counterpunch.org
Spying and Lying
The FBI's Dirty Secrets
by Mark Weisbrot
It seems that the FBI is likely to be rewarded
for the missed warnings, fumbled intelligence, and bureaucratic
foul-ups that preceded September 11. Attorney General John Ashcroft
has announced that the FBI is changing its rules so that it can
spy on domestic organizations, even where there is no evidence
of specific criminal activity.
It is doubtful that the Administration
could get away with these changes if the real functioning of
the FBI as a political police force were better known. The press
has referred to the agency's COINTELPRO (from counterintelligence
program) operation
of the 1960s and 70s as though it were ancient history, a minor
aberration of the FBI's quirky and fanatical director J. Edgar
Hoover.
In fact COINTELPRO was a massive operation
to infiltrate, disrupt, harass, and otherwise interfere with
the lawful activities of civil rights advocates, peace activists,
religious organizations, and others. One of the FBI's most famous
and hated targets was the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr. In a covert operation that now reads like a B-grade movie
script, the FBI actually made a serious effort to blackmail Dr.
King into committing suicide
Less well known is that FBI operations
against law-abiding citizens did not end when these abuses were
exposed in the 1970s. We know that they continued well into the
1980s, when the Reagan and then Bush (the elder) administrations
faced mounting domestic opposition to their wars in Central America.
Death squads in El Salvador were murdering religious workers
and clergy, the Guatemalan military was carrying out what is
now acknowledged as genocide against its indigenous population,
and an army of terrorists was trying to overthrow the government
of Nicaragua.
The US government was supporting and
sponsoring all of these crimes with billions of dollars, and
that did not sit well with many Americans. I was one of them,
and joined a student group called the Latin American Solidarity
Committee at the University of Michigan. Unbeknownst to us, the
watchful eyes of the FBI were closely monitoring our actions.
So closely, in fact, that one of our
members wrote a history of the group's activities with the help
of documents obtained from the FBI under the Freedom of Information
Act. We enjoyed seeing all of our names in print, and pored over
the documents with a mixture of awe and laughter, amazed that
the federal government could have taken our little student group
so seriously as to keep track of everything we did and who attended
our meetings.
As it turned out, this was part of a
nationwide spying operation involving all 59 FBI field offices.
The whole thing might be secret to this day, if not for fact
that one of the Bureau's informants had a change of heart. He
had infiltrated a community of religious activists in Texas,
and later said that he had second thoughts when his supervisor
suggested that he sleep with a nun in order to discredit them.
The Dallas Morning News broke the story,
and the FBI was forced to conduct an internal investigation.
FBI director William S. Sessions (1987-93) told Congress that
the investigation had left "no stone unturned" and
that his G-men had stopped their "counter- terrorism"
-- yes, they actually called it that -- operations by June of
1985.
Sessions was lying: documents released
to our local group showed that their spying in Ann Arbor continued
well beyond that date. But the press accepted that the FBI had
changed its ways, and today the whole story of their illicit
activities in the 1980s has disappeared into the memory hole.
That is a shame, because there is no
evidence that the FBI ever reformed itself, and now we have two
new reasons to worry about it. One is the blank check that Ashcroft
has handed to the FBI, which threatens our civil liberties. The
second is that after decades of crying "wolf" to justify
its functioning as an American KGB, the FBI is now charged with
protecting us from real terrorist threats.
There has never been an accounting of
how much of the FBI's resources have been devoted to policing
the constitutionally protected activities of our citizens. Congress
should demand this accounting as it examines the massive intelligence
failure that preceded September 11.
Historians like to say that we ignore
the past at our own peril; in the case of the FBI, it may be
literally true. |
