Stop the Deportation of John Graham!
Indigenous Rights Activist Faces Imminent Transfer to U.S.
By Ian Beeching
“I fear that John will not receive a fair trial in the US any more than I did. I must remind you, it is court record that the FBI lied to extradite me back to the US.” —Leonard Peltier
The British Columbia Supreme Court has dismissed an appeal by Tuchone-Canadian John Graham against his extradition to the U.S. Sitting in prison, Graham now waits to see if the Supreme Court of Canada will hear an appeal of the BC court decision. If it refuses, within 30 days he will be sent to South Dakota to face the same kind of kangaroo court system that imprisoned his former colleague and American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Leonard Peltier in 1977 and has held him ever since.
U.S. authorities accuse Graham of murdering Anna Mae Aquash, an AIM activist who was killed shortly after an armed standoff between U.S. government authorities and AIM at the Lakota Sioux Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1975.
Under Canadian law, U.S. government authorities can request extradition of a Canadian citizen using flimsy or hearsay evidence before Canadian courts. A Canadian judge need simply believe that arguments presented by U.S. authorities provide a “reasonable expectation” of conviction of the accused. The same criteria were used to extradite Leonard Peltier from Canada in 1976. He was convicted of killing two FBI agents at Pine Ridge. Years after his conviction, evidence emerged that key prosecution witnesses were coerced into lying at his trial.
“In Canada,” said Graham’s lawyer, Terry LaLiberte, following the BC Supreme Court decision, “I’d drive a truck through the holes in this case.”
The Evidence
The case against John Graham is a COINTELPRO style frame-up. That was the secret FBI program during the 1960’s and 1970’s to disrupt or violently assault social protest movements. A 2005 Vancouver Sun article by Rex Weyler reported, “’Alleged witness Al Gates had been dead for nine months,’ said LaLiberte, when the U.S. ‘claimed he was available for trial.’ Witness Frank Dillon, to whom Graham is alleged to have confessed, claims he did not make the statement attributed to him.”
Only one piece of evidence could possibly have pointed the finger at Graham. This was video-recorded testimony of Arlo Looking Cloud. Later, Looking Cloud claimed he had been given drugs and alcohol by detectives in order to manipulate the statement against Graham out of him.
Looking Cloud’s current attorney, Terry Gilbert from the Centre for Constitutional Rights in New York, “claims that Looking Cloud’s court-appointed lawyer incriminated his own client. ‘Looking Cloud was a homeless alcoholic for more than 20 years,’ said Gilbert, ‘vulnerable to manipulation by the detective in Denver.’”
“David Seals, with a Lakota human rights group, interviewed Looking Cloud at Pennington County jail in South Dakota, and writes that Looking Cloud told him, “’It was a set-up … I was drunk. They were giving me drugs and alcohol.’ Seals claims the video confession is ‘almost incoherent, and the police were asking a lot of leading questions.’”
Can Justice be Found in Graham’s Extradition?
The extradition of John Graham is not about finding justice for the tragic death of Anna Mae Aquash but rather punishing Graham for his involvement in AIM and covering up the FBI’s likely role in the death of Aquash. John Graham’s defenders claim that evidence points to involvement by FBI agent David Price in the killing of Aquash.
According to Aquash herself, when FBI agents arrested her after the Pine Ridge standoff and shootings, Price threatened that if she did not cooperate “you won’t live out the year.”
A year after the death of Aquash, Price used her death to threaten and extract false testimony from Myrtle Poor Bear that led to the extradition and imprisonment of Leonard Peltier. According to Poor Bear, “He [Price] showed me pictures of the body and said that if I don’t cooperate this is what may happen to me.”
The FBI’s violent undercover operations against AIM during the 1970’s resulted in the deaths of dozens of members of AIM and other Indigenous rights activists.
History Repeats Itself
Warren Allmand was Minister of Indian Affairs in the Canadian government at the time of the 1976 extradition demand against Leonard Peltier. He refused to intervene, despite considerable pressure on him from Peltier’s defenders and others concerned with civil liberties. According to Weyler, “He now feels ‘betrayed and insulted … [by the] FBI’s deliberate use of fraud.’ In 1992, fifty-five Canadian MPs filed a brief to a U.S. court affirming that Canada had been duped.”
In a letter in support of Graham, Peltier writes, “When we talk of sovereignty, we must be willing to solve our own problems and not go running to the oppressor for relief.… We have been and still are at odds with the most dangerous, well-funded, strongest military and political organization in the history of the world [the US government].”
The John Graham defence committee is asking supporters to write to the Supreme Court of Canada and demand that the extradition decision of the BC court be reviewed and overturned. You can write to:
Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin
Chief Justice of Canada
Supreme Court of Canada
301 Wellington Street
Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1A-0J1
To support the campaign to free John Graham contact: www.grahamdefense.org
The quotes in this article are from:
- “Who Killed Anna Mae?”, by Rex Weyler, Vancouver Sun, January 8, 2005.
- Native Youth Movement, Vancouver chapter, statement on the arrest of John Graham, February 2004
1 Comment »
One Response to “Stop the Deportation of John Graham!”
Support for John Graham continues « Against Exceptionalism on 14 Apr 2008 at 12:50 pm #
[...] “Stop the Deportation of John Graham!”, by Ian Beeching, Socialist Voice, July 4th 2007 [...]