who might be perceived as dissidents all in one spot for easy pickin's, like the Iraq stroke of genius, reactiving (if it can ever have been seen as gone) COINTELPRO.
Wikipedia's description of COINTELPRO:
History
COINTELPRO began in 1956 and was designed to "increase fascism, cause disruption and win defections" inside the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA). However, the program was soon enlarged to include disruption of the Socialist Workers Party (1961), the Ku Klux Klan (1964), African-American nationalist groups (including the Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam (1967)), and the entire New Left socio-political movement, which included antiwar, community, and religious groups (1968).
A later investigation by the Senate's Church Committee (see below) stated that "COINTELPRO began in 1956, in part because of frustration with Supreme Court rulings limiting the Government's power to proceed overtly against dissident groups..."<1> Congress and several court cases later concluded that the COINTELPRO operations against communist and socialist groups exceeded statutory limits on FBI activity and violated Constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and association.
Supporters of the program argue that the project was rooted in the Bureau's knowledge that some domestic left-wing and radical organizations were manipulated by hostile foreign intelligence agencies. For example, the FBI had access to the Venona decrypts that showed the Soviet Union and its KGB manipulated and worked under the cover of the CPUSA for espionage purposes and to incite domestic unrest in the United States.
Some of the largest COINTELPRO campaigns targeted the Socialist Worker's Party, the Ku Klux Klan<1>, the "New Left" (including several anti-war groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), Black Liberation groups (such as the Black Panthers and the Republic of New Africa), Puerto Rican independence groups, the American Indian Movement and the Weather Underground.
The program was secret until 1971, when an FBI field office in Media, PA was burglarized by a group of left-wing radicals calling themselves the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI. Several dossiers of files were taken and the information passed to news agencies, many of which initially refused to publish the information. Within the year, Director Hoover declared that the centralized COINTELPRO was over, and that all future counterintelligence operations would be handled on a case-by-case basis.
(snip/...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPROhttp://del.icio.us/cyborgoddess/COINTELPROA Short History of FBI COINTELPRO
by Mike Cassidy and Will Miller
The FBI and police used secret and systematic methods of fraud and force
In early 1971, the FBI's domestic counterintelligence program (code named "COINTELPRO") was brought to light when a "Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI" removed secret files from an FBI office in Media, PA and released them to the press. Agents began to resign from the Bureau and blow the whistle on covert operations. That same year, publication of the Pentagon Papers, the Pentagon's top-secret history of the Vietnam War, exposed years of systematic official lies about the war.
Soon after, it was discovered that a clandestine squad of White House "plumbers" broke into Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in an effort to smear the former Pentagon staffer who leaked the top-secret papers to the press. The same "plumbers" were later caught burglarizing the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee. By the mid-1970's Senate and House committees launched formal and lengthy inquiries into government intelligence and covert activities. These investigations revealed extensive covert and illegal counterintelligence programs involving the FBI, CIA, U.S. Army intelligence, the White House, the Attorney General, and even local and state law enforcement, directed against opponents of government domestic and foreign policy. Since then, many more instances of these "dirty tricks" have been revealed.
When congressional investigations, political trials and other traditional legal methods of repression failed to counter the growing movements of the 1950s, '60s and '70s, and even helped fuel them, the FBI and police moved outside the law. They used secret and systematic methods of fraud and force, far beyond mere surveillance, to sabotage constitutionally protected political activity. The purpose of the program was, in FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's own words, to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize" specific groups and individuals. Its targets in this period included the American Indian Movement, the Communist Party, the Socialist Worker's Party, Black Nationalist groups, and many members of the New Left (SDS, and a broad range of anti-war, anti-racist, feminist, lesbian and gay, environmentalist and other groups). Many other groups and individuals seeking racial, gender and class justice were targets who came under attack, including Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, the NAACP, the National Lawyer's Guild, SANE-Freeze, American Friends Service Committee, and many, many others.
(snip/...)
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/9905a/jbcointelpro.html
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~From the Los Angeles Times
A break-in to end all break-ins
In 1971, stolen FBI files exposed the government's domestic spying program.
By Allan M. Jalon
ALLAN M. JALON is a longtime contributor to The Times and other publications on issues of culture and media.
March 8, 2006
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS ago today, a group of anonymous activists broke into the small, two-man office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Media, Pa., and stole more than 1,000 FBI documents that revealed years of systematic wiretapping, infiltration and media manipulation designed to suppress dissent.
The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, as the group called itself, forced its way in at night with a crowbar while much of the country was watching the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight. When agents arrived for work the next morning, they found the file cabinets virtually emptied.
Within a few weeks, the documents began to show up mailed anonymously in manila envelopes with no return address in the newsrooms of major American newspapers. When the Washington Post received copies, Atty. Gen. John N. Mitchell asked Executive Editor Ben Bradlee not to publish them because disclosure, he said, could "endanger the lives" of people involved in investigations on behalf of the United States.
Nevertheless, the Post broke the first story on March 24, 1971, after receiving an envelope with 14 FBI documents detailing how the bureau had enlisted a local police chief, letter carriers and a switchboard operator at Swarthmore College to spy on campus and black activist groups in the Philadelphia area.
More documents went to other reporters Tom Wicker received copies at his New York Times office; so did reporters at the Los Angeles Times and to politicians including Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota and Rep. Parren J. Mitchell of Maryland.
To this day, no individual has claimed responsibility for the break-in. The FBI, after building up a six-year, 33,000-page file on the case, couldn't solve it. But it remains one of the most lastingly consequential (although underemphasized) watersheds of political awareness in recent American history, one that poses tough questions even today for our national leaders who argue that fighting foreign enemies requires the government to spy on its citizens. The break-in is far less well known than Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers three months later, but in my opinion it deserves equal stature.
Found among the Media documents was a new word, "COINTELPRO," short for the FBI's "secret counterintelligence program," created to investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the U.S. Under these programs, beginning in 1956, the bureau worked to "enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles," as one COINTELPRO memo put it, "to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."
The Media documents along with further revelations about COINTELPRO in the months and years that followed made it clear that the bureau had gone beyond mere intelligence-gathering to discredit, destabilize and demoralize groups many of them peaceful, legal civil rights organizations and antiwar groups that the FBI and Director J. Edgar Hoover found offensive or threatening.
For instance, agents sought to persuade Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself just before he received the Nobel Prize. They sent him a composite tape made from bugs planted illegally in his hotel rooms when he was entertaining women other than his wife and threatened to make it public. "King, there is one thing left for you to do. You know what it is," FBI operatives wrote in their anonymous letter.
(snip/...)
http://www.brandywinepeace.com/COINTELPRO%20dreamweaver%20test.htm
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
