25-04-2010, 08:35 PM
Aim,has been split into different camps since the murder of Anna Mae Aquash.Robert Robideau accuses AIM leaders Dennis Banks, Vernon Bellecourt and others,of ordering her death.This excerpt is taken from a review of Dennis Banks autobiography.
http://www.dancingbadger.com/dennisbanks.html#
The Albatross: Who Killed
Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash, and Why?
It is the innocence of the albatross that haunts the Ancient Mariner, the wantonness of killing it.
Anna Mae Aquash was born Pictou in Canada, and she came to the U.S. as a committed First nations activist. When she joined AIM she quickly ascended to a leadership role. Then she was murdered and she became, in her tragic death, the albatross of AIM–not an unpleasant burden to be ignored and discarded, but a crippling talisman like Coleridge's original, an emblem of failed will, pointless destruction, and dishonor. As I write, a booze-addled AIM flunkie has sort of confessed to having helped kill her at the behest of AIM leadership, and he has implicated a Canadian Indian man. People of character, like John Trudell, are offering corroborations that are circumstantial but troubling, and people of no character, like FBI and BIA officials, are serving up the usual farrago of lies.
Rex Weyler has written an excellent summary of the circumstances surrounding the Aquash murder for the Vancouver Sun (reprinted at http://www.grahamdefense.org). A telling though seemingly minor detail in Weyler's story: Myrtle Poor Bear, who was blackmailed into perjuring herself to get Leonard Peltier extradited from Canada 25 years ago, claimed when she successfully repudiated her testimony at Peltier's trial that the FBI coercion included this threat: They would see that what happened to Anna Mae (and they showed her pictures of the dead body) happened to her, if she failed to help them. (For a vehemently alternative view of the Graham/Aquash story, see Minnesotan Mike Mosedale's extremely hostile review of Ojibwa Warrior.)
We will never know the truth, thanks to the federal government. The FBI handled AIM with one of the most pernicious propaganda devices, worthy of the KGB: snitch jacketing. It's a simple strategy: If you want to neutralize a leader, spread the word that he/she is a government spy. He can't prove he isn't, and even if only some believe it, that's a wedge. There is no leader in AIM who has not, in the last thirty years, been identified as, alternately, a thief and con man or an FBI snitch. To my knowledge only a handful of the latter accusations have proven true, notably Doug Durham, who may have murdered Jancita Eagle Deer and had a serious grudge against Anna Mae Aquash. FBI bedfellows: Don't leave home with 'em.
Snitch jacketing backfires when the agency that's doing it has lost credibility, as the FBI has. When both sides could be liars, who do you trust? When the government is indistinguishable morally from its enemies, who do you believe? As I write, the FBI is using the same unethical tactics to get John Graham out of Canada that they used to extradite Leonard Peltier 25 years ago: a fabric of lies, suppressed details, and emotional coercion.
Snitch jacketing may have worked with Anna Mae Aquash, and maybe she actually was an informant, even though she was the first to "out" Doug Durham–scarcely the act of a fellow spy–and it was Durham who started the whisper campaign accusing her when she raised questions with Dennis Banks about Durham. There's no question that this most prominently active of the AIM women was suspected as an informant (turned, the wisdom went, to save herself after being captured in a shootout with the FBI). However, no evidence of collaboration has surfaced in the decades since her death, whereas Durham's spying is public knowledge now. So who do you believe?
We will never know for certain that she was not an informant; the law of negative proof makes snitch jacketing effective. The only kind of proof we can expect is, if she was an informant, proof of that. If she was, then perhaps the FBI's initial claim when her body was found, that she was a "Jane Doe" who "died of exposure" was a bit of Occidental humor, like South Dakota Attorney General (and part-time pedophile rapist, but she was just an Indian, you know) Bill Janklow's joke that most of the Indian problems in his state could be solved with bullets in the heads of AIM leaders. Which, it turns out, was what killed Anna Mae Aquash. Coincidentally.
Who do you believe? New evidence suggests that AIM may indeed have executed her "for treason," whether she was guilty or not, and whether the killer was John Graham or not. We'll never know, and Banks says not. Today, with 25 years of distance, we find the notion of her execution horrifying, an act of murder. But I think of The Guns of Navaronne, made in the '60's. Near the end, partisans of the Greek Resistance execute a spy in their midst and most of us approve, however sadly, the sentence for treason against freedom fighters. If they were wrong about her, though, what a burden to carry forever.
Dennis Banks certainly doesn't act guilty. The most damning bit of evidence against him, his having told John Trudell that her body had been found before the FBI released the identification of the commonplace "Jane Doe" they took such uncommon interest in, is easily accounted for. The FBI knew before the body was examined who the woman in the gully was, othewise why would two Special Agents respond to a report of another dead body at Pine Ridge? Keep in mind that about sixty Oglala Sioux were murdered in the five years surrounding Wounded Knee, not to mention untold numbers of casualties of hunger, alcohol, and deadly cold. The FBI didn't answer those calls for body bags. In fact, the sixty murders all went uninvestigated.
The FBI and the coroner knew that "exposure" doesn't generally cause blood-crusted bullet wounds to the skull. How carefully did these experts examine the dead young Indian on the slab? (Ten years later, the coroner would explain that the bullet that traversed her brain might have "contributed" to her death, but what killed her was frostbite!) Agent David Price, who had spent hours interviewing her a few months earlier, who targetted her for special attention as a key member of AIM, and –coincidentally again– had told her less than a year ago that if she didn't turn snitch she'd "be dead in a year," was on the scene when her body was found and present at the morgue when they cut off her hands (for "identification purposes"). Why this interest, one wonders, if she was thought to be a Jane Doe frozen drunk in a ditch? And he saw a face not, as he claimed, decomposed at all by the month of sub-zero "exposure" in a shady gully covered with snow. He knew who Jane Doe was, just he would have needed a blindfold not to see the bloody gunshot wound and the bulge in her skull where the .32 shell lodged. Exposure. So how did Banks know immediately that Anna Mae was found. Informants work both ways. Someone leaked the identification to AIM immediately, before the public admission that it was her.
For all the Pictou family's anger, the evidence of AIM guilt is still meagre. Banks certainly has done nothing to undermine the legend of Annie Mae (as Buffy Sainte-Marie calls her in "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee"); in fact, his is a prominent voice keeping her story in the foreground of AIM history. Banks spends a page of a final chapter of Ojibwa Warrior eulogizing Anna Mae, singling her out from his list of heroic American Indian women: Gladys Bissonette, Nilak Butler, Lou Bean, Mary Gertrude Crow Dog, Cecilia Jumping Bull. Another odd bit of "evidence" mustered against him is his failure to mention in the book that he and Anna Mae were, briefly, lovers while he was married to Kamook Nichols, the Lakota wife who would later accuse him of ordering Anna Mae's execution. But he is consistently vague about his love life. On the other hand, he is painfully forthcoming about his failure to listen to her when she voiced her suspicions about the sinister Doug Durham.
If Dennis Banks was an accessory to her death, if he conspired in her death, and this can be proved without relying on the lies and suborning and deceit that the FBI spews like a river of sewage, then let him be charged and tried. Meantime, nothing he does will bring her back, nothing will "make up for" her death, nothing will earn or merit forgiveness should there be reason to forgive. But if ever a man has paid for a sin, Banks has paid. He has devoted twenty years to the spiritual renewal of his people with a sincerity and dedication that cannot be denied.
Perhaps, if there is guilt, that has been an act of atonement, for the death of a woman he loved.
http://www.dancingbadger.com/dennisbanks.html#
The Albatross: Who Killed
Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash, and Why?
It is the innocence of the albatross that haunts the Ancient Mariner, the wantonness of killing it.
Anna Mae Aquash was born Pictou in Canada, and she came to the U.S. as a committed First nations activist. When she joined AIM she quickly ascended to a leadership role. Then she was murdered and she became, in her tragic death, the albatross of AIM–not an unpleasant burden to be ignored and discarded, but a crippling talisman like Coleridge's original, an emblem of failed will, pointless destruction, and dishonor. As I write, a booze-addled AIM flunkie has sort of confessed to having helped kill her at the behest of AIM leadership, and he has implicated a Canadian Indian man. People of character, like John Trudell, are offering corroborations that are circumstantial but troubling, and people of no character, like FBI and BIA officials, are serving up the usual farrago of lies.
Rex Weyler has written an excellent summary of the circumstances surrounding the Aquash murder for the Vancouver Sun (reprinted at http://www.grahamdefense.org). A telling though seemingly minor detail in Weyler's story: Myrtle Poor Bear, who was blackmailed into perjuring herself to get Leonard Peltier extradited from Canada 25 years ago, claimed when she successfully repudiated her testimony at Peltier's trial that the FBI coercion included this threat: They would see that what happened to Anna Mae (and they showed her pictures of the dead body) happened to her, if she failed to help them. (For a vehemently alternative view of the Graham/Aquash story, see Minnesotan Mike Mosedale's extremely hostile review of Ojibwa Warrior.)
We will never know the truth, thanks to the federal government. The FBI handled AIM with one of the most pernicious propaganda devices, worthy of the KGB: snitch jacketing. It's a simple strategy: If you want to neutralize a leader, spread the word that he/she is a government spy. He can't prove he isn't, and even if only some believe it, that's a wedge. There is no leader in AIM who has not, in the last thirty years, been identified as, alternately, a thief and con man or an FBI snitch. To my knowledge only a handful of the latter accusations have proven true, notably Doug Durham, who may have murdered Jancita Eagle Deer and had a serious grudge against Anna Mae Aquash. FBI bedfellows: Don't leave home with 'em.
Snitch jacketing backfires when the agency that's doing it has lost credibility, as the FBI has. When both sides could be liars, who do you trust? When the government is indistinguishable morally from its enemies, who do you believe? As I write, the FBI is using the same unethical tactics to get John Graham out of Canada that they used to extradite Leonard Peltier 25 years ago: a fabric of lies, suppressed details, and emotional coercion.
Snitch jacketing may have worked with Anna Mae Aquash, and maybe she actually was an informant, even though she was the first to "out" Doug Durham–scarcely the act of a fellow spy–and it was Durham who started the whisper campaign accusing her when she raised questions with Dennis Banks about Durham. There's no question that this most prominently active of the AIM women was suspected as an informant (turned, the wisdom went, to save herself after being captured in a shootout with the FBI). However, no evidence of collaboration has surfaced in the decades since her death, whereas Durham's spying is public knowledge now. So who do you believe?
We will never know for certain that she was not an informant; the law of negative proof makes snitch jacketing effective. The only kind of proof we can expect is, if she was an informant, proof of that. If she was, then perhaps the FBI's initial claim when her body was found, that she was a "Jane Doe" who "died of exposure" was a bit of Occidental humor, like South Dakota Attorney General (and part-time pedophile rapist, but she was just an Indian, you know) Bill Janklow's joke that most of the Indian problems in his state could be solved with bullets in the heads of AIM leaders. Which, it turns out, was what killed Anna Mae Aquash. Coincidentally.
Who do you believe? New evidence suggests that AIM may indeed have executed her "for treason," whether she was guilty or not, and whether the killer was John Graham or not. We'll never know, and Banks says not. Today, with 25 years of distance, we find the notion of her execution horrifying, an act of murder. But I think of The Guns of Navaronne, made in the '60's. Near the end, partisans of the Greek Resistance execute a spy in their midst and most of us approve, however sadly, the sentence for treason against freedom fighters. If they were wrong about her, though, what a burden to carry forever.
Dennis Banks certainly doesn't act guilty. The most damning bit of evidence against him, his having told John Trudell that her body had been found before the FBI released the identification of the commonplace "Jane Doe" they took such uncommon interest in, is easily accounted for. The FBI knew before the body was examined who the woman in the gully was, othewise why would two Special Agents respond to a report of another dead body at Pine Ridge? Keep in mind that about sixty Oglala Sioux were murdered in the five years surrounding Wounded Knee, not to mention untold numbers of casualties of hunger, alcohol, and deadly cold. The FBI didn't answer those calls for body bags. In fact, the sixty murders all went uninvestigated.
The FBI and the coroner knew that "exposure" doesn't generally cause blood-crusted bullet wounds to the skull. How carefully did these experts examine the dead young Indian on the slab? (Ten years later, the coroner would explain that the bullet that traversed her brain might have "contributed" to her death, but what killed her was frostbite!) Agent David Price, who had spent hours interviewing her a few months earlier, who targetted her for special attention as a key member of AIM, and –coincidentally again– had told her less than a year ago that if she didn't turn snitch she'd "be dead in a year," was on the scene when her body was found and present at the morgue when they cut off her hands (for "identification purposes"). Why this interest, one wonders, if she was thought to be a Jane Doe frozen drunk in a ditch? And he saw a face not, as he claimed, decomposed at all by the month of sub-zero "exposure" in a shady gully covered with snow. He knew who Jane Doe was, just he would have needed a blindfold not to see the bloody gunshot wound and the bulge in her skull where the .32 shell lodged. Exposure. So how did Banks know immediately that Anna Mae was found. Informants work both ways. Someone leaked the identification to AIM immediately, before the public admission that it was her.
For all the Pictou family's anger, the evidence of AIM guilt is still meagre. Banks certainly has done nothing to undermine the legend of Annie Mae (as Buffy Sainte-Marie calls her in "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee"); in fact, his is a prominent voice keeping her story in the foreground of AIM history. Banks spends a page of a final chapter of Ojibwa Warrior eulogizing Anna Mae, singling her out from his list of heroic American Indian women: Gladys Bissonette, Nilak Butler, Lou Bean, Mary Gertrude Crow Dog, Cecilia Jumping Bull. Another odd bit of "evidence" mustered against him is his failure to mention in the book that he and Anna Mae were, briefly, lovers while he was married to Kamook Nichols, the Lakota wife who would later accuse him of ordering Anna Mae's execution. But he is consistently vague about his love life. On the other hand, he is painfully forthcoming about his failure to listen to her when she voiced her suspicions about the sinister Doug Durham.
If Dennis Banks was an accessory to her death, if he conspired in her death, and this can be proved without relying on the lies and suborning and deceit that the FBI spews like a river of sewage, then let him be charged and tried. Meantime, nothing he does will bring her back, nothing will "make up for" her death, nothing will earn or merit forgiveness should there be reason to forgive. But if ever a man has paid for a sin, Banks has paid. He has devoted twenty years to the spiritual renewal of his people with a sincerity and dedication that cannot be denied.
Perhaps, if there is guilt, that has been an act of atonement, for the death of a woman he loved.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.â€
Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller