The Denial of My Parole
A CounterPunch Exclusive
After releasing an original and continuing disciple of death cult leader Charles Manson who attempted to shoot President Gerald Ford, an admitted Croatian terrorist, and another attempted assassin of President Ford under the mandatory 30-year parole law, the U.S. Parole Commission deemed that my release would “promote disrespect for the law.”
If only the federal government would have respected its own laws, not to mention the treaties that are, under the U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of the land, I would never have been convicted nor forced to spend more than half my life in captivity. Not to mention the fact that every law in this country was created without the consent of Native peoples and is applied unequally at our expense.
The truth is the government wants me to falsely confess in order to validate a rather sloppy frame-up operation, one whose exposure would open the door to an investigation of the United States' role in training and equipping goon squads to suppress a grassroots movement on Pine Ridge against a puppet dictatorship.
In America, there can by definition be no political prisoners, only those duly judged guilty in a court of law. It is deemed too controversial to even publicly contemplate that the federal government might fabricate and suppress evidence to defeat those deemed political enemies. But it is a demonstrable fact at every stage of my case.
Please support the Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee in our effort to hold the United States government to its own words. We must never lose hope in our struggle for freedom.
Why is this on the Libertarian site?
For the whole story read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Peltier
As a Libertarian I follow the simple rule, Don't bother me if I'm not bothering you, or restated, do whatever you want as long as it doesn't effect me. Murdering FBI agents seems like it falls into the "bothering me" section.
Killing 2 FBI agents should warrant jail time. Since when have Libertarians been light on crime? We want to legalize a lot of things, but I've never heard of us in favor of murder.
Your headline (yeah, I know you used the same one in his letter from prison) is misleading. Obama didn't give him 2 life sentences, nor did any president. Obama or any of the other presidents in the last 30+ years didn't deign him parole. The parole board did.
Posted by: Shawn | September 16, 2009 at 09:48 AM
It's on the Libertarian site because liberty is justice. Without justice, there is no liberty and libertarianism ends at pontification. If the murderer got away with murder, how is punishing an innocent man justice? Leonard Peltier didn't want to be "bothered" with a life sentence. The native Americans didn't want to be bothered by conquering immigrants. I don't mean to bug you but history repeats itself and witch hunts are historically successful at finding witches. Maybe he did it, I don't know either, it's food for thought and I'm not sure even the almighty Wikipedia knows the whole story.
That you would say any libertarian (me in particular) is suggesting that murder should be legal is quite an insult. But I will respectfully aim to improve.
Thanks
Posted by: Jaime | September 17, 2009 at 11:57 PM