Article: Revisiting the FBI's Dirty War on Black America
opednews.com
The tale of FBI informant Ernest Withers is now well known. He spent
years busily snapping photos of many major civil rights happenings,
actions, and doings of civil rights leaders, most notably Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. He got close-up shots of them because either through
disinterest, Wither's flattery, or simply naivety, they trusted him to
record their sometimes most intimate moments.
While Withers snapped away, he dutifully reported everything he saw and
heard to his FBI handlers.
Withers was hardly an isolated case, of a warped, greedy, low life
Judas. The woods were full of men and women like Withers then. They were
made possible not solely as the standard story line suggests by a
corrupt, paranoid lawless, FBI that was intent on duping, snooping,
hectoring, harassing, disrupting, and generally making life hell for
civil rights leaders, and organizations during the turbulent 1960's. But
because they had the tacit blessing of three PresidentsJohn F. Kennedy,
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon who firmly believed that the battle to
nail domestic subversives -- that is, communists, socialists, black
nationalists, Black Panthers and civil rights leaders, most notably
Martin Luther King Jr. -- justified bending, twisting, and ultimately
breaking the law and violating civil liberties.
There is also ample evidence from the correspondence, internal memos,
and discussions made public by historians and former White House
staffers that Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon knew that moderate civil rights
leaders, such as King, the man who was a particular focus of Wither's
camera lens, posed no real threat to the established order, yet they
still winked and nodded as Hoover launched the super secret and
blatantly illegal counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, that targeted
those leaders as well as thousands of innocent Americans during the
1960s. The mandate of the program, spelled out in the stacks of secret
documents released by Senate investigators in 1976, was to "disrupt,
misdirect, discredit, and neutralize" groups and individuals the FBI
considered politically objectionable. Those targeted in nearly all cases
were not foreign spies, terrorists, or individuals suspected of criminal
acts.
The FBI patterned COINTELPRO on the methods used by its
counterintelligence division and internal security sections during the
1940s and '50s. The arsenal of dirty tactics used by the bureau included
unauthorized wiretaps, undercover plants, agent provocateurs, poison-pen
letters, black-bag jobs, and the compiling of secret dossiers. Driven by
a grotesque mix of personal racism and paranoia, Hoover kicked the
program into high gear in the 1960s. The FBI assembled thousands of
"ghetto informants" like Withers and hundreds of FBI agents in a
relentless campaign to harass and intimidate African-American groups.
The FBI listed the targeted individuals under categories variously
titled Rabble Rouser Index, Agitator Index or Security Index.
The results were immediate and devastating. Thousands lost their jobs,
were expelled from schools, evicted from their homes and offices, and
publicly slandered. Few of those individuals were indicted, convicted or
even accused of any crime. FBI documents released in 1976 revealed that
the agency devoted less than 20 percent of its spy activities to
infiltrating organized crime or to solving bank robberies, murders,
rapes and interstate theft. More than half of its spy targets were
political organizations.
Hoover gave local FBI offices wide discretion to pick and choose their
targets and the tactics they could use. The new guidelines, like the old
FBI spy campaign, give local agents the same wide discretion to
determine what groups or individuals it can investigate and what tactics
they can use to investigate them.
With the death of Hoover in 1972 and congressional disclosure of the
illegal program, the Justice Department assured the public that
COINTELPRO was a thing of the past and that it had implemented ironclad
control over FBI activities. It didn't. During the 1980s, the FBI waged
a five-year covert spy campaign against dozens of religious and pacifist
groups and leaders that opposed American foreign policy in Central
America. In the 1990s it mounted covert campaigns against civil rights,
environmental, and anti-nuclear disarmament groups, as well as against
Native American and Arab-American groups. The FBI tactics used against
those groups were an exact repeat of the tactics that the 1970s
guidelines had supposedly banned.
Bush gave the green light to the FBI in 2002 to again wage a
free-wheeling campaign against those eyed as subversives, this time the
new watchword was "terrorist." The new guidelines again gave the FBI
carte blanche to surveil and plant agents in, churches, mosques and, of
course, political groups. They also permitted FBI agents to ransack the
Internet to hunt for potential subversives. They could do all this
without having to show probable cause of criminal wronging. Just as in
the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the rules gave the FBI unbridled power to
determine who and what groups and individuals it can target.
Withers was a pathetic, and now justly reviled figure who abused the
trust of civil right leaders such as King to lie, distort, sow dissent,
sully the civil rights cause. He didn't succeed. But he and the
thousands like him with the quiet blessing of the White House made
spying, legal and illegal, on its citizens a shameful part of American
life.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He hosts
national Capitol Hill broadcast radio talk show on KTYM Radio Los
Angeles and WFAX Radio Washington D.C. streamed on ktym.com and wfax.com
and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a nationally acclaimed author and political
analyst. He has authored ten books; his articles are published in
newspapers and magazines nationally in the United States. Three of his
books have been published in other (
more...
)
--
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Revisiting-the-FBI-s-Dirty-by-earl-ofari-hut
chin-110220-323.html
Via InstaFetch
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
