Range of targets In an interview with the BBCs Andrew Marr, MIT professor of linguistics and political activist Noam Chomsky spoke about the purpose and the targets of COINTELPRO saying, COINTELPRO was a program of subversion carried out not by a couple of petty crooks but by the national political police, the FBI, under four administrations... by the time it got through, I wont run through the whole story, it was aimed at the entire new left, at the womens movement, at the whole black movement, it was extremely broad. Its actions went as far as political assassination.[31] According to the Church Committee: While the declared purposes of these programs were to protect the national security or prevent violence, Bureau witnesses admit that many of the targets were nonviolent and most had no connections with a foreign power. Indeed, nonviolent organizations and individuals were targeted because the Bureau believed they represented a potential for violence -- and nonviolent citizens who were against the war in Vietnam were targeted because they gave aid and comfort to violent demonstrators by lending respectability to their cause. The imprecision of the targeting is demonstrated by the inability of the Bureau to define the subjects of the programs. The Black Nationalist program, according to its supervisor, included a great number of organizations that you might not today characterize as black nationalist but which were in fact primarily black. Thus, the nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference was labeled as a Black Nationalist-Hate Group. Furthermore, the actual targets were chosen from a far broader group than the titles of the programs would imply. The CPUSA program targeted not only Communist Party members but also sponsors of the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee and civil rights leaders allegedly under Communist influence or deemed to be not sufficiently anti-Communist. The Socialist Workers Party program included non-SWP sponsors of anti-war demonstrations which were cosponsored by the SWP or the Young Socialist Alliance, its youth group. The Black Nationalist program targeted a range of organizations from the Panthers to SNCC to the peaceful Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and included every Black Student Union and many other black student groups. New Left targets ranged from the SDS to the InterUniversity Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy, from Antioch College (vanguard of the New Left) to the New Mexico Free University and other alternate schools, and from underground newspapers to students protesting university censorship of a student publication by carrying signs with four-letter words on them. Examples of surveillance, spanning all presidents from FDR to Nixon, both legal and illegal, contained in the Church Committee report:[32] President Roosevelt asked the FBI to put in its files the names of citizens sending telegrams to the White House opposing his national defense policy and supporting Col. Charles Lindbergh. President Truman received inside information on a former Roosevelt aides efforts to influence his appointments, labor union negotiating plans, and the publishing plans of journalists. President Eisenhower received reports on purely political and social contacts with foreign officials by Bernard Baruch, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The Kennedy administration had the FBI wiretap a congressional staff member, three executive officials, a lobbyist, and a Washington law firm. US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy received the fruits of an FBI wire tap on Martin Luther King, Jr. and an electronic listening device targeting a congressman, both of which yielded information of a political nature. President Johnson asked the FBI to conduct name checks of his critics and members of the staff of his 1964 opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater. He also requested purely political intelligence on his critics in the Senate, and received extensive intelligence reports on political activity at the 1964 Democratic Convention from FBI electronic surveillance. President Nixon authorized a program of wiretaps which produced for the White House purely political or personal information unrelated to national security, including information about a Supreme Court Justice. The COINTELPRO documents show numerous cases of the FBIs intentions to prevent and disrupt protests against the Vietnam War. Many techniques were used to accomplish this task. These included promoting splits among antiwar forces, encouraging red-baiting of socialists, and pushing violent confrontations as an alternative to massive, peaceful demonstrations. One 1966 COINTELPRO operation attempted to redirect the Socialist Workers Party from their pledge of support for the antiwar movement.[33] The FBI claims that it no longer undertakes COINTELPRO or COINTELPRO-like operations. However, critics claim that agency programs in the spirit of COINTELPRO targeted groups such as the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador,[34] the American Indian Movement,[2][35]Earth First!,[36] the White Separatist Movement,[37] and the Anti-Globalization Movement.[citation needed] Page 4
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 16:45:20 +0000
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