In an outstanding
piece in today's LA Times, Allan Jalon notes a very significant - and portentous - anniversary: It was 35 years ago today that still-anonymous activists broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and set in motion a series of events that halted - for a time, anyway - a repressive, reprehensible and breathtakingly un-American program of illegal surveillance and intimidation against innocent United States citizens.
COINTELPRO was an FBI program begun in 1956 with the intent of monitoring and ultimately cowing individuals and groups engaged in what the FBI labeled subversive activities.
The activists in Media broke in at night and stole files that laid the program bare:
Found among the Media documents was a new word, "COINTELPRO," short for the FBI's "secret counterintelligence program," created to investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the U.S. Under these programs, beginning in 1956, the bureau worked to "enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles," as one COINTELPRO memo put it, "to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox." [emphasis added]
The surveillance targeted students, teachers, entertainers, leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., and organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The rationale for the activity?
"[To] neutralize them in the same manner they are trying to destroy and neutralize the U.S.," one [FBI] memo said.
The break-in at the Media office has never been solved. While some might consider the escapade a daring act of courage and heroism, to the FBI it remains an open case, a criminal act, even though it revealed a vast criminal enterprise operating at the highest level of the U.S. government.
Sound familiar?
Jalon writes, drawing the clear parallel between 1971 and 2006:
It is tragic when people lose faith in their government to the extent that they feel they must break laws to expose corruption.
But a war that had been started and sustained by lies had gone on for years. And a government had betrayed its citizens, manipulating their fear to strengthen its grip on power.
Those who fail to learn from history . . .