Thursday, August 23, 2007

Old plot to assassinate Churchill alleged

Brenda Norrell at the blog "Censored" recalls the days of the "Denver Spy Files":
It was called the “new McCarthyism” by the editors who would print those stories, before the ACLU filed lawsuits in Denver and across the nation.

Navajo Times was among the first to print the articles that I wrote in October of 2002. Glenn Morris, professor, AIM member and Columbus Day protest organizer said, “It seems that Indians, and Colorado AIM in particular, have been targeted in the ‘spy files.’”

Morris was targeted, along with Russell Means, Vine Deloria, Jr., Wilma Mankiller, Winona LaDuke, John Echohawk, John Mohawk, George "Tink" Tinker, Wallace Coffey, Ward Churchill, Dennis Banks, the Leonard Peltier Support Group, Big Mountain Support Group, Colorado AIM, and Indian staff and attorneys at the Native American Rights Fund.“This is the Indian equivalent of having a police spy database in the Black community that consisted of files on WEB DuBois, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Thurgood Marshall, Jesse Jackson, NAACP, the Black Panthers, Cornell West, John Hope Franklin and Angela Davis, all at the same time,” Morris said.
Thurgood Marshall and Angela Davis, together at last! Anyway, amid much other verbiage and finger-wagging is this little nugget:
Law enforcement knew of a plot to assassinate Ward Churchill, but never told him.
Never heard that one before. No details, either, but why does the name "Bellecourt" come to mind?

More Wardishness: IntelligentaIndigena crows over "winning" a "Thinking Blogger Award" from the Existentialist Cowboy (not pretentious, are they?), whose remarkably unintelligent post about Ward was mocked here not long ago.

Part of winning the award is naming five other "thinking" bloggers. Among II's five is the Try-Works, which, according to II, is "Still sticking it to the Colorado corporate media machine, via lefty invective . . . "

Actually, Indigena, the Try-Works' Benjie Whitmer spends most of his time obsessing about your darling Drunkablog. In fact, he's still in a snit because I refused to shake his lying, moronically slanderous, shit-under-the-fingernails hand at the disastrous National! Emergency! Forum! to drum up support for Ward last April. I'd rather kiss a rotting corpse, naturally, but he seems to think this was some great breach of etiquette. Benjie's insane, you understand.

The "Thinking Blogger" award, incidentally, comes with a button proclaiming one's having won the thing. Think Benjie will put it in the Try-Works' sidebar?

Update: Brenda Norrell, who mentions the Ward Churchill "assassination plot," is "southwest staff reporter" for Indian Country Today (which for some reason disallows linkaging). I could find no mention of the plot in her previous writings there (though admittedly they only go back to 2004; the spy files revelations came in 2002). Can't find anything on the interwebs, either. I'll leave a comment over there asking her to back it up.

Update II: PB notes in comments that Churchill frau Natsu Saito (or someone using her name) made the same allegation of a plot against Churchill last year in a note to "ethnic studies folk." (Note to self: always check PB.) Pertinent paragraph from Natsu:
This group ["National" AIM] has spent considerable energy attacking Colorado AIM. Recently released intelligence files reveal an the Denver Police [sic] were informed by the FBI in 1995 of a plan by unnamed individuals from Minneapolis to assassinate Colorado AIM leaders Ward Churchill and Glenn Morris and wound Russell Means.
One wouldn't expect Natsu to provide any evidence, and she doesn't. But Norrell is a reporter for a real newspaper, and even though she didn't make it at ICT, she still, as a reporter, should back up her claim. Documents, please.

Update II: Sure would like to know how they planned on doing Chutch in. Gun? Knife? Making him run half a block?

More Churchill: A home-schooled kid's blog called, bluntly, "Blog about Kirsten," posts Pirate Ballerina's July 26 post on Ward Churchill's firing with no link and no attribution. So that's how blogging works.

Lefty blogger Hullabaloo points to a lunatic piece calling for George W. Bush to be made president-for-life. Wardo has a cameo appearance, and, hoax or not, the Bush-for-dictator piece is pretty funny.

Update III: PB has the pertinent quote from Denver Police files (they're online?) on the supposed plot to assassinate Ward. Only Glenn Morris is mentioned by name, with another name, probably Ward's, redacted. PB asks an interesting question about that: "incidentally, aren't informants' names regularly redacted in these reports, you know, to protect their cover?"

He's trying to bad-jacket Wardo, man.

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