Dear Supporters:
On June 1st, the "International" Leonard Peltier Defense Committee came out with a real prize of a request:
"Recently, Leonard Peltier was again denied a transfer to a medium security facility. No reason was given. Please contact the Bureau of Prisons on Leonard's behalf...Let BOP authorities know that it is an outrage that this 70-YEAR-OLD man and in ILL HEALTH has not been transferred and demand a transfer whereby Peltier can receive help with daily living, quality health care, and PROTECTION FROM VIOLENCE. Let the BOP know that you consider this an instance of ELDER ABUSE." (Emphasis added)
Jack Coler and Ron Williams would willingly trade the lives that were stolen from them by Peltier and others and face the inevitability of aging. Jack and Ron never had the chance to age past twenty-eight years thanks to the cowards of Jumping Bull.
Really? Elder abuse? That's the latest excuse to keep the unsuspecting away from the facts, from the truth of what happened four decades ago?
And what happened to all the braggadocio of Peltier the brave warrior, the wannabe Chief, who allegedly stood up for his people, as he ran for the hills after he's the one who put every one of his own people in jeopardy that day.
The latest message, pure myth as it is, refers to June 26th as a--firefight. It was nothing of the sort. It was an unprovoked attack on two easily identified federal agents. And we have Ron Williams' own voice as definitive proof, overheard by a number of people, on exactly what was about to happen.
So now Peltier is whining from his cell in USP Coleman that he needs protection from violence. The absurdity of that has the permanence of breath on a mirror. The convicted murderer and aider and abetter in murder is no longer the tough guy he was when facing two critically wounded human beings and then shooting them both in the face. No, maybe he's not the "Tug" (to use his own term for Thug), he was in 1975, but the fact remains he is among his peers at Coleman. Deal with that reality!
The June 1st message included reference to a resolution for Peltier's clemency from the Rhode Island Progressive Democrats of America (RIPDA). Perusing their year-old website one can't help but think that mainstream, real Democrats, must wince at this fringe group's message and wish they would just go away. The resolution's thirteen WhereAs' and Therefore's are all Peltier boilerplate filled with the same disinformation and fantasy of the Peltier folklore.
An email to RIPDA (Rest-in-Peace Democrats of America?), pointed out that two statements were true, two were inaccurate, four were irrelevant, and five were just outright false, and offered to provide them with some facts...from the records of Peltier's conviction, appeals and self-incriminating public statements...to correct their position. But they probably don't want to be confused with the actual details.
Interestingly, the resolution states that "18" members (their entire membership?) were present and "16" signed in the affirmative, "0" for "nay" and "2" abstained. It would be curious to know what kind of debate was held, if any, and what, if anything, the two who abstained had to say.
The good news is that Peltier is bragging about 16 people as if it's a victory of some sort. What it does do, however, is reinforce Peltier's pathetically meager popularity and hallucinations of clemency prospects.
But let's offer this to those RIPDA folks, a direct quote from Leonard Peltier; "I seen Joe when he pulled it out of the trunk and I looked at him when he put it on and he gave me a smile." For those 16, what Peltier is talking about is Joe Stuntz smiling and stealing Jack Coler's FBI raid jacket while two dead, mutilated, human beings (who both were, by the way, rolled over to face the ground), lay at their feet.
Perhaps Peltier wasn't at Pine Ridge that day after all. Maybe he just got lost and wound up in Providence, Rhode Island.
"In the Spirit of Coler and Williams"
Ed Woods
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Destroying the folklore and myth surrounding Leonard Peltier.
