DO YOUR DAMN HOMEWORK! COINTELPRO: Program exposed[edit] The building broken into by the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, at One Veterans Square, Media, Pennsylvania The program was successfully kept secret until 1971, when the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI burglarized an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, took several dossiers, and exposed the program by passing this material to news agencies. Many news organizations initially refused to publish the information. Within the year, Director J. Edgar Hoover declared that the centralized COINTELPRO was over, and that all future counterintelligence operations would be handled on a case-by-case basis.[29][30] Additional documents were revealed in the course of separate lawsuits filed against the FBI by NBC correspondent Carl Stern, the Socialist Workers Party, and a number of other groups. In 1976 the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, commonly referred to as the Church Committee for its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, launched a major investigation of the FBI and COINTELPRO. Journalists and historians speculate that the government has not released many dossier and documents related to the program. Many released documents have been partly, or entirely, redacted. Since the conclusion of centralized COINTELPRO operations in 1971, FBI counterintelligence operations have been handled on a case-by-case basis; however allegations of improper political repression continue.[31][32] The Final Report of the Select Committee castigated conduct of the intelligence community in its domestic operations (including COINTELPRO) in no uncertain terms: The Committee finds that the domestic activities of the intelligence community at times violated specific statutory prohibitions and infringed the constitutional rights of American citizens. The legal questions involved in intelligence programs were often not considered. On other occasions, they were intentionally disregarded in the belief that because the programs served the national security the law did not apply. While intelligence officers on occasion failed to disclose to their superiors programs which were illegal or of questionable legality, the Committee finds that the most serious breaches of duty were those of senior officials, who were responsible for controlling intelligence activities and generally failed to assure compliance with the law.[1] Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.[27] The Church Committee documented a history of the FBI exercising political repression as far back as World War I, through the 1920s, when agents were charged with rounding up anarchists, communists, socialists, reformists and revolutionaries for deportation. The domestic operations were increased against political and anti-war groups from 1936 through 1976. Intended effects[edit] The intended effect of the FBIs COINTELPRO was to expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize groups that the FBI officials believed were subversive[33] by instructing FBI field operatives to:[34] create a negative public image for target groups (e.g. by surveilling activists, and releasing negative personal information to the public) break down internal organization create dissension between groups restrict access to public resources restrict the ability to organize protests restrict the ability of individuals to participate in group activities Range of targets[edit] The main target was the Communist Party. See: Anti-Communist. In an interview with the BBCs Andrew Marr, Noam Chomsky—a political activist and MIT professor of linguistics—spoke about the purpose and the targets of COINTELPRO, saying: COINTELPRO was a program of subversion carried out not by a couple of petty crooks but by the national political police, the FBI, under four administrations... by the time it got through, I wont run through the whole story, it was aimed at the entire new left, at the womens movement, at the whole black movement, it was extremely broad. Its actions went as far as political assassination.[35] According to the Church Committee: While the declared purposes of these programs were to protect the national security or prevent violence, Bureau witnesses admit that many of the targets were nonviolent and most had no connections with a foreign power. Indeed, nonviolent organizations and individuals were targeted because the Bureau believed they represented a potential for violence -- and nonviolent citizens who were against the war in Vietnam were targeted because they gave aid and comfort to violent demonstrators by lending respectability to their cause. The imprecision of the targeting is demonstrated by the inability of the Bureau to define the subjects of the programs. The Black Nationalist program, according to its supervisor, included a great number of organizations that you might not today characterize as black nationalist but which were in fact primarily black. Thus, the nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference was labeled as a Black Nationalist-Hate Group. Furthermore, the actual targets were chosen from a far broader group than the titles of the programs would imply. The CPUSA program targeted not only Communist Party members but also sponsors of the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee and civil rights leaders allegedly under Communist influence or deemed to be not sufficiently anti-Communist. The Socialist Workers Party program included non-SWP sponsors of anti-war demonstrations which were cosponsored by the SWP or the Young Socialist Alliance, its youth group. The Black Nationalist program targeted a range of organizations from the Panthers to SNCC to the peaceful Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and included every Black Student Union and many other black student groups. New Left targets ranged from the SDS to the InterUniversity Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy, from Antioch College (vanguard of the New Left) to the New Mexico Free University and other alternate schools, and from underground newspapers to students protesting university censorship of a student publication by carrying signs with four-letter words on them. Examples of surveillance, spanning all presidents from FDR to Nixon, both legal and illegal, contained in the Church Committee report:[36] President Roosevelt asked the FBI to put in its files the names of citizens sending telegrams to the White House opposing his national defense policy and supporting Col. Charles Lindbergh. President Truman received inside information on a former Roosevelt aides efforts to influence his appointments, labor union negotiating plans, and the publishing plans of journalists. President Eisenhower received reports on purely political and social contacts with foreign officials by Bernard Baruch, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The Kennedy administration had the FBI wiretap a congressional staff member, three executive officials, a lobbyist, and a Washington law firm. US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy received the fruits of an FBI wire tap on Martin Luther King, Jr. and an electronic listening device targeting a congressman, both of which yielded information of a political nature. President Johnson asked the FBI to conduct name checks of his critics and members of the staff of his 1964 opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater. He also requested purely political intelligence on his critics in the Senate, and received extensive intelligence reports on political activity at the 1964 Democratic Convention from FBI electronic surveillance. President Nixon authorized a program of wiretaps which produced for the White House purely political or personal information unrelated to national security, including information about a Supreme Court Justice. The COINTELPRO documents show numerous cases of the FBIs intentions to prevent and disrupt protests against the Vietnam War. Many techniques were used to accomplish this task. These included promoting splits among antiwar forces, encouraging red-baiting of socialists, and pushing violent confrontations as an alternative to massive, peaceful demonstrations. One 1966 COINTELPRO operation tried to redirect the Socialist Workers Party from their pledge of support for the antiwar movement.[37] The FBI claims that it no longer undertakes COINTELPRO or COINTELPRO-like operations. However, critics have claimed that agency programs in the spirit of COINTELPRO targeted groups such as the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador,[38] the American Indian Movement,[6][39] Earth First!,[40] the White Separatist Movement,[41] and the Anti-Globalization Movement.[citation needed]
Posted on: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 21:23:01 +0000
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