COINTELPRO
specter haunts Black America
by Frances M. Beal
�Guest Columnist�
The recent announcement by the FBI that
it was propa-gating new guidelines that would extend far-reaching powers
to its agents to monitor the internet, snoop in mosques and keep an eye
on people everywhere from the local library to a protest demonstration
was met with reactions within the Black community ranging from disbelief
to anger and fear accompanied by calls to resist this unconstitutional
encroachment on civil liberties and the right to dissent.
"The Administration�s continued defiance of
constitutional safeguards seems to have no end in sight," stated the
dean of the Black Caucus and ranking member of the House Judiciary
Committee John Conyers (D-Mich.). "Any government effort to
institutionalize the same powers that allowed the FBI to wrongfully spy
on the activities of civil rights organizations and disclose information
on the private affairs of Martin Luther King Jr.," he continued, "would
constitute an embarrassing step backwards for civil liberties in this
country."
This concern was actually mild compared to an editorial
by Bill Tatum, publisher and board chair of the New York Amsterdam
News, who called the FBI "totally corrupt." He continued in the June
3 editorial, "Once upon a time, the FBI was said to have had the bad
guys at the top of their most-wanted list. That was true, except for the
bad guys who were rich and famous ..." Linda Burnham, director of the
Berkeley-based Women of Color Resource Center, reminds us "we know from
our own history how readily the government resorts to spying and
disruption to squash legitimate protest and we will all live to regret
the broad surveillance powers being assumed by the FBI."
Clearly, if the rest of the nation has amnesia on FBI
history, Black America does not. A Black person who lived through the
civil rights battles of the 1960s and 1970s cannot help but see the
revitalized specter of COINTELPRO, the counter-intelligence program
carried out by the FBI against all political dissent, and particularly
against those involved in the racial justice movement. This disruptive
and illegal activity by the FBI targeted not only groups like the Black
Panther Party that called for a radical transformation of race and class
relations but also groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee or even more moderate formations like the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference.
What many of the younger Black activists may not know is
that COINTELPRO did not just unconstitutionally collect information
about people. It was a conscious program to neutralize political
dissidents. And even though covert operations had been employed
throughout FBI history, the formal COINTELPRO operations conducted from
1956 to 1971 were broadly targeted against what were perceived as
radical political organizations.
These activities included infiltrating Black American
groups and fomenting discord and antagonism among different groups and
individuals, provoking marital difficulties for activists and
politically motivated audits of IRS tax returns. Even more outrageous
were FBI activities to instigate and suggest violent and illegal actions
on the part of Black groups.
Obviously, "counterintelligence" was a misnomer for the
FBI programs then, and today�s critics fear the same is true. The people
the FBI targeted were U.S. political dissidents and not foreign spies.
Today, the evil threat is the "terrorists," and the attempt by the FBI
at a power grab and the further consolidation of a police state
apparatus within the United States is truly frightening.
On another front, Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU�s
Washington office, warns, "There is no proof that the incessant seizure
of new powers by Congress and the Bush Administration does anything to
increase safety." In fact, the current Washington scandal is not about
what the FBI or the CIA knew�which apparently is plenty�but the fact
that the FBI and other security agencies refused to act on information
because of political interference from higher ups rooted in the
political and economic ties of the bin Ladens to the Bush family.
Again, FBI history is telling. As a mechanism to
"predict violence," COINTELPRO was a complete flop. It is estimated that
the FBI conducted over 500,000 separate investigations of "subversive"
persons or groups from 1960 to 1974, predicated on the possibility that
they might try to overthrow the government by force. Yet, not a single
individual or group was prosecuted under the laws prohibiting action to
overthrow the government. Nonetheless, numerous individuals were
imprisoned or lost their jobs or were otherwise maligned on unrelated or
spurious charges in order to "neutralize" them and to prevent the spread
of their political views.
This sordid FBI history strongly suggests that a broad
Black United Front in defense of democracy and against these emergent
police state powers is as necessary to the survival of Black America as
the broader struggle for racial justice. Indeed, if we don�t take up
this struggle, we will have lost the right to fight racial inequities
because the demand will be treated as aiding and abetting terrorist
activity.
(Frances M. Beal is national secretary of the Black
Radical Congress. Contact:
[email protected]. This column transmitted via Pacific News
Service.)
Graphic: Ledelle Muhammad/MGN Online
Related story: War
on terror, or freedom FinalCall.com News June
6, 2002
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