Seth Rosenfeld, S.F. Reporter, Sues FBI to Get Records on Militant Activist
Richard Masato Aoki
by Joe Eskenazi, blogs.sfweekly.com
May 3rd 2011
Nearly 10 years ago, local journalist Seth Rosenfeld garnered fame for his
scathing series "The Campus Files: Reagan, Hoover, and the UC Red Scare," which
uncovered the FBI's conspiracy to harass UC Berkeley students and faculty
during the Cold War. It also detailed the FBI's role in the firing of the
college's then-president, Clark Kerr, because government officials didn't agree
with his politics.
It took court orders for the FBI to turn records over to Rosenfeld, who wrote
the series for the San Francisco Chronicle. And now the famed journalist is
taking the FBI back to court, demanding the agency release more records for a
book he is writing.
But this time Rosenfeld wants "any and all records" pertaining to Richard
Masato Aoki, the infamous militant activist who was at the center of of the
civil rights movement around Berkeley in the 1960s.
Aoki was involved in many activist organizations that were on the FBI's radar
at the time, including the Young Socialist Alliance, the Third World Liberation
Front, and the Black Panther Party. Many of these organizations were being
investigated by the FBI for their involvement in "subversive activities," the
lawsuit states. Aoki died in March 2009 at the age of 70.
Rosenfeld's attorneys argue that the public has the right to know about the
government's relationship with Aoki. Moreover, there is no reason to withhold
that information on the basis of privacy now that Aoki is dead.
Rosenfeld submitted a request for the documents on May 5, 2009, in hopes of
shedding more light on the work of the notorious activist through news articles
and a book. Yet 16 months passed, and after many appeals to the Department of
Justice, the FBI refused to release any records, according to the lawsuit filed
last week in San Francisco.
SF Weekly called Rosenfeld to find out more, but he refused to talk on the
record.
The lawsuit details Rosenfeld's painstaking efforts to get the documents. On
Oct, 1, 2010, the FBI said it would release 1,352 pages, yet it also indicated
that an unknown number of records had been destroyed. The FBI never turned over
all the documents, withholding hundreds of pages.
After several more appeals and Freedom of Information Act requests, the FBI
released only a handful of pages to Rosenfeld.
To date, the FBI has released 1,374 pages, some with deletions, while
withholding 507 pages that had been requested.
Original Page:
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/05/seth_rosenfeld_richard_masato_aoki.php
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