine guns, and I'm the one that flew them out to Hot Springs and ultimately to Oglala."

He said he saw the bodies of Williams and Coler.

"I know what happened at Oglala," Janklow said. "Leonard Peltier is not innocent. He's a cold-blooded murderer."

Janklow said he spoke to Clinton as a president who had once been a governor.

"I said to the president, 'You and I both exercise this power. Neither one of us have ever let anybody out of prison who would not admit they were wrong.' Leonard Peltier has never admitted he did anything wrong."

Janklow added: "I knew Peltier was not going to get out before President Clinton left office. After I talked to the president, I was notified some time later. As a matter of fact, I recently received a picture in the mail of me sitting in the Oval Office with the president, visiting. Enclosed was a business card of his intergovernmental relations person and a USA Today article that said Leonard Peltier would not be turned loose and that the president had been deeply moved by a conversation that he had with Gov. Janklow of South Dakota."

Peltier was not surprised by Janklow's words, but added that he thought Janklow overestimated his role.

"Janklow has never really been a friend to the American Indian Movement -- any Indian people that he can't control," Peltier said. "He deals with the gripes only because he has to on certain issues, but his history is not the greatest when he deals with Native Americans."

If Clinton believed whatever Janklow and Daschle said, "there's something lacking credibility in his concern about discrimination, too," Peltier said.

He noted that a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights investigation at Pine Ridge, conducted last year, concluded that racism is still a problem in relations between the reservation's residents and the local and federal governments.

"His own civil-rights commission just did an investigation that found South Dakota to be a very racist state against Native Americans," Peltier said of Clinton. "And yet, he would allow someone like Janklow, who has advocated this discrimination for the last 20 years, to come in and convince him? It doesn't make sense. I mean, either his morals aren't right, or he is a hypocrite about what he was saying about civil rights and discrimination."

Means agrees and adds that he thinks Janklow was simply blowing his own horn.

"What kind of influence could Janklow, a conservative Republican in a racist state, have on Clinton?" Means said. "I just don't buy it."
 

Theories in the air

Meanwhile, a theory that is on its way to becoming a contemporary myth, as Coyote puts it, is running rampant in both high-profile and underground circles from the East Coast all the way to Hollywood.

Peltier, Ellison and Matthiessen all think that the deal Clinton sealed on Jan. 19 with the Justice Department somehow included a pass-over-the-Peltier-file clause. In the deal, the government dropped its perjury and obstruction of justice investigation against Clinton that stemmed from his testimony to Congress during the Monica Lewinsky impeachment scandal. Clinton paid a $25,000 fine, and his Arkansas law license was suspended for five years as part of the deal.

"The rumor that I've heard -- that I've not been able to verify -- is that Leonard Peltier's name came up at least once in the discussions," Ellison said.

"I think everybody was probably looking for a way out," Ellison adds. "The question was what kind of quid pro quo would be involved. And Clinton, he didn't have to do anything. All he had to do was not do something. So it's a very, very easy thing. ... I've seen or heard nothing that says anything different.

"It's so typical that the government would bring up all kinds of things in plea discussions. And here we have the FBI director personally doing everything from working to deny parole to lobbying the attorney general to sending letters to both the attorney general and the president from his office. So when the Justice Department is engaged in plea discussions with the White House, to me it would be unreasonable not to expect that there would be something brought up."

Ellison, who said the FBI was likely to have attended the meetings between the Justice Department and Clinton, points out that Peltier's clemency case went through all the appropriate channels and was long-established.

"My experience has always been that the FBI has a tremendous amount of influence and can exert it in a variety of ways," Ellison said.

So Clinton, according to Ellison, chose the easy way out.

"What's his motivation?" Ellison said. "Think about your choices. You finish being president of the United States, and you either start making, like he just did, $100,000 for 45 minutes speaking somewhere -- doing that on a regular basis and being applauded when you do that and being paid big money -- or being under federal criminal indictment and being restricted in your movements, having police officers refuse to do security at any large places where you're supposed to be speaking and, if not, outright picketing. Between those two, what's his motivation? I don't know that it needs to be said. But those were clearly his options."

Clinton might have feared the same kind of FBI demonstrations that other Peltier supporters have faced, such as actor and producer Robert Redford. Redford narrated "Incident at Oglala," a documentary looking at the federal government's handling of the Peltier case. According to a source close to Redford, he was "stonewalled" by the government for two years in his attempts to get information for the film.

And just recently, on Feb. 26, Nashville's Fraternal Order of Police, in its newsletter and in a television interview, asked city police to boycott the set of a new movie Redford is working on, even though private security was hired.

Calvin Hullett, president of the Nashville FOP and a sergeant in the Nashville Police Department, asked police officers not to work on the movie set in their off-duty time.

"He made that documentary that was in support of Leonard Peltier, and I think he spoke out several times in addition to that in support of Peltier," Hullet said of Redford.

"We just asked our people, basically, not to work out there in a voluntary capacity," Hullett added. "These people come out in support of somebody that's been convicted of killing a law-enforcement officer. Granted, you can have your feelings either way, but to publicly support someone who killed a law enforcement officer is just wrong in our opinion."

Hullett said it was the FBI that approached the FOP to urge police to boycott Redford.

"That's just a typical communication between us as law enforcement," Hullett continued. "Obviously, we'd seen their march in Washington. They just asked us, as well, if we would join them in essentially boycotting anybody that's in support of Peltier."

The resolution was taken to the FOP's local board of directors, which voted unanimously in favor of a boycott, Hullett said.

Coyote said he'd seen it all before. He is no stranger to law enforcement's opposition to Peltier's cause.

In 1987, Coyote put on a concert titled "Cowboys for Indians." It was a benefit for Peltier that gave top billing to country singer Willie Nelson. Coyote said he had met Nelson on the set of a film.

"I basically told Willie what I wanted to do, and he gave me the name of his manager, and he gave me a check for $2,500," Coyote said.

In every spare moment he got, Coyote made calls to numerous musicians, comedians and actors, and their managers.

"Gradually I got a list of performers," Coyote said. "Willie's name was a big draw, so that made it easier for me to get Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne and all of those people."

But then, he said, the FBI got wind of the concert and sought to prevent it from taking place.

"They wrote letters on Justice Department stationery to all of our sponsors urging them to pull out," Coyote said. "Now, I don't know if that's illegal or not, but from my point of view, we were exercising First Amendment rights. For a government law-enforcement agency to write on official letterhead to try to stop us felt to me like it should be illegal, if it isn't."

There were also threats coming from unidentified sources, Coyote said.

"We got bomb threats, sniper threats," he said. "And since I was the emcee, you can imagine that my bowels were in a near-liquid state, spot-lit in an outdoor arena with stands and trees up on the hill. I was checking my car with mirrors for weeks."

Matthiessen said the FBI could make a former president's life miserable, especially one with a wife in the Senate.

"I'm sure they could threaten to, and probably do, some damage to Sen. (Hillary) Clinton and maybe others of his circle," Matthiessen said. "We've seen they're very willing to play rough and very willing to ignore the truth, so why should they hesitate to smear somebody else?"

Clinton, Mathiessen maintained, "was let off very, very easily" in the Justice Department deal.

Clinton's office scoffs at the allegation that the FBI had anything to do with his deal.

"That's not true," Payne said. "That allegation is absolutely false. That had nothing to do with what the president and the president's lawyers worked out with the independent counsel's office -- absolutely nothing. ... There was no reason for them to be involved, nor were they even involved."

She adds that David Kendall, Clinton's lawyer, and Robert Ray, the independent counsel who replaced Kenneth Starr, were the only ones privy to the deal aside from Clinton. Matthiessen was unconvinced.

"I'm very sure that Peltier was part of the deal," Matthiessen said. "I don't think he was the whole deal; I think to say that is maybe stretching it a bit. I think there's no question in any of our minds that he was thrown into the deal. The FBI is really hot, and they would have lost a lot of face if he had been let out. They were really rabid about it. They played dirty. They libeled him repeatedly in the press and in their ads. Imagine libeling a federal prisoner who has been in jail for 25 years. ... It's bad enough that he got convicted and put away for all his young life -- and these people smeared him.

"The job is to keep Peltier in prison for good. I think they lost face. That whole case was prepared very badly. The ballistics was farcical. They were very lucky to get one guy ... They know they made a mess of it. The FBI is constantly -- every two weeks -- in hot water for something else. They are just not a very effective outfit. It's the PR, but mainly the loss of face."

Matthiessen adds there is an issue that he believes goes beyond the Peltier case, alluding to a possible conspiracy.

"I think all of us have the distinct impression that Washington is scared to death of (the FBI) -- the politicians and everybody," Matthiessen said. "They are. They're scared of those legendary files."

And Peltier ponders his fate as a rallying point for the FBI.

"I believe they have a lot of vengeance in their heart," Peltier said. "Somebody has to pay. They know that if I was ever released, that nobody would ever get convicted."

Matthiessen also offers a theory far more salient than the allegations that surround the Justice Department deal -- something that a grand jury and a U.S. prosecutor would love to prove.

"It seemed in a way ironic, because the president probably got more hot water and earned more contempt for pardoning people like Rich and others than he would have gotten into trouble for pardoning Peltier," Matthiessen said.

"The FBI would have been very hot. He would have gotten a lot of slams from the far-right wing. Why should he care? At least he would have gotten credit for courage. Here, he got nothing. We were disgusted by those clemencies that were handed out. Some of us, like (Ellison) and I, have been working for over 20 years trying to get Leonard out, or trying to get him a fair shot. We realized that 20 years of work and books written, legal fees pro bono and Indian people and us traveling all over the country -- you put all that money together -- we could have socked away an awful lot more than Marc Rich and company.

"We should have just written a big check out to the White House, and Leonard would be out. That's a horrible realization one has to come to."

Reprinted under the Fair Use doctrine of international copyright law.
<<<<<>>>>>
Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
http://nativenewsonline.org/
<<<<<>>>>>
Native News Online
a Service of Barefoot Connection
 

"The true movement isn't a thing, or some collective entity of people, or
even any person. It has no form or structure and so can't be distributed,
or possessed, or detained. No one else can exclude you, as you must invite
yourself." - Rush (When We Were Iron)

PART 1 OF 2