Oglala protesters oppose Badlands dig

An 1896 illustration of an Arapaho Ghost Dance in the Oklahoma Territory.
Courtesy of the National Anthropological Archives

By Kara Christensen

Interior, South Dakota, June 25— A group of Oglala Sioux Tribe members want the National Park Service to abandon plans for a fossil dig planned for August and September of this year.

Unless the dig is canceled, about 25 protesters vow to camp on the Stronghold Table in the South Unit of Badlands National Park on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, one member said Tuesday morning.

The Stronghold Table is home to significant sacred and cultural sites for the tribe, including the buried remains of Ghost Dancers killed in 1890, Cecilia “Lovey” Two Bulls said.

“The people are protesting because of the burial sites in there,” she said.

The Journal was unable to verify the number of people present when the protest began Tuesday, but Two Bulls estimated 25 people would camp there indefinitely. Additional protesters will be there during the day, Two Bulls said.

Tribal members will supply portable toilets, water tanks and food. Backed by tribal police, some protesters will patrol the South Unit on horseback and ask park service employees found there to leave, she said.

“They’ll be courteous, but they will go by the law,” Two Bulls said. “Our tribal law.”

A Badlands National Park representative said the park service needs more information before commenting on the protest.

“We are still sorting out what the issues are at the heart of this situation,” Marianne Mills, public information officer, said Tuesday afternoon. “Until we have clear information on what the demands are, we have no official stance.”

Through the fossil digs, Mills said researchers hope to uncover titanotheres, the largest animal found in the White River Badlands. The animal looked like a rhinoceros and was about the size of a small elephant.

An area in the South Unit was used as a bombing range during World War II, she said, which made large white bones visible from the air.

Since then, universities have conducted fossil research and excavation, she said.

“There is a long history of fossil research in that area,” Mills said. “This is not something new we’re proposing.”

The planned dig is the first major excavation since the land became part of the National Park Service.

The group of protesters is calling itself “The Keepers of the Stronghold Dream.”

“A dream of a better life, a dream of freedom, a dream of free buffalo, a dream of free travels. These were the dreams that these people had, and they fought for it,” Two Bulls said. “They danced for it.”

This generation is better educated and can fulfill that dream, Two Bulls said.

“We’re going to get our freedom from the National Park Service, which is once again the Great White Father dictating to us,” she said.

The conflict over the planned digs is only one part of the larger issue of land management. Some tribal members want full control of the land back.

Although the tribe technically owns most of the South Unit in the Badlands, the land falls within park service boundaries. A Memorandum of Agreement signed by both groups in 1976 allows the park service to manage the South Unit for its purposes, although there is confusion over how the memorandum should be interpreted.

“Within that, we’re permitted to do the standard activities that the National Park Service would be able to do if it were our land,” Mills said.

That includes fossil excavations that are important to science or research, she said. The fossil digs scheduled to begin in August are part of a three-year project funded through park service research grants.

John Steele, tribal president, has said the park service needs tribal permission for the fossil digs. He and other tribal leaders were on administrative leave Tuesday for a tribal holiday in recognition of the Battle of Little Big Horn on June 25, 1876. They could not be reached for comment.

William Supernaugh, Badlands National Park superintendent, has said it would take an act of Congress to cancel the memorandum, if that is what the Oglala want to do.

Tribal members stand to lose some benefits if that happens, he said.

Under the memorandum, the tribe receives about $800,000 a year from half of the gate receipts paid by visitors to the Badlands, Supernaugh said last Friday. Most visitors enter from the north, near Wall. The tribes get half the money because visitors could choose to go south.

“In reality, 90 percent of the people who come in and pay that fee never see the South Unit,” Supernaugh said.

The park service also gives excess wildlife, such as bison, to the tribe, he said. And tribal members are given preferential hiring for park service positions in the South Unit, he said.

Source: Rapid City Journal

Bush edges toward suspension of habeas corpus

By Wayne Washington

Richmond, Virginia, June 26— The Bush administration pressed forward with its argument yesterday that “enemy combatants’’ should not have access to a lawyer even if they are American citizens, in a federal case that will have broad implications for the administration’s strategy in the war against terrorism.

In an unusual telephone conference call with three appellate judges, Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement reiterated the administration’s assertion that the president alone has the power to make a determination -- not subject to judicial review -- that someone is an enemy combatant and that such people should not have access to lawyers. Enemy combatants can also be detained until the war on terrorism ends -- another determination that the president alone is empowered to make, Clement argued.

Geremy Kamens, an assistant federal public defender speaking on behalf of Yasser Esam Hamdi, the Saudi American captured with Taliban forces in Afghanistan, countered that the US Constitution forbids the unlimited detention of a US citizen.

Judge William B. Traxler Jr. and Judge William W. Wilkins Jr. listened from their chambers in Greenville, SC; Chief Judge J. Harvis Wilkinson III listened from Charlottesville, VA. The judges, members of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals based in Richmond, asked each attorney numerous questions but did not rule.

The Fourth Circuit is one of the nation’s most conservative, and Wilkinson, who asked most of the questions yesterday, was most aggressive with Kamens, demanding to know what legal precedent mandates that someone who has been declared an enemy combatant have access to a lawyer. “Your honor,’’ Kamens said, “I believe the Constitution prevents the indefinite detention of an American citizen.’’

Wilkinson seemed unsatisfied with that answer and strongly criticized a ruling last month by a US District Court in Norfolk that Hamdi be given access to an attorney.

The Bush administration got a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit to stay that ruling during an appeal.

Clement said allowing enemy combatants to have access to a lawyer would effectively kill the government’s ability to get information from them that could prevent future acts of terrorism. Wilkinson agreed, noting that any good attorney would advise an enemy combatant not to talk because anything he says could be used against him in a criminal proceeding.

Constitutional scholars have said the Hamdi case -- along with that of Jose Padilla, the American citizen suspected of plotting with al-Qaida to explode a “dirty bomb’’ in the United States -- will go a long way toward defining what an enemy combatant is and to what legal assistance, if any, such a person would be entitled. Those scholars said the government’s argument that Hamdi is an enemy combatant is much stronger than its argument against Padilla, also known as Abdullah al Muhajir, who was arrested last month in the United States.

The government asserts that two legal cases, one centered on a team of German saboteurs caught in the United States during World War II and another involving an Italian-American caught fighting with Mussolini’s troops in Sicily, stand as the legal underpinning of the administration’s position. Congress affirmed this presidential power immediately after the attacks, government attorneys have argued, when it authorized Bush to use force against “nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.’’

Congressional leaders supported Bush’s planned strikes against al-Qaida and Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Constitutional scholars, however, say that while congressional support is unquestioned, the two cases the government cites as precedent do not match the circumstances of either the Hamdi or Padilla cases. There is no legal precedent for Bush to make a determination that would result in a US citizen being held indefinitely without trial or access to an attorney, according to constitutional scholars.

“It’s a breathtaking assertion of power that we wouldn’t grant someone who didn’t seem affable and a nice guy,’’ said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School. “But being affable isn’t a reason to let someone toss out the Constitution.’’

Wilkinson repeatedly questioned Clement’s assertion that courts have a severely limited role in ruling on whether a president has correctly determined someone to be an enemy combatant.

Source: Boston Globe

Protesters may be billed for police operation

By Terje Langeland

Colorado Springs, Colorado, June 20— In Colorado Springs, freedom of speech may not turn out to be “free” speech.

City police, who last week staged a massive security operation in response to a peaceful demonstration by a small group of environmental activists at The Broadmoor Hotel, say they are exploring the possibility of sending the protesters a bill for the operation.

“This is absurd,” commented Aaron Sanger, an attorney and spokesman for Corvallis, Oregon-based Forest Ethics, one of the activist groups that helped organize the rally. Police have indicated they may send a bill to the group.

Sanger said it’s the first time he’s heard of a law-enforcement agency seeking to bill activists for a demonstration. “There isn’t any legal basis for it.”

But Lt. Skip Arms, CSPD spokesman, said the commander of the police department’s tactical unit plans to meet with representatives for the City Attorney’s office “to research if there’s the legal possibility to go after costs.”

About 30 environmental activists, mostly from the Pacific Northwest and throughout Colorado, gathered in the Springs from June 10 through June 12 to protest against the North American Wholesale Lumber Association, which was holding its annual convention at The Broadmoor.

The activists charge that the association, representing North America’s largest wholesalers and distributors, is guilty of trading in massive amounts of wood products from endangered forests.

Police showed up in force. While they would not disclose details of the operation, dozens of officers could be spotted around the hotel, and some were seen carrying riot helmets with gas-mask attachments. A police helicopter circled above the hotel for hours.

While activists decried the police presence as vastly out of proportion, Arms says police wanted to be prepared for “all kinds of different contingencies.” He says advance “intelligence information” indicated that some of the activists coming to town had been associated with previous protests “that involved activities such as chaining themselves to objects or setting fires.”

The main protest event was a rally outside The Broadmoor on June 10. Three activists made their way into the hotel’s bell tower and hung a banner denouncing the wholesalers association. They were arrested and issued summonses for trespassing and property damage.

Two days later, an even smaller group of about 10 activists traveled to the Garden of the Gods, where the conventioneers’ spouses were scheduled to take a tour. The activists, who planned to perform a skit for the spouses, say they were followed to the park by numerous police cars and motorcycles, as well as a van full of officers in riot gear.

Police say activists subsequently engaged in criminal trespass by disobeying an order to leave the Garden of the Gods visitor center, which is privately owned. The activists say they never disobeyed any orders.

Following the events, police contacted one of the activists and asked for the address of Forest Ethics, explaining that the police wanted to know where to send a bill.

Arms says billing the group may be justified because activists engaged in criminal activity, including the banner hanging and the alleged trespassing. He claims police have evidence that the people who hung the banner were acting in concert with rally organizers. “We know that they were associated,” Arms said. “We know telephone communications that [they] were engaged in.”

The activists, meanwhile, say everyone who came to the rally acted as an individual. None of the three people who were arrested — two from Colorado and one from Moab, Utah — is connected with Forest Ethics, Sanger said.

Source: Colorado Springs Independent

NATION BRIEFS

FBI begins monitoring libraries
The FBI is visiting libraries nationwide and checking the reading records of people it suspects of having ties to terrorists or plotting an attack, library officials say.

The FBI effort is the first broad government check of library records since the 1970s when prosecutors reined in the practice for fear of abuses.

Judith Krug, the American Library Association’s director for intellectual freedom, said the FBI was treading on the rights it is supposed to be upholding.

Krug tells worried librarians who call that they should keep only the records they need and should discard records that would reveal which patron checked out a book and for how long.

“It wasn’t the right to privacy that let terrorists into our nation. It had nothing to do with libraries or library records,” Krug said. The Justice Department and FBI declined to comment June 24, except to note that such searches are now legal under the USA PATRIOT Act that President Bush signed last October. (AP)

Alabama prison punishment
ruled unconstitutional
The Supreme Court on June 27 declared unconstitutional an Alabama prison practice of handcuffing inmates to a metal pole for hours in the summer heat. The court ruled that a prisoner could sue over his chaining.

The punishment, revived in that state in 1995 as part of a get-tough program for criminals, is obvious cruel and unusual punishment, the court ruled in the six-to-three vote.

The victory for inmates was partly symbolic. Alabama was the only state to use “hitching posts” in recent years and it has since ended the punishment.

But the ruling halts a string of Supreme Court decisions that shielded prison officials from inmate lawsuits. Justices seemed disgusted by the treatment of a prisoner who said he was twice chained to an outdoor pole in 1995 and denied food and water as punishment for fighting while assigned to a chain gang.

In a dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the inmate was chained “for a legitimate penological purpose: encouraging his compliance with prison rules while out on work duty.”

The practice was reviewed as part of the broader question of when guards -- and potentially other government officials -- may be sued. (AP)

Court OKs random drug tests in schools
The Supreme Court put public high school students on notice June 27: Drug tests may be required for playing chess or joining the cheerleader squad. Justices ruled 5-4 that schools’ interest in ridding their campuses of drugs outweighs students’ right to privacy, allowing the broadest drug testing yet of young people whom authorities have no particular reason to suspect of wrongdoing.

The decision gives school leaders a free hand to test students who participate in competitive after-school activities or teams -- more than half the estimated 14 million American high school students. Drug tests had been allowed previously just for student athletes.

The court stopped short of allowing random tests for any student, but several justices have indicated they are interested in addressing that issue at some point. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a dissent, said the “program upheld today is not reasonable, it is capricious, even perverse.” (AP)

Black farmers take over USDA office
Three hundred black farmers took over a US Department of Agriculture regional office in Brownsville, TN, on July 1 to protest what organizers called the agency’s failure to process loan applications from growers who were counting on the money to plant this year’s crops.

Protesters came from 16 states by car, train and pickup truck to support five black Tennessee growers. Protest organizers said the five had applied for loans in Fayette County, but the loan applications were sent to Haywood County, where they sat for more than a month.

The farmers entered into agreements for land, fuel, fertilizer and seed with the understanding that the money was coming, Burrell said. When the planting season ended with the start of July, there was no money. Now they face thousands of dollars of debt.

Authorities reported no injuries in the building’s takeover, after which about half of the farmers remained inside throughout the day. USDA officials said its employees were sent home for the day. (Washington Post)