Bob's Dream Investigated by the FBI

BOB’S DREAM INVESTIGATED BY THE FBI

When we last left off, Bob Ecoffey was having problems with his dream, a dream that ended up as evidence that helped Bob solve the murder of Anna Mae Pictou Aquash a dream that put Arlo Looking Cloud away in prison. But now, the dream seems to be acting up, misbehaving. Why doesn’t it just go to rest? Bob had the dream interpreted by a medicine man, adjudicated by a judge, and it still is a troubled dream. It is time to have the dream investigated. And who better to investigate, than the FBI?

Lets take a look-see into what the FBI has done so far. During the 36 months roughly beginning with the end of Wounded Knee and continuing through the first of May 1976, more than sixty AIM members and supporters died violently on or in locations immediately adjacent to the Pine Ridge Reservation. A minimum of 342 others suffered violent physical assaults.

According to Jim Vanderwall and Ward Churchill in The COINTELPRO Papers, “Of these 60-plus murders occurring in an area in which the FBI held "preeminent jurisdiction," not one was solved by the Bureau. In most instances, no active investigation was ever opened. The same is true for the nearly 350 physical assaults, despite eye-witness identification the killers and assailants who in each instance were known members of the Wilson GOON Squad.”

This would not seem to be a very good track record. However, the FBI did manage to arrest 562 AIM members and supporters for participation in the siege, while another 600 individuals across the nation were charged for supporting the defenders. So you can’t exactly say that the FBI were sitting on their hands.

“the GOONs functioned essentially as a reservation death squad. Among their first victims was Pedro Bissonette, the young head of the grassroots OgIala Sioux Civil Rights Organization (OSCRO), who had emerged as an ION leader at Wounded Knee. In the aftermath of the siege, the FBI had offered Bissonette a "deal" wherein all charges would be dropped against him in exchange for his testifying against the AIM leadership.

He refused, and countered that it was his intention to testify instead to the specifics of the graft and corruption permeating the Wilson administration, and the role of the government in perpetuating the situation. Subsequently, he was accosted by a GOON named Cliff Richards in the reservation-adjacent hamlet of White Clay, Nebraska on the afternoon of October 17, 1973. In the ensuing scuffle, Bissonette knocked his attacker to the ground, then got in his car and drove away.”

Although White Clay is outside BIA police jurisdiction, Pine Ridge police/ GOON head Delmar Eastman immediately mobilized his entire force - assisted by several FBI spotter planes - in a reservation-wide manhunt for the "fugitive."

At some point between 9 and 9:50 p.m. the same evening, Bissonette was stopped at a roadblock near Pine Ridge village and shot in the chest by a BIA police officer (and known GOON) named Joe Clifford. In Clifford's official report, he had been forced to shoot the victim, who had resisted arrest, jumping from his car brandishing a weapon. He recorded that he'd used a 12-gauge shotgun and that the shooting occurred at 9:48 p.m. Bissonette was pronounced dead on arrival at the Pine Ridge hospital at 10:10 p.m."

No weapon attributable to Pedro Bissonette was ever produced by the police. Several witnesses who drove by the scene, however, later submitted affidavits that a pool of blood indicating that Bissonette had already been shot was evident at shortly after 9 p.m., suggesting that the GOONs had delayed the victim's transport by ambulance to the nearby hospital (and medical attention) for approximately an hour, until he bled to death.”

Moreover, when WKLDOC attorney Mark Lane viewed the corpse in the hospital morgue at around midnight, he discovered that rather than having suffered a shotgun blast, Bissonette appeared to have been shot seven times with an "approximately .38 calibre handgun" in the chest. The shots, "any one of which might have killed him," were placed in a very tight cluster, Lane insisted, as if they'd been fired at point-blank range." 118 The attorney also recounted that it appeared Bissonette had been beaten prior to being shot. 119 He therefore quickly called Gladys Bissonette*, the dead man's grandmother, and convinced her to demand an independent autopsy be performed. She agreed. Lane then phoned Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Clayton in Rapid City, to notify him of the family's intent to pursue its legal right to commission such an autopsy. Clayton appears to have immediately called Delmar Eastman and instructed him to remove the body from the morgue at 3 a.m. - and have it transported, not only off the reservation, but out of the state, to Scottsbluff, Nebraska. 120 There, W.O. Brown, a government-contracted coroner, dissected the body, turned over whatever slugs he recovered to the FBI and reached a conclusion corroborating Clifford's version of events. There was little left of the corpse for an independent pathologist to examine. [You will remember, Brown was the same coroner who examined Anna Mae’s body, missing the bullet wound to her head, and pronounced she died of exposure, and she was quickly buried as Jane Doe, without a death certificate] 121 Despite the controversy swirling around Bissonette's death, and the existence of witness accounts contradicting the police story, the Bureau pursued no further investigation of the matter. OSCRO collapsed as a viable organization as a direct result of its leader's elimination.

So Pedro’s death was never investigated. No one was charged with murder. No one went to court on it. However, the FBI did vigorously indict the AIM leadership, which they continue to do right up to the present day, which is like whipping a dead horse. Case in point is Arlo Looking Cloud. Instead of finding evidence to convict Arlo, the prosecution found FBI paid snitches to manufacture new evidence against Leonard Peltier who is doing time in Leavenworth Kansas for allegedly shooting the 2 FBI Agents, Coler and Williams, who were just as likely shot by some FBI Agent. All this was brought out in Arlo’s trial. So was Bob’s dream brought out in Arlo’s trial, and the puzzling thing is, we aren’t any closer to discovering Anna Mae’s murderer that we were 30 years ago.?

While claiming to lack the resources to investigate the literal death squad activity occurring beneath his nose, FBI Agent O'Clock managed to find the wherewithal to compile more than 316,000 separate investigative file classifications on AIM members with regard to the siege of Wounded Knee alone. 84 His agents also found the time and energy to arrest 562 AIM members and supporters for participation in the siege, while another 600 individuals across the nation were charged for supporting the defenders. 85 These 562 arrests resulted in the indictments of 185 persons, many on multiple charges (none involving a capital crime).

Indicative of the quality of justice involved in these "Wounded Knee Leadership Trials" was that of Russell Means and Dennis Banks before District Judge Fred Nichol during 1974. Based on an FBI "investigation," the defendants were charged with 13 offenses each, including burglary, arson, possession of illegal weapons, theft, interfering with federal officers and criminal conspiracy; cumulatively, each faced more than 150 years in prison as a result. 89The crux of the case was the "eyewitness" testimony of a young Oglala named Louis Moves Camp-whom Banks had earlier expelled from AIM due to his persistent misconduct - concerning the AIM leaders' actions inside Wounded Knee.

Moves Camp had been recruited as a witness by David Price [one of the last people to see Anna Mae alive, and the one person she feared the most] and Ronald Williams, two agents recently assigned to the Rapid City FBI office. [Ronald Williams, you will recall, was one of the numerous FBI Agents who illegally entered the Pine Ridge Reservation on June 25th, 1975, in an attempt to prevent AIM from protecting the traditional Lakotas from being assaulted and murdered by the GOONs. He was killed in a massive firefight, most likely killed by FBI bullets.] 91 His [Moves Camp] participation as a prosecution witness was apparently obtained in exchange for a "deal" concerning charges of robbery, assault with a deadly weapon (two counts) and assault causing bodily harm (two counts) - adding up to a possible 20-year sentence-facing him in South Dakota. 92 He was also paid by the Bureau for his services. 93 Further, while staying at a resort in Wisconsin with SAs Price and Williams, awaiting his turn to testify against Means and Banks, Moves Camp appears to have raped a teenaged girl in nearby River Falls; after meeting for several hours with local police, Agent Price was able to fix this charge as well. [Which leads us to wonder why Agent Price couldn’t identify Anna Mae, and immediately had her hands cut off, to possibly remove incriminating skin from under her fingernails.] And according to Terry Gilbert, Arlo Looking Cloud’s lawyer, the second autopsy on Anna Mae’s body, revealed sexual activity. When Anna Mae’s body was exhumed last June, 2004, Judge Piersol, the one who sentenced Arlo Looking Cloud to life in prison, refused to allow a DNA sample to be taken. Why?

Hurd [US Attorney] lied to the court, asserting that the River Falls situation was "only a minor matter," such as "public intoxication." 96 Then it came out that the FBI and prosecution had-despite the filing of proper discovery motions by the defense deliberately suppressed at least 131 pieces of exculpatory evidence which might have served to exonerate the defendants. 97 With this magnitude of government misconduct on the record, Judge Nichol responded by dismissing all charges against Means and Banks. In his decision, the judge observed that it was difficult for him to accept that "the FBI [he had] revered so long, [had] stooped so low," and:

Although it hurts me deeply, I am forced to the conclusion that the prosecution in this trial had something other than attaining justice foremost in its mind ... The fact that the incidents of misconduct formed a pattern throughout the course of the trial leads me to the belief that this case was not prosecuted in good faith or in the spirit of justice. The waters of justice have been polluted, and dismissal I believe, is the appropriate cure for the pollution in this case. 98

It was [Judge] Nichol, however, who was removed from trying any further AIM-related cases. 103 Nothing at all was done to Moves Camp. 104 Far from being disbarred, [U.S. prosecutor] R.D. Hurd was promoted and received an award for his performance, and was assigned a lead role in seeking convictions against other AIM leaders, such as Stan Holder, Carter Camp and Leonard Crow Dog. FBI Agent Trimbach and his agents continued in their positions with no official censure, while spearheading the Bureau's anti-AIM campaign on Pine Ridge.

Well, Bob, I was searching through all this for some hard facts, evidence, something that we could really nail down this dream of how Arlo Looking Cloud killed Anna Mae. I was hoping that the FBI boys could help you out here. It seems that you have done so much for them; it is the least they could do for you. If we could just come up with a little evidence, hard facts, that Arlo killed Anna Mae, we’d all feel better about Arlo sitting in prison for her murder. It would be ever so helpful. I have searched and searched, but the only smoking guns appear to be in the hands of the FBI, and furthermore, they are very reluctant to share any evidence that they haven’t rearranged first rearranged and dissected.

It makes it awfully hard in Arlo’s case, when all you have to go on is a dream. No evidence, no witnesses, just a dream. But you did manage to put Arlo away, and he wasn’t even a dangerous AIM leader. He wasn’t even part of AIM after 1973. It is doubtful he was part of AIM in 73. He was just a young kid at the time who thought it would look cool to all the girls if he marched around with all the AIM boys, but he wasn’t a leader. After all, Kamook thought Dennis Banks was a big, cool AIM leader, and she snagged him, but she didn’t snag Arlo. And, come to think of it, Anna Mae never snagged Arlo, either. And later, after much testimony and witness protection, Kamook snags you, Bob, which tells me that you must be in charge of something.

But, we digress. We are trying to get the FBI to investigate that dream, and let’s face it, the FBI has generated a lot of paperwork, but it is difficult to find the kernel of substance in it. But I will keep searching.