Organized Gang Stalking As The Modern FBI COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program)
This post includes five articles:
II. COINTELPRO
IV. http://COINTELPRO- FBI Domestic Intelligence Activities
I. The FBI’s Secret War
Sixty years ago, the FBI launched COINTELPRO. Its mission was simple: destroy the Left.
by Branko Marcetic
“Avenge Fred Hampton” rally in the Boston Common, Massachusetts, 1970. Boston Public Library
The idea that a tyrannical government is secretly plotting against US citizens is a popular and longstanding belief among much of the American far right. The scenario has many variations, but the basics are that politicians, threatened by a potentially rebellious populace, are watching and listening in on them, working to undermine them and readying for the day they will wrench away their freedoms.
But this scenario isn’t merely a paranoid fantasy dreamed up in the deepest corners of the alt-right — it’s relatively recent history. Instead of gun-toting “sovereign citizens” and Confederate-flag-waving patriot groups serving as the targets, however, the US government largely targeted segments of the Left for widespread surveillance, disruption, “neutralization,” and eventually destruction.
This was the COINTELPRO program, whose first operations were launched by the FBI sixty years ago this month.
COINTELPRO, short for “Counter Intelligence Program,” was the name given to a series of programs initiated by the Bureau between 1956 and 1971 aimed at undermining and eradicating groups, movements, and individuals — almost all of which were part of the Left — it viewed as threats to national security and social order.
By the time the FBI formally shut down the program, it had successfully torn apart many of these left-wing groups and movements. In the process, the Bureau destroyed the reputations, and in some cases lives, of many.
The history of COINTELPRO shows how far a nominally democratic government can go to shut down leftist movements it views as threatening — and what kind of pushback we might expect in response to a movement upsurge in the twenty-first century.
Origins in Hysteria
COINTELPRO had its origins in the anticommunist fervor of the mid-twentieth century. When COINTELPRO began in 1956, anticommunist hysteria was at its height. The FBI, like many government agencies, began seeing the hand of the Soviet Union in every protest movement, every act of resistance.
This sense of embattlement only increased as the years went on. In the 1960s and 1970s, opposition to the Vietnam War, segregation, and other injustices lit a fire under a number of diverse protest movements which began to challenge what many ordinary Americans — and their government — viewed as the basic precepts of their way of life.
The FBI quickly came to view the citizens who joined those movements as enemies to be covertly fought and eliminated.
As the Church Committee, a congressional committee set up in 1975 to analyze the excesses of US law enforcement and intelligence agencies over the preceding decades, put it, what followed was “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order.”
Although the FBI was run by the infamously paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, this was not just his pet project. Officials at the highest levels of government were aware of COINTELPRO and approved its continuation. The FBI as a whole dove headfirst into the project.
As Clarence Kelley, Hoover’s successor, told Congress in 1971 following the public exposure of the program: “For the FBI to have done less under the circumstances would have been an abdication of its responsibilities to the American people.”
He went on:
. . .situations have occurred in the past and will arise in the future where the Government may well be expected to depart from its traditional role . . . and take affirmative steps which are needed to meet an imminent threat to human life or property.
What were the threats that bedeviled the FBI during these decades? The Bureau launched successful attacks against racist hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan (though only after President Lyndon Johnson demanded that they do so, and never with the zeal with which it pursued leftists).
But the bulk of its efforts were devoted to “disrupting” and “neutralizing,” to use its own parlance, law-abiding groups on the broad left. This meant, firstly, the Communist Party USA, the inaugural target of COINTELPRO in 1956, as well as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
It also encompassed the Puerto Rican independence movement, the American Indian Movement, and what the Bureau termed “militant black nationalist groups,” a misleading rubric under which it placed groups as diverse as the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Martin Luther King, and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
Along with these, one of the major targets of the Bureau during this time was the New Left, whose members the Bureau believed were “getting strength and more brazen in their attempts to destroy American society,” and needed to be “destroyed or neutralized from the inside.”
Much of its ire was directed at the Students for a Democratic Society, the largest student group in the country that organized around issues like opposition to the Vietnam War and racism. In the Bureau’s view, they simply worked “constantly in furtherance of the aims and objectives of the Communist Party throughout the nation.”
Unsurprisingly, in the FBI’s quest to crush all forms of domestic dissent, it also came to target groups and individuals that were not associated with any of these movements, either institutionally or ideologically.
Bringing the War Home
COINTELPRO was a product of the Cold War in more ways than one. As the Church Committee’s final report pointed out, COINTELPRO had its roots “in the Bureau’s jurisdiction to investigate hostile foreign intelligence activities on American soil.”
Just as military equipment and technology is routinely used today against US citizens, the FBI turned the wartime tactics it had used against the Soviet Union on domestic groups.
As William C. Sullivan, former assistant to the FBI director, put it:
[The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate. This is a rough, tough business.
The bread and butter of COINTELPRO operations was the use of wiretaps, anonymous letters, informants, and other means of subterfuge to, in the Bureau’s own words, “foster factionalism” and create suspicion within groups, bring individuals “into disrepute before the American public,” and create “disruption and discord” among such groups and movements in order to destroy the Left, or at least render it useless.
Creating internal strife was key to the Bureau’s success. As one 1956 memo regarding the Communist Party explained, harassment from the outside “might serve only to bring the various factions together,” whereas “forcing and fostering from within the internal fight currently raging” would help destroy the organization while avoiding the appearance of government interference.
To do this, the FBI used a variety of methods. Often, paid informants would infiltrate a group and bring up “controversial issues” or raise “acrimonious debates” in order to spark conflict. Other times, the Bureau would plant falsified evidence suggesting that a particular individual was a CIA informant, fostering suspicion.
Such was the case with one Communist Party official who was subsequently expelled from the party, as well as Stokely Carmichael, who was exiled from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and denounced by the Black Panthers not long after he attempted to bring the two groups together.
Because of the New Left’s perceived immunity to shame and ridicule, the Bureau believed framing members as government informants was “the only thing that could cause these individuals concern.”
Anonymous letters were a staple of COINTELPRO. Individuals would open their mail and find letters that appeared to be written by anyone from members of allied organizations and movements to colleagues and rivals, usually containing misleading information intended to create or exacerbate rifts. This was the Bureau’s method of choice to widen the split between rival factions of the Black Panthers, for instance, as well as to create the impression that the Black Panthers were anti-Semitic.
The mailing of letters may not sound particularly sinister, but the practice had a chilling effect. In one 1964 memo, the FBI celebrated that its campaign of anonymous letters against the Puerto Rican independence movement had contributed to the heart attack of one of its leaders.
“It is clear . . . that our anonymous letter has seriously disrupted the [Puerto Rican independence movement] ranks and created a climate of distrust and dissension from which it will take them some time to recover,” the memo read.
The FBI also used the letters in an attempt to incite murder. In 1969, the Bureau sent an anonymous letter to the leader of the Blackstone Rangers, a Chicago street gang then allied with the Black Panthers, alleging that Black Panther leader Fred Hampton had taken out a hit on him.
In a memo, an FBI official stated his hope that the letter would “disrupt the BPP [Black Panther Party] or lead to reprisals against its leadership,” acknowledging that “violent type activity — shooting and the like — is second nature” to the Rangers.
The same year, the Bureau celebrated its accomplishments in its COINTELPRO against the Black Panthers: “Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego . . . a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this program.”
The FBI even attempted (unsuccessfully) to commit murder by proxy through “Operation Hoodwink,” in which the FBI used anonymous letters to pit La Cosa Nostra — the Mafia — against the Communist Party.
The Bureau’s other main tool to “neutralize” what it viewed as threats was digging up damaging or embarrassing information about its targets. Worried by the “increasing boldness” of the Puerto Rican independence movement, the coverage given to their cause by Fidel Castro, and the “inevitable communist and/or Soviet efforts to embarrass the United States” over the issue, the FBI began investigating the movement’s leaders.
“We must have information concerning their weaknesses, morals, criminal records, spouses, children, family life, educational qualifications, and personal activities,” one memo read.
To get such information, the FBI did not rely on subtlety. Between 1960 and 1966, the FBI carried out more than ninety burglaries of Socialist Workers Party offices, photographing over eight thousand pages of personal files like letters and financial records. Such break-ins were standard procedure against dozens of New Left groups.
The Bureau was more than happy to simply invent scurrilous stories to defame its targets.
In 1962, it planted five disinformational news stories about the SCLC’s communist connections, and had news articles and editorials involving gossip about Puerto Rican Independence Movement leaders’ sex lives and finances printed.
In St Louis, it created and distributed a fake underground newspaper that spread tales of infidelity by local black leaders and activists and sent letters spreading similar sexual gossip about the reverend Charles Koen, a longtime SNCC activist.
Particularly shameful was the episode involving the actress Jean Seberg, who donated money to the Black Panthers. As well as wiretapping and following her, the FBI decided to destroy her reputation by circulating gossip that her unborn baby had been the product of an affair with a member of the Black Panthers. The LA Times and Newsweek both ran the made-up story.
When Seberg read it, she attempted suicide, resulting in the stillbirth of her baby. According to her partner, she attempted suicide every year near the anniversary of the baby’s death, eventually succeeding on August 30, 1979.
As in Seberg’s case, the media was complicit in the FBI’s operations. Much like the intelligence officials today who leverage the anonymity granted to them by reporters to make a raft of claims that go unchallenged, the FBI regularly relied on friendly newspapers and publications to disseminate these lies.
In one case, the Bureau helped develop a documentary on the black liberation movement and New Left in the Miami area, later gushing about how the television station had, of its own accord, filmed and edited interview subjects to portray them in the most unflattering way possible.
Unsurprisingly, COINTELPRO also ensnared individuals who were far from the radicals that obsessed the Bureau.
During the 1960s, the FBI targeted the entire Unitarian Society of Cleveland because some its members had called for the abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), tried to block the city council campaign of a lawyer who had defended accused communists in court, and attempted to force a raid on a Democratic Party fundraiser because two of the Democratic candidates attending had been in involved in antiwar and anti-HUAC activities.
At times, its actions could be remarkably petty. When the Soviet Union gifted a group of horses to the head of the CPUSA, the FBI had a vet secretly sterilize them. They investigated a girl who had called the local youth branch of the SWP to get information for a social studies project, and arranged for a Boy Scout troop to lose its charter after the scoutmaster, whose wife was an SWP member, said he believed the Scouts were a better way to influence young minds than joining the organization.
Occasionally, the Bureau’s methods approached a goofiness that stands out among its more sinister methods. In 1968, having heard that the rise of the New Left had produced “a yen for magic,” the Bureau developed a plan to harass its leaders by sending them anonymous messages with symbols that could be interpreted as having “a mystical, sinister meaning,” like scorpions, cobras, and beetles. In another instance, the FBI proposed using a stink bomb to shut down the Black Panther newspaper’s production facility.
Preventing an American “Mau Mau”
Of all the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, none were as vicious as those carried out against various civil rights organizations.
Of all the movements of this period, the FBI viewed civil rights organizers as the greatest threat of all. According to an internal FBI document produced in 1963, civil rights protests were a threat to the “established order,” and Martin Luther King Jr a dangerous radical who had to be stopped.
Not long after King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the assistant to the FBI director wrote: “We must mark [King] now, if we have not before, as the most dangerous Negro in the future of this Nation . . . it may be unrealistic to limit [our actions against King] to legalistic proofs that would stand up in court or before Congressional Committees.”
The FBI followed this up with a program of eavesdropping, IRS harassment, and anti-King propaganda, culminating in the production of a compilation tape of the most damning secret recordings of King, including his affairs.
Two days after being announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Bureau sent the tape to King along with a letter, written from the point of view of a black member of the civil rights movement, calling him a “filthy, abnormal beast” who engaged in “sexual orgies,” and threatening to release the tape if he didn’t kill himself.
By the late 1960s, with the rise of more militant figures like Malcolm Xand groups like the Black Panthers, the Bureau was even more concerned. A 1968 memo outlined the stakes, as the FBI saw them.
“An effective coalition of black nationalist groups” — which, by the FBI’s definition, included virtually every civil rights organization — “might be the first step toward a real ‘Mau Mau’ in America, the beginning of a true black revolution,” it read, referring to the 1950s anticolonial rebellion in British Kenya.
The same memo noted that one of the goals of the COINTELPRO against such groups was to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement.”
Malcom X could’ve been one, the memo noted, had he not been assassinated (something the FBI privately took credit for, after having exacerbated a factional split in the Nation of Islam), as could Martin Luther King, “should he abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to ‘white, liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism.”
One year later, Chicago police raided the apartment of Fred Hampton, the twenty-one-year-old charismatic chairman of the Chicago Black Panther Party, killing him in the process. (This was the same Fred Hampton whom the FBI had previously tried to goad a local gang into assassinating).
The police fired ninety bullets into the apartment using submachine guns, shotguns, a rifle, and a pistol, which subsequent analysis showed were mostly aimed at Hampton’s bed. Although police claimed the Panthers had opened fire first, later evidence proved this to be false.
The FBI played a key role in what was essentially an assassination of a popular, rising black leader. Hampton’s bodyguard, William O’Neal, was an FBI informant who provided the Bureau with the floor plan for Hampton’s apartment, who then passed it on to the Chicago Police Department.
The COINTELPRO against the Black Panthers, part of the FBI’s wider “Racial Intelligence” program, spanned many years and methods. The group, with its growing popularity and penchant for carrying guns and standing up against police violence, was a particular bugbear for the Bureau. Of the 295 COINTELPRO operations launched against the FBI’s broad definition of black nationalist groups, 233 targeted the Panthers.
The Bureau, for instance, worked to destroy the Black Panthers’ breakfast program, which provided free breakfasts for school children. The FBI manufactured a violent and racist coloring book for children that it claimed was made by the Black Panthers, which it sent to the businesses donating food to the program in order to make them withdraw their support. It also wrote anonymous letters to the churches that served as venues for the breakfast program, hoping to lead them to rescind their offer.
Aside from its usual tricks aimed at fomenting suspicion and conflict within the organization, the FBI also embarked on a program of baseless raids and arrests of Panther members that didn’t just disrupt the group, but financially crippled it.
According to the Panthers’ attorney, between 1967 and 1969, the party spent over $200,000 (around $1.3 million in today’s dollars) on bail bond premiums alone.
The Bureau was wildly successful. By the early 1970s, the Black Panther Party effectively ceased to be, crumpling under the weight of paranoia, internal strife, jailings and assassinations, and financial pressure.
The Black Panthers weren’t the only ones. CPUSA membership, hitting a peak of eighty-five thousand in 1942 — well below the near-apocalyptic levels the FBI made it out to be, but far from insignificant — dropped to less than 2,800 by the late 1960s.
The New Left likewise splintered under the pressure of its own many divisions. These groups fell apart for multiple reasons, but the FBI’s sustained campaign to destroy them played a large role.
A History of Subversion
The traditional interpretation of COINTELPRO pegs it as an aberration in the history of the FBI and US government. For a few decades, the thinking goes, caught up in the paranoia of the time, the nation’s top law enforcement agency went rogue, turning its formidable powers and resources on the American people.
This ignores much of the preceding and subsequent history of the Bureau.
In truth, from its earliest days, when it investigated and arrested what it viewed as dangerous radicals during World War I and the red scare of 1919–1920, a significant part of the FBI’s role has been to act as something of a corrective against what it views as dangerous political extremes.
Even after the first red scare, the Bureau continued to monitor and harass communists, striking workers, and civil rights groups like the NAACP. As the Church Committee put it, “COINTELPRO existed for years on an ‘ad hoc’ basis before the formal programs were instituted, and more significantly, COINTELPRO-type activities may continue today under the rubric of ‘investigation.’”
And while it dropped the name after 1971, when the program was supposedly shut down after being exposed to the public, the FBI continued to engage in COINTELPRO-style activities long after.
To get a sense of how little has changed, consider the FBI today. The Bureau now spends an inordinate amount of time and resources paying or otherwise bribing criminals into becoming paid informers, and using them to goad and entrap young, poor, and sometimes mentally handicapped Muslim men into carrying out terrorist attacks they would neither have the wherewithal nor intention of otherwise committing.
Since 2014, at least eighty-eight people have been arrested on charges of supporting ISIS, many of which had little or no connection to the terrorist group. That doesn’t even count those arrested on more generic terrorism charges, typically in plots the FBI themselves have created.
This is a continuation of methods the FBI pioneered during the COINTELPRO years, when the Bureau regularly paid provocateurs to infiltrate student protesters and urge violence.
These individuals would push for bombings or the murder of police, provide students with weapons and explosive-making ingredients, give them guidance and training for carrying out such actions, and ultimately serve as the justification for raids and arrests of such groups by police.
In one case, an informant who “constantly talked violence, carried a grenade in his car, showed students how to use an M-1 rifle and offered advice on how to carry out bombings” led his followers to bomb a building, exposing him in the aftermath. He was cleared of all charges and later became a policeman. In another, the FBI informant was so unhinged, the group he was trying to goad into violence reported him to the local police.
Many such incidents from this period are nearly indistinguishable from the FBI’s antics today, if you replace the word “student” with “Muslim.”
Sixty years on from COINTELPRO, there’s not much reason to believe the FBI isn’t engaging in similar tactics today, particularly with reports that the Bureau has tracked and monitored Black Lives Matter protesters.
Advances in technology, however, allowing governments to peer into our personal lives like never before, make the prospect of a modern-day COINTELPRO distinctly frightening.
With a number of leftist movements beginning to spring up again all around the United States, it’s worth thinking about whether a surge in social movements could also see the full-blown revival of a campaign of dirty tricks by the FBI or another government agency. It might seem unthinkable. But then again, once upon a time, so did COINTELPRO.
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II. COINTELPRO
“Washington is using American-style Stasi methods…I thought this era had ended when the DDR fell…”
–Markus Ferber, German Member of European Parliament on NSA PRISM scandal
As the primary author of this site, I have been writing about and living the gang stalking phenomenon, which I believe to be the FBI’s largest COINTELPRO, for years. Advances in government surveillance technology, as well as, the breaking down of traditional barriers between the military and domestic law enforcement functions through anti-terrorism legislation, have broadened COINTELPRO. The creation of DHS has also given the new COINTELPRO more muscle, the local law enforcement “intelligence units” still play a big role in the COINTELPRO game. I have written articles on Nowpublic including “FBI FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT REQUEST”, and “DOJ KNOWS ABOUT GANG STALKING”, in an attempt to demonstrate that the FBI and DOJ are aware of gang stalking, and, more importantly, to attempt to persuade readers to use the federal freedom of information act “FOIA” to put pressure on these agencies to reveal what they know about gang stalking.
Firstly, this is not merely conjecture that the government is involved. Perhaps breaking down the modus operandi of gang stalking vis-a-vis COINTELPRO best makes my point in chief. According to the COINTELPRO literature (which I will elaborate on later), and, the most cited book on the web on gang stalking, David Lawson’s Cause Stalking, the formula as applied to groups and individuals in COINTELPRO, and, individuals in gang stalking is this:
COINTELPRO GANG STALKING
IDENTIFY IDENTIFY
DISRUPT VILIFY
DESTABILIZE NULLIFY
NEUTRALIZE DESTROY
Assuming a person had little idea of what COINTELPRO was, but, as a gang stalking victim, had a good understanding of what gang stalking is, the first place one could look for information on COINTELPRO is a Google search and a full reading of the Wikipedia page on COINTELPRO. One could further delve into the subject by doing a Google search of “political control technologies”, this is what the Europeans call COINTELPRO-style tactics. Also revealing would be a search on the Royal Canadian Mounted Police “VIP” program. This series of internet searches and a couple of hours perusing the results would familiarize anyone enough to make their own determination about the haunting similarity of political policing and gang stalking. More revealing would be reading The Cointelpro Papers by Churchill and Vander Wall which uses dozens of original FBI memo’s and teletypes (obtained through FOIA) to show how the government identified, disrupted, destabilized, and, finally, neutrilazed countless individuals and dozens of groups. This was conducted on most individuals and groups based on politics and not because of any actual or suspected criminality (i.e., political policing).
The Cointelpro Papers analyzes non-criminal groups targeted including the Socialists, Communists, New Left, Anti-War Movement, American indian Movement, and, Black Liberation Movement. It also discusses the targeting of Martin Luther King, Jr., and other less known activists who were nullified. The book also discusses principled pushback from FBI Field Office supervisors promptly squashed by J. Edgar Hoover and the domestic Washington Consensus. The government’s own version written by the Church Committe is available in paperback and is called Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans: 1976 U.S. Senate Report on Illegal Wiretaps and Domestic Spying by FBI, CIA and NSA (ISBN: 9781934941218). Of course, the Church Committee analyzed the COINTELPRO problem (i.e., government gang stalking) and came to the conclusion that lack of supervision was the problem. True to form, over three decades later no effective legislation has been passed to curb the problem the congress found to be illegal.
As for the FBI’s claim in sworn congressional testimony of abandoning COINTELPRO tactics, true to form, they lied. In 2001, the FBI, acting on a rumor and some weak circumstantial evidence, used COINTELPRO to destroy the life and career of Dr. Steven Hatfill. This was largely based on a rumor spread by an interested colleague that Hatfill was the anthrax mailer in 2001. The trial evidence showed that the full court press FBI gang stalking campaign even included dangerous tailgaiting and assault. Hatfill had zero privacy for years. The former U.S. attorney representing Hatfill described the FBI’s behavior as a McCarthy-style witch hunt. When the real anthrax mailer, another government scientist, was found to be the culprit, the FBI settled the case for $5.8 million. Another anthrax suspect, Dr. Bruce Ivins, was also subjected to a full court press by the FBI and effectively “suicided”. He was alienated by friends, family, and co-workers after the FBI made it known he was suspected in the domestic anthrax attacks.
Perhaps, the film the U.S. v. John Lennon is the most poignant illustration of politically motivated persecution. After donating $50,000 to the Black Panther Party in the late 1960’s Lennon became the target of a full blown FBI COINTELPRO (i.e., government gang stalking) campaign. Of course, he never moved, fought deportation successfully, and was ironically gunned down by a mentally ill postal worker from Hawaii. Besides Lawson’s book I think everyone should read Bridging the Gap, and Closing the Gap by GMB Bailey which highlight the snitch culture and informant misuse that pervades activities like gang stalking. Here is the link: https://www.smashwords.com/extreader/read/23863/2/bridging-the-gap .
One can approximate a complete shift in paradigm in the very structure of policing on the federal, state, and local level back to the “War on Drugs” and the creation of the DEA in the Nixon Administration. The first important thing to note about the war on drugs, is that, it is an endless war. Even in police states with expedited executions, the drug trade can not be eliminated. At bottom, it is a war against the poor, but, that is another story. The paradigm shift engendered by the war on drugs was one of a basically passive policing of crimes to an active crime management system. This was accomplished through a system of dealing between authorities and snitches. The snitch, and, his close cousin, the undercover narc, became the pillars of the criminal “justice” system. The abuses of this satanic pact are well covered. What is not so well articulated is that a wider range of policing systems that were given birth by this hideous marriage of convenience. This system which rendered de facto minority control of crime syndicates to police via their immunized, operational snitches created a foundation for more widespread abuses and social engineering controls, example par excellence, the inevitable gang stalking cointelpro phenomenon.
Who are the villains/cowards/derelicts? The people at the helm of the Justice system from the Attorney General to the U.S. Attorney’s Offices to the directors of the federal police down to the local police chief’s and county sheriffs.
Gang Stalking is an active 24/7/365 nationwide Program. Given the intensity of the harassment, the countless thousands of victim reports, the fact that it is happening not only in large cities, but, in rural towns and gated communities, the Program can only be funded by the federal government. Many gang stalking activities are carried out by criminals. An excellent example is the admission made to me by a NCVC victim advocate stating that the only confirmed cases of gang stalking are those performed by “Mafia personnel” against potential witnesses that they believe will be entering the federal Witness Protection Program. The fact that much, if not most, gang stalking is performed by criminal groups, for their own purposes, does not make gang stalking a private Program. For the reasons stated above, the totality of activities that is being referred to as gang stalking, can only be being funded by the federal government. The same logical deduction could have been made regarding the original COINTELPRO Program. The federal government has simply hijacked the already existing practice of gang stalking, and made it into a well funded federal Program, with the intention of using gang stalking targets as human bait to grease the rails for a federal civil rights conspiracy case against the traditional enemies of Washington such as organized crime.
“Gang stalking groups” have a substantially identical modus operandi to the FBI’s Special Surveillance Groups or “SSG’s”. These SSG’s were developed in the 1970’s to combat Soviet espionage. Today, these tactics have been taught to criminals, through FBI channels, for domestic COINTELPRO operations against American citizens. Anyone familiar with gang stalking will immediately understand the striking similarity by reviewing the following NPR links on SSG’s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P0UibgHIZg
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92207687
http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/surveillance/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Surveillance_Group
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Spying_on_spy_Raw_Story_interviews_0612.html
Unlike workplace mobbing which has been given some academic attention, and, is actually against the law in some places, gang stalking/community-based harassment is a crime avoided by credible sources in academia and media. The same basic principles apply. In a workplace mobbing (legally known as “constructive termination”) case the office is the center of systematic harassment. Most people quit or file a lawsuit. With organized group stalking there is no escape. It is a full court press seeking to destroy the targeted individual’s life. It is identical to COINTELPRO and all facets of the targets life are turned hostile to them. This is the creation of a hostile living environment. Infiltration of family, work, friends, associates, and, just about every aspect of the target’s life is manipulated using advanced behavioral science. It is inconceivable that anyone with a more than cursory knowledge of COINTELPRO could believe that these similarities could be attributed to anything but the involvement of the FBI.
All gang stalking targets experience an updated and refined version of McCarthy era blacklisting. This involves being hired, then, soon after, being subject to a hostile work environment, resulting in actual or constructive termination. Because of the sheer number of employers involved in this nefarious practice against gang stalking targets, as well as the fact that employers ranging from small businesses to large multinationals are involved, this neo-blacklisting can only be being orchestrated by the FBI, as was the case with McCarthyism. Unlike McCarthyism, neo-blacklisting, with its use of a hostile wok environment leading to actual or constructive termination, is not subject to the inference that a blacklisted target is being subject to defamation leading to un-employability, because they are indeed hired, then promptly set up for failure. Gang stalking targets’ “employment problems” start at the same time as their gang stalking starts. Most gang stalking targets, similar to victims of workplace mobbing, are actually better than average workers in their occupations.
I think the only way to break through the conspiracy theory label planted upon us by the mainstream media, as willing lapdog to government, is to focus on the basic commonalities of gang stalking. Gang stalking is merely a street name for Cointelpro tactics being used to silence and destroy political enemies and others targeted by the government using criminal tactics. Firstly, most individuals who are gang stalked are too hung up on why they fell into the trap. This is a nationwide, programmatic system being used as an alternative to direct law enforcement Cointelpro campaigns. Both the targeted individuals and the gang stalking groups are a means to a political end. By training snitches in Cointelpro tactics the establishment distances itself from illegal activities and gets to use these social engineering techniques in a more and more arbitrary way. This is the ultimate abuse of the snitch culture. Given its history, the FBI has used these techniques on political dissidents, judges, members of Congress, etc. In all liklihood, prominent left wing professors have experienced this, as well as journalists. These people are keeping quiet, in part, not to be labeled as conspiracy nuts.
We are all in this together, subject to a well trained and organized army of interlocking goon squads from sea to shining sea. The way to bring this mainstream is to focus on the fact that gang stalking IS COINTELPRO! There is a rich historical archive, well analyzed, that reveals what Cointelpro was in an earlier phase. The National Archives in Washington, D.C. has over 50,000 pages of declassified documents from the Church Committee hearings on domestic balckbag Cointelpro-style operations by the intelligence agencies (the bulk of which was illegal FBI activities directed against domestic political “enemies”). When the FBI decided to commandeer and train a national snitch network to farm out its blackbag operations, and, to use broad social engineering techniques to ensnare its political enemies, gang stalking was born.
See:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=COINTELPRO&defid=6660861
But this theory of our government is wholly different from the practical fact. The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: ‘Your money, or your life.’ And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat. The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the roadside, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful. The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a ‘protector,’ and that he takes men’s money against their will, merely to enable him to ‘protect’ those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful ‘sovereign,’ on account of the ‘protection’ he affords you. He does not keep ‘protecting’ you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villanies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.
–Lysander Spooner, American Philosopher
Suggested Reading:
COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall
Open using a new tab or window. The document is almost 500 pages and may take some time to load, depending on your computer.
http://www.krusch.com/books/kennedy/Cointelpro_Papers.pdf
AARC Public Library Contents Church Committee Reports
http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/church/contents_church_reports.htm
KGB DEFECTOR EXPLAINS SUBVERSION A.K.A. “ZERSETZUNG”
WILLIAM BINNEY ON THE “AMERICAN STASI” STATE:
The Ordeal of Larry Klayman, Esq.
Larry Klayman is a high-profile conservative attorney, and former Justice Department attorney. He was one of the first attorneys to initiate a lawsuit against the NSA for illegal spying on Americans. He has since then been subjected to COINTELPRO:
http://rt.com/usa/klayman-nsa-lawsuit-surveillance-388/
“I think they are messing with me,” Klayman told the court, according to Judge Leon’s memorandum from Monday.
Klayman told the court that “he and his clients had received inexplicable text message and emails, not to mention a disk containing a spyware program,” Leon wrote (page 39 below).
A transcript of that court hearing will not be made publically available until next year, according to the PACER electronic legal records database. Speaking to the website WND this week, however, Klayman opened up about the type of harassment he claims he was subjected to soon after taking the NSA to court.
“People began receiving from me emails that I had never sent,” the attorney told WND, or World News Daily — a right-leaning website based out of Washington, DC that Klayman has previously contributed to.
“The government just wanted me to know they were watching me,” Klayman claimed.
III. The Surreptitious Reincarnation of COINTELPRO with the COPS Gang-Stalking Program
BY RAHUL D. MANCHANDA, ESQ.
AUG 22, 2016
In 1975 Senator Frank Church convened a joint senatorial/congressional inquiry into the egregious human rights and civil liberties violations of the Central Intelligence Agency (“CIA”), National Security Agency (“NSA”), as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) against people both foreign and domestic. Such blatant transgressions included the “neutralization” and “elimination” of political dissidents, “enemies of the state,” real or imagined threats to National Security, and anyone else on the proverbial shit list of the Military Industrial Complex (“MIC”).
The Church Committee was the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church (D ID) in 1975. A precursor to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee investigated intelligence gathering for illegality by the aforementioned agencies after certain activities had been revealed by the Watergate affair.
Some famous examples which have since emerged include:
(1) the FBI sending letters to Martin Luther King Jr encouraging him to kill himself or else they would tell the world about his sexual proclivities;
(2) the planned or successful assassinations of foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and countless other South American, Middle Eastern or Asian leaders;
(3) the wholesale undermining of entire foreign economies if they democratically elected someone at odds with the elite power structure deep state of the United States such as what occurred against Salvatore Allende of Guatemala;
(4) the possible assassination of John F Kennedy;
(5) revelations of Christopher Pyle in January 1970 of the U.S. Army’s spying on the civilian population;
(6) the December 22, 1974 New York Times article by Seymour Hersh detailing operations engaged in by the CIA over the years that had been dubbed the “family jewels,” involving covert action programs involving assassination attempts against foreign leaders and covert attempts to subvert foreign governments were reported for the first time;
(7) efforts by intelligence agencies to collect information on the political activities of US citizens; and
(8) countless other examples, both overseas and domestically.
The end result of the Church Committee Hearings was the outright banning on CIA assassinations as well as the FBI/DOJ COINTELPRO gang-stalking programs. In 1975 and 1976, the Church Committee published fourteen reports on various U.S. intelligence agencies’ formation, operations, and the alleged abuses of law and of power that they had committed, with recommendations for reform, some of which were later put in place.
Among the other matters investigated were attempts to assassinate other foreign leaders such as Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, the Diem brothers of Vietnam, Gen. René Schneider of Chile, and Director of CIA Allen Dulles’s plan (approved by President Dwight Eisenhower) to use the Sicilian Mafia to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba.
Under recommendations and pressure by this committee, President Gerald Ford issued Executive Order 11905 (ultimately replaced in 1981 by President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333) to ban U.S. sanctioned assassinations of foreign leaders.
Together, the Church Committee’s reports have been said to constitute the most extensive review of intelligence activities ever made available to the public. Much of the contents were classified, but over 50,000 pages were declassified under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.
The Church Committee learned that beginning in the 1950s, the CIA and FBI intercepted, opened, and photographed more than 215,000 pieces of mail by the time the program was shut down. The Church report found that the CIA was zealous about keeping the US Postal Service from learning that mail was being opened by government agents. CIA agents moved mail to a private room to open the mail or in some cases opened envelopes at night after stuffing them in briefcases or coat pockets to deceive postal officials.
On May 9, 1975, the Church Committee called CIA director William Colby. That same day Ford’s top advisers (Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Philip W. Buchen, and John Marsh) drafted a recommendation that Colby be authorized to brief only rather than testify, and that he would be told to discuss only the general subject, with details of specific covert actions to be avoided except for realistic hypotheticals. But the Church Committee had full authority to call a hearing and require Colby’s testimony. Ford and his top advisers met with Colby to prepare him for the hearing.
The Ford administration, particularly Rumsfeld, was “concerned” about the effort by members of the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House to curtail the power of U.S. intelligence agencies. It seemed that Rumsfeld et al was comfortable giving the power to arbitrarily destroy anyone as “enemies of the state” by anyone working in the IC and MIC.
COINTELPRO (COunter INTELligence PROgram) was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted by the FBI aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic “political dissidents.”
FBI records show that COINTELPRO resources targeted groups and individuals that the FBI deemed subversive, including anti Vietnam War organizers, activists of the Civil Rights Movement or Black Power movement (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Panther Party), feminist organizations, anti colonial movements (such as Puerto Rican independence groups like the Young Lords), and a variety of organizations that were part of the broader New Left.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover issued directives on COINTELPRO, ordering FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, neutralize or otherwise eliminate” the activities of these movements and especially their leaders. Under Hoover, the agent in charge of COINTELPRO was William C. Sullivan.
Tactics included anonymous phone calls, IRS audits, and the creation of documents that would divide their targets internally. After the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Hoover singled out King as a major target for COINTELPRO. Under pressure from Hoover to focus on King, Sullivan wrote: “In the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech, we must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.”
The Final Report of the Select Frank Church Committee blasted the behavior 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. 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.”
According to attorney Brian Glick in his book War at Home, the FBI used four main methods during COINTELPRO:
(1) Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents;
(2) Psychological warfare: The FBI and police used myriad “dirty tricks” to undermine progressive movements. They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated or strong armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials and others to cause trouble for activists. They used bad jacketing to create suspicion about targeted activists, sometimes with lethal consequences;
(3) Harassment via the legal system: The FBI and police abused the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, “investigative” interviews, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters;
(4) Illegal force: The FBI conspired with local police departments to threaten dissidents; to conduct illegal break ins in order to search dissident homes; and to commit vandalism, assaults, beatings and assassinations. The object was to frighten or eliminate dissidents and disrupt their movements.
The FBI specifically developed tactics intended to heighten tension and hostility between various factions in their targeted groups and individuals, and this resulted in numerous deaths, among which were San Diego Black Panther Party members John Huggins, Bunchy Carter and Sylvester Bell.
While COINTELPRO was officially terminated in April 1971, critics allege that continuing FBI actions indicate that post COINTELPRO reforms did not succeed in ending COINTELPRO tactics.
ENTER THE “COPS” FEDERAL AND STATE SANCTIONED GANG-STALKING PROGRAM
“Community Oriented Policing,” (“COPS”) is a strategy of policing that focuses on police “building ties and working closely with members of the communities,” and originated in 1994 when then Senator Joseph Biden wrote and then President Bill Clinton enacted the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (“VCCLEA”) establishing the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (“COPS”) within the US Department of Justice.
Community policing is supposedly a policy that requires police to engage in a “proactive approach” to address public safety concerns, and is a cornerstone of the Clinton Administration, gaining its funding from the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.
Common implementations of community policing include: (1) relying on community based crime prevention by utilizing “civilian education,” neighborhood watch, and a variety of other techniques, as opposed to relying solely on police patrols; (2) restructuring the patrol from an emergency response based system to emphasizing proactive techniques such as foot patrol; (3) increased officer accountability to civilians they are “supposed to serve;” and (4) decentralizing police authority, allowing more discretion amongst lower ranking officers, and more initiative expected from them.
In other words, federal and state sanctioned and approved GANG-STALKING.
Gang Stalking has been described as fascism, using East Germany style “Stasi Tactics,” a systemic form of control, which seeks to control every aspect of a “Targeted Individual’s” life. Gang Stalking has many similarities to workplace mobbing, but takes place outside in the community, where the target is followed around and placed under surveillance by groups of organized civilian spies/snitches 24/7, 365 days a year. Targeted Individuals are harassed in this way for months or years before they realize that they are being targeted by an organized program of gang-stalking harassment. This is very similar to what happened to many innocent individuals in the former East Germany or activists and dissidents in the former Soviet Union. Many innocent people in the former East Germany would be targeted for these harassment programs, and then their friends, family, and the community at large would be used to monitor, prosecute, and harass them. In the former USSR it was used by the state to target activists, political dissidents, or anyone that the Secret Police thought was an “enemy of the state,” or as “mentally unfit,” and many were institutionalized or murdered using this form of systematic control.
In Bill Clinton’s COPS Gang-Stalking Program, civilian spies are recruited from every segment of society, and everyone in the “targets” life is made a part of this ongoing, continuous, and systematic form of control and harassment, with such actions that are specifically designed to control the target and to “keep them in line,” like a Pavlovian Dog. These actions are also designed to mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, financially, socially, and psychologically destroy the target over years, to make them appear to be crazy, and leave them with no form of support, whatsoever.
For the targets of this harassment, COPS Gang Stalking is experienced as a covert psychological, emotional and physical attack that is capable of immobilizing and destroying a target over time. For the state, it is a way to keep their targets in line, control them, or ultimately destroy them.
This modern day systematic form of control is funded at the highest levels of government, just like it has in other societies where these similar types of harassment programs have been implemented.
Targets can be chosen for many reasons: (1) political views; (2) whistle blowing; (3) political dissidence; (4) asserting rights at work; (5) making the wrong enemy; (6) too outspoken; (7) investigating something that the state does not want investigated; (8) signing a petition; (9) writing a letter; (10) being “suspicious” by a civilian spy/snitch; or (11) being a religious/ethnic/racial minority.
The goal of the COPS state sanctioned organized gang-stalking program is to isolate the target from all forms of support, so that the target can be set up in the future for arrest, institutionalized, or forced suicide. Other goals of this harassment are to destroy the targets reputation and credibility, and to make the target look “crazy” or unstable.
The process often involves sensitizing the target to every day stimuli’s as a form of control, which is used to control targets when they “get out of line.” Targets of this harassment become vulnerable and destitute, and often become homeless, jobless, have a breakdown, are driven to suicide, similar to targets of the banned COINTELPRO. The government eliminates perceived “enemies of the state” in this manner.
When a target moves or changes jobs, the harassment continues.
Every time the target moves, the same defamation, lies, libel, and slander will be spread, and the systematic harassment will continue. Online defamation, libel, and slander on the internet has made this continuation of COPS gang-stalking a great deal easier.
People from all segments of society can be recruited to be the “eyes and ears” of the state, such as laborers, drug dealers, drug users, street people, prostitutes, punks, church groups, youth groups, your best friend, your lawyer, local policeman, doctor, emergency services, a neighbor, family, social workers, politicians, judges, dentists, vet, supermarket cashier, postman, religious leader, care worker, landlord, anyone.
Most of these recruited civilian spies/snitches do not understand or even care that the end consequence of this harassment protocol is to eventually destroy the targeted person, and function as “useful idiots” of the state sanctioned COPS gang-stalking program.
It has been reported that people participate in this COPS gang stalking because it:
(1) gives them a sense of power;
(2) is a way to make friends;
(3) is something social and fun;
(4) breaks down race/gender/age/social barriers;
(5) is forced or blackmailed upon them by the State or police to take part;
(6) is told to them that they are part of “homeland or national security” to help keep an eye on “dangerous” or “emotionally disturbed” individuals where they are “heroic spies for the state;” (7) is used on local thugs or informants who are already being used for other activities where their energies are diverted into these COPS gangstalking community spy programs; (
8) is either a choice of spying for the State or police, or else go to jail;
(9) involves outright lies and slander about the target to get them to go along with ruining the targets life;
(10) includes average citizens recruited by the state the same way citizens were recruited in the former East Germany and other countries.
Some techniques used against targets in this organized COPS Gang-stalking program include:
(1) classic conditioning where a target is sensitized to everyday stimuli over a period of months and years to harass them in public to let them know they are constantly being harassed and monitored;
(2) 24/7 Surveillance following the target everywhere they go, learning about the target and where they shop, work, play, who their friends and family are, getting close to the target, moving into the community or apartment where they live, across the street, monitoring the targets phone, house, and computer activity;
(3) isolating the target via defamation, libel, and slander campaigns, (eg, people in the target’s community are told that the target is a thief, into drugs, a prostitute, pedophile, crazy, in trouble for something, needs to be watched, false files will even be produced on the target, shown to neighbors, family, store keepers);
(4) constant or intermittent noise and mimicking campaigns disrupting the targets life and sleep with loud power tools, construction, stereos, doors slamming, etc;
(5) talking in public about private things in the target’s life;
(6) mimicking actions of the target and basically letting the target know that they are in the target’s life;
(7) daily interferences, not too overt to the untrained eye, but psychologically degrading and damaging to the target over time;
(8) everyday life breaks and street theater such as flat tires, sleep deprivation, drugging food, putting dirt on targets property;
(9) mass strangers doing things in public to annoy targets such as getting called/text messages to be at a specific time and place to perform a specific action;
(10) blocking targets path, getting ahead of them in line, cutting or boxing them in on the road, saying or doing things to elicit a response from the target;
(11) “baiting” tactics where a surveillance operation can selectively capture evidence of a targeted person responding to harassment, and then that evidence could then be used to justify the initiation of more formal scrutiny by a government agency.
The COPS Gang-Stalking Program, as all other state sanctioned/approved gang-stalking programs, have always been funded by the Government. They are the only ones with enough money, coordination, and power to keep such a system in place. These coordinated efforts then join hands with others for this systemic form of control and harassment.
Such operations have nothing to do with the target’s criminality – they are led and perpetrated by federal agents and intelligence/security contractors, often with the support of state and local law enforcement personnel. Unofficial operations of this type are often private investigators and vigilantes – including many former agents and police officers, sometimes on behalf of corporate clients and others with connections to the public and private elements of America’s security industry.
The goal of such operations is “disruption” of the life of an individual deemed to be an enemy (or potential enemy) of clients or members of the security state. Arguably, the most accurate term for this form of harassment would be “counterintelligence stalking.”
Agents of communist East Germany’s Stasi (state police) referred to this process as Zersetzung (German for “decomposition” or “corrosion” – a reference to the severe psychological, social, and financial effects upon the victim). Victims have described the process as “no touch torture” – a phrase which also captures the nature of the crime: cowardly, unethical (and often illegal), but difficult to prove legally, because it generates minimal forensic evidence.
Tactics include online and personal slander, libel, defamation, blacklisting, “mobbing” (intense, organized harassment in public), “black bag jobs” (residential break ins), abusive phone calls, computer hacking, framing, threats, blackmail, vandalism, “street theater” (staged physical and verbal interactions with the minions of the people who orchestrate the stalking), harassment by noises, and other forms of bullying.
Such stalking is sanctioned (and in some cases, orchestrated) by federal agencies; however such stalking is also sometimes used unofficially for personal and corporate vendettas by current and former corrupt employees of law enforcement and intelligence agencies, private investigators, and their clients.
Since counterintelligence stalking goes far beyond surveillance – into the realm of psychological terrorism, as it is essentially a form of extrajudicial punishment. As such, the harassment is illegal – even when done by the government. It clearly violates the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unwarranted searches, and the Sixth Amendment which guarantees the right to a trial. Such operations also violate similar fundamental rights defined by state constitutions. Stalking is also specifically prohibited by the criminal codes of every state in America.
As was stated above, organized stalking methods were used extensively by communist East Germany’s Stasi (state police) as a means of maintaining political control over its citizens. Although this is supposedly illegal in the US, the same covert tactics are quietly used by America’s local and federal law enforcement, and intelligence agencies, to suppress political and domestic dissent, silence whistle blowers, and get revenge against persons who have angered someone with connections to the public and private agencies involved.
Although Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (“NSA”) in 2013 and 2014 generated a great deal of public discussion about mass surveillance, US domestic counterintelligence activities such as the COPS Program receive relatively little attention.
The FBI’s COINTELPRO operation is still happening, involving even more advanced surveillance technology – and this program is none other than Joseph Biden and Bill Clinton’s COPS Program.
US Department of Justice crime statistics from a 2006 survey indicated that an estimated 445,220 COPS gangstalking victims reported three or more perpetrators (the only ones reported), and this number is growing exponentially on a daily basis.
In addition to being morally reprehensible, the COPS gang stalking program, just like the original version of the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, is very, very illegal. It violates criminal laws in all fifty states against stalking, as well as grossly violates the US Constitution’s prohibitions against warrantless searches and extra judicial punishment.
While the vast majority of Americans are never personally targeted by the Joseph Biden/Bill Clinton COPS gangstalking program, they should still be concerned about the existence of such operations.
Even if such activities were constitutionally legitimate (which they are not), they still have an enormous potential for abuse as a personal or political weapon by enemies currently employed or friendly with these governmental institutions.
Ending this cowardly and illegal practice by law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, and their parasitic corporate and individual recruits will first require exposing what is happening, to the public.
IV. COINTELPRO- FBI Domestic Intelligence Activities
COINTELPRO Revisited – Spying & Disruption
Refuse and Resist!
By Brian Glick author of “War at Home,” South End Press
A History To Learn From- What Was 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.
How Do We Know About It?
COINTELPRO was discovered in March, 1971, when secret files were removed from an FBI office and released to news media. Freedom of Information requests, lawsuits, and former agents’ public confessions deepened the exposure until a major scandal loomed. To control the damage and re-establish government legitimacy in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, Congress and the courts compelled the FBI to reveal part of what it had done and to promise it would not do it again . . .
How Did It Work?
The FBI secretly instructed its field offices to propose schemes to “misdirect, discredit, disrupt and otherwise neutralize “specific individuals and groups. Close coordination with local police and prosecutors was encouraged. Final authority rested with top FBI officials in Washington, who demanded assurance that “there is no possibility of embarrassment to the Bureau.” More than 2000 individual actions were officially approved. The documents reveal three types of methods:
1. Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main function was to discredit and disrupt. Various means to this end are analyzed below.
2. Other forms of deception: The FBI and police also waged psychological warfare from the outside — through bogus publications, forged correspondence, anonymous letters and telephone calls, and similar forms of deceit.
3. Harassment, intimidation and violence: Eviction, job loss, break-ins, vandalism, grand jury subpoenas, false arrests, frame-ups, and physical violence were threatened, instigated or directly employed, in an effort to frighten activists and disrupt their movements. Government agents either concealed their involvement or fabricated a legal pretext. In the case of the Black and Native American movements, these assaults — including outright political assassinations — were so extensive and vicious that they amounted to terrorism on the part of the government.
Who Were The Main Targets?
The most intense operations were directed against the Black movement, particularly the Black Panther Party. This resulted from FBI and police racism, the Black community’s lack of material resources for fighting back, and the tendency of the media — and whites in general — to ignore or tolerate attacks on Black groups. It also reflected government and corporate fear of the Black movement because of its militance, its broad domestic base and international support, and its historic role in galvanizing the entire Sixties’ upsurge. Many other activists who organized against US intervention abroad or for racial, gender or class justice at home also came under covert attack. The targets were in no way limited to those who used physical force or took up arms. Martin Luther King, David Dellinger, Phillip Berrigan and other leading pacifists were high on the list, as were projects directly protected by the Bill of Rights, such as alternative newspapers. The Black Panthers came under attack at a time when their work featured free food and health care and community control of schools and police, and when they carried guns only for deterrent and symbolic purposes. It was the terrorism of the FBI and police that eventually provoked the Panthers to retaliate with the armed actions that later were cited to justify their repression.
Ultimately the FBI disclosed six official counterintelligence programs:
Communist Party-USA (1956-71);
“Groups Seeking Independence for Puerto Rico” (1960-71);
Socialist Workers Party (1961-71);
“White Hate Groups” (1964-71);
“Black Nationalist Hate Groups” (1967-71); and
“New Left” (1968- 71).
The latter operations hit anti-war, student, and feminist groups. The “Black Nationalist” caption actually encompassed Martin Luther King and most of the civil rights and Black Power movements. The “white hate” program functioned mainly as a cover for covert aid to the KKK and similar right-wing vigilantes, who were given funds and information, so long as they confined their attacks to COINTELPRO targets. FBI documents also reveal covert action against Native American, Chicano, Phillipine, Arab-American, and other activists, apparently without formal Counterintelligence programs.
What Effect Did It Have?
COINTELPRO’s impact is difficult to fully assess since we do not know the entire scope of what was done (especially against such pivotal targets as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, SNCC and SDS), and we have no generally accepted analysis of the Sixties. It is clear, however,that:
– COINTELPRO distorted the public’s view of radical groups in a way that helped to isolate them and to legitimize open political repression.
– It reinforced and exacerbated the weaknesses of these groups, making it very difficult for the inexperienced activists of the Sixties to learn from their mistakes and build solid, durable organizations.
– Its violent assaults and covert manipulation eventually helped to push some of the most committed and experienced groups to withdraw from grass-roots organizing and to substitute armed actions which isolated them and deprived the movement of much of its leadership.
– COINTELPRO often convinced its victims to blame themselves and each other for the problems it created, leaving a legacy of cynicism and despair that persists today.
– By operating covertly, the FBI and police were able to severely weaken domestic political opposition without shaking the conviction of most US people that they live in a democracy, with free speech and the rule of law.
– For more information on FBI COINTELPRO operations, see:
Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression:
The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, 1990, South End Press, Boston Eds.
Jim Fletcher, Tanaquil Jones, & Sylvere Lotringer, Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War Against Black Revolutionaries, 1993, Semiotext(e), New York
Brian Glick, War At Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It, 1989, South End Press, Boston _________________
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Reproduced from: ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN (AFIB)
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V. COINTELPRO
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO – mw-headhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO – p-search
COINTELPRO (a portmanteau derived from COunter INTELligence PROgram) was a series of covert, and often illegal,[1][2]projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting domestic political organizations.[3]
FBI records show that COINTELPRO resources targeted groups and individuals that the FBI deemed subversive,[4] including anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists of the Civil Rights Movement or Black Power movement (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Panther Party), feminist organizations, anti-colonial movements (such as Puerto Rican independence groups like the Young Lords), and a variety of organizations that were part of the broader New Left. White supremacist groups were also targeted, such as the Ku Klux Klan.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover issued directives governing COINTELPRO, ordering FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, neutralize or otherwise eliminate” the activities of these movements and especially their leaders.[5][6] Under Hoover, the agent in charge of COINTELPRO was William C. Sullivan.[7] Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy personally authorized some of these programs.[8] Although Kennedy only gave written approval for limited wiretapping of King’s phones “on a trial basis, for a month or so”,[9] Hoover extended the clearance so his men were “unshackled” to look for evidence in any areas of King’s life they deemed worthy.[10]
History[edit]
Centralized operations under COINTELPRO officially began in August 1956 with a program designed to “increase factionalism, cause disruption and win defections” inside the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA). Tactics included anonymous phone calls, IRS audits, and the creation of documents that would divide the American communist organization internally.[11] An October 1956 memo from Hoover reclassified the FBI’s ongoing surveillance of black leaders, including it within COINTELPRO, with the justification that the movement was infiltrated by communists.[12] In 1956, Hoover sent an open letter denouncing Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a civil rights leader, surgeon, and wealthy entrepreneur in Mississippi who had criticized FBI inaction in solving recent murders of George W. Lee, Emmett Till, and other blacks in the South.[13] When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was founded in 1957, the FBI began to monitor and target the group almost immediately, focusing particularly on Bayard Rustin, Stanley Levison, and, eventually, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.[14]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mlk-uncovered-letter.png
The “suicide letter”,[15] that the FBI mailed anonymously to Martin Luther King, Jr. in an attempt to convince him to commit suicide
After the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Hoover singled out King as a major target for COINTELPRO. Under pressure from Hoover to focus on King, Sullivan wrote:
In the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech. … We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.[16]
Soon after, the FBI was systematically bugging King’s home and his hotel rooms, as they now were aware that King was growing in stature daily as the leader among leaders of the Negro movement.[17]
In the mid-1960s, King began publicly criticizing the Bureau for giving insufficient attention to the use of terrorism by white supremacists. Hoover responded by publicly calling King the most “notorious liar” in the United States.[18] In his 1991 memoir, Washington Post journalist Carl Rowan asserted that the FBI had sent at least one anonymous letter to King encouraging him to commit suicide. Historian Taylor Branch documents an anonymous November 21, 1964 “suicide package” sent by the FBI that contained audio recordings of King’s sexual indiscretions combined with a letter telling him “There is only one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.” And even by 1969, as has been noted elsewhere, “[FBI] efforts to ‘expose’ Martin Luther King, Jr. had not slackened even though King had been dead for a year. [The Bureau] furnished ammunition to conservatives to attack King’s memory, and…tried to block efforts to honor the slain leader.” [19]
During the same period the program also targeted Malcolm X. While an FBI spokesman has denied that the FBI was “directly” involved in Malcolm’s murder, it is documented that the Bureau worked to “widen the rift” between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad through infiltration and the “sparking of acrimonious debates within the organization,” rumor-mongering, and other tactics designed to foster internal disputes; which ultimately led to Malcolm’s assassination.[20][21] The FBI heavily infiltrated Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity in the final months of his life. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Malcolm X by Manning Marable asserts that most of the men who plotted Malcolm’s assassination were never apprehended and that the full extent of the FBI’s involvement in his death cannot be known.[22][23]
Amidst the urban unrest of July–August 1967, the FBI began “COINTELPRO–BLACK HATE”, which focused on King and the SCLC as well as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), the Deacons for Defense and Justice, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Nation of Islam.[24] BLACK HATE established the Ghetto Informant Program and instructed 23 FBI offices to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate type organizations”.[25]
A March 1968 memo stated the program’s goal was to “prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups” ; to “Prevent the RISE OF A ‘MESSIAH’ who could unify…the militant black nationalist movement” ; “to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence [against authorities].” ; to “Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining RESPECTABILITY, by discrediting them to…both the responsible community and to liberals who have vestiges of sympathy…”; and to “prevent the long-range GROWTH of militant black organizations, especially among youth.” Dr. King was said to have potential to be the “messiah” figure, should he abandon nonviolence and integrationism;[26] Stokely Carmichael was noted to have “the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way;” as he was seen as someone who espoused a much more militant vision of “black power.”[27]
This program coincided with a broader federal effort to prepare military responses for urban riots, and began increased collaboration between the FBI, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and the Department of Defense. The CIA launched its own domestic espionage project in 1967 called Operation CHAOS.[28] A particular target was the Poor People’s Campaign, a national effort organized by King and the SCLC to occupy Washington, D.C. The FBI monitored and disrupted the campaign on a national level, while using targeted smear tactics locally to undermine support for the march.[29]
Overall, COINTELPRO encompassed disruption and sabotage of the Socialist Workers Party (1961), the Ku Klux Klan (1964), the Nation of Islam, the Black Panther Party (1967), and the entire New Left social/political movement, which included antiwar, community, and religious groups (1968). A later investigation by the Senate’s Church Committee (see below) stated that “COINTELPRO began in 1956, in part because of frustration with Supreme Court rulings limiting the Government’s power to proceed overtly against dissident groups …”[30] Official congressional committees and several court cases[31] have concluded that COINTELPRO operations against communist and socialist groups exceeded statutory limits on FBI activity and violated constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and association.[1]
Program exposed[edit]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:One_Vets_Sq_Media_Delco_PA.JPG
The building broken into by the Citizen’s 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 burgled an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, took several dossiers, and exposed the program by passing this material to news agencies.[32]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.[33][34]
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.
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.[30]
Range of targets[edit]
At its inception, the program’s main target was the Communist Party.[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 aide’s 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.
Groups that were known to be targets of COINTELPRO operations include:
• communist and socialist organizations
• organizations and individuals associated with the Civil Rights Movement, including Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others associated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress of Racial Equality, and other civil rights organizations
• black nationalist groups
• the Young Lords
• the American Indian Movement
• the white supremacist groups
• the Ku Klux Klan
• the National States’ Rights Party
• a broad range of organizations labeled “New Left”, including Students for a Democratic Society and the Weathermen
• almost all groups protesting the Vietnam War, as well as individual student demonstrators with no group affiliation
• the National Lawyers Guild
• organizations and individuals associated with the women’s rights movement
• nationalist groups such as those seeking independence for Puerto Rico, United Ireland, and Cuban exile movements including Orlando Bosch’s Cuban Power and the Cuban Nationalist Movement;
• and additional notable Americans.[37]
The COINTELPRO documents show numerous cases of the FBI’s 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.[38]
Methods[edit]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fred_Hampton_dead_body.jpg
Body of Fred Hampton, national spokesman for the Black Panther Party, who was murdered[39][40] by members of the Chicago Police Department, as part of a COINTELPRO operation.[41][42]
According to attorney Brian Glick in his book War at Home, the FBI used four main methods during COINTELPRO:
1. Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents.
2. Psychological warfare: The FBI and police used myriad “dirty tricks” to undermine progressive movements. They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials and others to cause trouble for activists. They used bad-jacketing to create suspicion about targeted activists, sometimes with lethal consequences.[43]
3. Harassment via the legal system: The FBI and police abused the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, “investigative” interviews, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters.[41][44]
4. Illegal force: The FBI conspired with local police departments to threaten dissidents; to conduct illegal break-ins in order to search dissident homes; and to commit vandalism, assaults, beatings and assassinations.[41] The object was to frighten or eliminate dissidents and disrupt their movements.
The FBI specifically developed tactics intended to heighten tension and hostility between various factions in the black militancy movement, for example between the Black Panthers, the US Organization, and the Blackstone Rangers. This resulted in numerous deaths, among which were San Diego Black Panther Party members John Huggins, Bunchy Carter and Sylvester Bell.[41]
Dhoruba Bin Wahad a former Black Panther, reflects on how these tactics made him feel, saying he had a combat mentality and felt like he was at war with the government. When asked about why he thinks the Black Panthers were targeted he said, “In the United States, the equivalent of the military was the local police. During the early sixties, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and the human rights movement, the police in the United States became increasingly militaristic. They began to train out of military bases in the United States. The Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA) supplied local police with military technology, everything from assault rifles to army personnel carriers. In his opinion, the Counterintelligence Program went hand-in-hand with the militarization of the police in the Black community, with the militarization of police in America.”[45]
The FBI also conspired with the police departments of many U.S. cities (San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Philadelphia, Chicago) to encourage repeated raids on Black Panther homes—often with little or no evidence of violations of federal, state, or local laws—which resulted directly in the police killing many members of the Black Panther Party, most notably Chicago Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton on December 4, 1969.[41][42][46]
In order to eliminate black militant leaders whom they considered dangerous, the FBI is believed to have worked with local police departments to target specific individuals,[47] accuse them of crimes they did not commit, suppress exculpatory evidence and falsely incarcerate them. Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, a Black Panther Party leader, was incarcerated for 27 years before a California Superior Court vacated his murder conviction, ultimately freeing him.
Appearing before the court, an FBI agent testified that he believed Pratt had been framed, because both the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department knew he had not been in the area at the time the murder occurred.[48][49]
Some sources claim that the FBI conducted more than 200 “black bag jobs”,[50][51] which were warrantless surreptitious entries, against the targeted groups and their members.[52]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Informal_J._Edgar_Hoover_Smile_1940.jpg
J. Edgar Hoover
In 1969 the FBI special agent in San Francisco wrote Hoover that his investigation of the Black Panther Party (BPP) had concluded that in his city, at least, the Panthers were primarily engaged in feeding breakfast to children. Hoover fired back a memo implying the agent’s career goals would be directly affected by his supplying evidence to support Hoover’s view that the BPP was “a violence-prone organization seeking to overthrow the Government by revolutionary means”.[53]
Hoover supported using false claims to attack his political enemies. In one memo he wrote: “Purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt the BPP and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge.”[54]
In one particularly controversial 1965 incident, white civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo was murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen, who gave chase and fired shots into her car after noticing that her passenger was a young black man; one of the Klansmen was Gary Thomas Rowe, an acknowledged FBI informant.[55][56] The FBI spread rumors that Liuzzo was a member of the Communist Party and had abandoned her children to have sexual relationships with African Americans involved in the Civil Rights Movement.[57][58]FBI records show that J. Edgar Hoover personally communicated these insinuations to President Johnson.[59][60] FBI informant Rowe has also been implicated in some of the most violent crimes of the 1960s civil rights era, including attacks on the Freedom Riders and the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.[55]
Hoover ordered preemptive action “to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence.”[5]
Illegal surveillance[edit]
The final report of the Church Committee concluded:
Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been illegally collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret and biased informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone “bugs”, surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous—and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations—have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity.
Groups and individuals have been assaulted, repressed, harassed and disrupted because of their political views, social beliefs and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory, harmful and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials. While the agencies often committed excesses in response to pressure from high officials in the Executive branch and Congress, they also occasionally initiated improper activities and then concealed them from officials whom they had a duty to inform.
Governmental officials—including those whose principal duty is to enforce the law—have violated or ignored the law over long periods of time and have advocated and defended their right to break the law.
The Constitutional system of checks and balances has not adequately controlled intelligence activities. Until recently the Executive branch has neither delineated the scope of permissible activities nor established procedures for supervising intelligence agencies. Congress has failed to exercise sufficient oversight, seldom questioning the use to which its appropriations were being put. Most domestic intelligence issues have not reached the courts, and in those cases when they have reached the courts, the judiciary has been reluctant to grapple with them.[61][62]
Post-COINTELPRO operations
While COINTELPRO was officially terminated in April 1971, critics allege that continuing FBI actions indicate that post-COINTELPRO reforms did not succeed in ending COINTELPRO tactics.[63][64][65] Documents released under the FOIA show that the FBI tracked the late David Halberstam—a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author—for more than two decades.[66]”Counterterrorism” guidelines implemented during the Reagan administration have been described as allowing a return to COINTELPRO tactics.[67][pages needed] Some radical groups accuse factional opponents of being FBI informants or assume the FBI is infiltrating the movement.[68]
The IG report found these “troubling” FBI practices between 2001 and 2006. In some cases, the FBI conducted investigations of people affiliated with activist groups for “factually weak” reasons. Also, the FBI extended investigations of some of the groups “without adequate basis” and improperly kept information about activist groups in its files. The IG report also found that FBI Director Robert Mueller III provided inaccurate congressional testimony about one of the investigations, but this inaccuracy may have been due to his relying on what FBI officials told him.[69]
Several authors have accused the FBI of continuing to deploy COINTELPRO-like tactics against radical groups after the official COINTELPRO operations were ended. Several authors have suggested the American Indian Movement (AIM) has been a target of these operations.
Authors such as Ward Churchill, Rex Weyler, and Peter Matthiessen allege that the federal government intended to acquire uranium deposits on the Lakota tribe’s reservation land, and that this motivated a larger government conspiracy against AIM activists on the Pine Ridge reservation.[70][71][72][73][74] Others believe COINTELPRO continues and similar actions are being taken against activist groups.[74][75][76] Caroline Woidat says that, with respect to Native Americans, COINTELPRO should be understood within a historical context in which “Native Americans have been viewed and have viewed the world themselves through the lens of conspiracy theory.”[77] Other authors argue that while some conspiracy theories related to COINTELPRO are unfounded, the issue of ongoing government surveillance and repression is real.[78][79]
See also
• 1971, 2014 documentary film on the break-in that first exposed COINTELPRO
• Active measures
• Agent provocateur
• All Power to the People, film documentary by Lee Lew-Lee 1996
• H. Rap Brown, targeted by COINTELPRO
• Milton William Cooper, COINTELPRO targets
• Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI
• Cold war
• Denial and deception
• The COINTELPRO Papers
• Cuban Nationalist Movement
• William Mark Felt, also known as Deep Throat served as chief inspector of COINTELPRO field operations
• Howard Bruce Franklin, targeted by COINTELPRO
• David Halberstam, targeted by COINTELPRO
• Ernest Hemingway, targeted by COINTELPRO
• FBI National Security Branch (NSB)
• Fred Hampton, targeted by COINTELPRO
• Jean Seberg, targeted by COINTELPRO
• Jeff Fort, leader of the Chicago street gang El Rukn, was tried and convicted for conspiring with Libya to perform acts of domestic terrorism by use of COINTELPRO type methods
• Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF)
• Judi Bari, organizer, Earth First! & IWW Local #1, targeted by COINTELPRO
• Jose Cha Cha Jimenez, targeted by COINTELPRO
• Viola Liuzzo, murdered by a shot from a car used by four Ku Klux Klansmen, one of whom was a COINTELPRO informant
• Laird v. Tatum
• Mass surveillance in the United States
• MAINWAY, a database of telephone metadata used by the NSA
• NSA warrantless surveillance controversy
• Operation Mockingbird
• Orlando Bosch
• Police brutality
• PROFUNC – a top secret plan of the Government of Canada
• Red squad – police intelligence/anti-dissident units, later operated under COINTELPRO
• Security culture
• Morris Starsky, early target of COINTELPRO
• State terrorism
• Surveillance abuse
• THERMCON
• Patriot Act
• Weathermen
•
References
1. ^ Jump up to:a b c “I. Introduction and Summary” (PDF). Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans – Church Committee final report. United States Senate website. II. United States Government. 1976-04-26. p. 10. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2014-04-18.
2. Jump up^ Wolf, Paul. “COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story”. Archive.org. World Conference Against Racism, Durbin SA.
3. Jump up^ Jalon, Allan M. (2006-03-08). “A break-in to end all break-ins; In 1971, stolen FBI files exposed the government’s domestic spying program.”. Los Angeles Times. Tribune Company. Archived from the original on 2013-12-03. Retrieved 2014-07-15.
4. Jump up^ Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri (208). The FBI. Yale University Press. p. 189. ISBN 9780300142846.
5. ^ Jump up to:a b COINTELPRO Revisited – Spying & Disruption – IN BLACK AND WHITE: THE F.B.I. PAPERS
6. Jump up^ “A Huey P. Newton Story – Actions – COINTELPRO”. PBS. Archived from the original on 2010-11-18. Retrieved 2008-06-23.
7. Jump up^ Weiner, Tim (2012). Enemies : A History of the FBI (1st ed.). New York: Random House. ISBN 9781400067480., p. 196. “Sullivan would become Hoover’s field marshal in matters of national security, chief of FBI intelligence, and commandant of COINTELPRO. In that top secret and tightly compartmentalized world, an FBI inside of the FBI, Sullivan served as the executor of Hoover’s most clandestine and recondite demands.”
8. Jump up^ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 233. “RFK knew much more about this surveillance than he ever admitted. He personally renewed his authorization for the taps on Levison’s office, and he approved Hoover’s request to tap Levison’s home telephone, where King called late at night several times a week.”
9. Jump up^ Herst, Burton (2007) Bobby and J. Edgar, p. 372.
10. Jump up^ Herst (2007), pp. 372–374
11. Jump up^ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 195
12. Jump up^ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 198. “On October 2, 1956, Hoover stepped up the FBI’s long-standing surveillance of black civil rights activists. He sent a COINTELPRO memo to the field, warning that the Communist Party was seeking to infiltrate the movement.”
13. Jump up^ David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 148, 154–59.
14. Jump up^ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 200.
15. Jump up^ Gage, Beverly (2014-11-11). “What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals”. The New York Times. Retrieved 2015-01-09.
16. Jump up^ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 235.
17. Jump up^ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 236. “The bugs got quick results. When King traveled, as he did constantly in the ensuing weeks, to Washington, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and Honolulu, the Bureau planted hidden microphones in his hotel rooms. The FBI placed a total of eight wiretaps and sixteen bugs on King.”
18. Jump up^ Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965 (Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 524-529
19. Jump up^ Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965 (Simon & Schuster, 1999) p. 527-529
20. Jump up^ Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965 (Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 243
21. Jump up^ Gregory Kane, “FBI should acknowledge complicity in the assassination of Malcolm X” The Baltimore Sun, May 14, 2000
22. Jump up^ Toure “Malcolm X: Criminal, Minister, Humanist, Martyr” The New York Times, June 17, 2011
23. Jump up^ James W. Douglass “The Converging Martyrdom of Malcolm and Martin” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture, Princeton Theological Seminary, March 29, 2006
24. Jump up^ “Guide to the Microfilm Edition of FBI Surveillance Files: Black Extremist Organizations, Part 1” Lexis-Nexis
25. Jump up^ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 271.
26. Jump up^ “The FBI Sets Goals for COINTELPRO” American Social History Project, City University of New York
27. Jump up^ Rob Warden “Hoover Rated Carmichael As ‘Black Messiah'” Chicago Daily News, Feb 10, 1976
28. Jump up^ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 272. “Some 1,500 army intelligence officers in civilian clothing undertook the surveillance of some 100,000 American citizens. Army intelligence shared all their reports over the next three years. The CIA tracked antiwar leaders and black militants who traveled overseas, and it reported back to the FBI. The FBI, in turn, shared thousands of selected files on Americans with army intelligence and the CIA. All three intelligence services sent the names of Americans to the National Security Agency for inclusion on a global watch list; the NSA relayed back to the FBI hundreds of transcripts of intercepted telephone calls to and from suspect Americans.”
29. Jump up^ McKnight, Last Crusade, pp. 26–28. “By March the Hoover Bureau’s campaign against King was virtually on a total war footing. In a March 21 ‘urgent’ teletype, Hoover urged all field offices involved in the POCAM project to exploit every tactic in the bureau’s arsenal of covert political warfare to bring down King and the SCLC.”
30. ^ Jump up to:a b “Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans”. United States Senate. Retrieved 2010-12-01.
31. Jump up^ See, for example, Hobson v. Wilson, 737 F.2d 1 (1984); Rugiero v. U.S. Dept. of Justice, 257 F.3d 534, 546 (2001).[dead link]
32. Jump up^ http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/1971/
33. Jump up^ “A Short History of FBI COINTELPRO”, Albion Monitor, Retrieved July 13, 2007. Archived September 28, 2007, at the Wayback Machine.
34. Jump up^ Weiner, Enemies (2012), p. 293
35. Jump up^ 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.
36. Jump up^ Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Final Report of the Senate Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities
37. Jump up^ Various Church Committee reports reproduced online at ICDC: Final Report, 2A; Final Report,2Cb; Final Report, 3A; Final Report, 3G. Various COINTELPRO documents reproduced online at ICDC: CPUSA; SWP; Black Nationalist; White Hate; New Left; Puerto Rico. Archived January 13, 2013, at the Wayback Machine.
38. Jump up^ Blackstock, Nelson. COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom, Pathfinder, New York. 1975. p. 111.
39. Jump up^ Michael Newton. Famous Assassinations in World History: An Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, p. 205. ISBN 1610692853
40. Jump up^ THE CHICAGO CRIME SCENES PROJECT: FRED HAMPTON
41. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e The FBI’S Covert Action Program to Destroy the Black Panther Party
42. ^ Jump up to:a b FBI Secrets: An Agent’s Expose. M. Wesley Swearingen. Boston. South End Press. 1995. Special Agent Gregg York: “We expected about twenty Panthers to be in the apartment when the police raided the place. Only two of those black nigger fuckers were killed, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.”
43. Jump up^ Ward Churchill (2002), Agents of Repression (Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement ed.), South End Press, ISBN 978-0896086463, OCLC 50985124, 0896086461
44. Jump up^ “Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities-Book III” [The Church Report], US Senate, 1976
45. Jump up^ Bin Wahad, Dhoruba. Still Black, Still Strong. Semiotext, 1993, pp. 18-19
46. Jump up^ Brown, Elaine. A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. New York: Doubleday, 1992, pp. 204-06
47. Jump up^ Paul Wolf, “COINTELPRO”, ICDC
48. Jump up^ “Former Black Panther freed after 27 years in jail”. CNN. Archived from the original on 2010-11-18. Retrieved April 30, 2010.
49. Jump up^ In re Pratt, 82 Cal
50. Jump up^ Alexander Cockburn; Jeffrey St. Clair (1998). Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. Verso. p. 69. ISBN 978-1-85984-139-6.
51. Jump up^ FBI document, 19 July 1966, DeLoach to Sullivan re: “Black Bag” Jobs.
52. Jump up^ [1]
53. Jump up^ FBI document, 27 May 1969, “Director FBI to SAC San Francisco”, available at the FBI reading room.
54. Jump up^ FBI document, 16 September 1970, Director FBI to SAC’s in Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Haven, San Francisco, and Washington Field Office. Available at the FBI reading room.
55. ^ Jump up to:a b Gary May, The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Luzzo, Yale University Press, 2005.
56. Jump up^ “Jonathan Yardley”. The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 2010-11-18. Retrieved April 30, 2010.
57. Jump up^ Joanne Giannino. “Viola Liuzzo”. Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography. Archived from the original on 2010-11-18. Retrieved 2008-09-29.
58. Jump up^ Kay Houston. “The Detroit housewife who moved a nation toward racial justice”. The Detroit News, Rearview Mirror. Archived from the original on 1999-04-27.
59. Jump up^ “Uncommon Courage: The Viola Liuzzo Story”. Archived from the original on 2006-02-23.
60. Jump up^ Mary Stanton (2000). From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo. University of Georgia Press. p. 190.
61. Jump up^ “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans Book II, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities United States Senate (Church Committee)”. United States Senate. Retrieved May 11, 2006.
62. Jump up^ “Tapped Out Why Congress won’t get through to the NSA.”. Slate. Retrieved May 11, 2006.
63. Jump up^ David Cunningham. There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI. University of California Press, 2005: “However, strong suspicions lingered that the program’s tactics were sustained on a less formal basis—suspicions sometimes furthered by agents themselves, who periodically claimed that counterintelligence activities were continuing, though in a manner undocumented within Bureau files.”; Hobson v. Brennan, 646 F.Supp. 884 (D.D.C.,1986)
64. Jump up^ Bud Schultz, Ruth Schultz. The Price of Dissent: Testimonies to Political Repression in America. University of California Press, 2001: “Although the FBI officially discontinued COINTELPRO immediately after the Pennsylvania disclosures “for security reasons,” when pressed by the Senate committee, the bureau acknowledged two new instances of “Cointelpro-type” operations. The committee was left to discover a third, apparently illegal operation on its own.”
65. Jump up^ Athan G. Theoharis, et al. The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999: “More recent controversies have focused on the adequacy of recent restrictions on the Bureau’s domestic intelligence operations. Disclosures of the 1970s that FBI agents continued to conduct break-ins, and of the 1980s that the FBI targeted CISPES, again brought forth accusations of FBI abuses of power—and raised questions of whether reforms of the 1970s had successfully exorcised the ghost of FBI Director Hoover.”
66. Jump up^ The Associated Press, “FBI tracked journalist for over 20 years”. Toronto Star. November 7, 2008. Retrieved November 23, 2008.
67. Jump up^ Bud Schultz, Ruth Schultz. The Price of Dissent: Testimonies to Political Repression in America. University of California Press, 2001: “The problem persists after Hoover….”The record before this court,” Federal Magistrate Joan Lefkow stated in 1991, “shows that despite regulations, orders and consent decrees prohibiting such activities, the FBI had continued to collect information concerning only the exercise of free speech.”
68. Jump up^ Mike Mosedale, “Bury My Heart,” City Pages, Volume 21 – Issue 1002, 16 February 2000
69. Jump up^ “FBI Probes of Groups Were Improper, Justice Department Says”. The San Jose Mercury News. September 20, 2010.also reported at democracynow.org, 21 September 2010
70. Jump up^ Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall, (1990), The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent, Boston: South End Press, pp. xii, 303.
71. Jump up^ Churchill, Ward; and James Vander Wall. Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, 1988, Boston, South End Press.
72. Jump up^ Weyler, Rex. Blood of the Land: The Government and Corporate War Against First Nations.
73. Jump up^ Matthiessen, Peter, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 1980, Viking.
74. ^ Jump up to:a b Woidat, Caroline M. “The Truth Is on the Reservation: American Indians and Conspiracy Culture”, The Journal of American Culture 29 (4), 2006, pp. 454–467
75. Jump up^ McQuinn, Jason. “Conspiracy Theory vs Alternative Journalism”, Alternative Press Review, Vol. 2, No. 3, Winter 1996
76. Jump up^ Horowitz, David. “Johnnie’s Other O.J.”, Front Page Magazine.com, September 1, 1997.
77. Jump up^ Woidat, Caroline M. “The Truth Is on the Reservation: American Indians and Conspiracy Culture”, The Journal of American Culture 29 (4), 2006. pp. 454–467
78. Jump up^ Berlet, Chip. “The X-Files Movie: Facilitating Fanciful Fun, or Fueling Fear and Fascism? Conspiracy Theories for Fun, Not for False Prophets”, 1998, Political Research Associates
79. Jump up^ Berlet, Chip; and Matthew N. Lyons. 1998, “One key to litigating against government prosecution of dissidents: Understanding the underlying assumptions”, Parts 1 and 2, Police Misconduct and Civil Rights Law Report (West Group), 5 (13), (January–February): 145–153; and 5 (14), (March–April): 157–162.
Further reading
Books
• Blackstock, Nelson (1988). Cointelpro: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom. Pathfinder Press. ISBN 978-0-87348-877-8.
• Carson, Clayborne; Gallen, David, editors (1991). Malcolm X: The FBI File. Carroll & Graf Publishers. ISBN 978-0-88184-758-1.
• Churchill, Ward & Vander Wall, Jim (2002) [1988]. Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against The Black Panther Party and The American Indian Movement. South End Press. ISBN 0-89608-646-1.
• Churchill, Ward; Vander Wall, Jim (2002) [1990]. The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States. South End Press. ISBN 978-0-89608-648-7.
• Cunningham, David (2004). There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, The Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-23997-5.
• Davis, James Kirkpatrick (1997). Assault on the Left. Praeger Trade. ISBN 978-0-275-95455-0.
• Garrow, David (2006). The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Revised ed.). Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-08731-4.
• Glick, Brian (1989). War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It. South End Press. ISBN 978-0-89608-349-3.
• Hersh, Burton (2007). Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0786719822.
• McKnight, Gerald. The Last Crusade: Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI, and the Poor People’s Campaign. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. ISBN 9780813333847.
• Halperin, Morton; Berman, Jerry; Borosage Robert; Marwick, Christine (1976). The Lawless State: The Crimes Of The U.S. Intelligence Agencies. ISBN 978-0-14-004386-0.
• Olsen, Jack (2000). Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt. Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-49367-3.
• Perkus, Cathy (1976). Cointelpro. Vintage.
• Theoharis, Athan, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Temple University Press, 1978).
• Weiner, Tim, Enemies: A history of the FBI, New York: Random House, 2012.
Articles
• Drabble, John. “The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE and the Decline of Ku Klux Klan Organizations in Mississippi, 1964–1971”, Journal of Mississippi History, 66:4, (Winter 2004).
• Drabble, John. “The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE and the Decline Ku Klux Klan Organizations in Alabama, 1964–1971”, Alabama Review, 61:1, (January 2008): 3-47.
• Drabble, John. “To Preserve the Domestic Tranquility:” The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE, and Political Discourse, 1964–1971″, Journal of American Studies, 38:3, (August 2004): 297-328.
• Drabble, John. “From White Supremacy to White Power: The FBI’s COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE Operation and the ‘Nazification’ of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s,” American Studies, 48:3 (Fall 2007): 49-74.
• Drabble, John. “Fighting Black Power-New Left coalitions: Covert FBI media campaigns and American cultural discourse, 1967-1971,” European Journal of American Culture, 27:2, (2008): 65-91.
FBI files
• Files on FBI’s website
• FBI COINTELPRO files on Espionage Program
• FBI COINTELPRO file on Hoodwink
• FBI COINTELPRO files on Puerto Rican Groups
• FBI COINTELPRO files on Cuban Matters
• FBI COINTELPRO files on the New Left
• FBI COINTELPRO files on the Socialist Workers Party
• FBI COINTELPRO files on Black Extremist Groups
• FBI COINTELPRO files on White Hate Groups
• FBI COINTELPRO files Las Vegas
• FBI COINTELPRO files Miami
• FBI COINTELPRO files Baltimore
• FBI COINTELPRO files Alexandria
• FBI COINTELPRO files Charlotte
• FBI COINTELPRO files Indianapolis
U.S. government reports
• U.S. Congress. House. Committee on Internal Security. Hearings on Domestic Intelligence Operations for Internal Security Purposes. 93rd Cong., 2d sess, 1974.
• U.S. Congress. House. Select Committee on Intelligence. Hearings on Domestic Intelligence Programs. 94th Cong., 1st sess, 1975.
• U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Government Operations. Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Hearings on Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders. 90th Cong., 1st sess. – 91st Cong., 2d sess, 1967–1970.
• U.S. Congress. Senate. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Hearings — The National Security Agency and Fourth Amendment Rights. Vol. 6. 94th Cong., 1st sess, 1975.
• U.S. Congress. Senate. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Hearings — Federal Bureau of Investigation. Vol. 6. 94th Cong., 1st sess, 1975.
• U.S. Congress. Senate. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Final Report — Book II, Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans. 94th Cong., 2d sess, 1976.
• U.S. Congress. Senate. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Final Report — Book III, Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans. 94th Cong., 2d sess, 1976.
• Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. United States Senate, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, April 26 (legislative day, April 14), 1976. [AKA “Church Committee Report”]. Archived at Archive.org by the Boston Public Library
• SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE TO STUDY GOVERNMENTAL OPERATIONS WITH RESPECT TO INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES: Intelligence Reports and the Rights of Americans: Book II. April 24, 1976.
Excellent site. Very informative. I’ve been targeted since March of 2008 for giving the
FBI information that they acted on in a major way. I’m stalked, threatened and harassed
24 hours a day. The reason for these illegal sadistic programs is money obviously, but there’s
more to it. These operations were put in place to protect the Deep State. Real proof is at
Enemy of the Swamp DOT com.
Thank you,
Aaron
I just started being stalked recently, here in Brasil my family and and their church along with neighbors,city employees,local businesses,Freemasons, and just about everyone I come in contact with seems to be in it. It’s a bad economy and everyone in on the take. Plus I ‘m an atheist and although by my actions I’ A much better Christian then most of them it doesn’t seem to matter. My own family drugged me, my niece hacked my phones(twice), they are all loving to torture me. We’ve had a dictatorship for 20 years and they are now choosing to elect another. It’s crazy! They are mostly evangelicals here and I can’t understand how they can hate so much, it’s completely against the teachings of their god. These people are mad all of the time, can never speak the truth. It’s really sad, I hope one day they will sail up and realize that their actions are the reason why they are so miserable, though I highly doubt it. They really seem to enjoy their new found power and free money and toys. Plus the fact that they can openly torture with the backing of the authorities . I’ve accepted my faith, live is to short to worry about these clowns. At least I have love and rightness and the truth on my side. I really hope their bible is true, can wait to see the look in their faces when they find out where they are going. Stay strong, laugh and live!
It’s the same here in Brasil. My perps are presbiterians evangelicals backed by neighbors,city employees, local businesses, local criminals and pretty much everyone I use to know. My mother and sister were drugging me, local bars selling me drugged cigarettes. My niece hacked my phones, caught my uncle, nephew and mother using ultra Sonics on me. My cousins drugged and hacked me also. Followed every where. These people are lost evil robots. I think they are all brainwashed. They hate everyone and everything, they poisoned all of the neighborhood’s cats it’s rediculous and yet they preach the gospel. They’ve sold out their morals,religion,family,values and their own rights(they just don’t know it yet) for a celular phone,WiFi,gift card and most of all to be able to join an evil group that allows them to feel powerful to torture and destroy descent people with no fear of legal reprisals (for now any away). These are miserable,scum,hypocritical clowns, if their bible is true they will all be in hell. I have love,rightiness and truth on my side, plus my family have always being disfunctional. The narcissistic,delusional, psychopathic type that hates everything different. I hope they will swim up one day and start practicing what they like to preach so much, but I doubt it. If they do they might find a little peace and maybe regain their salvation, but that is their problem not mine. Stay strong, fight for your rights and gather evidence. Love and live,live and live. Forget these clowns!
Same thing here in Brasil. I was aware of being tatrgeted about a year ago and conned into believing if I left the us my wife would be spared physical harm. My own family conned me into thinking that I would be safe here. Well it was all a set up, they told my family that I’m a killer (ludicrous) and crazy. They have actually fabricated tapes with me claiming to be a killer. They bugged the house and had my mother try to get me to confess by street theater. I have never even killed an animal. The us wouldn’t allow a known killer to walk away! Specially if they had evidence on tape of it! My uncle whom is very simple let it out that they were told that. Now my family never asked me if this was true nor asked them for proof of an official investigation or a judges order for it, they just jumped in with both feet. Then it turned to making me as crazy and the torturing and theater begun. My mother and sister drugging my food, bars selling me drugged cigarettes, my niece hacked my phones twice, my cousin drugging and hacking my phones. Every apple store won’t help,constant insinuating mental illness. Caught my mother, nephew and 81 year old uncle using ultra sonic guns on me. Freaks downstairs neighbors whom work for and rent from my sisters and moved in 2 months prior to me coming down with what seem to be a car mounted ultra sonic in his car(there are also two other clowns with the same thing on the street). They stopped now after almost killing my bed ridden 88 year old father. Constant street theater by my mother telling me things in moments of anger like when I confronted her about using my 15 year old nephew to use ultra Sonics on me (you went to 20 attorneys and no one will help you) than claiming that it was never said and i’m Hearing voices. I’m monitored 24/7 and they’ve got nothing. I’m a nobody a chef, I don’t know if I’m was picked for training some more of these clowns or because I’m an atheist and know history and stand up for social justice, it doesn’t matter. It could have being my daughter and nieces whom were robbing my mother in law and we put an end to it by cutting the money, my mother in law have Alzheimer’s and was heavily in debt. It could be my family for they are narcissistic psychopaths whom claim to be evangelicals but hate everything and non of them practices what they preach. I do know that here in Brasil my stalkers are my family, the Presbyterian Church, neighbors, Freemasons,street thugs,city employees,police,firefighters and everyone I use to know. They have all sold their souls,religion,honors,descent,compassion,rights (they just don’t know it yet) for a cellphone,wifi,microwave toys,gift cards, but in the main for felling powerful and be able to torture and destroy descent human beings whom are much better people than they will ever be because they think they won’t be prosecuted. Basically the mask is off all these so called evangelicals couldn’t wait to exercise their hate and hipochrisy. I hope they will WAIK up one day before their god come back but I don’t think that is forgiveness for these things for those whom know the words and are practicing and profiting from these evil. Me I have rightness, my beautiful wife,lot’s of love,truth and compassion on my side. There are over 1.000.000 people suffering this faith throughout the world and we need to publicize this and fight for all of our rights. There’s a whole generation of jfk,milk and che’s being exterminated before they even know their mission in this life. We have to reach out to them, find them and make sure they make it! They are penting on killing us anyway, let’s die fighting! We know what’s happening, we can’t allow this fascist corrupt system to take over. Let’s do it for our children and grandchildren, what do we have to loose! Forget these clowns! Live love and fight these evil roachs!