In only the second time in U.S. history, the U.S. Court of Appeals has removed a federal judge from a case, on the grounds he is too “biased” to continue. The judge, Royce Lamberth, is a Reagan appointee. The official grounds of his removal are his alleged loss of “objectivity,” based on statements that the case at hand exposed “spite,” “wrath,” “dirty tricks,” and “outright villainy” in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Perhaps other factors were at play in his removal–?
First, what is at stake in this case is treaty-guaranteed funds to all Native Americans with a federally-recognized reservation. Money guaranteed to Native people for their land and the “management” of that land’s timber and mineral resources is in the hands of the U.S. government, collected in the Indian Trust Fund. A legacy of the United States’ openly corrupt Dawes Act of 1887, which, besides establishing a “trust fund,” stole “excess” treaty-guaranteed Indian land to the tune of millions of acres, the Trust Fund has been considered mismanaged since its creation. It was not created to be properly managed–it was part of the Dawes Act, the stated purpose of which was to make Indians assimilate into mainstream society. It is an open question as to whether the Trust Fund ever could be properly managed.
The plaintiffs in this class action suit claim $27 billion are owed to them, although many, many more billions are likely owed to other Native people not included in the class action suit.
The failure to dispense treaty-guaranteed funds is the primary reason most Native American reservations are unable to escape from grinding poverty.
Meanwhile, no audit of the Indian Trust Fund has ever been completed.
Most interestingly, a security test of computers at the Interior Department, in which the BIA is located, revealed that thousands of Native American trust accounts could be (unbelievably) manipulated from the public Internet. This was in April 2000, and Judge Lamberth ordered the security problem to be fixed. Yet over the course of the next five years the problem was not solved. When a similar vulnerability was revealed in 2005, Lamberth ordered over 6000 computers at the Interior Department to be disconnected from the Internet. The Interior Department was outraged, and Lamberth responded:
“These Indians cannot protect their trust records themselves … and thus cannot by self-help prevent the harm of their loss, because Interior holds an information monopoly.” This ruling made many enemeies for Lamberth at the Interior Department, and is believed to be one of the reasons Lamberth was removed. This aspect of the case is not in the mainstream news media accounts, but you can find it by googling “Indian trust” and “security.” Apparently the NY Times did write an article on the “difficulties” the forced “unplugging” was causing at the Interior Department–poor them.
Officially, the appeals court that removed Judge Lamberth cited his open belief that the BIA’s Trust Fund was “a dinosaur — the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago, the last pathetic outpost of the indifference and anglocentrism we thought we had left behind.”
This belief, widely shared by those attentive to Native American politics, is apparently “beyond the pale” of objectivity. A new judge has not yet been appointed to the ten-year old case.
Astonishingly, the conservative blogosphere is denouncing Judge Lamberth for “hating America” and sighting instances of “savagery” in historical Native military actions against the U.S. to justify the Indian Trust Fund debacle.
Does it follow from this that the war against Native America is still being fought–that the deplorable record of the BIA is simply a programmed retaliation, an instance of “war by other means“? I believe it does–and I’m inclined to agree, although it’s hard to believe any person could support this Indian War at this point–especially since universal Indian citizenship means such a war constitutes a war of a government against its own citizens.
But, maybe following Virilio, this kind of security leak—apparently an uncontrollable aspect of the Interior Department’s network—is another example of the “integral accident”–as Virilio says, “it will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed ‘the integral accident’ that is the continuation of politics by other means.”
Are we beginning to see how the politics of imperialism are interfacing with technology in U.S.-Indian relations–in short, how colonialism will work by means of the integral accident, how the accident will be entirely entangled in the networks of daily life, and the way it will become more fluid than any single group can control?
Most tellingly, I believe, this aspect of the case was totally missed by the mainstream media, both left and right-wing. It is barely identifiable at this point—but I believe it is foretelling much about the next phase of U.S.-Indian relations. It does not look good.
The iPlosion 