A case of quasi-official manipulation of the U.S. legal system for purposes of censorship-one of the most virulent in recent memory-is apparently at an end. A Federal appeals court threw out a lawsuit, saying there was "no basis" to it, which had effectively suppressed In The Spirit of Crazy Horse, Peter Mattheissen's 1983 book documenting FBI persecution of the American Indian Movement (AIM) on and around the Pine Ridge Sioux reservation in South Dakota, during the mid-1970's.
FBI agent David Price brought the suit in 1984 against Matthiessen and Viking Press, his publisher,seeking $20 million in punitive damages for alleged "defamation of character," and joined former South Dakota Governor William Janklow, whose earlier claim was for $4 million in "actual" damages and $20 million in punitive damages--also the result of supposed libel suffered at the hands of Matthiessen and Viking Press. Price's suit was dismissed last summer[1989], Janklow's in 1988.
And that leaves Matthiessen free to update the material contained in his epic--much new information reinforcing his conclusions has surfaced in the intervening years--so that distribution of a revised second edition can begin soon.
But the story of attempted censorship should be told as well. Janklow was still living in the governor's mansion when he filed his suit, naming not only the author and publisher as defendants but also several local bookstore owners. The message imbedded in this gesture was clear: Outlets that stock titles containing material the government, or important members of it, consider "inappropriate" or "sensitive" should reconsider. Otherwise, they might get hauled into court, penalized at absurdly high levels, and thus be put out of business.
For his part, Price retained his active status as an FBI agent--and thereby his ready access to otherwise-restricted information relevant to the case--throughout the proceedings. He also received substantial support and legal assistance from the reactionary Heritage Foundation, absorbing the enormous expenses of pressing his case.
Neither Prince nor Janklow (himself a lawyer) argued that what Matthiessen said in his book--that the governor had been charged with sex offenses on two occasions and that Price had been deeply involved in several of the most unsavory episodes of the FBI's anti-AIM operations--was untrue. Rather, each contended that the author had no right to include such observations, regardless of their truth or falsity. Federal district judges ruled repeatedly that such reasoning was groundless and dismissed the suits. But on each occasion, the plaintiffs used the credibility of their official positions and apparently limitless finances to have the cases reinstated. The pattern continued, and it kept Crazy Horse out of circulation for years.
Plainly, the stakes involved in all this private litigation were higher than the personal reputations of a pair of private citizens. To understand the intensity of the effort to prevent Crazy Horse from being read by the general public, we must look to the little-known reality of what happened in the remote fastness of Pine Ridge between 1973 and 1976.
During those years, more than sixty AIM members died violently on the reservation, a murder rate several times that of Detroit, which in those years was known as "the murder capital of the United States." There is, in fact, no statistical counterpart in contemporary North America to the rate of violent death visited upon AIM in this period; to find parallels, we must look to such places as Uruguay during the height of the anti-Tupamaro repression or Chile during the three years following the Pinochet coup.
None of these homicides has been solved by the FBI. In a number of cases, the Bureau never so much as opened an investigation, despite the facts that it is the primary law-enforcement entity on the reservation and there were often eyewitness identifications of the killers. George O'Clock, the FBI agent in charge of Pine Ridge operations from 1973 to 1975, publicly pleaded "lack of manpower" to explain his office's inability to come to grips with the situation on Pine Ridge. Yet during these years, O'Clock enjoyed the highest ratio of agents to citizens ever sustained in any area at any time in the history of the Bureau. And in 1976, their number increased dramatically.
While the FBI professed to be too shorthanded to investigate the wholesale murder of AIM members, its agents found ample time and energy to go after the victims themselves. During 1973 alone, the Bureau amassed more than 316,000 separate file classifications on AIM and its membership. As a result, 542 charges on such weighty matters as "trespassing," "interference with Federal officers," and "theft" of a used pair of cowboy boots were referred to Federal prosecutors. Of these, only fifteen, all for minor infractions, resulted in convictions by juries. Meanwhile, however, AIM was financially gutted by the staggering cost of bail and legal defense. There is no clearer example in U.S. history of baseless and vindictive prosecution aimed at the destruction of a political movement.
Virtually all of those identified as the murderers of AIM people were members of a group known as the GOONs (Guardians of the Oglala Nation). This was essentially a vigilante force funded by the Federal Government to support tribal president Dick Wilson against his local opposition, in which AIM featured prominently.
Delamar Eastman and Duane Brewer, commanders of the reservation police force which reported directly to the FBI, doubled as heads of the GOON squad. More than half the personnel of the Pine Ridge police also doubled as GOONs. Thus the vigilantes can be seen to have acted as surrogates of the FBI while decimating the AIM membership.
Other FBI "enforcement techniques" included massive sweeps of the reservation by more than 200 SWAT-trained and equipped agents riding in military armored personnel carriers. Several air assaults were undertaken on reservation homes by teams of agents carried in Vietnam-style Baby Huey helicopters. Warrantless, no-knock assaults on premises were commonplace.
In court, as trial records repeatedly reveal, Bureau methods included the coercion of false testimony by witnesses, perjury by FBI personnel, fabrication of physical evidence, and withholding of exculpatory evidence. Other tactics that can be documented include infiltration of AIM by provocateurs, embezzlement of AIM funds, and systematic deployment of disinformation through the mass media. Fittingly, internal Bureau documents adopted the vernacular of counterinsurgency warfare in describing what was being done on the reservation.
Although few understood it at the time, there was a simple reason for the secret war in South Dakota. AIM and its supporters among the traditional Oglala Lakota of Pine Ridge were engaged in a program to recover land in the area illegally taken over by the U.S. Government. But the Government had quietly discovered substantial deposits of uranium and other minerals within a portion of Pine Ridge itself. Dick Wilson had agreed, in exchange for Federal support of his regime over his AIM and traditionalists opponents, to transfer title to the acreage in question to the Department of the Interior. Therefore, AIM had to be crushed and the traditionalists subordinated. The FBI moved in, did the job, and Wilson signed the papers.
In The Spirit of Crazy Horse tells this story in 630 well-crafted pages. It lays bare the fact that, long after the FBI announced it had terminated its illegal and repressive counterintelligence programs (COINTELPRO) against political groups--indeed, even as FBI Director Clarence Kelley was standing before Congress swearing that his agency would never again serve as a political police force--such operations were not only being continued but intensified against an American political group.
Those guilty of the crimes perpetrated against the Indians of Pine Ridge have gone unpunished. But that's not the moral of the story. The point to remember is, if the FBI lied about what it was doing then, at the height of its supposed self-reformation, it could certainly be doing the same thing now.
The victory over censorship in the Crazy
Horse case is real enough. But it's no time for complacency.
Ward Churchill, Creek/Cherokee Metis,
is co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado and
coordinator of American Indian Studies at the University of Colorado
in Boulder.
From The Progressive, April 1990