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Friday August 5, 2005
Cobell plaintiffs: Swimmer is “ignoring the big picture;”
Letter to the Editor by Bill McAllister Cobell spokesman Native American Times Editors Note: This letter is in response to a story detailing Special Trustee Charles Swimmer’s assertion that the Department of Interior has taken great strides to improve the situation for Indian trust fund account holders.
So, Ross Swimmer, the Special Trustee for American Indians, is once again telling Native Americans not to worry. (Aug. 4 article “Swimmer Touts Trust Improvements”) The Bush administration is making marvelous improvements to the long-troubled Indian trust system run by the Interior Department, he says.
Any improvements are long overdue and surely will be welcomed. Congress ordered a revamping of the trust system in 1994, 11 years ago.
But Swimmer is ignoring the big picture and misleading trust beneficiaries in the process.
Consider this. One of those “whereabouts unknown” accounts happened to belong to the husband of Elousie Cobell, the lead plaintiff in the Cobell vs. Norton lawsuit over trust accounts. You’d think after nearly 10 years in the courts, spending more than $100 million in taxpayer funds to fight Elousie Cobell, there would be someone in the Interior Department who would recognize the Cobell name. It shouldn’t have taken a task force of federal workers to have discovered another Cobell.
Swimmer ignores the fact that Interior still doesn’t have basics such as an accounts receivable system. Imagine that. A financial institution that doesn’t know when money is owed to its customers?
Other examples abound. Interior still doesn’t know the number of trust beneficiaries it serves. It doesn’t know the value of the Indians’ accounts or even the number of accounts the government is supposedly administering.
In fact, its data is so bad that the judge overseeing the trust case has ordered it to advise account holders that Interior’s data cannot be trusted.
As for the records now stored in a new federal storage facility in Kansas, what about the thousands of other important records that he admits were destroyed? Many were left to rot in barns or so fouled by rodents that they were deemed unusable.
If thing are so good and getting better, as Swimmer would have you believe, why did Interior’s own Inspector General award the department an “F” within the last few weeks in protecting the security of the trust beneficiaries’ sensitive and vital trust data in the department’s computer systems?
Swimmer’s spin does not change the facts. Nor will it spin fix the broken trust. Fixing the problem must begin with an admission that there are severe problems that have not been addressed. As long as Swimmer and his ilk continue to play politics, the injustice of this broken trust will continue and Indians across this nation will continue to suffer the indignities of their forbearers.
What is particularly worrisome to the Indian plaintiffs in the Cobell lawsuit is how Swimmer has perverted a position which Congress created to be a neutral and nonpolitical advocate for the nation’s Indians. Swimmer is supposed to have only one interest: managing the trust for the benefit of Indian beneficiaries.
Instead he has become an out-and-out apologist for an administration which has yet to learn the basics about serving as a faithful fiduciary and running a competent trust operation.
