Tuesday, March 08, 2016
45 Years
After COINTELPRO, FBI Still Thinks 'Dissent is the Enemy'
More than 60 groups sign letter calling for
full investigation into government spying on protest groups
Some of the groups targeted by the FBI’s
COINTELPRO. (Source: Zinn Ed Project)
Forty-five years ago on Tuesday, peace
activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania and unearthed
documents exposing the government's expansive COINTELPRO operations, which
aimed to surveil, disrupt, and "neutralize" lawful activist groups,
including war protesters, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the
American Indian Movement, and the National Lawyers Guild.
Though the COINTELPRO revelations stirred
widespread outrage and led to the eventual passage of reform legislation, such
as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, such abuse of activists' First
Amendment rights continues to this day.
More than 60 national and local groups on
Tuesday sent a letter (pdf)
to the leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees expressing concern
over the FBI's and Department of Homeland Security (DHS)'s "abuse of
counterterrorism resources to monitor Americans’ First Amendment protected
activity."
The groups, which include Center for
Constitutional Rights, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Government
Accountability Project, Greenpeace USA, National Lawyers Guild, School of the
Americas Watch (SOAW), and Veterans for Peace, among others, are urging the
Committees to conduct a full investigation, not unlike the Church Committee, "to
determine the extent of FBI and DHS spying in the past decade."
"The FBI in particular has a
well-documented history of abuse of First Amendment rights," the letter
states—referring specifically to the COINTELPRO operations—and such activities
have continued, including "sending undercover agents and informants to
infiltrate peaceful social justice groups, as well as surveillance of,
documenting, and reporting on lawful political activity."
Groups recently targeted by the
FBI include SOAW, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives
Matter, and anti-Keystone XL
Pipeline activists. Meanwhile DHS and local fusion centers, which
operate as local sources of "counter-terrorism" intelligence
gathering and sharing, monitored the
Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements as well.
What's more, the groups note,
"documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that the FBI
continuously invokes counterterrorism authorities to monitor groups it admits
are peaceful and nonviolent."
"Labeling activism as terrorism
criminalizes political dissent," the letter states. "Given the
current political climate and draconian laws concerning terrorism,
individuals may be deterred from participating in completely lawful speech,
such as a protest march, by this stigma."
"That the FBI cannot discern between
activism and terrorism shows us that they think dissent is still the
enemy," said Chip
Gibbons, legal fellow with Bill of Rights Defense Committee and Defending
Dissent Foundation, which organized the letter. "There have been multiple
attempts at reform but after each and every one we see the same thing happening
again. The FBI claims to no longer investigate groups for their political
beliefs, but look at who the FBI investigates under its counterterrorism authority—peace
groups, racial justice groups, economic justice groups—the very same types of
organizations that were targeted during the heyday of J. Edgar Hoover."
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Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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