Those Who Ignore Their History Are Doomed To Repeat It- COINTELPRO

[Clara T]

COINTELPRO
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

COINTELPRO is an acronym ('Counter Intelligence Program') for a program of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. Although covert operations have been employed throughout FBI history, the formal COINTELPRO operations of 1956-1971 were broadly targeted against organizations that were (at the time) considered to have politically radical elements, ranging from those whose stated goal was the violent overthrow of the US government (such as the Weathermen) to Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and racist and segregationist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The founding document of COINTELPRO directed FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of these dissident movements and their leaders.

<snip>

History
COINTELPRO began in 1956 and was designed to "increase factionalism, 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 movment, which included antiwar, community, and religious groups (1968). Opponents of COINTELPRO point out that many of these groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan and Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had no links to communism or foreign powers. 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.

<snip>

Methods
COINTELPRO used a broad array of methods, including:
1 Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents.<3>
2 Psychological warfare from the outside: The FBI and police used myriad other "dirty tricks" to undermine these movements. They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials and others to cause trouble for activists.<4>
3 Harassment through the legal system: The FBI and police abused the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, "investigative" interviews, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

[Marleyb]

1. You can bet it is 100 times worse now then what they did in the 60's

"Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents"

These guys know that all they need to do is assume leadership positions and then lead the movement into insignificance or make them look stupid. Like for instance what Answer did to the last anti-war protest.

It seems like there are many infiltrators in congress and the left 'activist' groups. The hard part is knowing who to trust. And if you try to point out who might be an infiltrator, then you will not be trusted. What are we supposed to do?

I think the left 'activist' organizations should be pushing much harder for impeachment(not censure) and demanding that congress ACT NOW! What is this crap about needing an investigation, signing more petitions? Bush admitted to an impeachable offense. The republicans would be outraged and demand action now. And where is answer, move-on, true majority etc on this outrageous affront to our democracy????

So in my opinion we are being 'led' by infiltrators or wimps...which is it?

[Clara T]

3. New Reports

New reports expose extensive illegal spying by US government

By Joe Kay
31 December 2005

Recent articles in the US media indicate that the illegal spying organized by the Bush administration has extended far beyond what was initially reported. It is becoming increasingly clear that the US government has been engaging in a massive operation that violates fundamental democratic and constitutional rights.
Following an initial report by the New York Times on December 15, Bush acknowledged that he issued a Presidential order authorizing the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on some calls made to or from the United States without obtaining the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In issuing the order, the administration acted in violation of US law, which requires the NSA to receive a court warrant to monitor any communications involving individuals within the United States.

The administration initially stated that the spying was limited to a relatively small number of individuals connected to Al Qaeda, and that no entirely domestic communications were spied on. Subsequent repots have undermined both of these claims.

Citing unnamed current and former government officials, the Times reported on December 24 that “the volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged ... It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries.”

Much of the communications that go in and out of the United States pass through switches that relay large amounts of data and are controlled by a handful of private corporations. The officials said that this data was turned over to the NSA, which was able to use various search, or “data mining” techniques to find information it was looking for. Essentially, this means that the government was not spying on a few hundred individuals at a time, as had been previously reported, but potentially thousands or millions of separate communications, including phone conversations and emails.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/dec2005/spy-d31.shtml

[Democrats_win]

4. The investigation seems to be about getting the leakers!

How's that for contrition? Remember how the wonks said Clinton needed to show contrition for his personal mistake? Now what does bu$h do? He demands that those who exposed this unconstitutional operation be discovered and punished! That's what Republicans call a "man of character?"

During the 2000 campaign bu$h called his campaign plane "Responsibility 1." If you look at bu$h's record, responsibility lost. This drunken fool should beg for our forgiveness.

[JRob]

15. exactly!

[shance]

5. It appears they have neighbors involved with Citizen Corps which

is an offset of Operations TIPS which received so much outcry.

So if you have rather overly interested or overly strange Gladys Kravitz types or even your run of the mill Bubbas that seem to be a little too interested in your life, keep this in mind.

;)

[lvx35]

11. Ye shall know them by their fruits

That's my policy toward infaltrators. You judge em by what they do. If there is no functional difference between a stupid liberal and a republican infultrator, you shouln'd lose sleep trying to figure out the which they are, you should just act.

[bigtree]

2. Here's a good spot to hear some of the accounts of that era of suppression

UC Berkeley Library
Social Activism Sound Recording Project: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/pacificapanthers.html


Listen to audio program on COINTELPRO (from Pacifica Radio program, Democracy Now) http://archive.webactive.com/webactive/pacifica/demnow/dn970804.html

[Clara T]

6. NSA Gave Other U.S. Agencies Information From Surveillance

NSA Gave Other U.S. Agencies Information From Surveillance

Fruit of Eavesdropping Was Processed and Cross-Checked With Databases

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer

01/01/06 "Washington Post" -- -- Information captured by the National Security Agency's secret eavesdropping on communications between the United States and overseas has been passed on to other government agencies, which cross-check the information with tips and information collected in other databases, current and former administration officials said.

The NSA has turned such information over to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and to other government entities, said three current and former senior administration officials, although it could not be determined which agencies received what types of information. Information from intercepts -- which typically includes records of telephone or e-mail communications -- would be made available by request to agencies that are allowed to have it, including the FBI, DIA, CIA and Department of Homeland Security, one former official said.

At least one of those organizations, the DIA, has used NSA information as the basis for carrying out surveillance of people in the country suspected of posing a threat, according to two sources. A DIA spokesman said the agency does not conduct such domestic surveillance but would not comment further. Spokesmen for the FBI, the CIA and the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, declined to comment on the use of NSA data.

Since the revelation last month that President Bush had authorized the NSA to intercept communications inside the United States, public concern has focused primarily on the legality of the NSA eavesdropping. Less attention has been paid to, and little is known about, how the NSA's information may have been used by other government agencies to investigate American citizens or to cross-check with other databases. In the 1960s and 1970s, the military used NSA intercepts to maintain files on U.S. peace activists, revelations of which prompted Congress to restrict the NSA from intercepting communications of Americans.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11428.htm

[Supersedeas]

14. thanks for the links bigtree

[Octafish]

7. Nixon was made by Prescott Bush Sr.

COINTELPRO was just the tip of the treasonous iceberg.



Of course, all is forgotten, let alone forgiven, between gentlemen of a certain class:

THE BUSH-DULLES-NAZI CONNECTION

SNIP…

"Sullivan & Cromwell was not the only firm engaged in funding Germany. According to 'The Splendid Blond Beast,' Christopher Simpson's seminal history of the politics of genocide and profit, Brown Brothers, Harriman was another bank that specialized in investments in Germany. The key figure was Averill Harriman, a dominating figure in the American establishment. . . .

"The firm originally was known as W. A. Harriman & Company. The link between Harriman & Company's American investors and Thyssen started in the 1920s, through the Union Banking Corporation, which began trading in 1924. In just one three-year period, the Harriman firm sold more than $50 million of German bonds to American investors. 'Bert' Walker was Union Banking's president, and the firm was located in the offices of Averill Harriman's company at 39 Broadway in New York.

"In 1926 Bert Walker did a favor for his new son-in-law, Prescott Bush. It was the sort of favor families do to help their children make a start in life, but Prescott came to regret it bitterly. Walker made Prescott vice president of W. A. Harriman. The problem was that Walker's specialty was companies that traded with Germany. As Thyssen and the other German industrialists consolidated Hitler's political power in the 1930s, an American financial connection was needed. According to our sources, Union Banking became an out-and-out Nazi money-laundering machine. . . .

SNIP…

". . . In a November 1935 article in Common Sense, retired marine general Smedley D. Butler blamed Brown Brothers, Harriman for having the U.S. marines act like 'racketeers' and 'gangsters' in order to exploit financially the peasants of Nicaragua. . . .

CONTINUED…

http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/randy/swas5.htm

Great post and a most important topic.

Hey, DU! Kick and Recommend, eh wot?

This isn't history. It's front page news, for those who can read between the lines.

[Octafish]

8. How does the BFEE use that illegal knowledge? That ILLEGAL Power?

To target and kill political opposition. Consider why it is political assassination seems to hit Liberals and those who threaten the War Party:

The one time I remember an assassination being directed against a Conservative was in the case of Democratic governor of Alabama George Wallace. Coincidently, removing Wallace from the 1972 race would only serve to help Nixon, also a Conservative racist kind of guy. Of course, to make sure the Presstitutes got the right idea, the Reich has its stooges led by E. Howard Hunt show up PDQ to plant incriminating evidence at the home of the designated intended assassin, A Bremer.

Richard Nixon and George Wallace

EXCERPT...

In July 1969, Nixon pressurized the IRS into forming the Special Services Staff (SSS). The role of the SSS was to target Nixon’s political enemies. By 1970 the SSS had compiled a list of 4,000 individuals. Most of this list were on the left. However, Nixon now added George Wallace and several of his aides to this list. This included George’s brother, Gerald Wallace, who had indeed made a fortune on local projects. This included a $2.9 million contract for asphalt that went to Gerald's company even though he charged a $2.50 per ton over the going price. By August 1970, the SSS had 75 people working on what was known as the “Alabama Project”.

To show he meant business, one of Wallace’s closest aides, Seymore Trammell, was sent to prison for 4 years for corruption. Nixon then used Winston Blount, his Postmaster General, to begin negotiations with Wallace. A deal was eventually struck with Wallace. In return for calling off the SSS, Wallace would not become a third party candidate. On 12th January, 1972, Attorney General John Mitchell announced he was not going to prosecute Gerald Wallace. On 13th January, Wallace gave a press conference where he announced he would not be a third party candidate. The plan was that Wallace would create havoc in the Democratic Party but that eventually George McGovern would become the winner, a man that Nixon knew he could beat.

However, Wallace did much better than expected. Nixon now feared that Wallace would not keep his promise and would indeed become a third party candidate. Polls suggested that virtually all of Wallace’s votes would come from Nixon’s potential supporters. If Wallace stood, Nixon faced the prospect of being defeated by McGovern.

On 15th May, 1972, Bremer tried to assassinate George Wallace at a presidential campaign rally in Laurel, Maryland. Mark Felt immediately took charge of the case. According to Dan T. Carter, Felt had a trusted contact in the White House: Charles Colson. Felt gave Colson the news. Within 90 minutes of the shooting Nixon and Colson are recorded discussing the case. Already they are talking about finding a way to blame George McGovern for the shooting.

Meanwhile Colson phones E. Howard Hunt and suggests he breaks in to Bremer’s apartment. According to Hunt, he dislikes the idea but makes preparations for the trip. He claims that later Colson calls off the operation.

CONTINUED...

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=4649

Poppy Bush told the FBI he was in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Why would J Edgar Hoover make certain we had that in the national record?

[Clara T]

9. History is meaningless unless it's known and applied to the present

Earlier this week NBC News exposed the existence of a secret Pentagon database to track intelligence gathered inside the United States. The database including information on dozens of anti-war protests and rallies particularly actions targeting military recruiting.

The list included: counter-military recruiting meetings held at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Forth, Florida. Anti-nuclear protests staged in Nebraska on the 50th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki. An anti-war protest organized by military families outside Fort Bragg in North Carolina. And a rally in San Diego to support war resister Pablo Parades. The Pentagon database described all of these events as threats.
The documents obtained by NBC also indicate the Pentagon is now conducting surveillance at protests and possibly monitoring Internet traffic. One Pentagon briefing document stamped "secret" concluded: "e have noted increased communication and encouragement between protest groups using the nternet." The same document indicated the military is tracking who is attending protests in part by keeping records on cars seen at protests.

The Washington Post is reporting today that the Pentagon has ordered a review of the military intelligence program following the NBC News report.

The Pentagon's domestic intelligence gathering has been done through a secretive program called TALON which allows military bases and other defense installations to file reports of suspicious activity into a consolidated database.

The TALON program is so secret that even the number of reports in the database is classified. Also classified is the size and budget of the agency overseeing the database - the Counterintelligence Field Activity. The agency was created three years ago following the Sept. 11 attacks.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/15/155219

But does any of this relate to me?

I am a consumer. I spend the money I make as quickly as possible in Walmart buying colored plastic widgets manufactured in China and imported by corporations controlled by executives making $100M a year. I save some money to give to the GOP in election years. I support all wars past, present, and future. I support cutting down ancient trees and pouring waste into rivers. I oppose paper ballots and think electronic voting is great and don't mind if someone changes my vote after I cast it, because they must have a reason to change it. Therefore I have nothing to hide, RFID is for consumers.

[Octafish]

10. What Cesar Bioys said about mirrors.

Spot-on analysis of the War Party, Clara T.

These same bed-wetting traitors have been in power since Dallas.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

by Jorge Luis Borges

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors hare something monstrous about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number or men. I asked him the origin of this memorable observation and he answered that it was reproduced in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, in its article on Uqbar. The house (which we had rented furnished) had a set of this work. On the last pages of Volume XLVI we found an article on Upsala; on the first pages of Volume XLVII, one on Ural-Altaic Languages, but not a word about Uqbar. Bioy, a bit taken aback, consulted the volumes of the index. In vain he exhausted all of the imaginable spellings: Ukbar, Ucbar, Ooqbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr... Before leaving, he told me that it was a region of Iraq of or Asia Minor. I must confess that I agreed with some discomfort. I conjectured that this undocumented country and its anonymous heresiarch were a fiction devised by Bioy's modesty in order to justify a statement. The fruitless examination of one of Justus Perthes' atlases fortified my doubt.

CONTINUED...

http://aegis.ateneo.net/fted/tlontext.htm

¿Una translacion bastante buena, no crees?

You're also correct about Borges. He is the best. Right there also are Vonnegut, Lem and Kafka.

[Clara T]

12. Thanks for that

Here I bring the personal part of my narrative to a close. The rest is in the memory (if not in the hopes or fears) of all my readers. Let it suffice for me to recall or mention the following facts, with a mere brevity of words which the reflective recollection of all will enrich or amplify. Around 1944, a person doing research fro the newspaper The American (of Nashville, Tennessee) brought to light in a Memphis library the forty volumes of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Even today there is a controversy over whether this discovery was accidental or whether it was permitted by the directors of the still nebulous Orbis Tertius. The latter is most likely. Some of the incredible aspects of the Eleventh Volume (for example, the multiplication of the hronir) have been eliminated or attenuated in the Memphis copies; it is reasonable to imagine that these omissions follow the plan of exhibiting a world which is not too incompatible with the real world. The dissemination of objects from Tlön over different countries would complement this plan... (5) The fact is that the international press infinitely proclaimed the "find." Manuals, anthologies, summaries, literal versions, authorized re-editions and pirated editions of the Greatest Work of Man flooded and still flood the earth. Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account. The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any symmetry with a resemblance of order - dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism - was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly plant? It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws - I translate: inhuman laws - which we never quite grasp. Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty - not even a that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars... A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues. If our forecasts are not in error, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.

Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial.

http://aegis.ateneo.net/fted/tlontext.htm



A personal favorite of mine:


Oh and are we becoming:

Surveillance Nation

Besides CAPPS II, the FBI is using the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database, containing 39 million criminal records. As the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) Web site explains, you can land in the NCIC database if someone steals your credit card and buys bomb-making material with it.

The aviation list, intended to catch terrorists before they board planes, has persistently and widely snagged innocent American travellers, according to government documents obtained by EPIC through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The documents -- which include numerous e-mails, letters and call logs detailing the attempts of seemingly ordinary Americans to remove themselves from the list -- reveal that the lists are only getting longer.

The United States has become the surveillance nation. It promulgates policies around the assumptions that government has the right to know absolutely everything about its people and that government can violate fundamental individual rights with impunity as long as the cause is deemed worthy.

In the surveillance nation, individuals have no right to know what the government is doing with information. That is also the basic premise behind the Irish government's revision of the Freedom of Information Act. Recent changes make secrecy into a mantra, to be controlled without the scrutiny of the press or the electorate. It's rather unsettling to be living in a modern Irish society where the government would like to harvest electronic communications records of citizens while stifling freedom of information requests.

http://www.enn.ie/frontpage/news-9354990.html

[EuroObserver]

13. ¡Muchas gracias!

Yes, looks very nice. Bedtime reading tonight.