US vs LEONARD PELTIER FBI MISCONDUCT

Anna Mae Aquash Investigation Reopened
http://nativenet.uthscsa.edu/archive/nl/9411/0182.html

Press Statement
November 7, 1994

FEDERAL RE-OPENING OF ANNA MAE AQUASH MURDER APPEARS TO BE AN ATTEMPT TO
KEEP LEONARD PELTIER IN PRISON FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE

For the past several months, the United States government has been
engaged in an aggressive re-opening of the investigation of the 1976
murder of American Indian Movement (AIM) member Anna Mae Pictou Aquash.
The investigation has taken the form of impaneling a federal grand jury
in Pierre, South Dakota, and interrogating dozens of current and former
AIM members across the United States, by the FBI and US Marshall Bob
Ecoffey, once a member of the violently anti-AIM "GOON Squad" on the Pine
Ridge India n Reservation.
Anna Mae, a Micmaq Indian from Canada, was murdered in late 1975 or early
1976,
her body discovered on February 25, 1976, about ten miles from the town of
Wanblee, on Pine Ridge. Initially, federal contract coroner W.O. Brown, of
Scottsbluff, Nebraska,
ruled she died of "exposure" to the winter elements. After a demand by
her family for an independent autopsy, the cause of her death was found to
be a .38 caliber gunshot wound in the base of her skull.
Given the violent political climate on Pine Ridge at that time, centering on
a
severely hostile relationship between AIM and the FBI, there is substantial
reason to believe the FBI was, either directly or indirectly, involved with
the
murder of Anna Mae
Aquash. After all, during the period of her death, more than 60 other
AIM members and supporters were murdered on Pine Ridge in what the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights officially described as a "reign of [political]
terror." Considerable evidence exists that the FBI was deeply involved
in this ugly pattern of atrocities.
The AIM Confederation remains more interested than anyone in
seeing justice done to the murderers of our sister, Anna Mae. The current
investigation, however, seems especially curious and suspicious. There are
many indications that the FBI is more interested in carrying out a
vendetta against AIM than in achieving justice in the case.
Why, for instance, is the FBI suddenly so interested in
"resolving" the Aquash case and not the scores of other unsolved murders
of AIM members dating from the same period? And why, if it is genuinely
interested in finding out what happened to Anna Mae , has the FBI never
bothered to interview coroner Brown or agents such as David Price, who is
known to have threatened her life shortly before she was killed?
The FBI has made it clear that it has never forgotten another
infamous date in 1975: June 26, the day two FBI agents and AIM member Joe
Stuntz were killed in a firefight on Pine Ridge. As a result of that
event, AIM member Leonard Peltier is serving tw o consecutive life
sentences in federal prison. The AIM Confederation believes that, despite
Peltier's unjust imprisonment, the FBI's desire for revenge will remain
unsatisfied until AIM is finally and entirely destroyed. Consequently, we
believe that the present investigation, rather than seeking to find the
killers of Anna Mae, is designed and intended to cast suspicion upon our
leadership and to sow distrust and confustion within our movement and
among its allies.
In sum, it appears that, far from seeking justice for Anna Mae,
the FBI has gone back to its old COINTELPRO tactics of the 1970s, casting
its net far and wide in a concerted attempt to disrupt the work of AIM and
to keep Leonard Peltier in prison for th e rest of his life by suggesting
that he and AIM are nothing more than "a band of thugs and killers." This
is indicated by two recent ads in the _Washington Post_ and _Indian
Country Today_ placed by current and past FBI agents asking President
Clinton to reject a petition for clemency for Leonard Peltier. In the ad,
the FBI repeats lie after lie, in an attempt to paint Leonard as a
cold-blooded killer from a murderous gang - the American Indian Movement.