Against Exceptionalism

By Ivan Drury

No case has illuminated the blind alley of the police “public inquiry” more clearly than that of the 1998 police killing of Frank Paul in Vancouver. The Frank Paul inquiry, restricted from the beginning from finding fault or laying charges, has the potential of becoming a crossroads from which the entire corrupt policing and “justice” system can begin to be challenged by the communities they have brutalized for hundreds of years.

This potential was clear to the BC government from the start. Solicitor-General Rich Coleman made that plain in 2001 when he sent a letter to Police Complaint Commissioner Don Morrison explaining that he would not open a coroner’s inquest into Frank Paul’s death where “culpability, liability and issues of racial discrimination are likely to become the central features. (…) [A] responsible coroner would not permit the pursuit of those matters. Public acrimony would almost certainly follow.”

Police brutality – a fact of life in Canada

Between 1992 and 2007, 52 people died at the hands of members of the Vancouver Police Department (VPD). Not a single one of these deaths resulted in charges being laid against a single officer.[1] Vancouverites have gotten so accustomed to police brutality that we take its existence for granted. When it is reported, most of us take the side of the victim against the police. Most people in Vancouver do not trust the police to deal fairly with oppressed people.

For evidence of widespread disillusionment with the Vancouver Police Department and the RCMP, we need only look at the public response to the death of the would-be Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski at the hands and tasers of the RCMP at the Vancouver airport in October 2007. Anticipating inevitable outcry, news coverage by even the most corporate of media organs snapped up and played and replayed civilian video of Dziekanski’s death.[2] The groundswell of opposition that followed exposed a deep rooted and convinced distrust of the police reaching far beyond the “usual suspects” of the protest world. A demonstration in Vancouver, initiated by people who were not known activists, was pulled together spontaneously through Facebook and drew over a thousand people.[3]

Perception of public inquiry as solution

The demands of the “Rally for Robert” were limited to banning tasers, the specific weapon used by the police in Robert’s death, and for a public inquiry into what happened at the airport.

In Canada the call for a public inquiry means an investigation of the police by the police themselves. The Frank Paul case lays bare the fraudulent character of such inquiries.

The killing of Frank Paul

Frank Paul’s death is more typical of police brutality cases in Vancouver than Robert Dziekanski’s. It’s instructive to note the difference in media coverage of the police killing of a European immigrant versus that of a homeless Indigenous man.

On December 5, 1998, Frank Paul, a 47-year-old Mik’maq man, was dragged, soaking wet and unconscious, from the downtown holding cells in Vancouver and dumped in an alley across town. He was drunk and, according to the testimony of the police constable who dropped him in the alley, could not stand or speak clearly. His body was found at 2:30am in the same alley by a passerby.

According to the pathologist report, Paul had died of hypothermia accelerated by acute alcohol poisoning that he had likely already been suffering as he was examined by the jail sergeant who decided Frank Paul was not drunk. He was likely already dying of hypothermia when Sergeant Russel Sanderson ordered the rookie wagon driver Constable David Instant to drag Frank Paul out of the jail house by his feet and dump him back into the night.[4]

Sergeant Sanderson testified, nearly ten years later that “anybody, a normal, for lack of better word here, citizen, Joe Q. Public that was not known as a seasoned alcoholic, if they had arrived that way, they would probably have been medically assessed (…) anybody in a suit would have been assessed (…) anybody neatly dressed would be assessed.”[5]

A case study of the investigation of police by police

If Frank Paul’s death is sad and tragic, the investigation process that followed is frightening and infuriating.

The death of Frank Paul was investigated by Detective Robert Douglas Staunton, one single officer. Staunton pursued his investigation “in a way I thought would be neutral.” At the inquiry Staunton testified that “neutrality” meant he worked to not find fault, and instead worked to obscure evidence of the criminal actions of the police that led to the death of Frank Paul.
In contravention of police regulations Staunton did not remove Const. David Instant, the suspect in Frank Paul’s death, from the crime scene. He did not interview Instant, or his commanding officer Sergeant Sanderson; relying instead on their contradictory duty reports and prepared statements that were, in Staunton’s understated words, “a little incomplete.”[6] He did not search for witnesses in the area Paul was found nor did he release a plea for witnesses to come forward. He did not perform any of the routines normal for a homicide investigation.

Why this “neutral” stance in cop killings? Staunton explained that unless, before the investigation started, it was already known that the suspected police-criminals “were absolutely guilty of a criminal offense, it basically served no purpose” because if investigators took steps towards prosecution “we would receive no information.” He explained, “that is a practice that the Major Crime investigators followed” in all 52 or so cases of deaths at the hands of the police in the previous 15 years. “We didn’t make judgments. We would just gather as many and all the facts that were available.”[7]

Det. Staunton’s astonishing admission that police officers would refuse to cooperate with a prosecution investigation of the police is rooted in history: When the Office of the Police Complaints Commission ordered an investigation into fifty complaints of police brutality issued by the Pivot legal society in 2002, the investigation came up empty because, according to Pivot in 2005, “at least 45 Vancouver Police officers refused to cooperate with the RCMP investigation, including the Chief.”[8]

Staunton’s “neutral” investigation in fact effectively paralyzed any process of accountability for the death of Frank Paul. Former Vancouver Coroner and former Mayor Larry Campbell explained that as coroner he would always take the word of the investigating officer over that of crown prosecution on the viability of charges, “I take the evidence of the person who was first – who was at the scene.”[9] He did not account for police “neutrality” in the investigation of other police. The Police Complaints Commissioner at the time of the Frank Paul killing, Don Morrison defended the same “neutrality” when he opposed calls for a public inquiry in 2001 saying, “What do you want me to do, wreck a young officer’s career?”[10]

The result of the VPD internal investigation was a slap on the wrist for each officer directly involved: a one-day suspension for Instant, and two days for Sanderson.

Complaints process uncovered

In the final days of the public inquiry, Mike Tammen of the BC Civil Liberties Association accused the Vancouver Police Department of cover-up. In fact, the cover-up was not solely the work of the police. From the investigation, to the Office of the Police Complaints Commission, to the Coroner, to the BC Liberal government, all channels remained closed against any investigation or inquiry into the killing of Frank Paul. A conspiracy of silence around Frank Paul’s death continued, virtually without exception, until early 2008. It included the NDP, who did not speak a word about Frank Paul until halfway through the inquiry.

The Frank Paul cover-up is only too typical of standard police procedure. In a document called “Towards More Effective Police Oversight” the Pivot Legal Society explains how complaints against police in BC are processed.[11] The complaints process is compromised from start to finish, the Pivot document shows, by the watchful eye of the police as well as by the government and ruling elite that the police protect.

The report cites John Westwood of the BC Civil Liberties Association, “I have never met an internal investigator who is biased in favour of a civilian complainant, though I have met a few who apparently view their job as assuaging the complainant while taking the officer’s statement at face value. Nor have I assisted in a complaint where the police witnesses support the complainant’s account of events in opposition to the accused officer’s account.”

The Pivot Society calls this the “blue code between officers which undermines the public interest in police accountability”[12]

Role of police in society

The “blue code” serves the underlying role of police in society as protectors of the status quo of capitalist property and property relations. The heavy arm of policing is exercised against capitalism’s victims – especially the poor, the sick, and racialized minorities. The young constable Instant, who dumped Frank Paul to die in an alley, described the process of a rookie cop adjusting to the demands of the job as “trying to work your way through a number of situations where what you think is normal and what you believe to be how things should be in fact aren’t. It’s not normal where I grew up that people sleep on the street in the middle of December, but the reality was we did have people sleep on the street in the middle of December.” He said that he learned from “experienced” officers that it was his job to contain and control people with “significant problems” like Frank Paul.

It is quite true that neither Constable Instant nor his colleagues create the conditions that killed Frank Paul. The set-up was carried out by the provincial and federal governments, in collaboration with the downtown eastside real estate barons who sit on block after block of empty buildings as speculation schemes, and with the big capitalists who juggle market relations to maintain a reserve army of labour in the person of people like Frank Paul.

A quick study of the effects of the neo-liberal reforms carried out by the BC Liberal government since 2002, or by the Harris and McGuinty governments in Ontario reveals the agenda of the government towards poor, oppressed and working people. These forces call in the police as shock troops to put down dissent. Hundreds of years of colonial genocide and repression have hammered people like Frank Paul in order to steal and plunder the land of the Mik’maq and other Indigenous nations.

David Dennis, the Vice-President of United Native Nations, an organization that represents off-reserve Indigenous peoples, said that Sanderson and Instant “weren’t represented by their police union; they were just let out to dry. It’s the brass that’s protecting the culture of the Blue Shield. It’s convenient for them every now and then to dole out a small head for us to cut off.” He explained how this scapegoating conceals “a structurally racist institution that reacts indifferent to the deaths of aboriginal people, period. No matter how many small heads you cut off, that won’t change that culture.”[13]

Dennis sees this culture, which reaches beyond the members of the police department, as being responsible for the day-to-day oppression and racism that many native youth experience. “There’s a direct relationship between the way the police are treating these young people and the way that these young people end up getting dead.”[14]

How the inquiry was won

Against all of these systemic barriers, a demand for a public inquiry came out of part of the Indigenous community in Vancouver; and an inquiry was won. A major factor in making Frank Paul’s death an issue big enough to force an inquiry was the work of Kat Norris and the Indigenous Action Movement (IAM). In an interview conducted in the last days of the public inquiry, Kat Norris explained how the government’s refusal to prosecute the cops who killed Frank Paul led to her organizing rallies that became a regular scene in front of the Vancouver jail. “What happened to him should not happen to anyone. The gall of racism just hit me. I just couldn’t let it go by without doing something.”[15]

The United Native Nations (UNN) was the first organization to lay a public complaint about the death of Frank Paul in 2002.[16] The UNN remained involved in Frank Paul’s case throughout the public inquiry. David Dennis said that UNN was interested in Frank Paul’s case because, he said, it confirmed “our fears about the polices role, the cover-up that occurred and the kind of the complicity of the provincial government to keep this death at the hands of the police suppressed for so long. We’ve always maintained the position that the reason the police aren’t solving the problem of the missing and murdered women is because they’re too busy arresting our young men and killing them.”[17]

It wasn’t until February 2007 that the government allowed the public inquiry to go ahead.

Limitations of the Frank Paul inquiry

The very fact that the death of Frank Paul, which had been covered-up, lied about, and silenced for nearly ten years, made it to public inquiry is a testament to the strength and potential power of social movements. However, the Frank Paul inquiry can only be considered a partial victory for the movement that fought and organized for it.

Kat Norris points out that although Const. Instant “is being used as a scapegoat to take the blame (…) he was following someone’s orders.” And David Dennis explains, “There are limitations to the inquiry, and we’ve been really vocal about how it’s not designed to assign fault. But it can assign responsibility to people and with that we can take it further.”

The final stage of the Frank Paul inquiry, April 28 to May 16, focuses on government and police policy hearings. While the inquiry commission cannot place binding recommendations on the government or police, it has and will present a platform where demands can be put forward. UNN present their demands in the courtroom of the inquiry on May 1st, and IAM will be making their demands heard in the streets with a march from the Vancouver Detox to Main and Hastings on May 8th.[18]

For both of them, the inquiry has opened a window to bring pressure against higher places in the police administration and government. David Dennis said, “In short what I’m saying is that we need someone like Police Chief Graham or Solicitor General Coleman to go down. These are the ones who knew about [the murder of Frank Paul] and didn’t do anything about it.”[19]

Development of movement demands

In the gap between the accountability process that an inquiry is supposed to be and the token fact-finding and scapegoating that it has actually been is the space where change is possible. It is in this space that the same groups that had organized and fought for the inquiry are demanding further action.

Kat Norris wants “to bring the police to justice. Someone has to answer for what happened to him. Someone needs to be held accountable. I want for this to never happen to one of my people again.” For her, the inquiry itself has been “a sign of how much power the police and the justice system has over its own… they take care of their own. The police and the higher-ups are great friends. I’ve always said that just by instinct. But you can see it. It all goes back to land ownership and the corporations.”

David Dennis and the UNN are working out a more ambitious program of reform, beginning with “tangible things that can be changed” like challenging the provincial contract for the RCMP that comes up for renewal in 2012. One of UNN’s specific demands is for civilian investigations. Davis Dennis explains that civilian investigation is “a distinction from oversight; every time someone dies in custody, this group of civilians are enacted.”

But Dennis recognizes the potential problem of corruption in this civilian investigation body. Volunteers for a similar group in Ontario are mostly former cops. The other danger is that people who join also quickly join the mentality of the “Blue Shield.” To protect against these trends, UNN is demanding that membership in such a body be based on recommendations from Indigenous leadership and other affected community groups. “People who are there are our eyes,” he says. “It’s kind of one step up.” In other words, he hopes to connect these civilian investigation units with the grassroots movement and mass organizations that will fight to keep the units in line.

Reform and the need to survive

Both David Dennis and Kat Norris share a priority of the survival of Indigenous communities and people against police repression. Police racism, harassment, brutality, and even murder is a grim reality for Indigenous peoples, particularly those who live off-reserve in urban centres.

In an article published by the United Nations Chronicle in 2007, Melissa Gorelick quantifies the hostile relationship between the Canadian “justice” system and Indigenous peoples; “According to the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, aboriginals make up about 19 percent of federal prisoners, while their number among the general population is only about 3 percent [see note 20]. Between 1997 and 2000, they were ten times more likely to be accused of homicide than non-aboriginal people. The rate of natives in Canadian prisons climbed 22 percent between 1996 and 2004, while the general prison population dropped 12 percent.”[21]

Kat Norris points out that Frank Paul “represents the discrimination, racism, murder, sexual abuse, residential schools, colonization that our people have suffered. He represents our people.” And she draws a connection between police harassment and colonization. “We’re suffering simply because the imperial powers desired our land. Once they realized the bountiful harvest they could gain financially, the greed started. They began the harvest of our children so they could harvest our land.”[22]

In the face of this brutal oppression, oppressed peoples respond with strategies for survival. Their day to day struggle against police violence is an immediate component of the movement to get rid of police and prison institutions along with the entire capitalist structure they serve.

The front lines of struggle

The Indigenous community has taken on the struggle against police repression more consistently and effectively than any other community in Canada. The work of United Native Nations, the Indigenous Action Movement, the Downtown Eastside Womens’ Centre Elders Council, Knowledgeable Aboriginal Youth Association, and others in Vancouver points the way. They must not be left to struggle alone. They need broad and effective support.

Racialized people all across Canada are familiar with the club and gun of the police departments – whether you are Latino or South Asian in Vancouver, Black in Toronto, or Arab in Montreal. The same is true of the multi-racial communities of the hand-to-mouth poor, homeless, drug users, and mental health consumers in neighbourhoods like the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. We should work to forge unified action groups between these diverse communities and cultures and their supporters.

White workers have a strong stake in supporting these struggles. First, racist treatment must be opposed because it divides working people and violates the human dignity of us all. Secondly, police are also the enemies of the labour and activist movements as they struggle for progressive change. Unionists who have found their strikes and actions attacked by police defending the bosses’ interests understand this well, as do activists who have been beaten up and arrested by police because of their actions for social justice.

The movement for a public inquiry into the police killing of Frank Paul holds an important lesson. Without a grassroots struggle in the streets, the demands of the movement – survival-based or otherwise – would not have carried weight. In fact, the street movement is where the demands are rooted, and where survival-based demands for reform can move forward.

The movement that Kat Norris has helped initiate has a potential to advance both the survival struggle and the broader movement against police violence, provided it is backed by the mounting pressure that only a street movement can advance. The breadth and strength of the grassroots movement against police brutality will decide how powerful and far reaching these demands can become.

ENDNOTES:

1. Frank Paul inquiry, Feb 14 2008, testimony of Staunton (pg. 130)

2. There are numerous samples of this coverage

3. http://justice4robertd.blogspot.com/ | http://www.robertdziekanski.org/

4. Frank Paul inquiry, Jan 7 2007, testimony of Sanderson

5. Frank Paul inquiry, Jan 7 2007, testimony of Sanderson

6. Frank Paul inquiry, Feb 14 2008, testimony of Staunton

7. Frank Paul inquiry, Feb 14 2008, testimony of Staunton

8. Pivot Legal Society press release, Nov 3 2005

9. Frank Paul inquiry, Jan 25 2008, testimony of Larry Campbell

10.http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/westcoastnews/story.html?id=55ce448c-04b6-45d2-9850-9837e4f3c3d6

11.“Towards More Effective Police Oversight”, Pivot Legal Society, September 2004 http://pivotlegal.org/pdfs/Effective_Police_Oversight-Sept2004.pdf

“According to the Police Act, a complainant must make a complaint in writing on the appropriate form (Form 1) and include the complainant’s name and address. A complaint must be submitted either to the Police Complaint Commission, the Discipline Authority (either the Police Chief or the municipal Police Board) or a senior constable of the police department on duty when the complaint is made. Once a complaint is properly submitted and categorized, the receiver of the complaint can: dismiss the complaint if it finds it “frivolous or vexatious”; recommend informal resolution; or order an investigation.

“Under the current Police Act, investigations into police misconduct are generally conducted internally. That is, if a complaint is made against a Vancouver Police Department officer, that complaint will be investigated by the Internal Investigations Department of the VPD. Depending on the findings and recommendations of the internal investigators, the Discipline Authority, often the Chief Constable, has the power to take corrective action through disciplinary proceedings.

“The Police Complaints Commission is responsible for reviewing the decisions reached by the Discipline Authority after an internal investigation has been completed.” (pg.4)

12.“Six Recommendations for Policing Reform”, Pivot Legal Society, Fall 2005 (Pg. 1) http://pivotlegal.org/pdfs/Pivot–six_recommendations_for_policing_reform.pdf

13.“Interview with David Dennis”, Ivan Drury, March 26 2008

14.“Interview with David Dennis”, Ivan Drury, March 26, 2008

15.“Interview with Kat Norris”, Ivan Drury, March 27 2008

16.“Interview with David Dennis”, Ivan Drury, March 26, 2008

17.“Interview with David Dennis”, Ivan Drury, March 26, 2008

18.March and Rally organized by Indigenous Action Movement, May 8th, 5pm at Vancouver Detox (377 E. 2nd Ave, Vancouver) http://indigenousaction.blogspot.com/

19.“Interview with David Dennis”, Ivan Drury, March 26, 2008

20.Statistics on numbers of Indigenous people in Canada vary greatly depending on the source used. 3% is a common (though dated) government number, based on “Status Indians” and those voluntarily identified by census. Other sources place Indigenous peoples at between 5% and 10% of the population in Canada. Many Indigenous nations regularly refuse to participate in the Canada census, and an unknown number of individuals do the same.

21.“Discrimination of aboriginals on native lands in Canada: a comprehensive crisis”, UN Chronicle, Sept, 2007, Melissa Gorelick http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2007/issue3/0307p50.html

22.“Interview with Kat Norris”, Ivan Drury, March 27 2008

REFERENCES:

For more information on the police killing of Frank Paul and policing in Vancouver see:

• The website for the commission of the Frank Paul Inquiry contains updates on the inquiry and a complete .pdf collection of transcripts from the inquiry:
http://www.frankpaulinquiry.ca/evidentiary-hearings.php

• Indigenous Action Movement http://indigenousaction.blogspot.com/

• Pivot Legal Society http://pivotlegal.org/

• United Native Nations http://www.unns.bc.ca/

On Wednesday March 26^th I went to a discussion forum organized by the Vancouver John Graham Defense Committee. In the room was a tension uncommon to most political meetings. There amongst the seventy people who filled every seat, with some sitting on the floor, were many who knew John. Some had grown to know him while helping in various aspects of the support work done by the Defense Committee throughout the years that he had been in Vancouver under house arrest. They sat in the forum unsettled, as though uncomfortable that they were there while John sits in prison. Others, like Mr. Graham’s daughter Naneek Graham, had known him their whole lives and, on top of anger and un-resolvable frustration, they projected shock at having a loved one taken from them by the courts of Canada and the US.

Some people evoke the word ‘complicated’ against the case of John Graham in order to avoid taking a stance, or even to excuse his extradition. This seeming ‘complication’ even reared its head at the forum, in the person of a woman who slipped into the room three-quarters of the way through and interrupted the event screaming “John Graham killed a woman!” I am familiar with this sort of Complication, having formerly been a member of a group, Fire This Time (FTT), that drew the same conclusions as the woman who interrupted this event. However, as the speakers at the forum outlined, the Complication insisted by groups like FTT is more of a subjective confusion developed under the machinations of the courts and media than an objective complication of the case of John Graham’s extradition. Rex Weyler, a seasoned journalist and one of the panelists at the event, explained, “As a journalist I am trained to look at facts to understand what is going on in any case. The facts in the case of John Graham speak for themselves.”

John Graham was an activist with the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the 1970’s. He was active on the Pine Ridge Reservation on Lakota Sioux territory at a high point of struggle that was marked by a heavy handed campaign of violent and secret agent style terrorist disruption carried out by the FBI under the auspices of their counterintelligence COINTELPRO program, the US Fifth Army, SWAT teams, and the vigilante GOON squads of the corrupt Tribal Council. According to Jennifer Wade, the founder of the Vancouver branch of Amnesty International, “In the 1970’s, Pine Ridge was a war zone. People were being killed left and right.”

In this climate of intense government suppression, the body of AIM organizer Anna Mae Aquash was discovered in the hills. FBI Agent David Price, who had told Anna Mae just six months before her death “if you don’t cooperate with us you won’t live out the year,” reported that he could not identify her body. She was classified a Jane Doe, her death was ruled “by exposure”, her hands were cut off for identification, and she was buried, unannounced, “in a paupers grave” as Jennifer Wade explained.

It was only because her family demanded her body be exhumed that her identity was discovered. It was only because her family demanded her body be exhumed that the .38 bullet hole in the back of her head was discovered, and her death reclassified as murder. The FBI had covered up the murder of this leader of Indigenous struggle.

“Time passed,” Rex Weyler explained, “and the FBI traveled all the way to the Yukon to track down John Graham.”

Jennifer Wade said, “John wisely refused to meet with with FBI behind closed doors,” but he did agree to talk to them in the park where they confronted him. They offered him a deal, “you give up the leadership of AIM and we’ll offer you immunity.” Wade continued, “I love John’s response, ‘Immunity from what?’” The FBI said “maybe it’ll turn out” that he had killed Anna Mae.

Panelists Billy Pierre and Lynn Highway explained that the FBI’s COINTELPRO program was one part systemic violence, and one part arbitrary terrorism to suppress the actions of communities by making examples of individuals. They said that this strategy is being carried out still today. “The case of John Graham is an example of policing at its best and most efficient,” Highway said.

Mike Gifford talked about John Graham’s continued commitment to Indigenous power and struggle through the years that passed between the struggles at Pine Ridge and his arrest for the alleged murder of Anna Mae in 2003. He said that John Graham had gotten involved in anti-Uranium mining actions in the 1980’s in northern Saskatchewan. In 1980 he organized a “Caravan for Survival” that traveled from Regina to La Ronge, the uranium mining hub in northern Saskatchewan. Then, in as part of the same campaign against the development of the mine that went on to become the largest uranium mine in the world, he was part of establishing the “Anna Mae Aquash Survival Camp” on the road to the proposed mine site.

Throughout this time, Jennifer Wade said, John Graham had remained worried about the FBI framing him for the murder of Anna Mae because of the threat they’d made against him for not cooperating with the US government smear campaign on AIM.

According to the extradition treaty between Canada and the US, it is not necessary for the US to provide evidence in order for Canada to extradite anyone requested by the US. Because of this far reaching treaty, the US did not have to supply any evidence of the charges they leveled at Graham. In the legal disclosure documents that have been released, the US government case rests on the testimony of Arlo Looking Cloud. Jennifer Wade called Looking Cloud the “Myrtle Poor Bear of the John Graham extradition.” Poor Bear had been the primary prosecution witness of Leonard Peltier’s trial around the deaths of the two FBI agents in 1975. Her testimony was held up as the justification of Peltier’s extradition from Canada. She later recanted her statements, saying that the FBI had manipulated and intimidated her into making a statement against Peltier, who she had never met and did not know. Like Poor Bear, Arlo Looking Cloud is a vulnerable oppressed man who, Weyler explained, “has many challenges,” and who the FBI plied with drugs and liquor. He has already recanted his statement and said that he will never take the stand against Graham.

John Graham was arrested in Canada based on the extradition request of the US government, and finally was extradited on December 6^th 2007. John Graham’s eldest daughter Naneek Graham, spoke at the forum about the last moments her father spent in Canada. “On December 6^th Dad was waiting for his turn to use the phone in the holding cell at 8am. Suddenly he was told that he was being moved, and was immediately put in leg irons and hand cuffs. He asked to call his lawyer, and they said no.” In the parkade of the Surrey Pre-Trial, fifteen minutes before the execution of his extradition was decided by the supreme court of Canada, he was transferred to a black SUV. He asked again to call his lawyer. The cops responded, “Don’t make trouble.” Naneek Graham continued, “They drove to the border at high speed and handed Dad over to the US police.” He was gone before anyone in Canada knew what was happening.

What stood out to this forum participant was that, while the panelists tore apart every claim the US government has laid against John Graham, it is around his extradition that ambiguities fall away, and the real issues that matter to Indigenous people and other working and oppressed people stand clear. The US Government’s claims around what might have happened on Pine Ridge in 1976 have less than zero value in the context of the serious stakes at play in this case, especially considering that if it was not for the concerted FBI attack on the American Indian Movement, Anna Mae would still be alive today.

The extradition treaty between Canada and the US is a tool still on hand for these two states to attack Indigenous organizers and all people who fight against injustice. These two states share an overwhelming interest in suppressing Indigenous fighters, whether their struggle is for self determination, Red Power, or against uranium mining. After all, if it were not for the suppression of Indigenous title over the entire territory now called “Canada” and the “United States”, neither of these states would exist. The struggle against colonialism and capitalism has been hurt by the extradition of John Graham. The speculations, complaints and hesitations of a handful of abstentionist or collaborationist Complicators further confuses the real issue of the need for continued struggle against the governments of the US and Canada. Justice for Anna Mae and all the hundreds of people killed in Pine Ridge in the 1970’s can only be served by charging the FBI and the US government. Their guilt is indisputable. Only the same movements that the governments of the US and Canada attempt to suppress can see through these charges to win justice.

The John Graham Defense Committee encourages you to write words of encouragement and solidarity to John where he is held in jail in the US:

John Graham
307 St. Joseph Street
Rapid City
SD 57701
USA

— — — — — — — — — — — —

For more information on John Graham’s case, see:

“Stop the Deportation of John Graham!”, by Ian Beeching, Socialist Voice, July 4^th 2007

“Who Killed Anna Mae?”, by Rex Weyler, Vancouver Sun, January 8, 2005.

A collection of articles and updates, as well as announcements for upcoming solidarity events and actions is available on the John Graham Defense Committee website and the Our Freedom blog

It’s been a month and a half since I released my statement about Fire This Time. A number of articles have since been written on right wing blogs, the online ‘youth’ edition of the Macleans magazine, and elsewhere that seem to perceive an opportunity in the release of this statement. Far from illuminated by new information presented by my statement, these writers have leapt upon what they misunderstand as a point of vulnerability, a weakness, through which they can attack the anti-war movement and progressives, and especially revolutionary and Marxist ideas and organization.

There are a number of problems with the articles and with the writers who have penned them, and no less the publications that have run them. Not least of which is the problem that has the most to do with Us, the progressive community. The very idea that an honest and open discussion of problems in our or any community is a ‘weakness’ is absurd. A willingness to openly discuss problems and mistakes is a sign of confidence and strength in a community or organization. For example to the contrary, it is not necessary to look any further than the governing party in Canada; the Federal Conservatives. Faced with a recent scandal where Prime Minister Stephen Harper was accused of being accessory to the bribing of an independent member of Parliament to change his vote while practically on his deathbed, Harper went silent. Not only did he refuse to discuss the issue in public or in the House of Commons, he threatened to sue those who brought the issue forward. Call me simple, but to me this is a clear sign of insecurity in the government. I have limited myself to an example of an inner party scandal; it would be possible to draw much more compelling examples from cases of the legal responsibility of government to the public, such as the assassination of Dudley George in Ontario or the transference of prisoners to be tortured in Afghanistan; and so on.

An even more obvious example could be found in Fire This Time’s zero response to my statement. Faced with the spectre of open criticism and discussion of differences from my statement and the comments and statements of more and more others, have they leapt on the opportunity to explain their side of the story or admit wrongdoings? No, they’ve hidden behind a mask of silence. Unfortunately, what I read in their silence and secrecy is a further organizational ‘tightening up’ where they define their friends and enemies within harder and thinner lines. Yerevani hopes to be able to limit his explanations to selected people who can be manipulated and pressured, and/or who may be willing to give him and FTT the benefit of the doubt because they have a previously existing investment in one of FTT’s front groups. Yerevani’s insistence on controlling which sources of criticism are legitimate (his own) and which are illegitimate (everyone else’s) is a mark of FTT’s internal weakness and vulnerability. He is afraid, most of all, of the thoughts of his own cadre. Woe to the ‘friends’ of Yerevani.

I adamantly insist upon the importance of openly and honestly discussing our problems in our progressive community. Even at this very basic level our integrity should stand publicly as an example against Rightists and other reactionaries of how We are different. Let them gloat and point fingers.

From the mistake of reading honest discussion as weakness flows another mistake held in common by all these recent self-proclaimed experts on the left; they misconstrue criticism of Fire This Time as criticism of the left. Far from representative of the left historically or even taking the contemporary in abstract, FTT is a deviation from all the best examples of what progressive movements are and have been. Those moments in history that revolutionary movements have stumbled into traps of bureaucratic prisons and/or had their visions obscured by concrete monoliths and personality cults have immediately followed moments of defeat. That is, historically, when revolutionary movements have suffered defeats, their stagnation or driving back has resulted in corrupt bureaucracies, often armed with personality cults, taking over leadership from the mass movements that had previously given the movement in each instance definition and life.

Unlike capitalist society, which depends upon the stagnation of social life for the motion of the economic and the minority of individuals, anti-capitalist revolutions (and therefore revolutionary and progressive movements at every level of development) depend upon the mass motion of people within the overall picture of social relations. When, as we are now, faced with a long period of downturn in social struggle on a mass scale, the sicknesses associated through all history with periods of stagnation or defeat come to the surface. Fire This Time is a localized but none the less acute symptom of this stagnation. Because FTT is a symptom of a bigger problem, it can be helpful for activists and thinkers in the small living and struggling left to drag these symptoms out to the light of day to diagnose the sickness; which I still believe is, in the final analysis, capitalism.

I don’t think these right wing columnists manage to break anyone from opposing the occupation of Afghanistan or union busting with their tirades against the left, even if only because they don’t generally make any arguments whatsoever. However, there is one sad and tragic result from their attack pieces; they further the stranglehold that Yerevani has over the membership of Youth Third World Alliance and the FTT frontgroups. The people who are members of these groups are, practically without exception, well intentioned activists who function under the sincere belief that they are helping to build a better world. Without this belief, none of their sectarian actions nor suppressions of doubt would be possible. Central to Yerevani’s logic for the cult-like secrecy and closed-ness of his group is the idea that the rest of the left is corrupt and, In The Final Analysis, in league with the Capitalist Ruling Class. According to his rationale, criticism of FTT will always end up a weapon in the hands of the capitalist propaganda machine to attack and weaken the group and therefore the revolution in Canada. For a month and a half, dear pro-war correspondents, Yerevani has been thanking you before he falls asleep at night and thanking you again each morning as he wakes for the proof of this rationale that you have provided him. Do not doubt that he is using your barbs as ammunition against his troops to further consolidate his hold over them and their doubts.

Within the common right wing attack, there are approaches particular to each article. Out of space and time concerns, I’m only responding to the most significant examples; criticism of the others, mostly obscure right wing and racist blogs, is best covered by the umbrella raised here.

1) Erin Millar

In an article syndicated in the Capilano Courier under the title “A Campus Cult” and the Macleans online campus edition under the title “That revolution thing? My bad…” Erin Millar uses my statement to smear anti-war activism as inherently Marxist-revolutionary, and Marxism as inherently cultist. The article finds its way into each publication with slight differences, but in each, the theme remains the essentially the same. The most marked difference between the two is that the Cap Courier version includes a line drawing of Yerevani (for some perplexing reason), and the Macleans version concludes with the outright statement “perhaps some day [Drury will] change his mind about [the need for revolution], too.”

It is really quite amazing that Millar possesses such confidence in her ideas that she is able to deride the anti-war movement and Marxism with a single wave of the hand without ever substantiating her accusations or explaining what she offers as an alternative. What is she saying? Does she support the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq? Only one or the other? Does she believe that capitalism is clicking along just fine and that its opponents are whiny and immature brats who need to grow up? Certainly that can be read in the “some day” that she wishes upon me. Why doesn’t she state what she believes? Left in the dark about Erin Millar’s political / ethical / moral stances, we’re left to assume that her sympathies lie with the Macleans school of the uber-Canadian right wing.

Millar cites sources such as J.J. McCullough, the editor of the Douglas College newspaper The Other Press who also writes a regular hard-right-wing column for the same newspaper. Blind to his own political alignments, McCollough “describes MAWO members as ‘hard-line communists of the old sort — extraordinarily dogmatic, non-compromising.’ He believes that a MAWO member was ‘assigned’ to his [sic.] newspaper […]. ‘She was an agent of theirs. She openly tried to co-opt the paper’.”

With such a jump, Millar extends the criticism of FTT’s sectarian and cultish behavior and theoretical bases to a blanket condemnation of leftists who seek to publicize their views in campus newspapers. This is hypocrisy to the n’th degree. What is the difference between a left wing political line being carried into student newspapers, by MAWO or anyone else, vs. a right wing political line being carried into student newspapers by McCullough and countless others like him? Millar’s implied argument is that leftists are inherently duplicitous because they consciously enter the arena of college print journalism to put out their ideas. While leftists and progressive people are forced to organize consciously, as an opposition and minority in the world of corporate controlled media, great spaces are made for people like McCullough by the same media and the unconscious status quo that they represent in the “common sense” of hegemonic social ideology. Millar herself provides the best evidence of capitalism’s hegemonic control of media and mass consciousness: when was the last time 2,000 words of space was made available for an article about the anti-war movement in Macleans magazine? How convenient.
2) Terry Glavin

Terry Glavin is a regular columnist for the online progressive publication “The Tyee” and his articles appear often in Vancouver newspapers as mainstream as the Vancouver Sun. He keeps a blog where he posts most of his articles as well as posting shorter articles on a more regular basis.

In the days immediately following the release of my statement on FTT, he posted a number of times to his blog celebrating my turn, saying “I told you so”. A couple days later he expanded his attack to include the NDP’s support of the peace movement.

This blog post was expanded in an article published in the Vancouver Sun, “Taliban Jack”.

In his Vancouver Sun article Glavin doesn’t evoke my statement as proof of his thesis that the anti-war movement is made up of “countercultural narcissists” obsessed with “cultural relativism”, and a “crude anti-Americanism” that has led to the “fashionable radicalism of the liberal elites” and “the pseudo-leftism of the radical chic.” Instead, he sits comfortably where Erin Millar is headed and proves MAWO’s ‘extremism’ through the group’s own anti-war and anti-imperialist position: “[MAWO’s] position on Afghanistan goes like this: ‘Wherever Islam is fighting against imperialism, ‘The Left’ must join with Muslims in this fight . . . the Muslims of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine who are fighting on the front lines against imperialism.’”

Glavin represents a more destructive and poisoned trend in intellectual circles than Erin Millar currently does. He is part of the Euston Manifesto group, and the tag for this international mishmash of what some call the Cruise Missile Left is prominently displayed on his blog. Like others of the left wing of Euston, Glavin’s politics are those of a former leftist-progressive who’s been overrun by the Islamophobic propaganda machine of the imperialist war machines. His international politics are those of a rigid modernist who has zero sense of global or historic orientation. He insists that modernist bourgeois democracy must be the practical end goal for every society, if he even recognizes that there are different societies in the world with unequal relations between them. And he is completely scornful of any society, country, nation, people who do not share this goal along with him. His is an unashamed White Mans Burden armed with equally unashamed military might.

The Euston Manifesto calls for the left to stand by universal “traditions” and “values” against the “fascism” of Islam. Apparently, universal freedom is best delivered at fifty-thousand feet. Glavin carries that into context in Canada (here he applies context) by forming the “Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee” which, along with “Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan” argues that “Troops Out = Pro-War”. To stretch the mind into such contortions it is first necessary to believe that Canada is “peace” itself; a cerebral gymnastic effort of its own.

Against right wing opportunism

Self-criticism, in a radical and social manner and in the interests of growth and development, is a concept completely alien to the right wing. That they mistake such criticism for weakness is a strike against them, not us.

Criticism of the left, and especially of sectarian groups that construct caricatures of the left, is important. I believe it is possible to carry out these criticisms, for the most part, as discussion amongst friends in the interest of making the left stronger, smarter, and more cohesive. Since I released my statement on my time in FTT I have received more than a hundred and fifty emails from people across Canada giving me feedback on this statement. All of these notes and comments have been educational for me, and have filled me with hope that it really is possible to overcome the recent history of division and sectarian squabbling over territory in the left. The capacity to openly discuss, learn and grow is, I believe, the greatest strength of the left, progressive, and revolutionary movement.

This letter was distributed to participants in the MAWO / International ANSWER joint organized conference that took place in Seattle on March 16, 2008. It was signed by groups and individuals from both Seattle and Vancouver as listed at bottom.

The letter is available here