Most people never contemplate whether the FBI has a file on them, let alone if they or a member of their family will be the target of slander, job loss, disruption, violent crime, internment or even death by our own government. And why should we? It is a basic human desire to want to feel safe. In order to feel safe we need to believe that if we stay on the right side of the law we will be protected from the bad guys -- from evil. We don't imagine that evil may be perpetrated against us by those very white knights that we want to believe will protect us.
THEY CAME FOR THE ENVIRONMENTALIST
Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney may have once thought those very thoughts. What Bari and Cherney did have was a sense of responsibility for the environment. With that responsibility they exercised what they felt was their moral obligation and civic right by becoming involved with the Earth First! movement. In 1990 they were on a concert and speaking tour to recruit college students for Redwood Summer, a campaign of nonviolent mass protest against corporate liquidation logging. As they were driving through Oakland California a motion-triggered pipe bomb wrapped in nails exploded in their car. It was planted directly under the driver's seat. Bari was nearly killed and Cherney was injured.
The pair were arrested for the bombing of their own car! Twelve years later, June 11 2002, a jury awarded Bari and Cherney $4.4 million dollars in a lawsuit claiming they were framed by Oakland police and FBI agents.
Although there were written death threats against them prior to the bombing there was never an investigation into who may have committed the bombing / attempted murder. The evidence uncovered during the trial clearly showed that the FBI and the Oakland Police tried to frame them for the bombing, further victimizing them by false arrest. According to the www.judibari.org website, "It was a deliberate politically motivated effort to target and 'neutralize' Judi, Darryl and Earth First!, and to discourage people from traveling from all over the nation to join in Redwood Summer." The sensational false charges made headlines nationwide, and the FBI and their Oakland Police accomplices kept a two-month media smear campaign going with a series of false claims about physical evidence linking Judi to building the bomb. But after delaying arraignment for seven weeks, when it was finally time for the District Attorney to present evidence in court and file formal charges, the FBI and Oakland Police didn't actually have any. The D.A. announced they would not file charges, citing the lack of evidence. The Oakland Police closed their "investigation," but the FBI continued theirs, telling the media that Judi and Darryl were their only suspects.
The FBI then used the pretext of investigating the bombing as cover for a nationwide investigation of Earth First!, sending agents to create dossiers on over 500 people whose only crime was to have received a long-distance phone call from someone associated with Bari or Cherney.
Why would the Judi Bari web site use the word "neutralize" as part of the FBI's tactics in regard to her treatment? Isn't the job of the FBI to investigate? Evidence shows that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is clearly not limited to investigation. The language of "disruption" and "neutralizing" comes straight from the FBI itself in the Cointelpro (counterintelligence program) documents that it was forced to release in the early 70s.
THEY CAME FOR THE THIRD PARTY SUPPORTERS
"The Cointelpro operations of the 1960s were modeled on the successful programs of earlier years undertaken to disrupt the American Communist Party. The programs against the Communist party continued through the 1960s, with such interesting innovations as Operation Hoodwink from 1966 through mid-1968, designed to incite organized crime against the Communist party through documents fabricated by the FBI, evidently in the hope that criminal elements would carry on the work of repression and disruption in their own manner..." according to Noam Chomsky in the introduction to the 1975 book Cointelpro [italicize],edited by Cathy Perkus and published by Monad Press.
Chomsky goes on to state, "From the evidence now available, it appears that the first FBI disruption program (apart from the Communist Party) was launched in August 1960 against groups advocating independence for Puerto Rico. In October 1961, the "SWP Disruption Program" was put into operation against the Socialist Workers Party. The grounds offered, in a secret FBI memorandum, were the following: the party had been 'openly espousing its line on a local and national basis through running candidates for public office and strongly directing and/or supporting such causes as Castro's Cuba and integration problems... in the South.' The SWP Disruption Program, put into operation during the Kennedy administration, reveals very clearly the FBI's understanding of its function: to block legal political activity that departs from orthodoxy, to disrupt opposition to state policy, to undermine the civil rights movement."
THEY CAME FOR THE ACADEMICS
You did not have to be a communist or a socialist in order to be a target of the FBI, as Clark Kerr clearly found out this year. After a seventeen year battle staged by the San Francisco Chronicle [italicize], under the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI was forced to turn over 200,000 pages. Kerr was, during the 50s and 60s, the president of the University of California. He was dismissed in 1967. According to the SF Chronicle [italicize], Kerr's dismissal followed a series of protests, including the 1964 Free Speech Movement, in which Berkeley students challenging the university's ban against campus political activity staged the nation's first major college protests of the era. J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the FBI and other top officials had been unhappy with Kerr for years. Soon after Kerr became UC president in 1958, the head of the San Francisco FBI office wrote Hoover a memo reporting on a plot by an aide to conservative state Sen. Hugh Burns to get Kerr removed from his job. "Dr. Kerr," an FBI report on the plan said, "has always given the impression that he is a 'liberal' in the education field." In the early 60s, Hoover became furious over an essay question on UC's English aptitude test for high school applicants that asked: "What are the dangers to a democracy if a national police organization, like the FBI, which operates secretly, is unresponsive to public criticism?" Hoover blamed Kerr for the question, even though the university president had nothing to do with it. Hoover wrote a memo to his top aides stating, "I know Kerr is no good." The SF Chronicle further reports that the FBI sent the White House reports containing allegations that the bureau knew were false and schemed with the CIA to leak derogatory reports about students and faculty to the University's Board of Regents, who used them in an effort to oust Kerr.
THEY CAME FOR THOSE FIGHTING RACISM
Kerr was no longer president of a University - but at least he was alive. Consider the case of Fred Hampton, one of the most prominent leaders of the Black Panther Party, skilled in community organizing and known for his opposition to violent acts. In December of 1969 he was killed in a pre-dawn raid by Chicago police while he was in bed in his apartment. Depositions in a civil suit in Chicago reveal that the chief of Panther security and Hampton's personal bodyguard, William O'Neal was an FBI infiltrator. O'Neal gave his FBI "contacting agent" Roy Mitchell a detailed floor plan of the apartment, which Mitchell turned over to the states attorney's office shortly before the attack, along with "information" - of dubious veracity -- that there were two illegal shotguns in the apartment. For his services, O'Neal was paid over $10,000 by the FBI.
Again from Cointelpro[italicize]: " The availability of the floor plan presumably explains why all the police gunfire went to the inside corners of the apartment, rather than toward the entrances, and undermines still further the pretense by the police that the police barrage was caused by confusion in unfamiliar surrounding that led them to believe, falsely, that they were being fired upon by the Panthers inside. Agent Mitchell was named by the Chicago Tribune [italicize] as head of the Chicago Cointelpro directed toward the Black Panthers and other Black groups. Whether or not this is true, there is now substantial evidence of direct FBI involvement in this Gestapo-style political assassination. "
The FBI was ordered to pay $1.85 million dollars to the family of Fred Hampton.
Fred Hampton was not the only target. Geronimo Ji Jaga of the Black Panthers served 27 years in California institutions for a crime he did not commit and was finally released because his defense proved that the only so-called witness they had had against him was in fact an FBI informant.
Leonard Peltier of the American Indian Movement still languishes in prison where he is serving his 27th year of two life sentences for the murder of two FBI agents. According to Ramsey Clark, U.S. Attorney General in the Johnson administration, "Leonard Peltier is the longest serving prisoner from the Indian wars and they admit they didn't prove who shot the agents." A former FBI agent and Democratic member of Congress, Don Edwards says "The FBI continues to deny its improper conduct on Pine Ridge during the 1970's and in the trial of Leonard Peltier. The FBI used Mr. Peltier as a scapegoat and they continue to do so today."
The FBI also targeted Martin Luther King. On November 1, 1975, former FBI Assistant Directory of the Domestic Intelligence Division, William C. Sullivan, said King was the target of an intensive campaign by the FBI to neutralize him as an effective civil rights leader. Sullivan stated that in the war against King, "no holds were barred."
THEY COME WITH GUNS, AND TANKS, and HELICOPTOTS AND INCENDIARY DEVISES
In August 1992 Americans watched events unfold at Ruby Ridge in northern Idaho. Attention was focused on Randy Weaver's separatist views. A short eight months later, Americans watched the siege at Waco, TX, and again the views of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians became a focus of media attention. The government's credibility in these cases has crumbled under lies, deceptions, evidence-withholding and other forms of obstruction of justice. One does not have to believe the views of either of these groups to see that the action of the FBI against them does not fall under the definition of law enforcement but aggression.
The FBI paid $3.1 million to the family of Vicki Weaver who was killed at Ruby Ridge.
THEY CAME FOR THE LAWYERS
On April 9th of this year, in a chilling application of the USA-PATRIOT Act, the legislation that was pushed into law post-September 11, human rights lawyer Lynne Stewart was accused of helping terrorists. She was arrested and agents searched her New York office for documents. While the press smeared Stewart's reputation for being an uncompromising advocate for "unpopular" causes and clients, their very own reports couldn't hide the reality that Stewart was arrested and indicted chiefly because of conversations that are supposed to be constitutionally protected - those between an attorney and client. Advocates believe that this is another in a long line of attempts by the government to silence dissent and instill fear in those who would seek to help oppressed people, in this case Arabs and Muslims who are being prosecuted without constitutional rights.
THEY CAME FOR THE WHISTLEBLOWERS
Fred Whitehurst earned his PhD in chemistry and was hired by the FBI in 1986. He became a leading expert in the FBI crime lab with regard to bombs. He gained public exposure first after the World Trade Center bombing of 1993. Dr. Whitehurst had been complaining (mostly internally), about the practices at the FBI Lab for almost a decade. Eventually he filed a formal complaint with the Justice Department accusing senior officials at the lab of slanting or contaminating evidence in more than 1,000 cases. As reported by Salon, an internal review of lab data in 13 bombings attributed to Unabomber Theodore Kacyznski found that evidence was either "incomplete or missing." Whitehurst has also charged that there were slanted reports in the WTC bombing of 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing case. He claims that federal prosecutors urged him to suppress lab findings helpful to the defense in the terrorism case involving the bombing of an Avianca airliner that exploded over Bogata Columbia in 1989. After the report was filed, he says his home was wiretapped and burgled, and his files were gone through. He was suspended from the FBI. In the end the FBI settled a wrongful dismissal suit for $1.2 million plus an undisclosed amount in damages.
THEY CAME FOR A TRUCKDRIVER
According to an AP story published July 28, 2002 in the News Gazette [italicize]:
"For more than 20 years, the FBI headquarters in Washington knew that its Boston agents were using hit men and mob leaders as informants and shielding them from prosecution for serious crimes including murder." The story unfolds that Joe Salvati a truck driver, husband, and father of four, once owed a gangster $400. When the gangster came to collect; Salvati fought him off with a baseball bat. The gangster later became a "government" witness and used this power to finger Salvati as an accessory to gang murder - out of revenge. For more than 30 years, the FBI hid memos showing that other men, including an informant it wanted to protect, were the real killers. He spent 30 years in prison before his sentence was commuted in 1997 after evidence of the FBI's misconduct surfaced in another mob case. According to the AP story, "Others who were wrongly jailed or who were victimized by crimes committed by FBI informants have already sued, their claims against the government exceeding $1 billion." We have no idea how many people are languishing in prison due to not only perjured FBI testimony, but also to fraudulent FBI lab analysis, that are a form of perjury themselves.
POST-CONSTITUTIONAL AMERICA
Cointelpro was a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association. In 1976, regulations were put in place, promulgated by Ford administration Attorney General Edward Levi to prevent another Cointelpro. These guidelines required the bureau to show evidence of a crime before engaging in domestic spying. And yet the plot against Judi Bari unfolded. Also in 1987, a decade after the Levi regulations went into effect, the Center for Constitutional Rights exposed FBI investigation of activists opposed to U.S. policy in Central America. This investigation targeted CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador). The FBI had been keeping files on lawful dissenters and infiltrating peace groups to weaken opposition to U.S. government support for dictatorships and death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua.
Combine the sinister motives with the incompetence shown in the "missing" files of the Timothy McVeigh case, the wrongful finger-pointing that led to the ruin of the reputation and livelihood of Richard Jewel in the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing, the inability to prevent 9/11 (even with the necessary information in the hands of their own agent Colleen Rowely), and there is good reason to call for reorganization of the FBI. Unfortunately the reorganization that resulted and was announced by Attorney General John Ashcroft only gives the FBI more money and more power. As Doug Ireland, writing for In These Times [italicize] puts it, "By giving the FBI carte blanche to spy on speech and ideas - from libraries to the Internet, from religious groups to political meetings - and by opening its files and agents to unprecedented levels of cooperation with the CIA (heretofore prohibited from domestic spying), the Bush administration has taken another giant step toward turning this nation into a garrison state."
Sam Smith, editor of the The Progressive Review [italicize], rightly describes the period we are now entering as "Post-Constitutional America."
As Gerry Spence, noted Constitutional lawyer states: "Our Constitution is only a memory on faded parchment. We cannot speak freely for fear we will be hated. Our civil liberties, once guaranteed under that blessed document, have given way to the exigencies of this struggle. The police have demanded that they be given more power, that they be permitted to tap our phones and search our homes without warrants. We have become prisoners with electronic tattoos. Reacting to our fear we have embraced the police who have promised to keep us safe. But we are no longer safe from them. We have been stripped of our rights and stand naked and helpless before them. Our lawyers, once warriors for the people, can no longer speak out for us. Their tools of justice, our constitutional rights, have been confiscated so that they stand impotent and whining. And the courts turn their heads. We have become locked within our self-constructed prisons on the promise that we will be safe there. But we are no longer safe from the police in this new police state--a nation still called America." |
