Descending Dark: Felling Canada
by C. L. Cook
So it's true; the Laird is fallen?!

Yes, Conrad Black, golden child of Canada's upper crust, cum British peer, Conrad Lord Black of Crossharbour finds himself now far from Fleet Street, lain low in America's second city, brought to ruin in a Chicago courtroom, of all places.

What will next befall our fallen hero? Possibly the rest of his life will be spent behind American bars - though his lawyers will doubtless continue the frantic efforts to have Conrad's Canadian citizenship restored - he rather flamboyantly turfed his passport, you may recall, over then-prime minister Jean Chretien's refusal to allow, contrary to law, a Canadian sit in a foreign government body - in hopes he might do his time in the less horrific Canadian penal system.

Imagine that: Conrad, Lord Black of Crossharbour eating crow in order to avoid the ignominious fate of a life wasted by American Jusitce! Would that the less well connected Canadians facing that awful prospect could dodge extradition and incarceration within that racist and unjust system too. But the moral midgets playing government in this country simply don't have the fortitude to stand up to, and guard against, the erosion of Canadian sovereignty.

These names may mean nothing to most reading this, but together they represent a chilling preview of what Canadians can expect in the near future, as the final frontispiece of Canada's nationhood is stripped away, the facade quickly to be replaced by the red, white, and blue swastika, emblematic of America today. Each of these men face perpetual imprisonment in one of the United States' fastest growing industries, the corporate prison/slavery industrial complex. That they are undeserving of such a fate is moot; that they may receive justice is certainly known: They will not.

Marc Emery is already delivered to the maw of American injustice, sacrificed by Canada's cowardly "rulers" to sate the infinite appetite of Cousin Sam's "War on Drugs."

 

[I'm happily standing corrected, Emery is still in Canada, free as a lark - see comment below]  

 

Emery is a cannabis activist, someone who believes smoking herb is not a crime, but a great ameliorative to life suffered under the thumb of the maniacal system we are currently and collectively subjects of. He was deemed by the protectors of our society's headlong leap to destruction a  threat to America due to his mail order "drugs paraphernalia" business that though run out of Vancouver, Canada [sic] was available too to subjects of America. Ergo, the argument went, he too should be subject of America. The quivering quislings in Ottawa quickly agreed, and sent Marc Emery into the moral abyss that is the spreading darkness of ages.

Tre Arrow sits these three years and more past in a picturesque prison located in my home city of Victoria, British Columbia. Three years without trial, or reasonable recourse to release for the crime of being named by an American kid busted for "eco-terrorism" and facing the rest of his long life behind bars, save he rat out as many people as he could think of for whatever charges the feds could think of.

 

Tre Arrow was a name he remembered, and the feds fingered him; they had a frame they could put him in. Tre escaped to Canada for a time, but his time ran out.

 

He now waits the moment that Canadian Justice says they have performed all the requisite legal procedures, and can in clear conscience send poor Tre Arrow into the buzzsaw. His crime: Having loved the wilderness not too wisely, but too well.

Leonard Peltier is known to any who have marched in any number of the myriad causes that draw people of conscience together to spend a weekend afternoon promenading down main street, lofting placards, and blowing whistles in vain glorious efforts to reach the ear of a government stone deaf to imprecation.

 

Peltier is a First Nations man - Injun' in southern parlance - who just more than thirty years ago was arrested and railroaded south on the say so of America's Federal Bureau of Investigation to stand trial for the killing of two of their agents. The FBI swore to Canadian officials holding Peltier that he was implicated in the deaths of the two men who, at the time of their demise were conducting a covert war against the American Indian Movement, of which Leonard was a member.

 

If it wasn't obvious at the time, it has now been clearly proven, the FBI manufactured the "evidence" against Peltier to gain his extradition. It was a trick they used too to garner a "guilty" verdict against him. Though this is all now widely known, Leonard Peltier rots yet in America's nightmare prison system three and more decades after the fact.

John "John Boy" Graham was too a member of AIM, and too escaped to Canada. But now Sam would have him occupy the dungeon alongside Peltier. He too is charged in a killing, one related to the Peltier case; Graham is named as the murderer of the "Canadian" First Nation activist Anna Marie Aquash. It's a charge that makes no rational sense, but like its titular leader, George W. Bush, American Justice has little use for the "real" world, and its inconvenient truths. Here's what John Graham's defenders say is behind the argument to extradite the "Canadian;"

"John is charged with the murder of Anna Mae Aquash, who was a friend and comrade of his in the American Indian Movement. He has repeatedly stated that he is not guilty of this crime. We believe that the charges against him have been manufactured by the FBI - as part of their ongoing war against AIM and against self determination for Indigenous people In the weeks before she disappeared, Anna Mae confided to John that she had been detained and threatened by FBI Officer David Price who told her that she would not live out the year if she didn't become an FBI informer."

The real world is indeed a messy place; it's a place where everybody doesn't necessarily agree with one's beliefs. It's a place where some people question the unquestionable authority practiced against their lives by certain parties claiming suzerainty over all. Until recently, it has been a place where it was possible, most of the time, to assume dissent was more than O.K. but an expected and welcome sign of a healthy democracy, but that, along with American Justice, seems as gone as the Dodo bird down south.

 

But, justice is not an entirely forgotten concept in Canada. Just ask Conrad, Lord Black of Crossharbour the value of Canadian citizenship!

There is still time to spare John Graham the privations of America's denigrated penal system. Below is the information needed to learn more of his case, and more importantly, the means you can use to make known to those claiming the mantle of Canadian Justice your deep concern for both the fate of John Graham, and all the future John Graham's who on the whim of George W. Bush or his successors, may too soon be whisked away from Canada as an Afghani goat herder with a bag over his head, and plastic straps around his heels and appendages, then to be thrown into the bottomless pit of that sad nation's degradation.

Consider Canada's history, and future, and stand on guard against its undoing in this, and every subsequent attempt to undo its sovereign rights and principles.

 

 

 

 

 

John Graham


Supporters of Justice for John Graham,
Anna Mae Aquash and Leonard Peltier
by Friends of John Graham

    We are in a race with the clock of injustice. John Graham will be shipped to South Dakota for a trial that Leonard Peltier says is certain to be a miscarriage of justice by July 26, 2007.


Handwritten letters to the people below today will have an impact in preventing this. Black Panther Angela Davis said that bags of mail going to the judge that presided over her case were more important than any legal procedure in getting her acquitted, after being framed up on accessory to murder charges and imprisoned for two years. Phone calls have the next most impact and emails are the weakest.

We are deeply appreciative for your concern,
Friends of John Graham
---------------
Noam Chomsky Expresses Concern for John Graham:
http://www.grahamdefense.org/20040320noam.htm

Subcomandante Marcos Letter to Leonard Peltier:
http://www.monthlyreview.org/100sub.htm

John on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2GXXaJmD3I

Robert Redford's "Incident at Oglala"--Leonard's Story, Free Online at
http://www.FreePeltierNow.org


 
Please urge Justice Minister to "Not sign Graham extradition order":
   
The Honourable Robert Douglas Nicholson
     Justice Canada
     East Memorial Building, 4th Floor
     284 Wellington Street
     Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
     K1A 0H8
     Telephone: (613) 992-4621
     Fax: (613) 990-7255
     E-mail: nichor@parl.gc.ca

Please urge to Chief Justice to accept Graham appeal before July 16, 2007:

     Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin
     Supreme Court of Canada
     301 Wellington St.
     Ottawa, Ontario
     K1A 0J1

     Executive Legal Officer to the Chief Justice, Jill Copeland
     media@scc-csc.gc.ca
     Tel: (613) 996-9296
     Fax: (613) 952-3092

Your Member of Parliament--The NDP has been supportive:
http://canada.gc.ca/directories/direct_e.html#mp

Urge Amnesty International to Oppose Graham Extradition:
     Amnesty International
     Secretary General Alex Neve
     312 Laurier Avenue East
     Ottawa, Ontario
     Canada
     K1N 1H9

     Telephone: (613) 744-7667 OR 1-800-AMNESTY (266-3789)
     Fax: (613) 746-2411
     E-mail: info@amnesty.ca

Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs
     Honourable Hon. Peter MacKay,
     MacKay.P@parl.gc.ca

WRITE TO JOHN ON POSTCARD SO PRISON WORKERS CAN SEE HIS SUPPORT TOO:
      Attn: John Graham
      North Fraser Pre Trial Center
      1451 Kingsway Ave.,
      Port Coquitlam, BC
      V3C 1S2

    John Graham, the Canadian First Nations AIM activist, has lost his appeal against an extradition order from the United States to have him returned to the U.S. to face the same courts that sent up Leonard Peltier nearly thirty years ago.

 
It's a bitter reminder of Peltier's extradition from Canada, before his shoddy trial and life-sentence, extracted from Canadian authorities based on "evidence" invented by the F.B.I. The details of Graham's history and struggle with the government is from the advocacy site, Free John Graham.
 
 
 
 
"I fear that John Boy will not receive a fair trial in the US anymore than I did. I must remind you, it is court record that the FBI lied to extradite me back to the US." - Leonard Peltier
 
 
QUICK FACTS:
 
John Graham was arrested in Vancouver in early December, 2003 on an American indictment and is now living under house arrest, awaiting an extradition hearing. He is a 48-year old Canadian native man from Whitehorse, Yukon Territories. Among other things, he is a father to eight, pipe layer, community organizer and AIM activist. In 1975 he was in the region when the FBI instigated a shoot-out at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota

"My greatest fear is that the U.S. will use the same kind of flimsy and trumped-up evidence that they used against Leonard Peltier to justify the extradition of John Graham, a Canadian citizen, to the U.S.," said Amnesty International member Bob Newbrook, a retired police officer who arrested Peltier in Alberta in 1976.  - (THE PROVINCE, DECEMBER 5, 2003)

John is charged with the murder of Anna Mae Aquash, who was a friend and comrade of his in the American Indian Movement. He has repeatedly stated that he is not guilty of this crime. We believe that the charges against him have been manufactured by the FBI - aas part of their ongoing war against AIM and against self determination for Indigenous people


In the weeks before she disappeared, Anna Mae confided to John that she had been detained and threatened by FBI Officer David Price who told her that she would not live out the year if she didn't become an FBI informer.


    John dropped Anna Mae at a safe house near the Pine Ridge Reservation. It was the last time he saw her alive.



When Anna Mae's frozen body was discovered on the reservation, FBI Agent David Price was one of the first to examine the body. He claimed he could not identify Anna Mae, despite having interviewed her. He had the hands cut off, sent to Washington for identification. Her body was buried as a Jane Doe. The cause of death was listed as "exposure:" The first coroner "missed" the bullet hole in the back of Anna Mae's head. Agent Price claimed there was no need to have a criminal investigation.


    An exhumation and a second autopsy occured. Our understanding is that people within AIM asked for this. The 2nd coroner was able to identify the bullet hole.



Media sources in the U.S. and Canada are already running stories that assume John's guilt. These stories can be traced back to a man named Paul DeMain, who runs a newspaper and website called "News from Indian Country." It claims to be an independent media source, but in our opinion, should be treated with grave suspicion. DeMains' main purpose is to perpetuate positions invented by the FBI. DeMain also makes it his business to personally contact anyone who expresses an opposite point of view. DeMain has spawned a number of websites - including the "Indigenous Women for Justice."


We are alarmed by a mentality that equates justice for Anna Mae with convicting John Graham - whether or not there is any real evidence. Initially, we invited the family of Anna Mae to come to Vancouver and meet John personally. They did not agree to this. Now, due to John's bail conditions, this is no longer possible. But, we urge them to look in the direction of the people who most strongly point the finger at John Graham. We believe the real killer is hidden among them.
 
 
Background

There are many tragedies which resulted from the shootout on the Pine Ridge reservation and subsequent events of nearly 30 years ago. These include the deaths of Lakota people, members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), two agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Canadian activist Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash.

In an effort to gain convictions for the deaths of the FBI agents, a continuing abuse of the justice system by the FBI has ensued, involving the fabrication of evidence and the use of false testimony and fraudulent affidavits. Perhaps the most infamous result of these tactics was the illegal extradition of Leonard Peltier from Canada to face charges for the deaths of the two agents.

    Amnesty International has condemned the fact that the FBI knowingly used false evidence to obtain the extradition of AIM activist Leonard Peltier from Canada in December 1976.

    ~ Amnesty International - Statement on the arrest of John Graham, December 12, 2003

    Warren Allmand, a former justice minister, and the judge who extradited Peltier later said they would never have agreed to his extradition had they known some affidavits and evidence presented by the U.S. were false.
    ~ As reported in The Province, December 05, 2003


While John Graham was not present at the actual Pine Ridge shootout, he was in the area at the time working with AIM as a junior security guard and assisting with routine activities. In the months following, AIM activists and other aboriginal people were regularly rounded up and interrogated, causing many to fear for their safety.

Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash was a friend and fellow activist from Canada. A Mi’qmak aboriginal woman from Nova Scotia, Anna Mae was also experiencing continued harassment by the FBI who believed she knew the identity of the shooter responsible for the FBI deaths. Several months after the shootout, after having expressed concern for her own safety to friends and family, Anna Mae was found dead on the Pine Ridge reservation, having suffered a fatal bullet wound to the head.

There are many questions that surround the death of Anna Mae, including the failure of the FBI agents to identify her while examining her body — even though they had interrogated her just weeks before — burying her in an anonymous grave and sending only her hands to FBI Headquarters for identification, and the failure of the FBI-led autopsy to detect the bullet wound — a wound which was immediately detected in a later autopsy — stating only that she had died of exposure.

    An FBI-sanctioned pathologist missed the bullet hole in the back of her head and said she died of exposure. Still unable to identify her, Norman Zagrossi, an FBI regional supervisor based in Washington, DC, ordered her hands chopped off. "Our experts in Washington suggested and told us that the proper procedure was to cut off the hands, put them in jars with formaldehyde and send them to Washington, which we did. I never had before..."
    ~ As reported by the CBC's Fifth Estate, November 08, 2000

    It was a mutilation that even twenty-five years later outrages the native community. A second autopsy with a different pathologist showed a bullet still lodged in her head. Zagrossi knew it looked like an FBI cover-up attempt, and he angrily phoned the first pathologist. "It looked like we were involved, it looked like we were trying to cover something up when in fact we weren't," said Zagrossi.
    ~ As reported by the CBC's Fifth Estate, November 08, 2000


Over the past decade, members of the FBI have made four trips to the Yukon to visit John Graham, asking him to identify Anna Mae’s murderer and offering him immunity from any related charges. They also warned that if John did not comply, they would in turn bring charges against him for the crime. During their fourth and last visit to the Yukon, the agents informed John that it would be the last time they would come to see him.

Living up to their promise, after extensive and questionable interrogations of John’s co-accused Arlo Looking Cloud, the FBI charged John Graham with the murder of Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash.


The Matter At Hand

The family and friends of John Graham, including numerous supporters, human rights and First Nation organizations, and the Honourable Yukon Member of Parliament and Parliamentary Secretary Larry Bagnell, are now calling on the Canadian government and all involved with this process to provide great scrutiny to the evidence presented in the extradition hearing.

    Amnesty is urging Canadian authorities to ensure that there is rigorous scrutiny of any evidence brought against him. If Graham should be brought to trial in the US, Amnesty International will seek assurances that his right to a fair trial is fully respected.
    ~ Amnesty International - Statement on the arrest of John Graham, December 12, 2003

    We are deeply concerned about the safety of Mr. John Graham and the legality of the procedures in Canada.
    ~ Günter Wippel, Menschenrechte (Human Rights) 3000, Germany, December 14, 2003


In the wake of the experiences of Maher Arar and comments by the American Ambassador Paul Cellucci that the United States will "do what it has to do" to protect U.S. national security, and that homeland security comes first even before respect be given to the Canadian passport, there is strong sentiment that Canadians do not receive the proper respect and consideration by the U.S.

We believe that should an extradition occur under questionable circumstances, the public reaction would be loud, swift, and highly critical of the Canadian government for allowing it.

    Jennifer Wade, the founder of the Vancouver branch of Amnesty International who was at the extradition hearing of Leonard Peltier – another man connected to Pictou-Aquash – says Canada will make the same mistake if it extradites Peltier's friend, John Graham, for the murder of their colleague, Pictou-Aquash.

    ~ As reported by the CBC NEWS, December 04, 2003