-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointel.htm <A HREF="http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointel.htm">COINTELPRO</A> ----- Quite the site, many articles, links and embeds. A small sample Om K ----- COINTELPRO COINTELPRO was the FBI's secret program to undermine the popular upsurge which swept the country during the 1960s. Though the name stands for "Counterintelligence Program," the targets were not enemy spies. The FBI set out to eliminate "radical" political opposition inside the US. When traditional modes of repression (exposure, blatant harassment, and prosecution for political crimes) failed to counter the growing insurgency, and even helped to fuel it, the Bureau took the law into its own hands and secretly used fraud and force to sabotage constitutionally - protected political activity. Its methods ranged far beyond surveillance, and amounted to a domestic version of the covert action for which the CIA has become infamous throughout the world. The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States by Ward Churchill & Jim Vander Wall Chapter 2 - COINTELPRO - CP/USA Chapter 3 - COINTELPRO - SWP Chapter 4 - COINTELPRO - Puerto Rican Independence Movement Chapter 5 - COINTELPRO - Black Liberation Movement Chapter 7 - COINTELPRO - AIM Chapter 8 - Conclusion: COINTELPRO Lives On Exerpts from Brian Glick's War at Home: COINTELPRO in the 60's COINTELPRO in the 70's COINTELPRO in the 80's COINTELPRO in the 90's The Federal Bureau of Intimidation by Howard Zinn Some Call it Murder by Shelly Waxman FBI Secrets: An Agent's Expose --- book review and exerpt ------ the logistics of a black bag job Wages of COINTELPRO Still Evident in Omaha Black Panther Case by Ward Churchill 3/10/99 "King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own but I am sure that they don't have one at this time that is any where near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. ... King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation." - anonymous letter from FBI to Martin Luther King obtained from FBI files using the FOIA Martin Luther King * Black Panther Party * Geronimo Pratt * Nation of Islam/Elijah Mohammad Malcolm X * Eldridge Cleaver * Fred Hampton * Huey Newton * Bobby Seale * Sundiata Acoli * Assata Shakur * Dhoruba Al-Mujahid Bin Wahad * Republic of New Afrika * Angela Davis Black Propaganda: this children's coloring book was sent by the FBI to thousands of white Americans in the name of the Black Panther Party. The FBI, COINTELPRO, and Far Right Vigilantee Networks The Public-Private Partnership by Tom Burghardt The Covert War Against Native Americans by Ward Churchill "They are a conquered nation, and when you are conquered, the people you are conquered by dictate your future. This is a basic philosophy of mine. If I'm part of a conquered nation, I've got to yield to authority ... a colonial police force." -- ASAC Zigrossi, at seige of Wounded Knee, 1976 American Indian Movement many COINTELPRO-AIM articles Leonard Peltier * Dennis Banks * Anna Mae Aquash * Myrtle Poor Bear * John Trudell * Russell Means Communist Party, USA Labor Movement, USA As long as [anti- communism] remains national policy, an ... important requirement is an aggressive covert psychological, political and paramilitary organization more effective, more unique, and if necessary, more ruthless than employed by the enemy. No one should be permitted to stand in the way of the prompt, efficient, and secure establishment of this mission. The Doolittle Committee Report, 1954 MOVE * Mumia Abu-Jamal & Churchill Interview on Mumia "Anticipating how far the city would go to silence them, MOVE began fortifying their Osage Avenue home. Meanwhile, the police made preparations for a murderous assault by secretly obtaining from the FBI over 37 pounds of the powerful military explosive C4." -- 25 Years on the Move Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador * Puerto Rican Independence Movement * La Raza Unida Party of Texas * La Casa de Carnalsimo * Pro-choice / Abortion * National Lawyers' Guild * Earth First! In the late sixties and early seventies, more than a thousand political organizations were watchlisted. At least 10,000 American homes were burglarized by the FBI in illegal "black bag jobs" for the purpose of political intelligence gathering. In 1971, only 1% of the paper collected by the FBI had anything to do with organized crime, and 2/3 was devoted to political monitoring and supression of political activities. The FBI carried out 500,000 investigations on so-called subversives from 1960 to 1974, without a single court conviction. Whistleblower Protection For FBI Employees * pgp and mailing lists Mike Rivero's COINTELPRO page Suggested Reading: The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents From the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States by Ward Churchill & Jim Vander Wall, South End Press, ISBN 0-89608-360-8 Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement by Ward Churchill & Jim Vander Wall, South End Press, ISBN 0-89608-293-8 FBI Secrets: An Agent's Expose by M. Wesley Swearingen, South End Press ISBN 0-89608-501-5 War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It by Brian Glick, South End Press ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ECHELON -- COINTELPRO -- WAR ON DRUGS webpage by Paul Wolf ===== from: http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/copap8.htm <A HREF="http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/copap8.htm">The COINTELPRO PAPERS - Chapter 8: Conclusion </A> ----- <snip> The Shape of Things to Come This may well be the shape of things to come, and in a frighteningly generalized way. A pattern is emerging in which the "attitude adjustment" represented by police and prison becomes a normative rather than exceptional experience of power in the U.S. If the present dynamics of spiraling police power and state sanctioned secrecy, proliferating penal facilities and judicial abandonment of basic constitutional principles is allowed to continue unabated, it is easily predictable that upwards of 20% of the next generation of Americans will spend appreciable time behind bars in prison environments making present day Sing Sing and San Quentin seem benign by comparison. Another not inconsiderable percentage of the population maybe expected to undergo some form of "electronic incarceration," either in their homes or at some government-designated "private" facility. The technologies for this last have been developed over the past twenty years, are even now being "field tested" (i.e.: used on real prisoners), and will undoubtedly be perfected during the coming decade. 107 In such a context, the classic role of domestic counterintelligence operations will logically be diminished; any hint of politically "deviant" behavior will likely be met with more-or-less immediate arrest, packaging as a "criminal" by the FBI and its interactive counterparts in the state and local police, processing through the courts and delivery to one or another prison for an appropriate measure of behavior modification. The social message - "don't even think about rocking the boat, under any circumstances" - is both undeniable and overwhelming At this point, it will be necessary to assess the legacy of COINTELPRO not only as having perpetuated, but of having quite literally transcended itself. It will have moved from covert and relatively selec tive or "surgical" repression of dissent to the overt and uniform suppression of political diversity per se, from a secretive safeguarding of the parameters of "acceptable" political expression to the open imposition of orthodoxy, from somewhat constrained service to to socio-economic status quo to outright social pacification and maintenance of a rigid social order. It is perhaps ironic that it is at precisely the moment the police state apparatus inherent to the Soviet Union and its various eastern European satellites appears to be crumbling that the U.S. police state shows every indication of consolidating itself at a new and unparalleled level of intensity and sophistication. But it should certainly come as no surprise. The entire 70 year history of the FBI has given fair warning. The COINTELPRO era provided a detailed preview of what was to come. And, not only the continuation, but the systematic legitimation of all that was worst about COINTELPRO during the 1970s and '80s has been sufficiently blatant to set alarm bells ringing loudly in the mind of anyone wishing to consider the matter. The sad fact is, however, that other than during certain peak periods of repression notably the Palmer Raids, the McCarthy period, and at the very end of the COINTELPRO era - such things have received only scant attention from the left. Instead, concern with questions of police power and the function of prisons has been consigned mainly to lawyers and a scattering of researcher-activists whose work has been typically viewed as "marginal," "esoteric" and even "paranoid," and thus of little utility to the "positive" and "more important" agendas of progressives. A dismal -but entirely plausible- prospect is that such circumstances have long since foreclosed on our collective ability to do much about the danger in which we are now engulfed. U.S. progressivism presently seems to stand vis a vis the "law enforcement" establishment like a person who has walked to the middle of a railway bridge and suddenly faces a locomotive bearing down on him or her at miles per hour. There is no way to outrun the engine of destruction, and no place to turn for safety. Worse, the posture of far too many people on the left suggests they are continuing to amble along with their backs to the train, still remaining unaware that they are just about to be run over. This last is readily borne out by the number of progressives who have rallied n ationally to the cause of removing assault rifles and other semi-automatic weapons from the hands of the populace, while doing nothing to confront the rampant proliferation of SWAT capabilities among police forces throughout the country. 108 Another choice indicator may be apprehended in the range of ostensibly progressive individuals and groups which have lately queued up to "take back ... streets" they never had in the first place, righteously endorsing a government-sponsored "war on drugs" entailing unprecedented police prerogatives to engage in no-knock entry, warrantless search and seizure, the routine "interdiction" of people of color driving along the nation's highways, uncompensated impoundment of personal property, massive applications of physical and electronic surveillance, the use of preventive detention on a wholesale basis, and myriad other abridgements of civil rights and liberties which would have remained unthinkable just five years ago. 109 Grounds for Hope, Program for Action A cynic might argue, and with considerable justification, that a people which follows such a course will eventually get exactly what it deserves: fascism (and, Bertram Gross' phrase notwithstanding, the form is hardly "friendly" 110 ). Demonstrably, we are at or very near this point. Yet, despite all, we remain very far from a social consensus on either the acceptability or inevitability of such an outcome. As the very existence of the RATF, Resistance Conspiracy, Ohio 7, Los Macheteros and the FAIN, and a range of other entities makes abundantly clear, there are still many who are prepared to struggle with every fiber of their beings to prevent the culmination of fascist reality in the U.S. And, as the jurors who acquitted Filiberto Ojeda Rios, the "Son of Brinks" group, and those of the Ohio 7 tried for seditious conspiracy and RICO violations have shown beyond any real question, there remain numerous "plain, ordinary, apolitical folk" who can and will respond favorably to such a stance when afforded a tangible opportunity to do so. These people, activists and jurors alike, regardless of the issues and perspectives which may divide them, are nonetheless bound together in what the German theoretician Rudi Dutschke once defined as the "anti-authoritarian impulse."111 Herein lies the hope - perhaps the only hope - of an alternative to the specter described herein. To be sure, mere hope is no solution to anything. It represents a point of departure, no more. The development of viable options to avert consummation of a full-fledged police state in North America will require a deep rethinking, among many who purport to oppose it, of priorities and philosophical positions, including the near hegemony of pacifism and nonviolence on the left. The emphasis accorded confrontation with the police and penal systems will have to increase rapidly and dramatically within virtually all groups pursuing progressive social agendas, from environmentalism to abortion rights. The fates of prisoners, particularly those incarcerated for having been accused of engaging in armed struggle against the state, must thus be made a central concern - and primary focus of activism - in every politically conscious sector of the U.S. population. Understandings must be achieved that what is currently being done to political prisoners and prisoners of war, in "exemplary" fashion, is ultimately designed for application to far wider groups than is now the case; that the facilities in which such things are done to them are intended to eventually house us all; that the enforcement apparatus which has been created to combat their "terrorism" simultaneously holds the capacity to crush all that we hold dear or seek to achieve, soon and perhaps irrevocably. In sum, if we do not move - and quickly - to overcome our tactical differences to the extent that we can collectively and effectively confront the emergent structure of "law enforcement" in this country, all the rest of our lofty and constructive social preoccupations will shortly be rendered meaningless by the very forces we have all too frequently elected to ignore. There are many points of attack open to us, places where important victories can and must be attained. These include renewed and concerted efforts to extend real community control over local police forces, the dismantling of localized police SWAT capabilities, the curtailment or elimination of national computer net participation by state and local police forces, the abolition of police "intelligence" units, and deep cuts in the resources (both monetary and in terms of personnel) already allocated to the police establishment. The judicial system, too, must become an increasing focus of broad-based progressive attention; not only is substantial support work vitally necessary with regard to activists brought to court on serious charges, but every judicial ruling - whether or not it is rendered in an overtly political trial - which serves to undercut citizen rights while legitimating increased police intervention in the political process must be met with massive, national expressions of outrage and rejection. It is incumbent upon us to infuse new force and meaning into "the court of public opinion," using every method at our disposal. By the same token, maximal energy must be devoted to heading off the planned expansion of penal facilities across the U.S. and securing the abolition of "control units" within every existing prison in the country. The BoP and state "adult authorities" must also be placed, finally, under effective citizens' control, and the incipient "privatization" of large portions of the "prison industry" must be blocked at all costs. Plainly, this represents a tremendously ambitious bill of fare for any social movement. Coming to grips with the FBI is of major importance. The Bureau has long since made itself an absolutely central ingredient in the process of repression in America, not only extending its own operations in this regard, but providing doctrine, training and equipment to state and local police, organizing the special "joint task forces" which have sprouted in every major city since 1970, creating the computer nets which tie the police together nationally, and providing the main themes of propaganda by which the rapid build-up in police power has been accomplished in the U.S. Similarly, the FBI provides both doctrinal and practical training to prison personnel - especially in connection with those who supervise POWs and political prisoners - which is crucial in the shaping of the policies pursued within the penal system as a whole. Hence, so long as the FBI is able to retain the outlook which defined COINTELPRO, and to translate that outlook into "real world" endeavors, it is reasonable to assume that both the police and prison "communities" will follow right along. Conversely, should the FBI ever be truly leashed, with the COINTELPRO mentality at last rooted out once and for all, it may be anticipated that the emergent U.S. police state apparatus will undergo substantial unraveling. In the concluding chapter of Agents of Repression, we offered both tactical and strategic sketches of how the task of bringing the Bureau to heel might be approached. In his book, War at Home, Brian Glick extends these ideas in certain directions. At the same time, both we and Glick indicated that our recommendations should be considered anything but definitive, and that readers should rely upon their own experience and imaginations in devising ways and means of getting the job done. Since publication of those books, a number of people have contacted us to expand upon our ideas and to enter new ones. Although the specifics vary in each case, there are two consistent themes underlying such contributions. These are first that is it is imperative more and more people take the step of translating their consciousness into active resistance and, second, that this resistance must be truly multifaceted and flexible in form. We heartily agree. Hence, we would would like to close with what seems to us the only appropriate observation, paraphrasing Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton: We are confronted with the necessity of a battle which must be continued until it has been won. That choice has already been made for us, and we have no option to simply wish it away. To lose is to bring about the unthinkable, and there is no place to run and hide. Under the circumstances, the FBI and its allies must be combatted by all means available, and by any means necessary. Organizational Contacts The following are organizations currently involved in the sorts of work described in the conclusion to this book. People wishing to become involved in the sorts of struggles thus represented should contact one or more of them for further information. Emergency Committee for Committee to End the Center for Constitutional Political Prisoners Marion Lockdown Rights/Movement Support P.O. Box 28191 343 S. Dearborn, Suite 1607 666 Broadway, 7th Floor Washington, D.C. 20038 Chicago, IL 60604 New York, NY 10012 National Committee to Free National Committee Against New Afrikan People's Puerto Rican Prisoners Repressive Legislation Organization P.O. Box 476698 501 C Street, NE P.O. Box 11464 Chicago, IL 60647 Washington, DC 20002 Atlanta, GA 30310 Justice for Geronimo National Alliance Against National Emergency Civil Campaign Racist/Political Repression Rights Committee 214 Duboce Avenue 126 W. 119th Street 175 Fifth Avenue San Francisco, CA 94103 New York, NY 10026 New York, NY 10010 The National Prison Project Comm. to Fight Repression Peltier Defense Committee 1616 P Street, NW Box 1435, Cathedral Station P.O. Box 583 Washington, DC 20035 New York, NY 10025 Lawrence, KS 66044 Saxifrage Group Anti-Repression Resources National Lawyers Guild 1484 Wicklow P.O. Box 122 55 Ave. of the Americas Boulder, CO 80303 Jackson, MS 39205 New York NY 10013 Nuclear Resister People's Law Office The Real Dragon P.O. Box 43383 633 S. Dearborn, No. 1614 P.O. Box 3294 Tucson, AZ 85733 Chicago, IL 60604 Berkeley, CA 94703-9901 Political Rights Defense Partisan Defense Committee Free Puerto Rico Committee Fund c/o R. Wolkensten, Esq. P.O. Box 022512 P.O. Box 649, Cooper Station P.O. Box 99, Canal St. Station Cadman Plaza, Brooklyn New York NY 1000? New York, NY 10013 New York, NY 11202 End of Chapter 8 ------ Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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