COINTELPRO Redux: Global Order Targets the 9/11 Truth and Patriot Movements
TruthNews | November 2, 2007
Kurt Nimmo
In 1970, as an antiwar activist, I was deemed dangerous enough�even though I was eighteen years old�to warrant a dossier compiled by the Michigan State Police "Red Squad," a throwback to the so-called Red Scare of the early 1920s. The Red Squad was organized to go after dissidents of all stripes but in particular, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to go after antiwar and "New Left" activists. As I discovered years later, the Red Squads worked in concert with the FBI, under its notorious COINTELPRO, and even the CIA, supposedly prevented by its charter from snooping and subverting domestic activists.
The depth and criminal severity of the CIA's subversion of American activists partaking in entirely legal and constitutionally guaranteed dissent was recently revealed in documents released to the the National Security Archive at George Washington University, known as the "family jewels" by agency insiders. Of course, much of the information revealed in the documents is nothing new, as researchers have known about numerous CIA projects for decades, including Operation Chaos and the Merrimac and Resistance programs, all specifically designed to infiltrate and compromise dissident groups. It is important to note that these CIA operations worked hand-in-glove with the FBI and local police, as noted by the Select Committee to Study Government Operations, otherwise known as the Church Committee.
The "CIA received and maintained considerable information about the domestic activities and relationships of American individuals and organizations. Much of that material was collected in the first instance by the FBI, police or other confidential sources, who turned it over to the CIA," the final report issued by the Church Committee notes.
"From 1959 to at least 1974, the CIA used its domestic organizations to spy on thousands of US citizens whose only crime was disagreeing with their government's policies," writes Mark Zepezauer (The CIAs Greatest Hits). "This picked up speed when J. Edgar Hoover told President Johnson that nobody would be protesting his Vietnam war policies unless they were being directed to do so by some foreign power. Johnson ordered the CIA to investigate."
In response, the CIA vastly expanded its campus surveillance program and stepped up its liaisons with local police departments. It trained special intelligence units in major cities to carry out "black bag" jobs (break-ins, wiretaps, etc.) against US "radicals." �
In 1968, the CIA's various domestic programs were consolidated and expanded under the name Operation CHAOS. When Richard Nixon became president the following year, his administration drafted the Huston Plan, which called for even greater operations against "subversives," including wiretapping, break-ins, mail-opening, no-knock searches and "selective assassinations." Bureaucratic infighting tabled the plan, but much of it was implemented in other forms, not only by the CIA but also by the FBI and the Secret Service.
With the revelation of CIA and White House complicity in the Watergate break-in, light began to shine on Operation CHAOS. After a period of "reform," much of CHAOS's work was privatized, and right-wing groups and "former" CIA agents now provide the bulk of the CIA's domestic intelligence.
The FBI's concurrent program went by the name COINTELPRO, short for Counter Intelligence Program. COINTELPRO, the Church Committee explained, employed "techniques � adopted wholesale from wartime counterintelligence, and ranged from the trivial (mailing reprints of Reader's Digest articles to college administrators) to the degrading (sending anonymous poison-pen letters intended to break up marriages) and the dangerous (encouraging gang warfare and falsely labeling members of a violent group as police informers)�. 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."
In order to understand the game of hardball the government played with activists�the vast majority of them nonviolent and many pacifist�consider the remarks of William C. Sullivan, former Assistant to the director of the FBI: "This is a rough, tough, dirty business, and dangerous. It was dangerous at times. No holds were barred�. We have used [these techniques] against Soviet agents. They have used [them] against us. . . . [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate. This is a rough, tough business."
Of course, it was not rough and tough for the FBI and the "establishment," never seriously in jeopardy of losing control, even with the failures of Vietnam, but it was certainly rough and tough for activists, particularly activists involved in black and Indian "national liberation" movements�many of them, including Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark (the latter two of the Black Panthers), assassinated outright.
As Gregg York told M. Wesley Swearigen , published in Swearigen's in FBI Secrets: An Agent's Expose (1995), the FBI's plot to assassinate the Panthers was "in a style similar to the Chicago gangland murders of the 1950s," that is to say, at least in regard to the Black Panthers (and the American Indian Movement), cold-blooded murder was the preferred method of dealing with upstarts.
In A Short History of FBI COINTELPRO, Mike Cassidy and Will Miller bullet-point the FBI's COINTELPRO tactics:
- First, there was infiltration. Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. The main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. They also exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents.
- Second, there was psychological warfare from the outside. 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 agents, and manipulated or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials and others to cause trouble for activists.
- Third, there was harassment through the legal system, used to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers 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.
- Fourth and finally, there was extralegal force and violence. The FBI and police threatened, instigated and conducted break-ins, vandalism, assaults, and beatings. The object was to frighten dissidents and disrupt their movements. In the case of radical Black and Puerto Rican activists (and later Native Americans), these attacks, including political assassinations, were so extensive, vicious, and calculated that they can only be accurately called a form of official "terrorism."
"The public exposure of COINTELPRO and other government abuses resulted in a flurry of apparent reform in the 1970s, but domestic covert action did not end," the two authors warn. "It has persisted, and seems a permanent feature of our government. Much of today's domestic covert action can also be kept concealed because of government secrecy that has been restored."
Indeed, as Ross Gelbspan documents (Break-Ins, Death Threats and the FBI), COINTELPRO was not shut down in the 1970s but continued to live on and subvert the constitutional rights of Americans through the 1980s and 1990s, right up until the present day. "Utilizing thousands of pages of FBI documents secured through the Freedom of Information Act, Gelbspan found that activists who opposed U.S. policy in Central America �experienced nearly 200 incidents of harassment and intimidation, many involving�break-ins and thefts or rifling of files,'" writes Paul Wolf . (COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story).
"There is no better example than the Judi Bari �boom and bust' case to show that the FBI kept on well into the 1990s using covert action tactics against political movements and activists which they perceived as threats to the established order. One can make a case that the FBI is still using such tactics in the Bari case in 2001," Wolf writes. Environmental activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were targeted by the FBI for engaging in "leftist environmental and labor organizing." As it turns out, the FBI planted a bomb in their car.
In the 1990s, the FBI and government concentrated on a new target�the putative militia movement, its numbers increased by the treacherous events in Waco, Texas. As Daniel Brandt writes (The 1960s and COINTELPRO: In Defense of Paranoia), the Clinton administration turned the legacy of COINTELPRO into a full-blown media circus with the likes of Warren Christopher unveiling simultaneously "a broad plan for expanded wiretapping, denial of visas, working with other governments on money laundering and seizing assets, and expanding the use of current laws prohibiting fund- raising for terrorist organizations," in short a precursor of things to come under the neocon Bush administration and its contrived GWOT.
The bombing in Oklahoma City happened three months later. It was accompanied by 100 times more footage about dead children than the same media mustered for Waco two years earlier � or for that matter, bombed children in Vietnam during the 1960s. They deftly dropped the word "international" from all references to "terrorism," and "anti-terrorism" moved to the fast track. The president's popularity went up as Bill and Hillary staged a session with some children in front of the cameras, promising the toddlers that they'd do their best against the bad guys. They didn't take questions. A few days later Clinton sent a $1.5 billion anti-terrorism bill to Congress. Here we go again, for those old enough to remember the sixties.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) had bigger fish to fry. Even though the connection between the bombing and militia groups was more imaginary than real, the copy-starved media grabbed whatever crumbs they were offered by these two axe-grinding groups. The militias hit the front pages everywhere. On June 7, with the support of the ADL, the Senate passed a sweeping $2 billion anti-terrorism measure by a vote of 91-to-8. It took a pair of gloves at the O.J. trial to slap our media back to their usual fare. And by then the House was already reporting a similar bill out of committee.
Since the 60s and 70s, Brandt notes, things have changed. "Without the �communists' to kick around anymore, some of those who once underwrote Wall Street's global interests by donating their first- born, are now describing themselves as patriots and populists. Many of them have taken a fresh look at the international ruling class, and resurrected a long but gnarly tradition of anti-establishment, isolationist nationalism�. Much of the political thinking among these new patriots is immature, and is short on both research and scholarship. Even so, it still describes the world better than what's left of the Left, with its self-interested insistence on multiculturalism and political correctness. The conspiracy theories peddled by patriots make more objective sense today, than the reasons they were given for our involvement in Vietnam did in the sixties. That's progress of sorts."
Naturally, the corporate media did a fine job destroying the so-called militia movement's reputation. "Widely portrayed as having links with white supremacist organizations or �Nazi' type groups, many of them vigorously deny such allegations and point to a growing number of Black participants in the movement, including some in leadership roles. This is a loosely-federated movement with a presence in all 50 states, in urban as well as rural areas," writes Husayn Al Kurdy .
The rebels and "revolutionaries" now challenging the major power internally turn out to be from the Right, insofar as the Left/Right spectrum has any real meaning anymore. Many of those pushing for "tough" state-sponsored measures (those at the business end of some of these initiatives could call them "terrorist" with full justification) now include voices from what calls itself the "Progressive Community," the remnants of what used to be called "The Left." By cheering government repression against their opponents, as many are now doing, they expose their political opportunism, just as many in other political camps did on previous occasions. The Pastor Niemoller scenario as evoked during the Hitler period has been playing itself out. This time around, the story begins "First they came for Randy Weaver's family and the Branch Davidians�"
Indeed, the "target" threat, as elucidated by the FBI and CIA way back in the late 60s, has transferred from the "left" over to "right," that is if you still put any credence into these antiquated political designations.
The growing 9/11 truth and "patriot" movements�largely a reformulation of the "militia" movement with a contingent of disillusioned "progressives"�pose more of a threat than anything proffered by the diehard and politically correct to a fault Greenies, so many who are completely snowed under by the globalist agenda and dependent on foundation grant money dispensed through methodical gatekeepers.
Of course, the anti-globalist movement, well entrenched on the "progressive" side of the equation, still poses a significant threat to the New World Order and, as black bloc "anarchist" agent provocateurs demonstrate, the state is busily at work attacking the anti-globalist movement, as it poses a sincere threat to the corporatist-fascist order, determined to convert the planet into a slave plantation.
In the years since the events of September 11th, 2001, the patriot movement, increasingly merged with a nascent "truth" movement, has effectively challenged the globalist order�from exposing the 9/11 cover-up and substantially detailing the texture of the inside job to confronting and hounding the elite and their minions from Ottawa and university auditoriums to live television audiences. Needless to say, these often improvised guerrilla tactics have put our rulers on the offensive.
As Alex Jones warned on his November 1st radio program, the gloves have come off and the elite are in the process of targeting the patriot-truth movement head-on. The slanderous mischaracterizations of Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and other corporate media minion-whores of state power are but a preparation of things to come�and likely sooner before later.
It is no mistake the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 sailed like a clipper ship through Congress, as our rulers certainly consider 9/11 truth an "extremist belief system" determined to "advance political, religious, or social change," that is to say, in the parlance of the elite, engage in terrorism. It is the job of Glenn Beck et al to equate truth activists to the sufficiently demonized Timothy McVeigh�emblematic of the "patriot" terrorist, never mind his shadowy linkage to military intelligence�a process made all the more simple by the fact the corporatist-fascist media venue allows no rebuttal short of a Bill O'Reilly shout-over, replete with adolescent references to pinheads and cartoonish al-Qaeda villains.
However, these shrill, irrational and confrontational tactics will not work, as far too many Americans are clued in to the fact there is something rotten� not specifically in Denmark but rather in Washington, on Wall Street, and in the corporate suites and on the sets and studios of the corporate-fascist media.
It remains to be seen if enough Americans will step up and show the intestinal fortitude required to make a difference. But then, it should be remembered, the last time we had a revolution in this country it was a small number of dedicated individuals who made the difference while a large and hesitant majority sat on the fence.
New Pentagon memos released by the Washington Post prove that ex-U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld directed a psychological campaign of terror in order to achieve political objectives, making Rumsfeld himself a terrorist according to the very definition of the term.