We still have political prisoners in the U.S. from the Nixon Era: One of them is my friend

Originally published on Medium.com

Ever since the start of his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has invited comparisons to authoritarian figures in history.

Richard Nixon is currently enjoying favor in the media because of their shared obsession with law and order, White House leaks, and hatred of journalists.

But before the punditry glibly snags another Trump twin from its Arcade Claw Machine of Despotism, I’d like it to focus, really focus, on Nixon and the COINTELPRO era of law enforcement, because we still have political prisoners in the United States serving sentences due to the legal abuses from that era.

And one of them is my friend, Jalil Muntaqim.

As has been amply documented by authors like Peter Matthiessen, Ward Churchill, Betty Medsger and documentaries like COINTELPRO 101, the FBI under Nixon targeted activists who were part of movements like the Black Panthers, and the American Indian Movement (AIM), infiltrating their activities, often marking them for assassination.

When they fought back, their experience with the judicial system was one marked by the government’s illegal tampering with evidence and with witnesses lying to judges.

In Jalil’s case, the tampering in his trial and his co-defendants for murdering two police officers involved inconsistent evidence from three witnesses, the recanted testimony of one witness who was intimidated into cooperating, the suppressed exculpatory FBI ballistics test on a .45 caliber weapon seized after he and his co-defendant Albert Washington were arrested and the perjured testimony of NYPD detective George Simmons concerning the test. The Nixon tapes contain a record of a secret White House May 26, 1971 meeting in which Richard Nixon, John Erlichman, FBI Director Herbert Hoover, and others named the murders “NEWKILL,” (for “New York killings”). Those involved with the case of Jalil and his co-defendants believe they decided to blame them on Black Panther Party (BPP) members as part of the COINTELPRO conspiracy to destroy them.

While the 1975–76 Senate Church Committee hearings disclosed some of the abuses of COINTELPRO and other intelligence agencies, it never sought redress for those prisoners framed by the FBI’s manipulations of the justice system.

So Jalil and the other COINTELPRO targets are still in prison.

Why? Because the Judges that put them there refused to grant appeals and because parole boards are made up largely of law enforcement personnel, who almost never vote for the parole of prisoners involved in the death of other law enforcement personnel. And they have a powerful lobby when it comes to petitioning governors and presidents against clemency.

Any other prisoner serving twenty-five years to life with Jalil’s record would have been paroled long ago.

While in prison he has graduated with a BS in psychology and a BA in Sociology, taught computer skills to prisoners, and helped them get their GEDs.

He has twice received commendations for quelling prison riots and was recognized by the Deputy Superintendent of Auburn Prison for his efforts to raise inmate funds for the Red Cross after 9/11.

From prison he has also co-sponsored a Victory Gardens project, enlisting Maine farmers to distribute produce to poor urban New York New Jersey and Boston communities.

Think of what this man could have done if he had not spent the last 45 years in prison.

I saw Jalil last weekend.

He had been transferred from Attica to a super max facility near the Pennsylvania border because he had been teaching a class in Black History and had compared, unfavorably, the Crips and the Bloods gang membersto the Black Panthers.

He noted how the former were not invested in supporting their communities while the Panthers’ raison detre was uplifting their neighborhoods.

Somehow, the prison authorities took from this bit of pedagogy that Jalil was promoting gang warfare.

Attica is refusing to release the tape of the session, which Jalil is certain will exonerate him — but it is in the hands of his lawyer now.

We asked him why he thought Obama, during his last days in office, had pardoned Oscar Lopez Rivera, targeted by COINTELPRO because of his activism for Puerto Rican independence and not AIM activist Leonard Peltier, also a COINTELPRO victim.

(Jalil, convicted on a state offense, is not eligible for federal pardon.) Jalil thought Jimmy Carter appealing for Lopez Rivera probably had something to do with it.

However, he thought that it probably had more to do with the quantity of votes Puerto Ricans had to offer the Democratic Party versus the quantity of votes Indigenous people have to offer.

I have followed the Free Peltier Campaign for some time on social media, and my heart broke in January for Peltier and all the dedicated activists, when they found out that Obama would not pardon Peltier, who is quite ill.They viewed Obama’s decision as a death sentence.

Because, of course, no one has any illusions that Trump will respond to appeals for political prisoners.

This is a man who still claims the Central Park 5 are guilty despite the fact they were all exonerated after DNA proved them innocent and the actual rapist confessed to the crime.

So what is our responsibility to Jalil Muntaqim, Leonard Peltier and all the remaining political prisoners in the United States?

Addressing past assaults on civil liberties that resulted in the presence of political prisoners in U.S. jails might very well equip us to face the contemporary assaults on civil liberties committed by the Trump Administration.

Learning the names of these prisoners is a start.

Here, for example are all the Black Panthers, like Jalil, currently still in jail or in exile.

Updates since this this article was written in March.

April 2, 2017 Update:

Jalil reports that he has finally received all of his property, except for TV. The typewriter is broken and has been sent out for repairs.

March 22, 2017 Update from Jalil:

I’m out of SHU, however, phones, commissary and packages won’t be restored until March 29, 2017.

They released me from SHU and placed me in the “Close Supervision Unit” (CSU) absent any notice or due process procedure. At the surface, prisoners are treated like all other prisoners, go to school, programs, recreation, etc., as all other prisoners. But they are scrutinized more closely, searched more often, and, I imagine, reported on more frequently.

I intend to file a FOIL request for all documents regarding the unit and the arbitrary and capricious decision to place me in the CSU. Once I get the documents, I’ll file a grievance to exhaust administrative remedies and proceed with a petition in the Court.

Still haven’t received my property, hopefully by the end of the week at the latest.

Revolutionary Love and Unity,
Jalil

In the Spirit of Nelson Mandela
in Apartheid NYS Prison System!

Please take the time to write to Jalil and let him know he is in our hearts and on our minds.

Anthony J. Bottom #77A4283
Shawangunk C.F.
P.O. Box 700
Wallkill, NY 12589–0700

Treasure in Ferguson, Colombia, Palestine, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Turtle Island

Note: I originally wrote this reflection for my blog, then adapted it for my organization’s CPTnet. I’m adapting it back again a little.

Since a St. Louis, Missouri prosecutor and Grand Jury have determined that Police Officer Darren Wilson killing unarmed teenager Michael Brown did not merit a trial, I have been busy tweeting #Ferguson on the Christian Peacemaker Team Twitter account. Those tweets have been getting a lot of retweets. We have no people working in Ferguson and I have asked myself why I am inundating the account.

I think it has to do with the disposability of human life, with the contempt shown to Michael Brown when the authorities left his body in the street for four and a half hours and did not bother interviewing key witnesses to the shooting for weeks (until there was a public outcry.) That contempt connected directly with our work in Colombia, Iraqi Kurdistan, Palestine, with indigenous communities in North America, and with migrants in Europe. In all these cases, people in power have deemed the people we work with disposable.

If you want to drive Colombian farmers off their land so that you can make big profits with palm oil plantations, it’s okay to assault them, to threaten to rape their nine-year old daughters, to kill their animals, to burn their homes, to use the instruments of the Colombian state illegally to evict their communities’ teachers. And of course, you can do much worse. The types of violent harassment cited above are just some issues the communities we work with have been dealing with recently.

In Iraqi-Kurdistan, our civil society partners have had to drop most of their work to focus on the some most disposable people in the world: refugees. And these refugees have included those from the Ezidi/Yazidi community, whose wives, sisters, and daughters are now in ISIS/DAESH brothels, women considered worthless except for sexual gratification.

And then there is the project CPT Europe participated in this summer, welcoming the refugees that Europe wishes would just disappear, and who, because of European policies, have drowned by the thousands in the Mediterranean, fleeing the violence in countries such as Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

In Palestine, for nineteen long years, we have watched the forces of military occupation say it is acceptable to arrest, jail and torture Palestinian men, women and children without due process, and destroy their homes if Israel wants their land for settlement expansion. It is acceptable for soldiers to shoot teargas at Palestinian children on their way to school and look on as settlers attack them.

In our work with Indigenous partners, we have watched again and again naked racism strip them of their sovereignty, strip their lands of their resources, and leave behind the toxic poisons of their industries. We have watched the Canadian government shrug as 1800 Indigenous women are reported murdered and missing.

So I think it’s all related—Mike Brown, VonDerrit Myers, Tamir Rice, Tina Fontaine, Loretta Saunders, Bella Laboucan-McLean, Marissa Alexander, Jalil Muntaqim, Leonard Peltier…People of color who lost their lives, livelihoods, and freedom because here in North America they were considered just as disposable as the people we work with in Colombia, Palestine, Lesvos, Turtle Island and Kurdistan.

The good news, of course, is that our Colombian, Indigenous, Palestinian, Kurdish, and refugee partners are revealing to the world that they are a treasure—as are the people of Ferguson. The season of Advent is upon us. Let us listen.

Good hashtags to follow #BlackLivesMatter #TheologyofFerguson #StayWokeAdvent. Good accounts: @FaithinFerguson, @BroderickGreer @MikeBrownCover. The #Ferguson hashtag has a lot of good information, but you will also find really racist tweets there.

My newest beta reader is a COINTELPRO prisoner

UPDATE: We learned on the morning of June 25, 2014 that Jalil was turned down for parole yet again. He wrote to me and my husband that there had been one sympathetic person on the parole board, but she must have failed to convince one of the other two people. I feel so sad, because I know from letters he wrote to me and my husband that he had allowed himself to hope.

In previous blog posts I wrote about a visit to Attica prison and my conversation with Jalil Muntaqim, a member of the Black Panther Party who was swept up in the COINTELPRO prosecutions/persecutions of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI in the 1970s and has been incarcerated since 1973.

During our visit in April, we were talking about our writing and my husband brought up, a little to my chagrin, my novel, The Price We Paid, and suggested that Jalil’s opinion on it was worth having.

Now, the thing is, my main character, Islam Goldberg-Jones is a political prisoner incarcerated for three decades for a crime he did not commit. Even though the fascist Christian Republic government has fallen by the end of the novel, he remains in jail because the federal judiciary remains filled with Christian Republic appointees. I actually had in mind COINTELPRO prisoner Leonard Peltier when I subjected Iz to life in prison. (I had this fantasy that if the novel were published I would follow up with a novella or short story that frees Iz on the condition that Obama pardon Peltier—but it looks unlikely at this point that the book will be published while Obama is still in office.)

So, I never thought I’d have the chance to have an actual COINTELPRO prisoner read the novel and offer suggestions—and he was someone I did not know well to boot, always a bonus in a beta reader. (People most willing to read your manuscripts are usually people who like you, and they will try to be objective, but they will also always cut you a little slack.)

Within a few days of his receiving my manuscript, I had Jalil’s first letter. It was exactly the sort of critique that any writer hopes to receive from a reader, one that shows the reader has read the manuscript carefully, noticed gaps in logic, and sees ways that it can be improved. He followed it with two more letters containing some afterthoughts—again, gratifying to the writer, because it shows the novel has stuck with the reader.

The flaw he pointed out that I most want to remedy was the omission of how the African slave trade, 400 years of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow etc would have fed into the rise of the Christian Republic theocracy—even though the people participating in the government, including people of color, might not understand this history.

Additionally, he wrote

As you may recall, I mentioned there was an absence of the African diaspora experience and how it shaped the U.S. existence. What I failed to mention as a method for you to include this dynamic is the reality of how the slave trade miscegenation created a New Afrikan. The Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, Mandigo, Mandika, etc. etc. were chained, shackled and brought to the country, denied the right to practice their indigenous religions (Yoruba, Islam, Animism, etc.) were told to Christianize their names, not permitted to read or write, until they were integrated into the Christian religion, soon being allowed to read the Bible and Christian literature, etc. until they were able to have Black Christian churches and other forms of worship. This method of creating a New Afrikan, including Native American and European DNA in the Afrikan bloodline, wrapped in the Christian belief system was an important plan/procedure to domicile these Africans, which lead to the U.S. becoming an international economic power.

So this has given me the idea to go back to the Ralph section, when he is meeting the young people from all the various youth groups in the DC area to plan public witnesses that are veiled critiques of the government, and having one of them be a New Afrikan youth group, who view Christianity as a slave religion. I was thinking that Jerry, Ralph’s boyfriend, could become fascinated by the New Afrikan kids and interested in that history. Hank, on the other hand, devout African Methodist Episcopal Zion member that he is, would frown on this talk, and that could increase the sense of alienation that Ralph begins to feel towards Hank, who has been a mentor and father figure to him.

Last summer, I wrote about the pleasure of revising future Canadian history in the manuscript after my colleague Jim Loney read it. I will feel some of the same pleasure incorporating Jalil’s suggestions, especially since Iz and most of the people in my novel’s resistance movement are people of color.

So I was even more apologetic than I would have been ordinarily that it took me so long to respond to Jalil’s letters. I noted that I was feeling a little overwhelmed by my CPT work, and had been unable to do writing that really fed me for more than a month (more about this in a future post.) He wrote back that it was good to take time away from CPT work to deal with my needs and mentioned that his comrade in the struggle, Safiya Bukhari had died too young because she had not taken care of herself. (It feels weird to receive comfort and encouragement from someone who is locked up in Attica while I am living a suburban lifestyle in Rochester, NY.) I googled Bukhari and really wish she was still around. She sounds awesome. And she was a year older than I am when she died.

In a couple weeks, Jalil will be face a parole hearing for the eighth time. It is my great hope that justice will prevail and he will be able to leave prison and sit down to the family dinner his mother wants so much. If not, I am going to adjust my fantasy. If I manage to sell this book I will suggest, as part of the marketing, that I will follow up with a short story or novella about Iz leaving jail, on the condition that all of the COINTELPRO prisoners receive a pardon.

Dreams are free, right?

Why aren’t the COINTELPRO prisoners free already? My visit with Jalil Muntaqim in Attica

Attica prisoner from COINTELPRO era to face eighth parole hearing in June

The release of Betty Medsger’s book The Burglary this winter once again drew attention to the conspiracies of COINTELPRO, a program devised by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI that sought to discredit and destabilize minority empowerment and self-defense groups like the NAACP, Black Panthers and American Indian Movement— sometimes to the point of assassinating members of their leadership.
The false evidence and prosecutorial misconduct used to convict high profile COINTELPRO prisoners such as Leonard Peltier is a matter of public record. But J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI also framed dozens of lesser known individuals such as Attica inmate Jalil Muntaqim (formerly Anthony Bottom) who, like Peltier, are still in jail decades after the Church Committee held hearings in 1975 exposing this misconduct.

I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Muntaqim on April 9, 2014 at Attica State Prison. The problem with the Church Committee hearings, he told me, was that they never proposed a remedy for the activists imprisoned by the unethical conduct of the law enforcement officers during the COINTELPRO years.

Among the irregularities in his own prosecution for the murder of two police officers in 1971 included a colleague tortured with a cattle prod and needles in his testicles to get him to testify against Muntaqim and Herman Bell both of whom were convicted of the killings. When he told the judge he was testifying only because of torture, the judge informed the prosecutor that the witness had revealed this information to him, but did not share the information with the defense. Muntaqim also knows that tapes exist of Hoover, Nixon, H.R. Haldemann, John Ehrlichman, and Mark Felt (of Watergate’s Deep Throat fame) deciding to solve the shootings of the police officers (under the code name NewKill) by setting up Muntaqim and his codefendants, but his lawyer has not been granted access to those tapes. During his trial, ballistics expert George Simmons matched a gun that Muntaqim had carried in California to the bullet that killed the police officers and testified that he was the only person who had examined this ballistics evidence. Years later, Muntaqim’s defense team found out that an FBI ballistics expert had examined the gun and the bullet and determined they were not a match. This information was also withheld from the defense. In the 1980s, three months after Muntaqim’s lawyer filed a petition for a new trial based on this new evidence, someone removed the gun and the ballistics report from the locker in New York where they had been stored.

The parole board, largely made up of ex-law enforcement personnel, has denied Jalil Muntaqim parole seven times. The first six times, they did so because he did not express remorse (this stipulation is a glitch in the system for all who take plea bargains to avoid the hazards or costs of a trial or prisoners who are wrongly convicted: they must express remorse for crimes they did not commit.) For the seventh time, because his eighty-year-old mother wants so much for the whole family to sit down for a meal together before she dies, he decided to say, “Okay, I did it,” and express remorse. The parole board then denied him parole because he had lied about committing the crime the previous six times.

Jalil Muntaqim has another parole hearing coming up in June. He has 750 letters testifying to his good character and his rehabilitation. Included among those is a letter from the family of one of the slain police officers who wrote of Muntaqim and Herman Bell, “If they did it, we forgive them. But we have serious concerns about whether they are the ones.” Muntaqim will argue the precedent set by Silman v. Travis that if remorse and rehabilitation are the only relevant factors for a parole board to make decision regarding his release, the members of the board cannot make up reasons to keep him in jail.

Aside from wanting to grant his mother’s wish, he also thinks he could do more on the outside to keep young people out of jail. “I’m wasted here,” he told me. “I feel like I’m that Dutch boy with all ten fingers and toes in the dike.”

From a justice perspective, however, Mr. Muntaqim’s plans for the future are beside the point. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program was a stain on our constitution and disreputable era in our law enforcement history. The people it sent to prison should be set free.

Kathleen Kern, from Rochester, NY has worked for the human rights organization Christian Peacemaker Teams since 1993, serving on assignments—and advocating for political prisoners—in Haiti, Israel, Palestine, Mexico, Colombia, Iraqi Kurdistan, the U.S. and Canada.

Visit to Attica State Prison aka “Correctional Facility”

Winter photo of the entrance to Attica State Prison. Three flags are at half mast. The asphalt drive is wet. A light frosting of snow lies on the grass, bushes and cars. — *Post is from Wikimedia Commons: Jayu from Harrisburg, PA, U.S.A.*

My husband and I are perhaps the only couple I know who would work a trip to Attica Correctional Facility into a romantic weekend getaway. But we did. I’ll be writing more about our visit with Jalil Muntaqim this week. Jalil—like Leonard Peltier, Martin Luther King, and members of other minority empowerment and antiwar groups—was the target of J. Edgar Hoover’s vivious COINTELPRO campaign that came to light in the 1970s.

But I thought for now I’d just jot down a few impressions of our visit to Attica, which looks something like a castle with its turrets, parapets and ramparts. Michael and I got there around 10:30, bringing with us our drivers licenses and the car key—the only items visitors are allowed to take inside the prison. We filled out information slips with rubbery pens about 3” long—made so they could not be weaponized, I guess. But when we got inside with the actual prisoners they laid out pencils for us to use, so I could have gotten all stabby with those menacing lead points, if I had wanted to.)

We sat in the outside waiting room with families who were talking with each other in subdued conversations. A nurse who said she usually keeps to herself told us the guards were behaving disrespectfully that day. They were making the people wait outside the gate, while they schmoozed and laughed with each other. Once we were inside and I watched families, friends, and loved ones talking and cuddling with prisoners, I understood how precious that time was to them, and that this time was dispensed entirely at the whims of the guards.

This is the outfit I was wearing when I was deemed too alluring for Attica, oversized baggy pants, a two-part attached long-sleeve yellow shirt, and a fleece vest, which is open in the picture. — *This is the outfit I, a woman in my forties, was wearing when I was deemed too alluring for Attica.*

When the guards called Jalil’s name (the name before he became a Muslim, “Anthony Bottom,”), Michael and I came forward to be processed. A female guard informed me that my shirt was too revealing, and I would have to go to a dollar store and buy something else. I said I could zip up the vest I was wearing, but she told me I could not be trusted to do that while I was in the visiting room. Fortunately, since we had planned to go to a bed and breakfast afterwards, Michael had an extra shirt in his car.

I took the car keys, turned to the others in the waiting room and said, “Guess I’m too slutty for Attica,” and walked out. Later, one young woman who had burst out laughing when I said this, was told her fashionably ripped jeans and striped sweater were too tight. As it happens, the nurse we talked to earlier was wearing the same shirt, showing much more cleavage and they let her in. I wondered if they were punishing the other woman because she laughed. I also wondered what sort of business the dollar store did selling clothes to people who arrived wearing the wrong ones, and what people did who came to see family members on the bus from New York City, who didn’t have a car to make the quick three mile trip to the dollar store to appease the arbiters of suitable prison visitor attire.

By the time we actually got to the visiting room, and Jalil was released to come meet with us, it was 12:30—two hours after we had arrived. At one point, Michael went to the vending machines to buy some lunch and Jalil asked me what I saw when I looked around at the other tables. I told him I was surprised by how much love I saw in the smiling people around us. “I mean,” I said, “I’m sure there’s also a lot of family dysfunction, here, too.” He laughed. “You think?” he said. “Yeah,” I said, “but they’re still here. They want to be together. Some of these people have been physically holding on to each other for hours.”

“Yeah,” he said. “These families have sacrificed a lot to be here.”

AAARGH! I can’t believe I missed the Bellwether Prize deadline!

Probably the biggest “triumph” of my literary career was my selection as a finalist in Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize a decade or so ago. The prize has since morphed into the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. That, dear reader, is the fiction that I write. So far, it is the only fiction that I know how to write, the only fiction that emerges from that deep compelling place, the stories that push and butt inside me until my only choices are to write them or become mentally ill.

My second novel, Because the Angels, at 50,000 words ended up being too short for the Bellwether Prize, and I was sad about it, but I didn’t really grieve for long, because the novel was really as long as it was supposed to be, and I thought that by the next time the Bellwether Prize rolled around, I would have another novel ready.

And it was, and I missed the deadline. And I missed the deadline because I was working with my human rights organization in Hebron for the month of October and mid-December through mid-February, so I didn’t see the Poets and Writers listing. But really, that’s no excuse. If I had been wanting to submit this novel for the Bellwether Prize, I should have been paying attention to the deadline, and I didn’t and now it’s too late.

AAAAARGH! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

I am trying not to lapse into magical thinking about this, as writers are wont to do. You know, like, “Well maybe God wanted me to miss this opportunity, so that the novel will have more of an impact in another situation.” (I confess I had plans involving clemency for Leonard Peltier.) Or “Just you wait writer-friend-who-didn’t-like-it; Ms. SuperAgent was thrilled to pull it out of the slush pile and is already optioning it off to Hollywood.”

As a spiritual discipline, I keep telling myself that neither God nor the publishing world owes me a thing.

But I also need something to keep me away from the spiral of self-loathing. The fact that my novel might very well not have sold in another two years and I can enter it then? Not super comforting. That the next one I’m beginning work on might be better? At this point it’s in such nebulous shape–in my head and a collection of notes, I have no way of knowing how good it’s going to be—it hasn’t reached the place that my other three did where everything begins to click.

I do pray that God will use my novels for good. Since they have secular as well as religious characters and some of those characters use profanity and follow sexual mores frowned upon by most religious publishers (and I’m pretty much fine with them the way they are), I know that some people might think that strange. But it’s true. I really do want God to use what I write to transform situations of oppression and sadness. I guess that prayer is the only comfort I have; it’s something I can do.

But still, AAAAARRRRRGH! (Really there’s nothing I can do.)

*******

In January, I wrote a Facebook post about my grief over losing Pete Seeger and the wise comments of a colleague (a young Palestinian woman from Ramallah who had never heard of him) about why I was grieving. I felt a little “smiley hurt” reading an article in the February issue of Rolling Stone, that echoed her comments

Mikal Gilmore referred to Seeger singing at Barack Obama’s inauguration this verse from “This Land is Your Land”:

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

That moment heartened many of us, perhaps discomfited others, but both reactions were validations: Pete Seeger was finally singing to all of America as its redeemed native son, as a loved and revered hero. The day he died, we immediately understood, we’d never see anybody like him again.

For those interested, I also wrote a blog post about Seeger in January: http://www.kathleenkern.net/human-rights/hearing-about-pete-seeger-in-palestine/

My NPR Three-Minute Fiction Entry: “You, Me and Leonard Peltier”

I discovered from reading the writer’s blog associated with NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction contest that writers have no way of finding out whether their 600-words-or-fewer submissions were in the top ten or rejected at the initial sorting out process by creative writing students with no appreciation for the scope of their genius.

Anyway, Round 10 was a story in the form of a voicemail message. Here’s mine:

YOU, ME AND LEONARD PELTIER

By Kathleen Kern

Hey, I heard that the President didn’t pardon Leonard Peltier today, so I know that right about now you’ve thrown some plants against the wall, and shredded the piles of petitions, appeals, and endorsement letters by your computer and all the printouts of celebrities holding up the “Free Leonard Peltier” signs around the office. Or maybe you’re just on your couch sobbing while you watch the Cartoon Network. And that’s okay, too. Anything that doesn’t involved hurting yourself is good.

I hope you didn’t shred the photo of us all at the Mitakuye Oyasin awards banquet last year. The award’s legit, you know. It’s the president that failed, not you. And I’m on the edge of the photo. You could just cut my head out and shred me.

I was going to send you an e-mail, but that seemed inadequate. I mean, all the overtime on nights and weekends, all the rhetorical shrieking with Zuzu, Mark and the others. It was…big. Bigger than just you and me. But I guess since I’m calling you and not them, then this is about you and me, too. You, me, and Leonard Peltier.

I wanted to tell you there’s more to life than your computer, your rage, and Leonard Peltier, but there’s also part of me that’s glad there are angry obsessive people with poor social skills like you who won’t give up on him, because frankly, I like going hours at a time NOT thinking about Leonard Peltier. I like getting seven to eight hours of sleep at night. I like being a Religion and Ethics professor for earnest young Mennonite college students who think I’m exotic because I’ve lived in Washington, DC.

They write letters for Leonard, you know, my students. They’ve been writing to President Obama, asking him for the pardon for weeks. They were shocked, just shocked, when I told them the details of his case, the extradition and everything. Remember what it was like when you could still find something that felt a little bit like joy in your outrage? You probably can’t. I miss it.

There’s one girl, Kayla (so many, many Kaylas here) who asked me this week why I left the campaign. The way she said it, she meant, “Dude, Leonard Peltier’s still in jail, and you’re teaching Intro to Ethics? Seriously?” I wanted to smack that disapproving arch right out of her eyebrow. She’s a senior and I’d hook her up with you and the office, but I don’t think she’s got your stamina, or, for lack of a better word, your soul—even though you don’t believe in souls.

That’s another thing I like besides my job and enough sleep, by the way. I like going to church and believing in God without listening to your snide comments. I never understood why in your cosmology only Leonard was allowed to believe in God.

Sorry; sorry, sorry, sorry. This isn’t why I called…

Umm…you know sometimes I wonder whether my motives for wanting Leonard freed are entirely selfish. I mean it; some days, I my reasons have nothing to do with travesties of justice. Some days I just want him out jail because of how it will change your life and my life.

Because maybe then you’ll be free.
And maybe then you’ll pardon me.

I thought my novel DID have a happy ending and “ Most Surprisingly Good Read of the Decade” review for Because the Angels

When I first started getting back comments from people who had read my Shea manuscript, I was taken aback when they referred to the novel’s sad ending, because in my mind, I thought the novel had a happy ending. Good triumphed. The efforts of all the people who sacrificed so much to bring the fascist Christian Republic down succeeded. Iz and Shea reconciled. Yes, a lot of the people who resist the regime die along the way, and my narrator, Islam Goldberg-Jones remains in prison at the end because in the U.S., Federal judges are appointed for life, and the entrenched Christian Republic judiciary and Christian Republic holdovers in the FBI conspire to keep him there. Most of the people who committed the worst atrocities under the Christian Republic never have to pay for their crimes.

But that’s how the world is. Famous and anonymous heroes for millennia have sacrificed their lives, bodies and sanity to bring down tyrants or systems of domination. AIM activist Leonard Peltier, whom most of the world regards as a political prisoner, remains incarcerated today for murder even though the U.S. government lied to get him extradited him from Canada, coerced witnesses, withheld evidence during his trial, and even though an Iowa jury acquitted his co-defendants of the same crime.

Dictators and generals in Latin America like Augusto Pinochet, after their torture states finally fell, lived affluent, comfortable lives for decades afterwards.

People think I’m a glass half-empty kind of person. Sometimes I think that’s true. I think sometimes when the Israeli military occupation of Palestine finally ends, if it does end in my lifetime, that I want to be the one who remembers all the people who gave everything they had to fight it and ended up crippled with despair, as well as the ones who ended up dead. But I also think that while compassion is never wrong, it is also always right to celebrate when grassroots movements succeed in toppling oppressors. We need to take a moment and honor the thousands, even millions of nameless Filipinos, South Africans, Chileans, Serbs, East Timorese, Tunisians etc. who decided simply the time had come when toppling their government was more important than their lives, or, that if they all worked together, they had the power to topple their government with minimal loss of life. By honoring them, we also learn, and when we face tyrants ourselves, we are better equipped.

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I was tempted to put in a plug for my novel Because the Angels, when the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war rolled around and then decided that was tacky. (The plot is partially based on the experience of my organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams, when four of our colleagues were kidnapped in Baghdad 2005-06). But this morning, I decided I hadn’t plugged it for awhile, so I thought I’d send out a tweet with a link to the Amazon Kindle page. I discovered that someone I didn’t know had written the following review:

Most Surprisingly Good Read of the Decade, April 22, 2013
This review is from: Because the Angels (Kindle Edition)
“BtA wins the most surprisingly good read of the decade. Past the cover art and the anime obsession, the story is fraught with messy, intense, and endearing characters. What’s probably best about the book is the amazingly successful and comedic ending. Without being sappy, the author manages to weave a brilliant resolution to an engrossing tale.”

It’s my first genuinely unsolicited review—probably from the week of free downloads in late February, early March. Davey R. Jones also really like Junot Diaz’s Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a book I really loved, and books by Mario Vargas Llosa, Madeline L’Engle and about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, so he seems like a kindred spirit. I am assuming he’s not the dead Monkee. Glass half full, see?

SermonsLeonard Peltier