Whose Liberty, Whose Security? (PDF)

IV COINTELPRO: “ABHORRENT IN A FREE SOCIETY” Many of the techniques used [by the FBI in its COINTEL- PRO operations] would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far bey...

IV COINTELPRO: “ABHORRENT IN A FREE SOCIETY” Many of the techniques used [by the FBI in its COINTEL- PRO operations] 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. The unexpressed  major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order. —Final Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities Properly used, the term “counterintelligence” refers to efforts to combat the “intelligence” or spying activities of foreign pow- ers. Officially, “the FBI’s counterintelligence functions have al- ways been administratively lodged in its Counterintelligence Division (CID) and [were] legally restricted to ‘hostile foreign governments, foreign organizations and individuals connected with them.’” Nonetheless, since first receiving President Tru- man’s 1936 mandate to investigate subversive activities, Hoover had initiated domestic counterintelligence programs within the Bureau. Some were officially named “COINTELPROs” (COunter INTELligence PROgrams) and others were not, but the term has come to refer to a broad range of FBI programs, generally illegal, intended to repress political dissent. Al- though these programs had almost nothing to do with countering foreign intelligence, the use of the term illustrates the agency’s proclivity to invoke the fear of external threats to the national security while quashing domestic movements which were prima- rily engaged in lawful—indeed, constitutionally protected— activities. Even if one looks only at FBI actions between 1956 and 1971, the period of officially acknowledged COINTELPRO opera- tions, the scope of the operations and their sheer volume is over- whelming. This section will present a brief summary of how the program was exposed, the kinds of tactics used and the move- ments that were the primary targets, giving a few illustrative ex- amples. While constituting a particularly intense period of governmental repression of political dissent, the COINTELPRO era represents not an aberration but the logical outgrowth of the previous use of law enforcement agencies to suppress movements for social change, a process that is still at work in the laws and policies being enacted in the name of countering terrorism. A. COINTELPRO Exposed In 1976, the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (known as the “Church Committee” because it was chaired by Senator Frank Church), characterized the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations as “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the es- tablished order.” To quote the Committee’s Final Report, “[i]n these programs the Bureau went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret actions designed to ‘disrupt’ and ‘neutralize’ target groups and individuals. The techniques were adopted wholesale from wartime counterintelligence, and ranged from the trivial... to the degrading... and the dangerous.” The Committee noted that from 1956, when the FBI officially labeled its anti-communist efforts as a “COINTELPRO,” to 1971, when the program was officially terminated, the FBI approved more than 2000 COINTELPRO actions as part of “a sophisticated vigi- lante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.” Despite a very constricted review which was abruptly termi- nated in mid-stream, the Church Committee hearings and its four-volume Final Report provide more than enough evidence to show that the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Army Intelli- gence, and numerous other federal agencies engaged in thousands of illegal and unconstitutional operations spanning several decades with the explicit intention of destroying social and political movements they considered a threat to the status quo. There is much that we do not know about COINTELPRO and similar operations. Nonetheless, what we do know is more than sufficient to cause alarm. The following sections focus on what is known about FBI COINTELPROs, but it is important to re- member that the Bureau was but one of perhaps dozens of fed- eral agencies engaging in such practices. B. The Tactics Employed The illegal practices employed by the FBI in its COINTEL- PRO operations are far too numerous to list specifically, but they fall into several basic categories: surveillance and infiltration, dissemination of false information, creation of group conflict, abuse of the criminal justice system, and collaboration in assaults and assassinatons. 1. Surveillance and Infiltration One category of operations involves the acquisition of infor- mation through illegal means, including mail interception, wire- taps, bugs, live “tails,” break-ins and burglaries, and the use of informants. The FBI has acknowledged that between 1960 and 1974 it illegally utilized over 2300 wiretaps, 697 bugs, and 57,000 mail openings. It is worth noting that this kind of “in- telligence gathering” is the activity most commonly associated with COINTELPRO—and is also the most hotly debated aspect of the 2001 Act’s expansion of executive power —but is, in fact, the least egregious of the practices involved. Perhaps more sig- nificant than the resulting violations of privacy is the fact that these tactics were not utilized simply for the purpose of acquiring information, but were explicitly intended to induce “paranoia” in movements for social change. As Hoover stated, he wanted his targets to believe that there was “‘an FBI agent behind every mailbox.’” In other words, the executive branch of the federal government was engaging in such activities precisely because of the chilling effect they would have on speech and associational activities protected by the First Amendment. 2. Dissemination of False Information A second level of tactics employed in COINTELPRO opera- tions encompasses the dissemination of information known to be false. One version, sometimes called “gray propaganda,” was the systematic release of disinformation (i.e., false and misleading in- formation) designed to discredit organizations in the eyes of the public and to foster tensions between groups. The Church Committee’s Final Report notes that the Bureau used “confiden- tial sources,” i.e., unpaid informants and “friendly” media sources “who could be relied upon not to reveal the Bureau’s interests” to leak derogatory information about individuals and to publish unfavorable articles and fabricated “documentaries” about targeted groups. Among such groups were the Nation of Islam, the Poor People’s Campaign, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Southern Students Organizing Committee, and the anti-war National Mobilization Committee. Another form of disinformation, known as “black propa- ganda,” involved the fabrication of leaflets and other publica- tions purporting to come from targeted individuals and organizations. Thus, for example, the FBI had an infiltrator in the Sacramento chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) pro- duce a coloring book for children which promoted racism and violence. Although the Panther leadership immediately ordered it destroyed, the Bureau mailed copies to companies which had been contributing food to the Panthers’ Breakfast for Children program to get them to withdraw their support. Such fabrications did much to promote the image of the BPP as violent “cop-killers,” an impression still widely held by the American public. In another example, FBI artists, imitating the drawing styles used by the BPP and a Black cultural nationalist organization known as the United Slaves (US), created a series of leaflets in which each organization appeared to be advocating the elimina- tion of the other’s leadership. The FBI’s intent can be seen in this excerpt from a 1969 report on its San Diego operations: In view of the recent killing of BPP member Sylvester Bell, a new cartoon is being considered in the hopes that it will assist in the continuance of the rift between BPP and US. This car- toon, or series of cartoons, will be similar in nature to those formerly approved by the Bureau and will be forwarded to the Bureau for evaluation and approval immediately upon their completion. 3. Creation of Intra- and Inter-Group Conflict This brings us to the third level of COINTELPRO operations, the FBI’s destruction of targeted organizations both by creating internal dissension and by setting up groups to attack each other. As reported by the Church Committee: Approximately 28% of the Bureau’s COINTELPRO efforts were designed to weaken groups by setting members against each other, or to separate groups which might otherwise be allies, and convert them into mutual enemies. The techniques used included anonymous mailings (reprints, Bureau-authored articles and letters) to group members criticizing a leader or an allied group; using informants to raise controversial issues; forming a “notional”—a Bureau-run splinter group—to draw away membership from the target organization; encouraging hostility up to and including gang warfare, between rival  groups; and the “snitch jacket.” Thanks in part to such efforts, the Bureau managed to escalate US-BPP tensions to the point that two US members, widely be- lieved to be informants, shot and killed BPP members Jon Hug- gins and Bunchy Carter at a meeting on the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles in January 1969. Fabricated correspondence was also a favored tactic, as illus- trated by Hoover’s authorization of an anonymous letter directed to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—accompanied by a tape compiled from bugs of his Washington, D.C. hotel room—suggesting that he commit suicide to avoid the disgrace of the exposure of al- leged sexual misconduct. Nearly one hundred instances of fabricated correspondence between BPP leaders Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver were instrumental in creating intra-party violence and ensuring the 1971 split within the Party. Because of its success in actually infiltrating organizations, the FBI was able to further disrupt their functioning by creating sus- picions about legitimate leaders. In a practice known as “bad- jacketing” or “snitch-jacketing,” the Bureau spread rumors and manufactured evidence that key members were informers or were otherwise undermining the organization by subverting its activities or stealing its funds. This tactic succeeded not only in discrediting many activists, but also resulted in the murders of some who were falsely accused of betraying others within the organization. 4. Abuse of the Criminal Justice System A fourth level of COINTELPRO operations involved the de- liberate misuse of the criminal justice system. Working with local police departments, the FBI had activists repeatedly arrested, not because it anticipated convictions, “but to simply harass, increase paranoia, tie up activists in a series of pre-arraignment incarcera- tions and preliminary courtroom procedures, and deplete their resources through the postings of numerous bail bonds (as well as the retention of attorneys).” Using this tactic, the Revolu- tionary Action Movement in Philadelphia was effectively de- stroyed despite the fact that no criminal convictions were ever obtained against members of this group. Similarly, the govern- ment made 562 arrests in the wake of the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee by members of the American Indian Movement (AIM). Even though these massive arrests only resulted in a to- tal of fifteen convictions, they succeeded in depleting AIM’s re- sources and keeping its leaders tied up in court for years. Virtually all of the Bureau’s surveillance and infiltration re- vealed that the targeted groups were engaging in entirely lawful activity. Rather than turning its focus elsewhere, one of its re- sponses was to place within groups agents provocateur who ad- vocated violence or illegal activities which, if carried out, would then be used as an excuse to crush the organizations. Another response was to make it appear that the groups were engaging in illegal conduct by obtaining convictions in questionable cases by using fabricated evidence or perjured testimony and by explicitly framing people for crimes they had not committed. Prominent cases in which the FBI used perjured testimony and falsified evidence to convict activists include that of New York Black Panther Dhoruba bin Wahad (Richard Moore), whose murder conviction was overturned in 1993 after he had spent twenty years wrongfully incarcerated, and AIM activist Leo- nard Peltier, who is still incarcerated after twenty-seven years, despite the acknowledgment that his conviction for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation was ob- tained with the use of perjured testimony and falsified ballistics evidence and despite worldwide recognition of his status as a political prisoner. The best known case may be that of Los Angeles BPP leader Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), who was the subject of constant surveil- lance and numerous failed attempts to convict him of various crimes. Finally, in 1972, the government succeeded in convicting him of the 1968 “tennis court” murder of a woman in Santa Monica on the basis of the perjured testimony of an FBI inform- ant, and despite the fact that the FBI, thanks to its surveillance, knew that Pratt had been 350 miles away at a BPP meeting in Oakland at the time of the murder. In these cases, which were by no means aberrational but rather an explicit part of the government’s strategy to eliminate the leadership of movements it did not sanction, the Department of Justice—the nation’s highest law enforcement agency—was turn- ing the criminal justice system on its head. It was not enforcing the law but was deliberately engaging in illegal practices, misus- ing criminal laws and the courts to imprison activists, not because they had engaged in criminal conduct but because of their politi- cal beliefs, actions and associations. 5. Collaboration in Assaults and Assassinations A fifth level of COINTELPRO operations involves the gov- ernment’s participation in direct physical assaults and assassina- tions. This is, of course, the hardest area to document, but as Churchill and Vander Wall note, while the Bureau has “almost always used surrogates to perform such functions, [it] can repeat- edly be demonstrated as having provided the basic intelligence, logistics or other ingredients requisite to ‘successful’ operations in this regard.” The most infamous of these is probably the 1969 murder of Chicago Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. At the time, twenty-one year old Hampton was widely recognized as one of the most charismatic leaders emerging in the black com- munity and, despite his characterization by the government as a “black nationalist,” it was his success in cross-racial coalition building that the FBI found most threatening. The prominent role played by FBI informant William O’Neal, who was by then in charge of security for the Chicago BPP chap- ter, and the FBI’s collaboration with local police which culminated in a pre-dawn assault on Hampton’s apartment is well documented. Despite evidence that hundreds of shots were fired into the apartment, killing Hampton and Clark and wound- ing several others, including Hampton’s pregnant fiancee, with only one shot fired in response, all government officials were cleared of criminal charges. Nearly fifteen years later there was a civil finding of a government conspiracy to deny the vic- tims’ civil rights and a $1.85 million settlement, but the FBI had long since accomplished its purpose of destroying the Black Panther Party in Illinois. In the meantime, as part of its concerted program to destroy the American Indian Movement, the FBI provided direct sup- port to the self-proclaimed “Guardians of the Oglala Nation” or “GOONS” on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota who have been implicated in the “unsolved” deaths of at least seventy individuals associated with AIM between 1972 and 1976. Par- ticularly chilling is the fate of the family of John Trudell, AIM’s last national chairman: In February 1979, Trudell led a march in Washington, D.C. to draw attention to the difficulties the Indians were having. Al- though he had received a warning against speaking out, he de- livered an address from the steps of the FBI building on the subject of the agency’s harassment of Indians... Less than 12 hours later, Trudell’s wife, Tina, his three children [ages five, three and one], and his wife’s mother were burned alive in the family home in Duck Valley, Nevada—the apparent work of an arsonist. As noted above, what is at stake in allowing the government un- restrained powers is not merely an abstract notion of First Amendment freedoms but, in many cases, the very survival of those who protest. C. The Groups Targeted Literally hundreds of organizations, most of them related only by a desire to effect social or political change through constitu- tionally protected means, were the targets of various COINTEL- PROs. The Church Committee identified five overarching categories of targets: the Communist Party USA, the Socialist Workers Party, “White Hate Groups,” “Black Nationalist Hate Groups,” and the “New Left.” As the Final Report noted, these were “labels without meaning” as the categories included an extremely wide range of often unrelated organizations. Thus, all of the predominantly black organizations targeted, including Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Confer- ence (SCLC) and numerous Black Student Unions, were “Black Nationalist Hate Groups,” while the Communist Party USA heading covered the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee and numerous civil rights leaders. The “New Left,” which the Bureau could only define as “more or less an attitude,” encompassed targets from the Stu- dents for a Democratic Society (SDS) to anyone involved in pro- testing the war in Vietnam. This section provides a few examples of how these organizations were targeted. 1. Communist and Socialist Organizations Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, COINTELPRO-type opera- tions were directed almost exclusively at the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and groups believed to be affiliated with them. As previously noted, groups identified as “communist” have been targeted by the gov- ernment since the 1870s, and the FBI, or its predecessors, had been trying to crush the CPUSA since its emergence in 1919. The FBI’s first formal COINTELPRO, initiated in 1956, was di- rected at the CPUSA, a lawfully constituted organization which had not been shown to have engaged in any criminal activity. The Bureau specifically instructed agents and infiltrators to gen- erate “acrimonious debates,” “increase factionalism,” and gener- ate “disillusionment and defection.” Apparently it was quite successful. Goldstein says: “Although the precise results of FBI efforts cannot be determined, between 1957 and 1959, what was left of the CP was virtually destroyed by factional infighting.” Nonetheless, “[e]ven as the CP collapsed into a tiny sect of a few thousand members, FBI COINTELPRO activities increased and expanded” to the point where by the mid-1960s the FBI was attempting to engineer the assassination of “key communist leaders” by creating a conflict between the CP and organized crime. The FBI undertook 1,388 separate actions against the CPUSA between 1956 and 1971. In 1973, following public disclosure of COINTELPRO, the So- cialist Workers Party and its youth organization, the Young So- cialist Alliance (YSA), sued the government for illegally subjecting them to infiltration, disruption, and harassment in vio- lation of their constitutional rights. After fifteen years of litiga- tion, the SWP and YSA were awarded $264,000 in damages. The suit documented FBI surveillance that began in 1936 and in- cluded fifty-seven operations conducted by the FBI. These in- cluded poison-pen letters, malicious articles planted in the press, instances of harassment and victimization, covert attempts to get SWP members fired from their jobs, and efforts to disrupt collab- oration between the SWP and civil rights and anti-Vietnam war groups. Judge Griesa’s opinion for the Southern District of New York notes that between 1943 and 1963 the FBI illegally engaged in 20,000 days of wiretaps, 12,000 days of listening “bugs,” and 208 burglaries of office and homes, and that between 1960 and 1976 it employed about 300 member informants (constituting, at any given time, from two to eleven percent of the membership) and 1000 non-member informants. Griesa concludes: Presumably the principal purpose of an FBI informant in a domestic security investigation would be to gather information about planned or actual espionage, violence, terrorism or other illegal activities designed to subvert the governmental structure of the United States. In the case of the SWP, how- ever, there is no evidence that any FBI informant ever re- ported an instance of planned or actual espionage, violence, terrorism or efforts to subvert the governmental structure of the United States. Over the course of approximately 30 years, there is no indication that any informant ever observed any violation of federal law or gave information leading to a single arrest for any federal law violation. What the informant activ- ity yielded by way of information was thousands of reports re- cording peaceful, lawful activity by the SWP and YSA. 2. The Civil Rights Movement By the early 1960s, J. Edgar Hoover began expanding COINTELPRO operations to the civil rights movement, adding Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Atlanta field office’s pick-up list of persons who would be interned under the Detention Act in the event of a national emergency. Despite the fact that the Atlanta office had submitted a thirty-seven-page report confirm- ing that neither King nor the SCLC were under any kind of com- munist influence, Hoover rationalized the operation with the assertion that King associated with “known Communists.” Shortly after King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, William Sulli- van, who was responsible for COINTELPRO nationally, stated in an internal FBI memorandum, “We must mark [King]... as the most dangerous Negro in the future of this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security....” Acknowledging the FBI’s intent to use illegal methods, he continued, “it may be unrealistic to limit [our actions against King] to legalistic proofs that would stand up in court or before Congressional Committees.” When the Bureau failed to con- vince King to commit suicide, it stepped up the campaign to dis- credit King and the SCLC, an effort that continued even after King’s death. Numerous other civil rights organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Mississippi Demo- cratic Freedom Party, and various church and student organiza- tions were similarly targeted. 3. The Ku Klux Klan and “White Hate” Groups Prior to the murders of three young northern “freedom riders” in Mississippi in the summer of 1963, the FBI’s investigation of “racial matters” focused not on the Ku Klux Klan or other white supremacist organizations, but on subverting civil rights groups and their relationships with predominantly white “new left” or- ganizations. The Bureau routinely fed information to police de- partments enforcing the apartheid regime in the South, with full knowledge that the police often transmitted the information di- rectly to the Klan and related organizations. While the FBI had informants in the Klan, it did not use the intelligence it gath- ered to prevent violence against civil rights workers. According to Kenneth O’Reilly, the FBI had been aware of plans to attack two buses of freedom riders arriving in Alabama in the spring of 1961 for weeks, but simply looked on, doing nothing to intervene, when the first bus was destroyed and riders on the second were attacked with bats, chains, and lead pipes. Indeed, the FBI had given the Birmingham police “details re- garding the Freedom Riders’ schedule, knowing full well that at least one law enforcement officer relayed everything to the Klan.” An internal report indicates that the Bureau was aware that during the Freedom Summer of 1963 at least thirty-five SNCC workers were murdered and about 1000 arrested while engaging in constitutionally protected activities, primarily a joint SNCC- CORE voter registration drive intended to support the Missis- sippi Freedom Democratic Party. Moreover, informants had told the FBI that a Mississippi Klan leader had told his followers, who included a significant number of law enforcement officers, to “catch [activists] outside the law, then under Mississippi law you can kill them.” Nonetheless, the Bureau did not act on reports that civil rights activists James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Sch- werner—two of whom the FBI was monitoring as “subver- sives”—were missing until the Justice Department came under intense pressure as a result of widespread publicity about the dis- appearances. Responding to the public outcry, President Lyn- don Johnson himself began pressuring the Bureau to solve the case, and the FBI eventually sent 258 agents to Mississippi. Even then, they found the bodies only after giving a Klan partici- pant $30,000 and immunity from prosecution. Twelve of the participants in the murders went free and the remaining only served short sentences for conspiracy to violate civil rights, not for murder. What is particularly interesting is the FBI’s strat- egy afterwards. Their “sit by and watch” approach having been nationally exposed, they seem to have developed a strategy to control the Klan, but not necessarily to render it ineffective. 4. The “New Left” and the Antiwar Movement Between 1968 and 1971 “New Left” COINTELPROs targeted a wide range of primarily white activist organizations, from Stu- dents for a Democratic Society to the Institute for Policy Studies, the Peace and Freedom Party, and “a broad range of anti-war, anti-racist, student, GI, veteran, feminist, lesbian, gay, environ- mental, Marxist, and anarchist groups, as well as the network of food co-ops, health clinics, child care centers, schools, book- stores, newspapers, community centers, street theaters, rock groups, and communes that formed the infrastructure of the counter-culture.” Given the government’s long history of suppressing anti-war activists, it is not surprising that opponents of the war in Viet- nam were a primary target. A series of COINTELPRO opera- tions were conducted with the aim of causing splits within anti- war organizations and among coalitions of such organizations. College campuses, and even high schools, were a primary focus of FBI operations, with informants placed in classrooms and stu- dent organizations. Their tactics included false media reports, fabricated correspondence, the widespread use of informants and infiltrators, and “snitch-jacketing.” Government agents also ac- tively subverted the logistics, such as the housing, transportation, and meeting places of anti-war activities. 5. “Black Nationalist” Organizations and the Black Panther Party The FBI has, of course, a long history of suppressing the ef- forts of African Americans to obtain racial justice, from its de- struction of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA to the undermining of civil rights groups discussed above. Not surprisingly, the most in- tense of its official COINTELPRO operations were directed at “Black Nationalist” groups, a classification which appeared to in- clude any predominantly African American organization. Ac- cording to a 1967 memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover, “The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalists, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.” One of the program’s explicitly stated goals was to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’” who could unify the movement for Black liberation. According to Hoover, “Malcolm X might have been such a ‘messiah;’... Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammed all aspire to this position.” Another primary goal was to “[p]revent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability....” Hoover in- structed his agents: You must discredit these groups and individuals to, first, the responsible Negro community. Second, they must be discred-  ited to the white community, both the responsible community and to “liberals” who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalist [sic] simply because they are Negroes. Third, these groups must be discredited in the eyes of Negro radicals, the followers of the movement. All predominantly Black activist organizations were targeted, from King’s adamantly nonviolent SCLC to the Nation of Islam. However, by 1968 the Bureau had decided that the Black Pan- ther Party (BPP) was most likely to serve as an effective catalyst for black liberation movements and declared the BPP to be “the greatest [single] threat to the internal security of the country.” Field offices were instructed to submit proposals for “imaginative and hard-hitting counterintelligence measures aimed at crippling the BPP.” The Bureau has acknowledged conducting 295 offi- cial COINTELPROs against Black activist organizations. Of these, 233 operations, most of which took place in 1969, directly targeted the Black Panther Party. However, as Kenneth O’Reilly says, “It is impossible to say how many COINTELPRO actions the FBI implemented against the Panthers and other targets simply by counting the incidents listed in the COINTEL- PRO-Black Hate Group file. The Bureau recorded COINTEL- PRO-type actions in thousands of other files.” We do know that ultimately: [T]he assault left at least twenty-eight Panthers dead, scores of others imprisoned after dubious convictions, and hundreds more suffering permanent physical or psychological damage. The Party was simultaneously infiltrated at every level by agents provocateurs, all of them harnessed to the task of dis- rupting its internal functioning. Completing the package was a torrent of disinformation planted in the media to discredit the Panthers before the public, both personally and organization- ally, thus isolating them from potential support. Ward Churchill concludes that “[a]lthough an entity bearing its name remained in Oakland, California, for another decade... the Black Panther Party in the sense that it was originally con- ceived was effectively destroyed by the end of 1971.” Among the other things destroyed by COINTELPRO were the BPP newspaper, schools, breakfast for children programs, sickle cell anemia and other health care programs, and programs for free clothing, shoes, housing, transportation to prisons and hospitals, and child care. This further illustrates that it was not criminal activity but challenges to the status quo that were perceived as threats by the government. 6. The American Indian Movement Soon after Hoover announced the termination of COINTEL- PRO in 1971, the FBI was launching a massive operation against American Indian organizations which moved from “counterintel- ligence” actions to the use of tactics which are probably more accurately described as “counterinsurgency warfare.” Their pri- mary target was the American Indian Movement (AIM), founded in Minneapolis in 1968. In many respects, AIM emu- lated the Black Panther Party with street patrols intended to counter police brutality by “policing the police” and the estab- lishment of alternative schools and media, legal and health clin- ics, free food programs, and services to assist with housing and employment. More threatening to the federal government, however, was AIM’s emerging focus on reasserting American In- dian sovereignty and its success in linking the poverty and de- spair of Indian communities directly to federal policies. AIM leaders organized the 1972 “Trail of Broken Treaties” march across the country to Washington, D.C., where they occu- pied the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) office and obtained clas- sified documents which showed, among other things, that American Indians were receiving only about ten percent of the market value of mineral and land leases—and even that money was not accounted for—and uncovering a secret Indian Health Services program which had resulted in the sterilization of forty percent of American Indian women of childbearing age. Many of the subsequent FBI operations centered on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where federal agents had installed a tribal president who was willing to turn over a large, mineral-rich por- tion of the reservation to the government. There, in 1973, the FBI led a paramilitary invasion against AIM activists gathered for a symbolic protest at Wounded Knee, the site of the 1890 massacre. During their 71-day siege the government deployed over 100 FBI agents, nearly 300 federal marshals, 250 BIA po- lice, Army warfare experts, and local vigilantes known as the GOONS (Guardians of the Oglala Nation). In their attempt to remove the activists, government forces fired approximately 500,000 rounds of ammunition into the area. The government followed up with the hundreds of bogus criminal charges in- tended to keep AIM leaders tied up in court and to deplete the organization’s funds. From 1973 to 1976 the GOONS, often using arms supplied them by the FBI, murdered at least sixty-nine AIM members and supporters on the Pine Ridge Reservation and assaulted an- other 340. The FBI, which exercised criminal jurisdiction on the reservation, was too “short of manpower” to investigate these murders. In 1975 it was revealed that AIM’s national security chief, Doug Durham, was an undercover FBI operative. Among other things, Durham had been AIM’s liaison with the Wounded Knee legal defense team and had authored the AIM documents consistently cited by the FBI to demonstrate the group’s alleged tendencies toward violence.  On June 23, 1975, the Church Committee announced that it would hold hearings on the FBI operations targeting the Ameri- can Indian Movement. Three days later, two FBI agents were killed in a firefight on Pine Ridge, triggering, in the words of the Chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, “a full-scale mili- tary-type invasion of the reservation” and allowing the Church Committee to “postpone” the hearings indefinitely. D. Assessing COINTELPRO: Is It Over? Even the Church Committee’s carefully worded Final Report acknowledged: [I]n the course of COINTELPRO’s fifteen-year history, a number of individual actions may have violated specific crimi- nal statutes; a number of individual actions involved risk of serious bodily injury or death to the targets... ; and a number of actions, while not illegal or dangerous, can only be de- scribed as “abhorrent in a free society.” Given the massive documentation of illegal and unconstitutional activities conducted by the United States’ highest law enforce- ment agency against its own citizens, the paucity of legal analysis of these activities is quite stunning. There is a tendency to dis- miss the COINTELPRO era as “an awkward period in the his- tory of the FBI” rather than recognizing, as the Church Committee did, that it was, in fact, a war against social and politi- cal dissent in the United States. By 1989, a federal district court was already discounting COINTELPRO activities as “[r]elatively ancient governmental misconduct” irrelevant to indictments being brought against white activists in the “Resistance Conspiracy” case. Can we safely relegate this era to history, perhaps acknowledging that, as Senator Church put it, it was “one of the sordid episodes in the history of American law enforcement,” but accepting it as an aberration generated by the FBI’s zeal for protecting the national security? There are a number of reasons why such an approach, while perhaps comforting to some, is not warranted. First, we must look at the “excesses” of the COINTELPRO era in light of the earlier history of the FBI and its predecessor organizations. While the earlier efforts to suppress political dis- sent were not nearly as well funded or efficiently organized, this country has a consistent history of using its police powers—fed- eral, state, local and private—not to enforce the law and uphold the Constitution, but to crush what are perceived as threats to the status quo. The purposes of COINTELPRO, as articulated by the Church Committee, illustrate that it was the logical exten- sion of this history: Protecting national security and preventing violence are the purposes advanced by the Bureau for COINTELPRO. There is another purpose for COINTELPRO which is not explicit but which offers the only explanation for those actions which had no conceivable rational relationship to either national se- curity or violent activity. The unexpressed major premise... is that the Bureau has a role in maintaining the existing social order, and that its efforts should be aimed toward combating those who threaten that order. Second, we must remember that information about COINTELPRO was only made available to the American public because a group of citizens burglarized the FBI’s Media, Penn- sylvania office and stole files which were subsequently published in the press—an activity that would today probably be classified as “domestic terrorism” under the 2001 Act —and because the Watergate scandal, not the crushing of the political movements in question, spurred the Senate to convene the Church Committee hearings. Almost all of the additional documentation of COINTELPRO abuses has been obtained by piecing together censored files released under the Freedom of Information Act, an avenue dramatically curtailed by Attorney General Ashcroft in October 2001. There is no reliable way for the American public to know what programs are continuing or may be insti- tuted in the future. Third, what we do know about the FBI’s activities from 1956 to 1976, generally believed to be the height of COINTELPRO-type operations, is far from complete. The Church Committee’s find- ings are based on the depositions of select Bureau agents and targets, and the review of only about 20,000 of the millions of pages of documents generated by the Bureau. It could not, of course, review files that were withheld or destroyed or opera- tions that were not documented. More significantly, the Church Committee “temporarily” suspended its investigation before reaching scheduled hearings on some of the FBI’s most intense operations, notably those targeting the American Indian Movement and the movements for Puerto Rican independence, just as the repression of these groups was reaching its zenith. Twenty-six years later the hearings have not been resumed. Fourth, what has been done about the abuses that were ex- posed? One of the fundamental principles of American law, and of the rule of law more generally, is that there is a remedy for legally acknowledged wrongs. Despite the thousands of in- stances of illegal conduct on the part of the government that were documented by both Senate and House committees, no changes were made in the law and no government official has spent a day in jail as a result. A handful of victims or their surviving families have managed to obtain civil judgments or set- tlements for damages, but these cases are by far the exception. No one disputes that governmental agencies at the highest level engaged in long-term, systematic and deliberate violation of the laws and the Constitution. Yet the legislature which enacts the laws, the executive which is charged by the Constitution with “faithfully Executing the laws,” and the judiciary whose responsi- bility it is to see that the laws are enforced have all looked the other way and, by doing so, have implicitly sanctioned this under- mining of the rule of law. All of this confirms the accuracy of FBI Director Kelley’s testimony to the Church Committee that “the FBI employees involved in these programs did what they felt was expected of them by the President, the Attorney Gen- eral, the Congress, and the people of the United States.” Fifth, despite the barriers to public access to such information, there is on-going evidence that COINTELPRO-type operations continue. On April 27, 1971, in response to the release of classi- fied information obtained in a break-in of the Media, Penn- sylvania, FBI office, Hoover officially terminated all COINTELPROs for “security reasons.” The FBI “termina- tion” memo provided, however, that “[i]n exceptional circum- stances where it is considered counter-intelligence action is warranted, recommendations should be submitted to the Bureau under the individual case caption to which it pertains.” Despite the Bureau’s initial contention that there was no post- 1971 COINTELPRO activity, the Church Committee docu- mented several post-1971 COINTELPRO-type operations, and noted that it had not been able to determine with any greater precision the extent to which COINTELPRO may be continuing, because any proposals to initiate COINTELPRO-type action would be filed under the individual case caption. The Bureau by then had over 500,000 case files, and each one would have to be searched. In fact, the number of illegal bugs and wiretaps uti- lized by the Bureau in the three years after 1971 increased significantly. In the meantime, evidence of on-going operations continues to surface. During the 1980s the FBI and CIA used classic COINTELPRO tactics against organizations opposed to U.S. policy in Latin America. Operating under classified “Foreign In- telligence/Terrorism” guidelines promulgated by the Reagan ad- ministration, the government targeted the nonviolent Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) and groups involved in the “Sanctuary” movement. When their own field reports consistently confirmed that the ac- tivities of CISPES and other Latin America solidarity organiza- tions were “legitimate” and “respectable,” the FBI took the position that CISPES’s overt activities were “designed to cover a sinister covert program of which most CISPES members were unaware,” and that it must be a “front group” for more danger- ous organizations. Using this rationale, the FBI extended its operations to encompass hundreds of other groups, including Amnesty International, Clergy and Laity Concerned, the U.S. Catholic Conference and the Maryknoll Sisters, utilizing its stan- dard tactics of infiltrators and agents provocateur, disinforma- tion, black bag jobs, telephone monitoring, and conspicuous surveillance designed to induce paranoia. Ultimately, in this context the FBI gathered information on the political activities of ap- proximately 2,375 individuals and 1,330 organizations, and ini- tiated 178 related investigations that appear to have been based on political ideology rather than on suspicion of crimi- nal activity. Yet this massive government intrusion into the lives of thousands of lawful political activists failed to yield a single criminal charge, let alone a criminal conviction. Using the rubric of “counter-terrorism” rather than “anti-com- munism,” the FBI has continued to conduct numerous opera- tions against anti-war and anti-nuclear groups such as the pacifist organization Silo Plowshares; environmental activists such as Earth First!; supporters of the Puerto Rican independence movement, including the coordinator of the National Lawyers Guild’s anti-repression task force; and perhaps black elected officials in general. As Brian Glick states: The targets [of ongoing domestic covert action]... include virtually all who fight for peace and social justice in the United States—from AIM, Puerto Rican independentistas and the Coalition for a New South, to environmentalists, pacifists, trade unionists, homeless and seniors, feminists, gay and les- bian activists, radical clergy and teachers, publishers of dissi- dent literature, prison reformers, progressive attorneys, civil rights and anti-poverty workers, and on and on. Finally, the best evidence that COINTELPRO-type opera- tions, and the more general repression of political dissent that they represent, cannot be relegated to history may be the consis- tent efforts of the executive branch to roll back the minimal re- forms mandated by Congress in the wake of the Church Committee investigations, to further shield their activities from public scrutiny, and to legalize many of the tactics routinely em- ployed by the FBI in its efforts to suppress dissent, before, during and after the COINTELPRO era. These efforts are discussed in Part V.