In the dead of night, someone broke into an office and stole documents for political purposes. Nope, not Watergate, but a mysterious group known as the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. The still unknown group stole every classified document they could find from a small FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania in 1971.
This burglary ended J. Edgar Hoover's secret COINTELPRO. Started by the FBI chief in 1956, this program was used to spy on Martin Luther King, John Lennon, antiwar groups, and religious organizations. The FBI also promoted gang wars in the black activist community in order to destroy the Black Panther Party.
The FBI was exposed for inserting "agent provocateurs who repeatedly urged and initiated violent acts on and off university campuses, attacks on police, bombings, and so on."
Chomsky (1999)
Link: COINTELPRO Targets (wiki)
Over the next few months, the group leaked the documents to the press and members of the government.
“It took weeks, in some cases months, before the reporters began to understand the documents. They were fragmentary records of undercover FBI operations to infiltrate twenty-two college campuses with informers, and the described the wiretapping of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panthers. It took a year before one reporter made a concerted effort to decode a word that appeared on the files: COINTELPRO. The word was unknown outside the FBI.”
Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI. New York: Random House, 2012. Pp. 293.
Following the leaks of the stolen FBI classified documents, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Church Committee) reported in 1976 that..
The Committee finds that the domestic activities of the intelligence community at times violated specific statutory prohibitions and infringed the constitutional rights of American citizens.
...
Many of the techniques used 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 Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante 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.
Final report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities
The Church Committee was sparked by a previous whistleblower, Christopher Pyle, in 1970.
Christopher Pyle was a captain in Army intelligence in 1970, when he first disclosed the military’s widespread surveillance of civilian groups. The disclosure triggered fifty congressional inquiries within a month. Pyle went on to work for Senator Sam Ervin’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights and Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee on Intelligence, that led to the founding of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
(Video and transcript)
Democracy Now
Embedded video below the fold..
The Goodman interview with Pyle was a followup piece on an earlier story that the Army had placed an agent in an antiwar group in 2009, so it is obvious that the reining in of the intelligence community by the Church Commission in 1976 has passed its expiration date as far as the government is concerned.
This is supported more recently during the Occupy Wall Street movement as government documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) through its FOIA records requests revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) conducted daily monitoring of peaceful, lawful protests as a matter of policy.
The first trove of FBI documents obtained by the PCJF in December 2012 exposed that the FBI treated the Occupy movement, even before the first tent went up in lower Manhattan, as a potential criminal and terrorist threat in spite of the fact that the FBI acknowledged that the OWS organizers explicitly called for peaceful protests.
Justice Online
This is why we need whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, Christopher Pyle, and the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. The spies need to be spied on to insure the government stays within the bounds of the Constitution.
Those who are demonizing Snowden for his initial act of exposing the NSA may need to reevaluate considering the history of intelligence gathering and its abuse in America. His alleged cooperation with Chinese authorities adds complexity to the issue, and may be Snowden's undoing. Sharing the intel with China will also diminish the importance of his revelation that the NSA is watching all of us as it will allow the government to revive the "Red Scare" that initiated the existence of COINTELPRO in 1956.
Having said that, in no way should Glenn Greenwald be criticized. It is the duty of the fourth estate to report these abuses by the government.