All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
I am ever so depressed to be reading THE UNQUIET GRAVE this morning. The perfect white world where everybody can “pull them selves up by their boot straps” and there is a chicken in the pot and a car in the driveway….(yes I am aware that countries have it much worse than we do but I do not judge our country by the lowest of human standards) …is crumbling all around. The story of corruption just gets worse and worse.
As Monica mourns the history of her people, I mourn the loss of the facade of mine. Well I don’t mourn it in the sense that I regret it’s being torn apart. I mourn that it wasn’t true….or only true for a very small segment. And for that small segment it is only true as long as you remain ignorant to what is happening in the areas or circles that you don’t normally travel. It is only true if you think that the rights of human beings exclude minorities, activists, or those of lower income.
The trial of Dennis Banks and Russel Means was so outrageous that the judge lectured the prosecution for an hour and threw out the remaining charges against Banks and Means.
It was an enormously important decision, or should have been. But as the trial’s foremost historian, John Sayer, wrote,”To a public saturated with misconduct at the highest levels of government, the escapades of the FBI at a trial somewhere in the Midwest could not have mattered much….”
Days after Nichol dismissed the case, the Justice Department named. R.D. Hurd and David Gienapp two of the nation’s outstanding assistant U.S. attorneys. Banks likened the commendations to the Congressional Medals of Honor given the Seventh Cavalry after the massacre at Wounded Knee.
In the following months, both the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office undertook postmortems to determine what had gone wrong at the trial. Much of the FBI’S analysis focused on Joseph Trimbach, but in the end the Bureau concluded that neither he nor his agents had done anything-not a thing- wrong.
The prosecution came to the same conclusion….it was all the fault of those pesky Indians. Reminds me of some people on a certain discussion group….
But losing the trial did not mean losing the fight against AIM-quite the contrary. As prosecutor David Gienapp said year later, ” To some extent, the prosecutions accomplished as much by getting dismissed or an acquittal as they would have had there been a conviction, because Russell Means and Dennis Bands realized even if you get off, sitting nine months in a courtroom isn’t what they want to do.” Gienapp was speaking not merely with the advantage of hindsight; the strategy was one the government consciously pursued at the time. At the end of the siege, for example, colonel Volney Warner urged the Justice Department to throw the proverbial book at AIM. “AIM’s most militant leaders and followers, over three hundred,” he wrote, “are under indictment, in jail, or warrants are out for their arrest. the government can win even if no one goes to prison.” It was not a new strategy. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had used the same plan in the late 1960′s to kneecap the Black Panthers.
….the strategy was beginning to have the desired effect. AIM was spending something like three of its every four hours and dollars just to keep its members out of jail. which did not leave much time or money for the betterment of its people or the recruitment of new followers or calm thought about is future or past. It was the sort of strain that could lead a group to do desperate things.
