in college i got interested in the American Indian Movement and one book in particular, "Agents of Repression: the FBIs Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement", did more to open my eyes to the history of the FBI and its COINTELPROs (Counter Intelligence Programs) than all the other reading combined. Co-written by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, the book was a brutally explicit detailing of how the FBI systematically destroyed the Black Panther Party and then took its techniques to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and created a wave of murder and insanity that left the reservation town with a per capita murder rate vastly in excess of Detroit, which, at the time, was called the "murder capital" of America. "Wild Bill" Janklow was at the time running for Attorney General of South Dakota and issuing statements such as, "The only way to deal with the Indian problem in South Dakota, is to put a gun to the AIM leaders' heads and pull the trigger." (Janklow became Attorney General and, later, Governor of South Dakota.)
in the media eye, the battle in Pine Ridge eventually came to a head in a stand-off that resulted in two dead American Indian Movement (AIM) activists and two dead FBI agents.
no charges were ever filed for the deaths of the AIM members, but Leonard Peltier is still in jail for the deaths of the two FBI agents, even though there is no conclusive proof that he killed either of them.
a little over a year ago Churchill got into the media spotlight for use of the term "little Eichmanns" to describe workers in the World Trade Center towers. he claims the right wing media pundits misquoted as him saying that the people who died in the WTC towers were "deserving" of the deaths for their complicity in the genocide that the United States propigates internationally. the text of what he actually said (and some interesting bio info) is posted
here.
this image, from a search of Google images, is indicative of the massive campaign to discredit him that was launched following his comments:
tonight, while cruising the right wing directory on the Left Wing MoonBat Society (or some such derogatory term for America Haters like Michael Moore, Al Franken and, not surprisingly, Ward Churchill) i came across a transcript of a speech in which Churchill defends and explains what he said and why he said it.
http://www.counterpunch.org/churchill02212005.htmlthe article is brilliant and should demonstrate to those who haven't read his many incredible books (i've only read a few of his dozen or more books but reread Agents of Repression numerous times over the past ten years) that he is offering an international perspective on why resistance to US imperialism is a global struggle that began with the first occupants of Turtle Island and remains as critical in Native North America (ie reservation land and the urbanized Indian ghettos) as ever.
here's a taste of what Churchill has to say: There's a county on the Pine Ridge Reservation: Shannon County. Shannon County has been the absolute poorest county in the United States for fifty of the last fifty years. And by poorest, I don't mean unable to afford to get the new color TV, 'Gee whiz, I can't trade my truck.' I'm talking about a per capita income of less than $3,000 per year to try to survive South Dakota winters. I'm talking about an unemployment rate that runs into the ninetieth percentile every year. I'm talking about a life expectancy that's one-third shorter generation-in, generation-out than the average American. One-third truncation of a life span, and that's the overall data with regard to reservation based native North America. Urban based is not appreciably better. That's thirty-fifth percentile attrition of a population, and every generation for the last five generations. I don't know how you define a genocidal impact of policy imposition, but that comes real close in my book, OK? I call it genocide. [applause] It comes to a degree of impoverishment that results in a continuous tone of death from malnutrition, nutritionally related diseases. Continuous tone of death and immiseration from rarely communicated diseases. I'm talking about a third-world degree of impoverishment of an entire people, based on the racial definition imposed on us us by the federal government of the United States in behalf of each imagined constituency, which includes everybody else. Not on an even playing field, but in gradients. And a degree of impoverishment devolves from something called plenary power, that the federal government has assigned itself if there's any law professors in the room, you'll know what I'm talking about. Plenary power, in plain English rather than legalese, means absolute, unchallengable power to make disposition of our affairs and our assets. With that, they've assigned themselves a trust authority over those assets. When those assets are exploited by American corporations, they're exploited in a discount royalty rate, discount deep ninety percent they're paying ten cents on the dollar for what they'd be paying on the open market for the minerals, and the money does not go to the people who's minerals they were. It's placed in trust accounts administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Do you wanna know where the Indian destitution comes from? Do you wanna know why our life spans are truncated accordingly? Do you wanna know why our children are so desperate that they are committing suicide at fourteen times the national average? Do you wanna know why all those things come together? Right now there's a case in the federal courts [inaudible], in which it is conceded that the Bureau of Indian Affairs in combination with the Treasury Department of the United States government has "misplaced" one hundred and fifty billion dollars worth of assets. Cash, money. By federal account, there's two million Indians. You wanna divide two million into one hundred and fifty [billion] dollars and see what our standard of living would be if it wasn't being spent on designer overpasses? If it wasn't being spent on the accoutrements of the quality of life that every American yuppie has decided that they are divinely entitled to enjoy? [applause] Does that make me angry? Yeah, it does. Churchill's angry, he speaks angrily, he speaks forcefully. I don't think the issue however is why Churchill would be angry about that. The question is why Governor Bill Owens and the Board of Regents are not, and they have nothing to say on it. [applause]
And I link that up, in my mind, to what was then pronounced to be approximately five hundred and sixty-five thousand Iraqi children who had died needlessly in less than five years. By needlessly, they too were dying of nutritionally related illnesses. They too were dying of readily curable diseases, because of a set of sanctions that the United States hoisted off the pretext of it being UN and imposed in order to make the people themselves scream to the point where they would compel their leadership to become "free," as defined by George Herbert Walker Bush, meaning, to understand that "what we say, goes." This was no mystery. This was official, UN report it was confirmed. It was known, to be confirmed, by Madeline Albright, US ambassador, at the time, to the United Nations, on no less public a venue than 60 Minutes in 1996. Leslie Stahl asked her, are you aware of this, this half-million plus children of another people. And she said, yes, we're aware, we've decided it's worth the price. It's worth the price, in somebody else's children to ensure that they get the message that "what we say, goes."
