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June 5, 2002
Robert Fisk
Berlusconi the Censor
Danielle Brian
Nuclear
Plants and Terrorism
Ardeshir Cowasjee
For What Do We Fight?
George Monbiot
Kashmir
on the Brink
Michael Neumann
What is Antisemitism?
June 4, 2002
Dave Marsh
Bono the Useful Idiot
William Evan / Francis
Boyle
Kashmir:
Invoking Intl. Law to Avoid Nuclear War
Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves
June 3, 2002
Ramdas / Makhijani
India,
Pakistan and Nukes:
A Road Map to Peace
Fran Shor
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan
Neve Gordon
The Caterpillar
Effect
June 2, 2002
Fidel Castro
From FDR to Mister "W.":
Cuba, the US and Democracy
Arundhati Roy
Under the
Nuclear Shadow
Bernard Weiner
Bush 9/11 Scandal for Dummies
June 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
The
Strange Math of Roberto Carlos: Brazil v. Turkey
Gavin Keeney
Bush and Mies van der Rohe:
Architecture and Ideology
Jeff Halper
Sharon's
Post-Incursion Plan:
Incarceration or Transfer?
Walt Brasch
Crumpling the Constitution
May 31, 2002
Rev. Sandra Olewine
Land Grabs and Occupation:
Silent Destruction of Palestine
James Dunlop
Russian
Colonel:
"Insane But Fit for Duty"
Chomsky / Bennett
Debating "Terrorism"
May 30, 2002
Steve Perry
Jim Carrey:
"Love Me!"
Tom Turnipseed
Sex Among the Sacred
George Monbiot
Corporate
Phantoms
Web of Deciet over GM Foods
Robert Jensen
Are You a Journalist
or a Patriot?
Gary Leupp
Georgia
and the War on Terror
May 29, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Age of Inequality
Philip Farruggio
The
Cleaning Lady
Bill Christison
Disastrous US Foreign Policy:
Part 2, Globalization
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CIA, Drugs & the
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by Alexander
Cockburn
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The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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June 5, 2002
Spying and Lying
The FBI's Dirty Secrets
by Mark Weisbrot
It seems that the FBI is likely to be rewarded
for the missed warnings, fumbled intelligence, and bureaucratic
foul-ups that preceded September 11. Attorney General John Ashcroft
has announced that the FBI is changing its rules so that it can
spy on domestic organizations, even where there is no evidence
of specific criminal activity.
It is doubtful that the Administration
could get away with these changes if the real functioning of
the FBI as a political police force were better known. The press
has referred to the agency's COINTELPRO (from counterintelligence
program)  operation
of the 1960s and 70s as though it were ancient history, a minor
aberration of the FBI's quirky and fanatical director J. Edgar
Hoover.
In fact COINTELPRO was a massive operation
to infiltrate, disrupt, harass, and otherwise interfere with
the lawful activities of civil rights advocates, peace activists,
religious organizations, and others. One of the FBI's most famous
and hated targets was the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr. In a covert operation that now reads like a B-grade movie
script, the FBI actually made a serious effort to blackmail Dr.
King into committing suicide.
Less well known is that FBI operations
against law-abiding citizens did not end when these abuses were
exposed in the 1970s. We know that they continued well into the
1980s, when the Reagan and then Bush (the elder) administrations
faced mounting domestic opposition to their wars in Central America.
Death squads in El Salvador were murdering religious workers
and clergy, the Guatemalan military was carrying out what is
now acknowledged as genocide against its indigenous population,
and an army of terrorists was trying to overthrow the government
of Nicaragua.
The US government was supporting and
sponsoring all of these crimes with billions of dollars, and
that did not sit well with many Americans. I was one of them,
and joined a student group called the Latin American Solidarity
Committee at the University of Michigan. Unbeknownst to us, the
watchful eyes of the FBI were closely monitoring our actions.
So closely, in fact, that one of our
members wrote a history of the group's activities with the help
of documents obtained from the FBI under the Freedom of Information
Act. We enjoyed seeing all of our names in print, and pored over
the documents with a mixture of awe and laughter, amazed that
the federal government could have taken our little student group
so seriously as to keep track of everything we did and who attended
our meetings.
As it turned out, this was part of a
nationwide spying operation involving all 59 FBI field offices.
The whole thing might be secret to this day, if not for fact
that one of the Bureau's informants had a change of heart. He
had infiltrated a community of religious activists in Texas,
and later said that he had second thoughts when his supervisor
suggested that he sleep with a nun in order to discredit them.
The Dallas Morning News broke the story,
and the FBI was forced to conduct an internal investigation.
FBI director William S. Sessions (1987-93) told Congress that
the investigation had left "no stone unturned" and
that his G-men had stopped their "counter- terrorism"
-- yes, they actually called it that -- operations by June of
1985.
Sessions was lying: documents released
to our local group showed that their spying in Ann Arbor continued
well beyond that date. But the press accepted that the FBI had
changed its ways, and today the whole story of their illicit
activities in the 1980s has disappeared into the memory hole.
That is a shame, because there is no
evidence that the FBI ever reformed itself, and now we have two
new reasons to worry about it. One is the blank check that Ashcroft
has handed to the FBI, which threatens our civil liberties. The
second is that after decades of crying "wolf" to justify
its functioning as an American KGB, the FBI is now charged with
protecting us from real terrorist threats.
There has never been an accounting of
how much of the FBI's resources have been devoted to policing
the constitutionally protected activities of our citizens. Congress
should demand this accounting as it examines the massive intelligence
failure that preceded September 11.
Historians like to say that we ignore
the past at our own peril; in the case of the FBI, it may be
literally true.
Mark Weisbrot
is co-Director of the Center
for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.
He is co-author (with Dean Baker) of Social
Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press).
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