By Brian Carnell

Wednesday, December 20, 2000

Will Bill Clinton grant Leonard Peltier clemency? I have no idea, but either way the decision will almost certainly be determined not on the facts but rather on how Clinton thinks he'll be perceived politically for the act. As Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating, writes in the Wall Street Journal, Peltier is certainly guilty.

In fact a careful reading of Peter Mathiessen's gushingly pro-Peltier book, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, reveals that the claim that Peltier is not guilty is built on a house of cards comprised largely of far out conspiracy theories that make my friends who believe in black helicopters seem tame. As Alan Dershowitz noted many years ago in a review of Mathiessen's book,

On this issue, Mr. Matthiessen not only fails to convince; he inadvertently makes a strong case for Mr. Peltier's guilt. Invoking the cliches of the radical left, Mr. Matthiessen takes at face value nearly every conspiratorial claim of the movement, no matter how unfounded or preposterous.

As Dershowitz noted, even in Matthiessen's book there are comments to the effect that Peltier's own legal team thought he was guilty in the technical sense (i.e. that he actually murdered the FBI agents), but that he was not guilty in the larger philosophical sense because he was fighting a just cause.

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