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News :: Miscellaneous |
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COINTELPRO: It's Not Just History Anymore |
Current rating: 0 |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
01 Jan 2002
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Those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it. |
Here's a website that has more than historical significance now that Bush has started an endless war on our constitutional rights.COINTELPRO was once viewed as an anachronism that would not be repeated because of its undermining of basic civil rights regarding political expression. Recent changes in law will likely result in secret operations by the U.S.'s political police, the FBI, against people merely exercising rights that used to be Constitutionally protected. That means it's time for all citizens who really care about the positive values our country claims to represent to study the past in order to organize against a repressive present with the hope that we can regain what has been stolen from us in the future.
From the COINTELPRO website:
"COINTELPRO is an acronym for the FBI's domestic "counterintelligence programs" to neutralize political dissidents and groups. Although covert operations have been employed throughout FBI history, the formal COINTELPRO's conducted between 1956-1971 were broadly targeted against radical political organizations.
The origins of COINTELPRO were rooted in the Bureau's operations against hostile foreign intelligence services. Counterintelligence, of course, goes beyond investigation; it refers to actions taken to neutralize foreign agents.
"Counterintelligence" was a misnomer for the FBI programs, since the targets were American political dissidents, not enemy spies. In the atmosphere of the Cold War, the American Communist Party was viewed as a serious threat to national security. Over the years, anti- Communist paranoia extended to civil rights, anti-war, and many other groups. As John Edgar Hoover, longtime Director of the FBI, put it:
"The forces which are most anxious to weaken our internal security are not always easy to identify. Communists have been trained in deceit and secretly work toward the day when they hope to replace our American way of life with a Communist dictatorship. They utilize cleverly camouflaged movements, such as peace groups and civil rights groups to achieve their sinister purposes. While they as individuals are difficult to identify, the Communist party line is clear. Its first concern is the advancement of Soviet Russia and the godless Communist cause. It is important to learn to know the enemies of the American way of life."
Although today this may sound ridiculous, the implications were deadly serious for the thousands of people who became COINTELPRO targets. After many years of investigating and disrupting these groups, the Bureau was not able to find evidence that any of them were foreign-controlled.
These programs were exposed to the public following a lawsuit by the Socialist Workers' Party, an unsolved break-in into the FBI's Media, PA local office, and a US Senate investigation led by Frank Church. Although COINTELPRO officially ended in 1971, there have been many examples of counterintelligence-type operations against political dissidents since." |
See also:
http://www.derechos.net/paulwolf/cointelpro/
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