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CounterPunch
August
19, 2002
The Son of COINTELPRO
by Kurt Nimmo
As Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Justice
Department, the FBI, CIA--and soon to be unleashed mega-snoop
bureau of gargantuan dimensions, the Department of Homeland Security--begin
to once again plot the invasion of our civil liberties, I wonder
how many baby boomers remember the days of COINTELPRO. Or, more
precisely, how many of them have amnesia when it comes to recalling
the historical facts of what the government did to a lot of us
some thirty odd years ago.
Beyond the obscure reaches of the alternative
press--alive and well, thanks mostly to an unhampered (for the
moment) Internet--we hear few voices within the tidy bulwarks
of the corporate press reminding us of the way things were in
the late 60s and early 70s. On occasion, a corporate columnist
will pen his astute and widely published opinions, comparing
Ashcroft's proposed TIPS program to the Stasi, but nary a soul
mentions COINTELPRO, or how the CIA, in violation of its charter,
spied on Americans, or how the NSA listened in on millions of
telephone calls and read countless telegrams in direct violation
of the constitutional principles our so-called leaders claim
to cherish, especially around election time.
For those of us too young to remember--or
those of us old enough to remember but suffering from amnesia--COINTELPRO
is snoop parlance for "counterintelligence programs,"
in other words a series of highly orchestrated, secret, often
vicious (and, occasionally, deadly) FBI initiatives launched
in the 1960s and early 70s, actions designed, in the words of
the FBI, to "disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise
neutralize" the civil rights, anti-war, and student movements,
most engaged in the long-standing American tradition of organized
disagreement against the government. In many instances, this
disruption and misdirection came at the hands FBI-planted provocateurs,
more than a few of them who were criminals, sociopaths, and even
psychopaths.
The FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover's able
hand, engaged in the most scurrilous of tactics, including blackmail,
dissemination of false accusations (which resulted in people
being fired from jobs and tenured professors being sacked), the
publication of bogus and harmful literature (which we now quaintly
and euphemistically call "disinformation"), and even,
as in the case of Peter G. Bohmer, an economics professor at
San Diego State University, in an assassination attempt carried
out by an FBI-sponsor terrorist group (known as the Secret Army
Organization, which was "over the top" in its violent
zeal to attack those deemed too militant by the government; regardless,
the FBI waited more than six months to take action in the matter).
In addition to these tactics, the FBI
encouraged the IRS to release confidential tax information on
anti-war and black movement activists, which often resulted in
audits and prosecutions. The IRS, eagerly encouraged by the FBI,
set up a Special Services Staff to investigate and possibly audit
not only such un-American organizations as the ACLU, American
Library Association, American Jewish Congress, Common Cause,
and National Education Association, but also the New York Review
of Books and Rolling Stone (as well as more than a few rock concert
organizers and, remarkably, then New York mayor John Lindsay).
So sleazy, backhanded, and vicious was
COINTELPRO that actress Jean Seberg miscarried and eventually
committed suicide after the FBI provided bogus information concerning
her pregnancy to a gossip columnist--the Bureau, known for its
racism, said the father of the child was a Black Panther, which
Seberg's husband vehemently denied. The FBI considered Jean Seberg's
"neutralization" (for her support of the Black Panthers)
successful.
Other forms of indirect violence against
Americans dissenting government policy were also deemed appropriate
by the FBI. For instance, the agency worked closely with police
departments and "red squads" across the country, encouraging
them to attack peaceful crowds, tear-gas private residences,
beat movie-goers, vandalize churches, break the cameras of news
photographers, and generally engage in behavior expected of Latin
American paramilitary goons.
COINTELPRO was, in large part, a success.
By 1972, the anti-war and black liberation movements were in
complete disarray. Police pressure, mass false arrests, specious
federal grand jury investigations, and flimsy if not entirely
bogus conspiracy trials had all taken their toll. According to
the Church Committee, which was convened to investigate FBI abuses,
there were 290 separate COINTELPRO actions from 1968 until 1971,
when the program supposedly terminated. Approximately 40 percent
of these actions were specifically designed to keep activists
from speaking, teaching, writing, and publishing, contrary to
the principles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which
the government is sworn to uphold.
All of this, of course, may seem improbable,
especially in a democracy. But don't take my word for it--read
Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall's book, The COINTELPRO Papers
(South End Press, 1990), a collection of actual FBI documents.
Many of the confidential documents in the book were removed from
an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971; others were released
through FOIA requests.
Even though COINTELPRO was "officially"
closed down in 1971, the FBI has continued to spy on and harass
Americans exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right
to free speech and peaceful dissent. From 1983 to 1985, the agency
spied on the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador
(CISPES), an organization critical of US policy in Central America.
In 1991, a federal district court ruled that the FBI had violated
a 1981 consent decree which outlawed political surveillance in
Chicago. A year later, the FBI was ordered to expunge the names
of all Chicago CISPES members from its files on "international
terrorism."
Attorney Michael Krinsky, of the National
Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, cites the CISPES case as
proof that COINTELPRO never really ended. The FBI files kept
on CISPES, explains Krinsky, "show a long train of abuses
and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object--the destruction
of the people's right to know and to assemble in order to express
opposing views on public policy... The FBI is still reaching
into the Hoover-era bag of tricks to fight dissent. They are
feeding their fantasies that the Red Menace is everywhere. It
is an obsessive belief they share with Reagan--and like all fantasies,
facts do not put it to sleep."
It does not take a rocket scientist to
deduce the obvious: the "abuses and usurpations" fomented
by the FBI over the last fifty years will, under the scary and
unprecedented aegis of George W. Bush's war on terrorism, increase
dramatically in the days to come. In the place of Reagan's "Red
Menace," we now have "evil" Arab terrorists who
are at war with "civilization" (read: they are opposed
to US imperialism).
How long before those of us who, as well,
are opposed to the imperialistic policies of the US government
will fall under the steady purview of not the FBI--which, if
we are to believe what the corporate media tells us, are not
up to the task of rooting out "evildoers"--but rather
Bush's super-snoop agency, the Department of Homeland Security,
enabled as it will be by the loosening of legal fetters and empowered
under mandates thrown down by the US Patriot Act? How long before
the cable guy spies on us, reporting us to the TIPS hotline for
"subversive" literature on our book shelves? Or the
Green poster on our wall? Is the time far away when our computers
will be hacked, our hard drives scanned for keywords, when Magic
Lantern records our every keystroke, our email and web destinations
probed, logged, and archived by the likes of Carnivore or one
of its descendents? Can we expect--as we mobilize against Dubya's
war on Iraq, or the one against Iran or Syria that may follow
in this interminable war on terrorism--to be arrested as "enemy
combatants," spirited away in the night, "disappeared"
like Jose Padilla who, after all, did not actually commit any
perceivable illegalities but only engaged in a thought crime?
Are we to take Ari Fleischer at his word--we must now watch what
we say and what we do?
It now appears--for those of us who never
allowed historical amnesia to sweep over us--that COINTELPRO
never really "officially" died. It is alive and well,
growing in strength, and amply mandated not only in the guise
of the so-called (and vastly Orwellian) US Patriot Act, but in
the hearts of too many of our leaders as well.
Amnesia is no longer an option.
Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer
in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
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August 14
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