The Rocky Mountain News has published the next installment of its independent investigation of the charges against embattled University of Colorado scholar-activist, Ward Churchill. In today's segment, the paper reports that Churchill's cited sources do not support his claim that the U.S. government deliberately infected Native Americans with smallpox as part of a campaign of genocide. The article compares Churchill's sources with Churchill's representation of those sources, showing that in case after case, Churchill relies on secondary works by other scholars rather than primary sources that he himself examined; the article shows, too, that in case after case, Churchill distorts the words of the historians he cites, turning the story of a tragic smallpox outbreak into a tale of intentional biological warfare. The News spoke with some of the historians whose books provided Churchill with his alleged documentation; they are unequivocal about the misuse Churchill has made of their work. "My own view is Churchill probably just wanted to have something more to holler about," said UCLA professor, Russell Thornton, a member of the Cherokee nation and the author of American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492. "I think it's just out-and-out fabrication. It depends on how you want to look at it, but in one sense, it's just making up of data, and that kind of thing shouldn't be tolerated in scholarship or science."

Even if Ward gets the boot for blatent academic fraud, it will all be spun a the VRWC at it again (and censorship, can't forget the censorship).