Cointelpro-Style Spying and Provocation
New FBI Rules: A Danger to All
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 783, 14 June 2002.
On May 30, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced new “guidelines” for FBI operations to “combat terrorism.” Each of the FBI’s 50-plus field offices will now have full authority to infiltrate political and religious groups, conduct surreptitious break-ins of homes and offices and seize information, including on computers, without a scintilla of evidence of any criminal activity. The standards for conducting an investigation under the new guidelines are blatantly put as “substantially lower than probable cause.” In fact, the basis for FBI investigations will be “thought crimes,” i.e., political advocacy. Ashcroft’s guidelines allow the FBI to initiate “a terrorism enterprise investigation” of organizations even if their statements or activities “would not warrant such a determination.” And if the government labels you a “terrorist” it means you’re an outlaw to whom they can do anything they want.
The FBI’s Counterterrorism Division is shifted from “reactive orientation to proactive”—i.e., “prevention of terrorism” rather than criminal prosecution. The operational point is to provide justification and a mandate for massive and intrusive state surveillance, suspension of democratic rights and the use of extralegal force. Investigations for “prevention” provide the perfect open-ended situation for the government. Full-scale state intervention is justified; if there are no terrorist attacks, then the methods are “proven” successful; if there are terrorist attacks, this is justification for even further state surveillance. In short, the “new” guidelines are that there are no guidelines.
Ashcroft’s announcement resurrects the notorious Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). This operation was begun in the 1950s McCarthyite witchhunt, initially directed at the Communist Party, and then shifted into high gear during the 1960s. Its purpose was to intimidate, incarcerate and even kill those who dared lead opposition to racist American imperialism. None were spared its attentions, from avowed socialists to liberal pacifists like Martin Luther King and even dissenting bourgeois politicos, but its savagery was directed at those who were perceived as challenging the mainstays of the American imperialist order.
In 1968 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared, “The Negro youth and moderate must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries.” He was deadly serious. The cop/FBI killings of 38 Black Panthers and the arrests of hundreds more were a message to those who would challenge the bedrock of American capitalism, the racial segregation of black people. Panther leader Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) was imprisoned for almost three decades with full government knowledge of his innocence. Mumia Abu-Jamal was first targeted by COINTELPRO as a spokesman for the Philadelphia branch of the Panthers at the age of 15. After more than a decade of constant surveillance and cop harassment and failed attempts to railroad him, he was finally convicted in a 1982 frame-up trial and sentenced to death on false charges of killing a Philadelphia police officer. The FBI continued to spy on him even as he sat on death row.
Today, no less an authority than William Safire, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon in the heyday of COINTELPRO, argues:
“Ashcroft claims he is merely allowing the feds to attend public events, or to surf the Internet, which ‘even a 12-year-old can do.’ That’s a masterful deceit....
“Consider the new reach of federal power: the income-tax return you provided your mortgage lender; your academic scores and personnel ratings, credit card purchases and E-ZPass movements; your political and charitable contributions, charge account at your pharmacist and insurance records; your subscription to non-mainstream publications like The Nation or Human Events, every visit to every Web site and comment to every chat room, and every book or movie you bought or even considered on Amazon.com—all newly combined with the tickets, arrests, press clips, full field investigations and raw allegations of angry neighbors or rejected lovers that flow into the F.B.I.”
Safire continues: “Some sunshine libertarians are willing to suffer this loss of personal freedom in the hope that the Ashcroft-Mueller rules of intrusion may prevent a terror attack. They won’t because they’re a fraud.” Indeed, while Ashcroft’s plans were long in the works, it was the Democrats’ efforts to make political hay out of pre-9/11 “intelligence failures” by the FBI that set the stage for the Bush administration to issue its marching orders.
In our statement issued the day after the attack on the World Trade Center, we warned:
“The ruling parties—Democrats and Republicans—are all too eager to be able to wield the bodies of those who were killed and wounded in order to reinforce capitalist class rule. It’s an opportunity for the exploiters to peddle ‘one nation indivisible’ patriotism to try to direct the burgeoning anger at the bottom of this society away from themselves and toward an indefinable foreign ‘enemy,’ as well as immigrants in the U.S., and to reinforce their arsenal of domestic state repression against all the working people.”
Immigrants of Arab or South Asian descent continue to languish in the jails in which they were confined in the immediate aftermath of September 11 without any legal recourse. The arrests of Muslim immigrants continue, as do the attacks on Islamic religious charitable organizations, all without an atom of evidence of any connection to terrorism. The rapidity with which Bush, Ashcroft & Co. rammed through their repressive measures has been made possible by the illusion that only a specific small and vulnerable sector of the population— immigrants from Muslim countries—would be denied legal recourse. But now American citizens John Walker Lindh and Yasser Esam Hamdi, both accused of fighting on the side of the Taliban, find their right to examine prosecution witnesses and, in the case of the latter, even to meet with an attorney challenged by the government. And with Ashcroft’s announcement, the government’s intent is clear: we’re all potentially the enemy.
If you want an idea of what this means, look at the extensive reach of the government’s original COINTELPRO. In 1956, the FBI had over 900 active informants in the Communist Party. In 1961 COINTELPRO was extended to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and over the next five years the FBI conducted at least 90 burglaries (“black bag jobs”) of the SWP’s national office. In short order the government’s political police massively expanded COINTELPRO to go after civil rights protesters, antiwar activists, feminists, supporters of gay rights, environmentalists, Indian rights activists, tenants’ organizations, and virtually anyone critical of government policies. In 1975 the FBI was conducting surveillance of 1,100 organizations.
In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal in the mid 1970s, the government’s secret police were nominally reined in. Revelations that the Nixon administration was carrying out “black bag jobs” even against the Democratic Party were cause for concern among significant sections of the American bourgeoisie over such “excesses.” At the same time, exposure of the FBI’s massive spying on civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activists elicited public outrage. Shortly after Watergate COINTELPRO was officially ended.
But even then, all restrictions on FBI activities were putatively self-imposed. They could still do whatever they wanted without violating any known laws. Take the case of the “L.A. Eight”—seven Palestinians and a Kenyan who have been fighting deportation orders for the last 15 years for political advocacy on behalf of the Palestinian people. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times (4 June), their lawyer, David Cole, painted a stark picture of what it means to have an FBI agent at your meetings:
“For three years agents attended public demonstrations and meetings, seized literature and had it translated, and reported on the ‘anti-Reagan’ slogans chanted at rallies.... In 1986, agents attended a public community dinner the students held to celebrate Palestinian culture and politics. Although none of the agents could speak or understand Arabic, they reported afterward that by observing posters of people with assault rifles, the ‘tone’ of the speeches, and ‘the music and entire mood’ of the gathering, they had divined that it was a fund-raising event for terrorism.”
Though the FBI “found no evidence that anyone in this group had engaged in anything criminal, much less terrorist,” the Feds nonetheless moved to deport them.
Fight the FBI’s “Anti-Terror” Witchhunt!
In 1983, the FBI adopted the Domestic Security/Terrorism Guidelines, which equated left-wing political activity with terrorism and organized crime. We responded with a lawsuit, as a result of which the government conceded the central aim of our legal challenge—that Marxist advocacy cannot be equated with violence or terrorism. This was a modest but genuine blow to the government’s efforts to criminalize leftist political dissent. But as we wrote at the time (WV No. 368, 7 December 1984):
“We have no illusions that the government’s secret police have stopped or will stop their harassment, infiltration and disruption of Marxist political organizations and other perceived political opponents of the government. We do know that the secret police have not changed since Karl Marx was harassed by secret agents of Prussia, that as long as the capitalists hold state power, their police agents will continue their dirty work against any real or perceived challenges to their class rule.”
The U.S. rulers have used the criminal attack on the World Trade Center to assert their “right” to chart the political and military agenda on the planet to suit their own particular imperialist appetites. Thousands have been killed in wretchedly backward Afghanistan; subsequent mopping-up operations have entailed the seemingly random killings of various tribesmen, by the administration’s own admission, to no particular benefit. One direct result has been the destabilization of the area and the possibility of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan. Another has been to give Israel a free hand in its unending attacks on Palestinian towns and mass roundups of “suspects” (any young Palestinian male) in service of its own “war against terror,” i.e., its “right” to dominate and, if necessary, expel the Palestinian population. These unforeseen offshoots of the U.S. invasion now threaten to stymie stage two of the “war against terrorism”—Bush’s plans to invade Iraq sometime next year.
American imperialism’s aspirations to dominate the world unimpeded are both insane and dangerous to the world’s masses. The U.S. bourgeoisie wields the September 11 attacks to promote “national unity” patriotism and peddle the lie that they are defending the population against terrorism. Such calls to patriotism against the “foreign threat” are always used to attempt to quash working-class militancy and social protest. Following the post-World War I strike wave, the 1919-20 Palmer raids expelled thousands of radical immigrants thought to be agents of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The giant strike wave in this country that followed World War II was met by the bourgeoisie’s Cold War drive against the USSR that had as its first target the trade-union militants and socialists who had built the unions in the class struggles of the 1930s. This purge, with its underlying themes of anti-Semitism and anti-black racism, put the unions under the firm control of the “America First” trade-union bureaucrats who dominate the union movement to this day and who are responsible for the decline of union strength. In the 1960s, those who protested against U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants were painted as traitors while the government unleashed its secret police against fighters for black rights at home.
With recession-generated joblessness stalking the land today, America’s rulers, having gorged themselves on the fabulous and ephemeral profits of the 1990s and reeking with corruption, seek to stamp out even the thought of resistance, opposition or social struggle. The American populace is ordered to now accept repression of their rights as the norm for a “war” that the rulers proclaim will last a lifetime.
“National unity” patriotism is a noose around the necks of all working people. As the Labor Black League for Social Defense and the Partisan Defense Committee emphasized in the call for the February 9 Oakland labor-centered mobilization of trade unionists, Asians, blacks, students and others in defense of immigrant rights against the government’s new repressive laws:
“Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft—that apologist for the Confederate slavocracy—have taken first aim at people of Near Eastern descent who were rounded up and thrown in jail where hundreds still remain. They’ve created the spectre of an ‘enemy within’ in order to strengthen the powers of their own consummately violent state. But what America’s racist rulers can get away with will be determined by class struggle. We must fight now to defend our rights and jobs, and the rights and jobs of our immigrant brothers and sisters.”
We had better fight for more and larger such mobilizations in defense of our rights against a government whose equation of political advocacy with a criminal terrorist enterprise is a license to kill.