DURING THE COLD WAR, Soviet propagandists and Western “progressives” routinely charged that the United States had “political prisoners” of its own: “freedom fighters” locked up by the Justice Department for “crimes of conscience.” The complaint has lost steam in recent years. There is no longer a Cold War to animate it. And many of the most celebrated American “political prisoners” of the 1960s and 1970s simply aren’t prisoners any more.
One such Cold War-era case remains alive, however. Millions of Soviet citizens once “spontaneously” signed petitions demanding the release of Leonard Peltier, a mid-1970s American Indian Movement (AIM) gunman serving a life sentence for murder. The Russians have since forgotten about the matter. But an astonishing number of Western would-be do-gooders — Amnesty International, the European Parliament, rock bands, the National Council of Churches, and Hollywood celebrities like Danny Glover and Susan Sarandon — have refused to let it drop. Indeed, their efforts have lately intensified, even as their claim that Peltier is innocent has never seemed weaker.
November was “Freedom Month for Leonard Peltier” in the nation’s capital, a series of events organized by his defense committee. Using the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill as their headquarters, these activists demonstrated in front of the White House and lobbied congressional offices on behalf of their imprisoned hero. Peltier, they insisted, is only the most recent major victim of a centuries-long U.S. assault on Native Americans.
“Leonard Peltier is typical of the abuse of other native people,” said Jennifer Harbury at a Lafayette Park rally a few weeks ago. Harbury directs a “human rights” group in California and has waged a long battle to implicate the Guatemalan government in the death of her husband, who was a leftist guerrilla in that country. Peltier “is a symbol of the campaigns of oppression” waged by white people throughout the Americas, she announced. “It seems the federal government is using this as an example of what could happen to us if we are out of line,” added Coki Tree Spirit, another pro-Peltier activist.
Peltier himself addressed the Lafayette Park rally with a recorded message. “I still cannot understand that with the millions of people around the world demanding my freedom the government can still ignore it.”
Maybe the fact that he is guilty has something to do with it.
On June 26, 1975, two FBI agents, 28-year-old Jack Coler and 27-year-old Ronald Williams, were on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, searching for a torture and robbery suspect named Jimmy Eagle. They spotted a vehicle matching the description of Eagle’s van and followed it into a pasture near where Peltier and other AIM members were residing. Then, Williams called in a report that the van had stopped on a rise and that its occupants had emerged with rifles and appeared ready to shoot. The agents were trapped in their cars in an open field, armed only with service revolvers and a single rifle in Coler’s trunk.
Williams was hit first, in the arm and side. Coler seems to have crawled to the back of his car for his rifle, but he got off only a single shot before his arm was nearly severed by return fire. Despite his own wound, Williams managed to apply a tourniquet to his colleague. But Coler was unconscious, and, realizing further resistance was futile, Williams apparently attempted to surrender. The two agents had managed to get off only five shots. Their cars had been hit at least 125 times by long-range rifles, semiautomatics, and an AR-15 assault rifle.
Some number of gunmen — dozens of Peltier’s fellow militants may have joined the battle from a nearby camp — then walked down the rise toward the FBI agents. Williams held up a hand in front of the executioner’s gun; a bullet blew off three of his fingers and the back of his skull. Coler was shot in the head and throat from less than two feet away.
An FBI rescue party killed one AIM suspect and captured another but the rest initially eluded them. A witness at the scene identified Peltier as the driver of the van Williams and Coler had been following, and his thumbprint was found inside. In November 1975, an Oregon state trooper stopped a vehicle that Peltier was driving. Peltier responded with gunfire and escaped into the woods. He left behind Agent Coler’s revolver — again, with Peltier’s incriminating thumbprint on it — along with eight other guns, a collection of hand grenades, and 350 pounds of dynamite.
In February 1976, Peltier was finally arrested in Canada by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. After a lengthy appeals process, he was extradited to the United States. At his trial the next year, three witnesses said they had seen Peltier walk toward Coler and Williams with the AR-15 murder weapon moments before they were executed. The Mounties who captured Peltier testified that he had volunteered an explanation for the killings: The agents, he had mistakenly believed, were looking for him — to arrest him for the 1972 attempted shooting of a Milwaukee police officer. A jury in Fargo, North Dakota, took 10 hours to convict Peltier on two counts of murder, for which he would be legally guilty even if he had not fired the actual bullets that killed the FBI agents. He was given two consecutive life sentences.
Journalist Peter Matthiessen’s 1983 book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse quibbled with the overwhelming forensic evidence that Coler and Williams were killed by Peltier’s AR-15 rifle. The book suggested, instead, that a vast conspiracy involving the FBI, judges, prosecutors, coroners, and the Canadian Mounties had contrived to frame Peltier because he threatened white corporate America’s interests in valuable uranium deposits on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Those uranium deposits have never been found. And Matthiessen’s book was later withdrawn from circulation for several years in the face of libel suits.
But In the Spirit of Crazy Horse helped spark the “Free Leonard Peltier” movement. Oliver Stone purchased the film rights. Robert Redford used it as the basis for a highly distorted documentary. And when the book was reissued in 1991, Matthiessen produced a new piece of “evidence” in the case: a filmed interview with a hooded “Mr. X,” who claimed to be the “real” murderer.
Except that he wasn’t. In the course of an exhaustive 1995 investigation of the Peltier controversy, Scott Anderson of Outside magazine interviewed one of Peltier’s original codefendants, who told him flat-out that “there is no Mr. X. Those are all lies.” Anderson also made clear that Peltier was never the significant American Indian Movement leader his advocates make him out to be — but only a “bodyguard” for AIM, hired “muscle” with a long and frightening history of armed violence.
None of which seems to matter to the people massed in Lafayette Park last month. They have been encouraged by President Clinton’s recent pardon of the 1970s Puerto Rican FALN terrorists. Peltier, too, has a long-pending clemency petition on file at the Justice Department. Perhaps, come Christmas, the president will finally “free Leonard,” who — his defenders continue to imagine, against all logic — has long been targeted by the U.S. government for destruction simply on account of his beliefs.
Then again, perhaps Clinton will not free Peltier. He certainly shouldn’t. Peltier has never expressed any regret for his crimes and continues to deny the worst of them. “I was there that day,” he grudgingly acknowledges of the murders for which he was convicted. “But we were attacked, and we had a right to defend ourselves, and so I fired back” — though “Mr. X” delivered the coup de grace. Peltier sees himself a martyr and gladly accepts the mythology that has grown up around him. He signs his letters “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.”
In a striking departure from common practice, FBI director Louis Freeh has publicly opposed any possibility of clemency for Peltier. “Leonard Peltier was convicted of grave crimes,” he said in 1994, “and there should be no commutation of his two consecutive terms of life in prison.” Organizations representing both current and former special agents of the Bureau also actively oppose clemency, calling Peltier a “vicious, violent, and cowardly criminal who hides behind the Native American Community.”
Before he gives even a thought to pardoning this man, President Clinton should listen to his FBI. Jack Coler, Ronald Williams, and their families still deserve our sympathy. Leonard Peltier, the man who killed Coler and Williams, deserves many more years in prison.
Mark Tooley is the director of the United Methodist Committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.
