-Caveat Lector-
http://www.monitor.net/~bari/America's_Secret_Police.html
AMERICA'S SECRET POLICE:
FBI COINTELPRO in the 1990s
(This report was written by Noelle Hanrahan in association with the Redwood
Summer Justice Project, which pursues Judi Bari's and Darryl Cherney's civil
rights case against the FBI and Oakland Police.)
On April 22, 1970, as 22 million Americans rallied across the country on the
first Earth Day celebration, FBI agents in over 40 cities were ordered to
spy on and infiltrate these events. Senator Edwin Muskie, himself a victim,
remarked from the floor of Congress that this surveillance was "a dangerous
threat to fundamental constitutional rights." The power of the environmental
movement and the challenge it posed to business-as-usual made it an instant
target for FBI suppression.
Twenty years later on May 24, 1990, a shrapnel-wrapped car bomb went off
under noted Earth First! activist Judi Bari's car seat, nearly killing her
and injuring fellow organizer Darryl Cherney. Even more frightening to Bari,
as she woke up in the hospital intensive care unit under armed guard, was
the realization that a major FBI "counterintelligence" operation against
Earth First! was underway.
Within minutes of their arrival on the scene of the blast, the FBI was
falsely characterizing nonviolent environmental organizers Bari and Cherney
as "terrorists". Within hours, the Oakland Police Department had arrested
and detained them for transporting explosives. It was not enough that the
two leaders had been physically blown up; the FBI immediately began to
orchestrate a disinformation campaign designed to discredit and imprison
these activists and destroy Earth First!
What could make nonviolent environmental organizers the targets of
repression? Back in May 1990, Earth First! in the redwood region was gearing
up for "Mississippi Summer in the California Redwoods," a bold call that
would draw thousands of activists to Mendocino and Humboldt counties. Earth
First!'s fierce, grassroots, pro-labor campaign of mass nonviolent civil
disobedience was determined to stop corporate timber's liquidation of the
old-growth forests. Even in the face of the attempted assassination of the
key organizers and a well-orchestrated FBI disinformation campaign,
thousands came to Redwood Summer, bringing national attention to the
destruction of the redwood forest ecosystem. It is a testimony to the power
of the movement mobilized by Judi Bari that today, eight years later,
protests to save the old growth forests are more dynamic than ever.
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"It is absolutely foolish to suggest that the FBI was involved in anything
that would obstruct justice."
-- Richard W. Held, FBI
"These guys are professional liars, who have raised selective memory loss to
an art form."
-- Judi Bari, Earth First!
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----
FBI Legacy
>From the moment of its birth in 1908 as the Justice Department's "Bureau of
Investigation," a key part of the FBI's mission has been to suppress
political dissent. In the early years they used deportations and the
career-destroying Palmer raids to target union leaders and communists.
Burglary, blacklisting, infiltration, and disruption became standard
operating procedure. Later, when the Supreme Court ruled that the Smith Act
specifically could not be used to target communists, the FBI took it
undercover, developing its "counterintelligence" program dubbed COINTELPRO.
In the words of then-director J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO was designed to
"expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" groups
whose views the FBI deemed threatening to the status quo.
Richard W. Held: Constitutional Assassin
Richard W. Held was Special Agent-in-Charge of the San Francisco FBI Office
1985-1993 during its extensive COINTELPRO operations against Earth First! Of
all the COINTELPRO operatives, Richard Wallace Held's past is particularly
brutal and haunting.
Held began his career in 1968 in the Los Angeles office of the FBI. He
quickly became the lead agent in the "racial matters" squad which focused on
what the FBI called "black extremists". Just one year later he was involved
in targeting Los Angeles Black Panther Party leader Geronimo ji jaga (Pratt)
for "neutralization." Framed for a murder he did not commit, Geronimo spent
25 years in state prison. He was released in 1997 after a judge overturned
his conviction based on prosecutorial misconduct. The key witness in the
case, Julius Butler, was an informant for the FBI, LAPD, and the L.A.
District Attorney's office; that information was kept secret during
Geronimo's trial.
An uncanny ability to lie under oath, commonly referred to as "testa-lying,"
is a trademark of rogue law enforcement professionals. Under oath in a
deposition for Geronimo's federal appeal, Held remarked on his relationship
with Julius Butler: "I think that it may have been relevant, your honor,
depending on what the contact was at the time and what else I knew, because
I don't recall really knowing much about the case at all anyway." In fact,
Held was coordinating COINTELPRO operations in L.A., and Geronimo was at the
top of the "Key Black Extremists" list.
Even more damning, Held was the control agent for informant Julius Butler.
In two-and-a-half years, Held recorded contact and meetings with Butler 33
times. Contrast Held's repeated denials of knowledge and responsibility with
the cold, hard facts, including this from a 1/28/70 memo by Held to the FBI
Director: "I request Bureau approval ... to attack, expose, and ridicule the
BPP... operation number one is designed to challenge the legitimacy of the
authority exercised by Elmer Gerard Pratt."
After a few years in Washington, DC as a headquarters intelligence
supervisor, Held was back in the field on the Pine Ridge Reservation three
days after the firefight between federal agents and the American Indian
Movement (AIM) during which two FBI agents and an Indian man were killed. An
FBI memo dated 7/26/75 to the Washington Bureau's Intelligence Division
notes, "Supervisor Richard Wallace Held arrived at Pine Ridge, South Dakota
Indian Reservation Command Post on 6/29/75, to assist in the RESMURS
investigation. He was assigned three important phases of this investigation;
namely, the correlation of Bureau-wide informants into the investigation;
the establishment of the confidential fund; and the coordination of all
intelligence information as it relates to the American Indian Movement (AIM)
and the RESMURS investigations... throughout the country ..."
Held's work contributed to the framing of noted political prisoner Leonard
Peltier, and to covering up the truth about the agents' deaths and the still
unsolved killings of 70 AIM supporters on the Pine Ridge Reservation during
the extensive FBI's operations.
>From 1979 until 1985, Held was Special Agent-in-Charge of the San Juan,
Puerto Rico office. There he presided over a politically-oriented
paramilitary campaign against the Puerto Rican Independence movement,
creating files on 74,000 individuals. In his last operation in Puerto Rico,
Held led 300 FBI agents and U.S. marshals in raids all over the island,
trashing office and homes and arresting scores of activists. One advocate of
Puerto Rican independence said the raids made "even the desire for
independence a crime." Held left Puerto Rico in 1985 to head the FBI's San
Francisco, California field office.
Held Turns His Sights on Earth First!
In the year before the car bombing of Bari and Cherney, a shocking and
classic political disruption campaign was conducted against Earth First! in
Northern California. In the months just prior to Redwood Summer, the
disruption was intense. Bari, Cherney and other Earth First! organizers
received over 30 death threats from March to May, 1990. Fake Earth First!
press releases were circulated in the community and to the press, falsely
connecting the Earth First!ers with violence and sabotage. Local law
enforcement refused to investigate the death threats, signaling their
tolerance for violence against environmentalists. "If you turn up dead,
Judi," Mendocino County Sheriff's Sgt. Steve Satterwhite told Bari, "then
we'll investigate."
The FBI's very act of blaming Bari and Cherney for the bombing that nearly
killed them, and their repeated feeding of damaging and bald-faced lies to
the press about evidence in the case, are both classic components of a
"counter-intelligence" campaign. The FBI's own files refer to the use of
informants, yet even now the full scope of their actions remains hidden.
Coincidence or COINTELPRO?
In depositions in Bari's and Cherney's civil rights lawsuit, FBI agents
repeatedly denied that there was an investigation against Earth First! in
California prior to the bombing. Yet, documents at first withheld and
blacked out, then later released, show that the FBI field reports written at
the time of the bombing stated Bari and Cherney were "subjects of an
investigation in the terrorist field."
The Arizona FBI Sting Operation In 1988, a major FBI sting operation was
launched against Earth First! in Arizona. In a cynical attempt to discredit
and criminalize Earth First!, the FBI spent $3 million and employed over 50
FBI agents, extensive wiretaps, body wires and overt entrapment in order to
arrest Arizona Earth First!ers for conspiracy to down power lines.
At the heart of Operation THERMCON (short for "Thermite Conspiracy") were
undercover FBI agent/provocateur Michael Fain and informant Ron Frazier, who
infiltrated a group of environmental activists in Prescott. Though
unsuccessful, the FBI worked long and hard to entrap these individuals into
using explosives to down power lines. Apparently the FBI sought to involve
Earth First! with explosives in order to create a sensational case against
them. This would serve to discredit Earth First! and provide justification
to conduct illegal investigations and operations against the political and
First Amendment activity of the environmental movement nationwide. Busted on
May 30, 1989, in the Arizona desert, four people were caught with a cutting
torch attempting to disable a power transmission tower leading to a pumping
station of the central Arizona project (CAP). CAP is a billion dollar pork
barrel project to carry Colorado River water uphill across hundreds of miles
of desert to water the lawns of Phoenix and Tucson.
Judi Bari laughingly called this, "the only joint FBI-Earth First! action
ever to take place." Undercover FBI agents picked the target, drove the
truck, and taught the activists to use an acetylene torch. The FBI paid
informant Ron Frazier $54,000 cash in exchange for implicating the Earth
First!ers, and granted him immunity from prosecution for various crimes.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
"The first lesson in activism is that the person that offers to get the
dynamite is always the FBI agent," joked Judi Bari.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
FBI Lies Exposed
It was in the context of such a massive undercover operation against Earth
First! that the FBI terrorist squad responded en masse to the bombing of
Bari and Cherney in May of 1990. Special Agent John Conway, who was one of
the main case agents assigned to the bombing, had also handled the San
Francisco FBI office's substantial field work on the Arizona "THERMCON"
sting.
It is striking that after failing in a major COINTELPRO operation to tie
Earth First! with explosives in Arizona, the FBI again tried to smear and
defame nonviolent environmental activists as terrorists by falsely charging
Bari and Cherney with transporting the bomb that was meant to kill them.
In his deposition in the Bari/Cherney lawsuit, Held insists that he was
completely out of the loop and unaware of the case, even though other FBI
agents contradict his testimony and have said that they briefed him on a
regular basis.
Key Questions Remain
Were Judi Bari, Darryl Cherney or Earth First! subjects of an ongoing
investigation in "the terrorist field" as agents claimed in FBI reports? If
so, where are the files? Was this investigation authorized? Were they under
FBI surveillance when they were bombed? What does the FBI know about who
bombed Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney? And finally, why have they never made
any attempt to catch the real bomber?
In search of answers to these questions, the Redwood Summer Justice Project
will continue to expose secret FBI operations against Earth First! as we
pursue the civil rights lawsuit against the FBI and the Oakland Police.
(This article refers to the actions of FBI Special Agent Richard Wallace
Held. For clarification, his father Richard G. Held was Associate Director
of the FBI.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
COINTELPRO: The FBI's Secret War Against Democracy
Between 1987 and 1990, in a conspiracy to entrap and "pop Dave Foreman
[founder of Earth First!] to send a message," the FBI spent $3 million, used
50 agents and conducted more than 1000 hours of wiretaps. A key informant
was paid a total of $54,000.
1981-1990, activists opposed to the U.S. foreign policy in Central America
(as well as a dozen U.S. Senators and Congressmen) were subject to FBI
harassment. The FBI's "investigation" of CISPES (Committee in Solidarity
with the People of El Salvador) involved 59 field offices and 200 incidents
of death threats, intimidation, and break-ins.
In August 1985, Richard W. Held led 300 FBI agents and U.S. marshals in
raids throughout Puerto Rico, trashing offices and homes and arresting
scores of activists. The FBI's overall operations resulted in the creation
of files on 74,000 individuals.
In 1975, Richard W. Held was involved in the FBI's cover-up of the 70 deaths
of American Indian Movement supporters at Pine Ridge in South Dakota. On the
scene after an FBI operation which resulted in the deaths of two FBI agents
and one Indian man, Held helped lay the groundwork for the framing of AIM
leader Leonard Peltier for murder. Peltier remains wrongfully imprisoned to
this day.
On April 27, 1970, Richard W. Held requested and received permission from J.
Edgar Hoover to "neutralize" actress Jean Seberg. Held placed an anonymous
letter with a Hollywood gossip columnist regarding the parentage of Seberg's
unborn child. On August 7, 1970, Seberg, nearly 7 months pregnant, attempted
suicide. On August 23rd, she gave birth prematurely to a baby girl. Weighing
less than 4 pounds, the baby died. Seberg's transgression? Her support of
the Black Panther Party.
Beginning in 1970, FBI agent Richard W. Held, an architect of COINTELPRO vs.
the Black Panthers in L.A., helped orchestrate the 25-year false
imprisonment of Geronimo ji jaga (Pratt). Held and others engineered the
frame-up of Geronimo by withholding critical information that the
prosecution's key witness, Julius Butler, was an FBI operative.
On Dec. 4, 1969, Chicago police and the FBI assassinated Black Panthers Fred
Hampton and Mark Clark. Hampton, who was alive but wounded after the initial
assault, was then executed at close range. William O'Neal, an FBI informant,
provided a detailed floor plan of Hampton's apartment; he was paid $30,000.
In 1963, the FBI turned their attention to Martin Luther King, Jr., and
sought to destroy him through a campaign of wiretaps and harassment. In one
incident, the FBI confronted King with a compilation of secretly recorded
tapes, threatening to release them to the press if King did not commit
suicide before accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.
>From 1943-63, the federal civil rights case Socialist Workers Party v.
Attorney General documents decades of illegal FBI break-ins and 10 million
pages of surveillance records. The FBI paid an estimated 1,600 informants
$1,680,592 and used 20,000 days of wiretaps to undermine legitimate
political organizing.
-----Original Message-----
From: Aleisha Saba <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thursday, April 12, 2001 7:29 PM
Subject: [CTRL] Fwd: Mayor declares curfew in Cincinnati
Remember the Black Panthers who went to a banquet where Mrs Bush was
guest speaker in an attempt to intimidate here - some of these
"Panthers" armed with Uzis, and ones who were not armed with this guns
like the Israelies carry about presumably they were felons and could
have been picked up.
This is the work of the NAACP and ADL and it has been in the making
since Bush won the election......like King schemed for the riots using
his call to Macedonia - his riots were timed - but he professed not to
know what the left hand was doing while he spoke words of peace.
What was it he said - I want to be your brother, not your brother in
law.....really?
Look at TV today and who controls what and it is the same scenario......
Remember the 5 people murdered in Witchita by this many pig tailed
savages....sodomized, raped, tortured - one was to be a priest, the
other lady was a celloist - this were nice people and oh these are under
privileged people......
If Cincinnati burns they deserve it for not calling out the troops -
this is the same old line.
One Black Panther stated years ago during the rioting where Washington
burned and not a damned thing was done about it - for these are poor
deprived black folk....this guy said he wanted to come with the heads of
the McClellan Committee-------strange this is the Committee working to
put away organized crime figures, and JFK and RFK worked with them at
one time.
These are not Farrakhan's men; this is your NAACP in action and Jesse
Jackson has taken his zulus to the streets.
Saba
Mayor declares curfew in Cincinnati 'It is dangerous and getting more
dangerous' Cincinnati police arrest an unidentified man during
Wednesday's unrest, which was sparked by the police shooting of an
unarmed 19-year-old black man.
MSNBC NEWS SERVICES
CINCINNATI, April 12 — Mayor Charles Luken declared a state of
emergency and curfew in Cincinnati Thursday, saying parts of his city
resembled Beirut after violent protests over the shooting death of an
unarmed black man by police. "It is dangerous and getting more
dangerous," he said. He also said the National Guard may be brought in
to restore order.
'I think the black citizens are tired and scared, I think the white
citizens are tired and scared.'
— CHARLES LUKEN
Mayor of Cincinnati LUKEN SAID the citywide curfew would
be in effect from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. and that police would "clear the
streets" of people during those hours. Only people going to and from
work will be allowed on the streets, he said.
"The time has come to deal with this seriously," said
Luken, who was interrupted during his news conference by protesters.
"The message ... is that the violence must stop."
Luken said his first priority was to restore order, then
look into complaints of police brutality against blacks.
TENSIONS RISE
The fatal shooting over the weekend of Timothy Thomas,
19, by a white officer sparked days of unrest, a federal investigation
and calls for accountability.
Thomas was killed as he fled Officer Steven Roach, who
was trying to arrest him for failing to appear for misdemeanor charges
and traffic violations. Roach's union said he feared for his life during
the encounter.
Tensions between blacks and police have heightened over
the past few years. Since 1995, 15 black men died at the hands of
police, including four since November.
Small groups of vandals roamed several neighborhoods
Wednesday night and early Thursday, breaking windows, looting stores and
assaulting at least one white motorist who was dragged from her car,
police said. Others in the neighborhood came to the woman's aid.
Local coverage from WLWT-TV
POLICE OFFICER SHOT
A police officer was shot Wednesday night. The buckle of
his gun belt caught the bullet and saved him, though he was severely
bruised, Luken said. No arrest had been made in that shooting.
Advertisement
Youths reinvaded several stores that had previously been
looted in Over-the-Rhine, a poor and predominantly black district just
north of downtown.
"I think the black citizens are tired and scared, I think
the white citizens are tired and scared," Luken said.
At least 66 people have been arrested on such charges as
disorderly conduct, criminal rioting, obstruction, felony assault, theft
and breaking and entering since the violence began Monday.
'BEAR WITH US'
Luken said he signed a document minutes before the news
conference declaring the state of emergency, and City Manager John
Shirey authorized the curfew to begin Thursday night.
"We don't like the fact that we have to declare a
curfew," said the mayor, who was flanked by five of the nine city
council members. "For 99.9 percent of the citizens of our city, a curfew
is completely unnecessary. We ask our citizens to bear with us."
It was not immediately clear how the curfew would affect
a planned nighttime town meeting called by Kweisi Mfume, president of
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He had
planned to lead the meeting Thursday night at a church near downtown.
A man interrupted Luken at the news conference to ask
whether the mayor was ready to meet with a group calling itself the New
Black Panthers. He was pulled out of the room after shouting that the
mayor was a "liar."
"That's the kind of incivility we've been dealing with,"
Luken said.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this
report.
Bush: U.S. crew not at fault in China collision WashPost: U.S.
seeks end to Chinese intercepts Mayor declares curfew in
Cincinnati Canadian train derails, hits building Probe begins into
S. Africa stampede MSNBC Cover Page
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