To President John Kerry on Leonard Peltier

A Message from Harvey Arden on Behalf of Leonard Peltier

Dear President Kerry,

Congratulations on your sweep of the debates and on your coming triumph among the country's voters on election day. Thanks for restoring my pride in America, and giving a new bright hope to our Nation's future.

For the catastrophic last four years, the America I thought I knew for my nearly 70 years seemed to have fallen away from the democratic and human principles on which this country was founded. I know you will bring rationality and compassion back to our nation's foreign and domestic policies. I know you will help bring about the Great Healing so desperately needed in America and around this fragile and endangered planet of ours. Yours is a truly historic mission.

Among the great tasks now facing you, I ask, I pray, that you consider the fate of one Native American man named Leonard Peltier ”USP#89637-132—-a symbol to millions around the world of America's continuing injustice toward its indigenous Peoples. Now that the dereliction of the FBI on 9/11 has been formally confirmed by the Kean Commission, I recall with a chill how, in December 2000'-even as the terrorists were already in our cities fine-tuning their attacks against our Nation-some 500 FBI Agents found the leisure and spare time to spend a day staging an FBI march of intimidation in front of the White House, demanding that President Clinton NOT grant long-expected and well-deserved executive clemency to wrongfully imprisoned Native American Leonard Peltier.

Mr. Peltier now serves his 29th year of incarceration at USP Leavenworth for a 'crime' the whole world--and especially the FBI--knows he did not commit. In the sorriest moment of his Presidency, Mr. Clinton acceded to the FBI's intimidating demands. Leonard remains in prison, torn from his People and his granddchildren, recently refused by the courts even a hearing on parole until December 2008 even though he fulfilled all requirements for parole a dozen years ago. His false imprisonment began when he was 31; he is now 60.

I am compelled to wonder if the efforts of those 500 FBI agents might not have been better spent that day on protecting our Country against our real enemies instead of continuing their 30-year unlawful vendetta against a Native American man they know to be innocent, but whose false imprisonment conceals the many many crimes of Agency personnel on the Pine Ridge Reservation during the 1970's Reign of Terror authorized by the FBI's illegal COINTELPRO program. The Agency has spent countless thousands of hours over the decades constructing a Wall of Lies & Silence against Mr. Peltier. For the sake and safety of the America People, this shameful vendetta must cease.

I ask you, I plead with you, President Kerry, as part of your coming re-organization of the FBI, that you immediately issue an order for an absolute end to the Agency's ongoing and self-serving vendetta and disinformation campaign against Leonard Peltier and other members of the American IndianMovement. I pray you will give him immediate executive clemency, or at least allow him a new--and this time fair and unstaged--trial, which would clearly reveal the FBI's own innumerable crimes against him and many others.

Also, the recent sham trial staged by the FBI in Rapid City to railroad still another Native American man--Arlo Looking Cloud--to a life behind bars, as well as to further defame Leonard Peltier and others of AIM, should immediately
be overturned by the courts or the executive branch-both of which have been complicit, if only out of FBI intimidation, in allowing that Soviet-style mockery of justice to occur in this Land.

President Kerry, I don't know if you know the Leonard Peltier case personally. I ask that you grant a brief audience to myself and Chief Arvol Looking Horse, 19th-Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Pipe of the Great Lakota Nation, so that we may deliver a message to you on behalf of millions of good souls around the earth who plead for Leonard's freedom, who see Leonard's freedom as The Sign that Democracy and Justice and Love and Prayer still have a meaning in America.

I ask to read to you from Leonard's book PRISON WRITINGS: MY LIFE IS MY SUN DANCE, of which I was privileged to be the editor. Please invite Vice President John Edwards and others of your Administration so they may hear Leonard's
powerful and healing words. I also ask to have Leonard Peltier himself standingbeside me in the Oval Office as I read his words-words Leonard would read to youhimself if his locked jaw would allow him to.

Mr. President, we await your strong hand in bringing to an end this enormous and glaring injustice and stain on America's honor. Please please please--FREE LEONARD PELTIER!

Let that be the truly noble and auspicious beginning to your Presidency.

Respectfully,
Harvey Arden
harvey@haveyouthought.com
www.haveyouthought.com

P.S. I am sending you a copy of Leonard's spiritual testament PRISON
WRITINGS: MY LIFE IS MY SUN DANCE,
and also of the brand new book
HAVE YOU THOUGHT of LEONARD PELTIER LATELY?
which explains what the FBI has yet to confess to the American People.

~EVERYone! Please distribute. With YOUR help we CAN reach the whole world!~

THE NEW BOOK ON LEONARD PELTIER IS NOW OUT!

~HAVE YOU THOUGHT of LEONARD PELTIER LATELY?~
A Living Memoir with Artifacts by Harvey Arden, Edited & Compiled by George Bowe Blitch
with companion website www.haveyouthought.com

with Special Contributions by
Leonard Peltier
George Blitch
Barry Bachrach
Standing Deer
Arthur J. Miller
Lawrence Sampson
Carter Camp
Stephanie M. Schwartz
Keith Rabin

Please Order copies NOW for yourself & your friends at:

www.haveyouthought.com

or send a check for $23+$5=$28 per copy ($5 s/h on one copy;
$2 s/h each add'l copy) made out to 'Have You Thought' & mail to:

Have You Thought
1410 Blalock Road, #420
Houston, TX 77055

Booksellers, Libraries, Stores, Distributors, Pow-Wow Vendors,
From the desk of Harvey Arden
Author & Editor:
WISDOMKEEPERS: Meetings with Native American Spiritual Elders
DREAMKEEPERS: A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia
NOBLE RED MAN: Lakota Wisdomkeeper Mathew King
TRAVELS IN A STONE CANOE: The Return to the Wisdomkeepers
~HAVE YOU THOUGHT of LEONARD PELTIER LATELY?~
PRISON WRITINGS: MY LIFE IS MY SUN DANCE by Leonard Peltier
WHITE BUFFALO TEACHINGS by Chief Arvol Looking Horse

contact harvey@haveyouthought.com or visit www.haveyouthought.com