Freedom! Lakota Sioux Indians Declare Sovereign Nation Status

http://www.lakotafreedom.com/

 

Lakota
Mitaku Oyasin: We Are All Related

 

19 Dec 2007

Media Contacts:
Naomi Archer, Communications Liaison (828) 230-1404 lakotafree [at] gmail.com


Freedom! Lakota Sioux Indians Declare Sovereign Nation Status

Threaten Land Liens, Contested Real Estate Over Five State Area in U.S. West

Lakota Satisfies Treaty Council Mandate of 33 Years, Drafted by 97 Indigenous Nations

Dakota Territory Reverts back to Lakota Control According to U.S., International Law


Washington D.C. – Lakota Sioux Indian representatives declared sovereign nation status today in Washington D.C. following Monday’s withdrawal from all previously signed treaties with the United States Government. The withdrawal, hand delivered to Daniel Turner, Deputy Director of Public Liaison at the State Department, immediately and irrevocably ends all agreements between the Lakota Sioux Nation of Indians and the United States Government outlined in the 1851 and 1868 Treaties at Fort Laramie Wyoming.

“This is an historic day for our Lakota people,” declared Russell Means, Itacan of Lakota. “United States colonial rule is at its end!”

“Today is a historic day and our forefathers speak through us. Our Forefathers made the treaties in good faith with the sacred Canupa and with the knowledge of the Great Spirit,” shared Garry Rowland from Wounded Knee. “They never honored the treaties, that’s the reason we are here today.”

The four member Lakota delegation traveled to Washington D.C. culminating years of internal discussion among treaty representatives of the various Lakota communities. Delegation members included well known activist and actor Russell Means, Women of All Red Nations (WARN) founder Phyllis Young, Oglala Lakota Strong Heart Society leader Duane Martin Sr., and Garry Rowland, Leader Chief Big Foot Riders. Means, Rowland, Martin Sr. were all members of the 1973 Wounded Knee takeover.

“In order to stop the continuous taking of our resources – people, land, water and children- we have no choice but to claim our own destiny,” said Phyllis Young, a former Indigenous representative to the United Nations and representative from Standing Rock.

Property ownership in the five state area of Lakota now takes center stage. Parts of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana have been illegally homesteaded for years despite knowledge of Lakota as predecessor sovereign [historic owner]. Lakota representatives say if the United States does not enter into immediate diplomatic negotiations, liens will be filed on real estate transactions in the five state region, clouding title over literally thousands of square miles of land and property.

Young added, “The actions of Lakota are not intended to embarrass the United States but to simply save the lives of our people”.

Following Monday’s withdrawal at the State Department, the four Lakota Itacan representatives have been meeting with foreign embassy officials in order to hasten their official return to the Family of Nations.

Lakota’s efforts are gaining traction as Bolivia, home to Indigenous President Evo Morales, shared they are “very, very interested in the Lakota case” while Venezuela received the Lakota delegation with “respect and solidarity.”

“Our meetings have been fruitful and we hope to work with these countries for better relations,” explained Garry Rowland. “As a nation, we have equal status within the national community.”

Education, energy and justice now take top priority in emerging Lakota. “Cultural immersion education is crucial as a next step to protect our language, culture and sovereignty,” said Means. “Energy independence using solar, wind, geothermal, and sugar beets enables Lakota to protect our freedom and provide electricity and heating to our people.”

The Lakota reservations are among the most impoverished areas in North America, a shameful legacy of broken treaties and apartheid policies. Lakota has the highest death rate in the United States and Lakota men have the lowest life expectancy of any nation on earth, excluding AIDS, at approximately 44 years. Lakota infant mortality rate is five times the United States average and teen suicide rates 150% more than national average . 97% of Lakota people live below the poverty line and unemployment hovers near 85%.

“After 150 years of colonial enforcement, when you back people into a corner there is only one alternative,” emphasized Duane Martin Sr. “The only alternative is to bring freedom into its existence by taking it back to the love of freedom, to our lifeway.”

We are the freedom loving Lakota from the Sioux Indian reservations of Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana who have suffered from cultural and physical genocide in the colonial apartheid system we have been forced to live under. We are in Washington DC to withdraw from the constitutionally mandated treaties to become a free and independent country. We are alerting the Family of Nations we have now reassumed our freedom and independence with the backing of Natural, International, and United States law. For more information, please visit our new website at www.lakotafreedom.com.

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PREVIOUS ADVISORIES

Media Release 12/19/07: Sovereignty Declared, 33 Year Treaty Council Agreement Satisfied, Liens Threatened

Pre-Press Conference Media Advisory: Lakota Delegation Confront State Department with Withdrawal

Advance Media Advisory: Lakota Declaration to Make History in Withdrawal from United States Treaties

 

 

Descendants of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away from US

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

They also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and will continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months, they told the news conference.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free -- provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said.

The treaties signed with the United States are merely "worthless words on worthless paper," the Lakota freedom activists say on their website.

The treaties have been "repeatedly violated in order to steal our culture, our land and our ability to maintain our way of life," the reborn freedom movement says.

Withdrawing from the treaties was entirely legal, Means said.

"This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically article six of the constitution," which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land, he said.

"It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and put into effect by the US and the rest of the international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to be free and independent," said Means.

The Lakota relaunched their journey to freedom in 1974, when they drafted a declaration of continuing independence -- an overt play on the title of the United States' Declaration of Independence from England.

Thirty-three years have elapsed since then because "it takes critical mass to combat colonialism and we wanted to make sure that all our ducks were in a row," Means said.

One duck moved into place in September, when the United Nations adopted a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples -- despite opposition from the United States, which said it clashed with its own laws.

"We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children," Phyllis Young, who helped organize the first international conference on indigenous rights in Geneva in 1977, told the news conference.

The US "annexation" of native American land has resulted in once proud tribes such as the Lakota becoming mere "facsimiles of white people," said Means.

Oppression at the hands of the US government has taken its toll on the Lakota, whose men have one of the shortest life expectancies -- less than 44 years -- in the world.

Lakota teen suicides are 150 percent above the norm for the United States; infant mortality is five times higher than the US average; and unemployment is rife, according to the Lakota freedom movement's website.

"Our people want to live, not just survive or crawl and be mascots," said Young.

"We are not trying to embarrass the United States. We are here to continue the struggle for our children and grandchildren," she said, predicting that the battle would not be won in her lifetime.

~ Link ~

NSA Gets Real Time Access to Your Email

Kurt Nimmo
TruthNews
19 Dec 2007

" ... It was inevitable: the Advanced Research Projects Agency, later to become DARPA, right out of the Pentagon, created the internet. The RAND Corporation invented modern packet switching. DARPA and ARPANET recruited Vint Cerf of Stanford University to work on TCP/IP. Cerf is regarded as “the father of the Internet,” or maybe that should be the military-NSA snoop network. Now we learn NSA increasingly controls SSL, now called Transport Layer Security, the cryptographic protocol that provides secure communications on the internet for web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, and other data transfers.

In other words, increasingly, the NSA is reading your email and everything you type in your IM client — and in real time, that is to say there is no delay in the timeliness of the information, the underwear drawer snoopers have the ability to read your IMs as you type them.

“Certain privacy/full session SSL email hosting services have been purchased/changed operational control by NSA and affiliates within the past few months, through private intermediary entities,” notes Cryptome.

Hushmail: now fully owned by private entity NSA affiliate; has had informal relationship with NSA for a number of years that effectively provided NSA with real time access to Hushmail’s hosting servers.

Safe-mail.net: Israeli-based, ironically privately lauded by NSA and US military several years ago for its sound implementation of SendMail with SSL webmail GUI frontend. Now provides mail server info to NSA in real time.

Guardster.com (SSH/SSL proxy): NSA contractors have “bought” full access rights to Guardster servers a few days ago. Separate but related: facilitated port sniffing of hosting servers at Everyones Internet, on NSA affiliates’ behalf, has been ongoing for a number of months now.

Geekspeak aside, what this means is that the NSA is buying up key technology in an effort to snoop you even more closely. If this trend continues, we may as well call the internet the NSAnet.

Moreover, according to Cryptome’s research, if you own “security” software produced by Zone Alarm, Symantec, and MacAfee, you are in essence throwing out a welcome mat for the NSA and its bevy of underwear drawer sniffing goons. “All facilitate Microsoft’s NSA-controlled remote admin access via IP/TCP ports 1024 through 1030,” and without a “security flag,” that it to say you will be none the wiser. ... "

http://www.truthnews.us/?p=1327

11th annual "Wacky Warning Label Contest"

By Ron Vample
The Associated Press
12 Dec 2007

" ... Here are some words to live by, from a warning label on a small
tractor: "Danger: Avoid Death."

That warning is the winner of the 11th annual "Wacky Warning Label Contest,"
sponsored by Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch. The contest is part of an effort
to show the effects of lawsuits on warning labels.

Kevin Soave of Farmington Hills, a Detroit suburb, won the $500 grand prize
for submitting the tractor's "Danger: Avoid Death" label.

The $250 second place prize went to Carrianne, Jacob and Robby Turin of
Greensburg, Pennsylvania, for a label they found on an iron-on T-shirt
transfer that warns: "Do not iron while wearing shirt."

Richard Goodnow of Lancaster, Massachusetts, earned the $100 third-place
prize for a label on a baby stroller featuring a small storage pouch that
warns: "Do not put child in bag." ... "

Marshall's Law

" ... Though he couldn't afford it, Marshall still made time for the fight
against segregation. Representing the local NAACP, he negotiated with white
store owners who sold to blacks but would not hire them. He joined John L.
Lewis's effort to unionize black and white steelworkers. And he convinced a
college graduate who wanted to go to law school to apply to the University
of Maryland, which did not accept blacks into its law school program.
Marshall had considered applying to Maryland himself after he graduated from
college but decided it would be hopeless. Now he was taking the law school
to court.

Houston came to Baltimore and helped argue the case. During the proceedings,
Marshall told the court: "What is at stake here is more than the rights of
my client; it is the moral commitment stated in our country's creed." No one
expected Marshall and Houston to win; they were simply trying to set up a
case that could be appealed. "We were hoping to get to the Supreme Court any
way we could," Marshall says. "But Judge Eugene O'Dunne said no. He said we
won right there."

"The colored people in Baltimore were on fire when Thurgood did that"
recalls Juanita Jackson Mitchell, an NAACP activist in Baltimore. "They were
euphoric with victory . . . We didn't know about the Constitution. He
brought us the Constitution as a document like Moses brought his people the
Ten Commandments." ... "

http://www.thurgoodmarshall.com/speeches/tmlaw_article.htm

The Army's Other Crisis

Why the best and brightest young officers are leaving

By Andrew Tilghman

 

" ... These problems are of vital concern, and are reasonably well understood in newsrooms and on Capitol Hill. But the top uniformed and civilian leaders at the Pentagon who think hardest about the future of the military have a more fundamental fear: young officers—people like Matt Kapinos—are leaving the Army at nearly their highest rates in decades. This is not a short-term problem, nor is it one that can simply be fixed with money. A private-sector company or another government agency can address a shortage of middle managers by hiring more middle managers. In the Army's rigid hierarchy, all officers start out at the bottom, as second lieutenants. A decline in officer retention, in other words, threatens both the Army's current missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its long-term institutional future. And though many senior Pentagon leaders are quite aware of the problem, there's only so much they can do to reverse the decline while the United States maintains large numbers of troops in Iraq.

 

In the last four years, the exodus of junior officers from the Army has accelerated. In 2003, around 8 percent of junior officers with between four and nine years of experience left for other careers. Last year, the attrition rate leapt to 13 percent. "A five percent change could potentially be a serious problem," said James Hosek, an expert in military retention at the RAND Corporation. Over the long term, this rate of attrition would halve the number of officers who reach their tenth year in uniform and intend to take senior leadership roles. ... "

 

~ Full article ~

 

Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms

" ... Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of
life forms driven by completely artificial DNA.

Scientists in Maryland have already built the world's first entirely
handcrafted chromosome -- a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch
in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live
and reproduce.

In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is
expected to "boot itself up," like software downloaded from the Internet,
and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first
synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others
that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under
construction.

The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and
philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between
biological and artificial -- and forcing a rethinking of what it means for
a thing to be alive. ... "

 

~ Read more... ~

 

People & Power - Death of the dollar 2 - 19 Dec 07 - Part 2