[Ppnews] Covert FBI war against Americans leaves dark memories

Fri Oct 29 10:19:17 EDT 2010

Link Includes 2 embedded videos including one about COINTELPRO 101

Covert FBI war against Americans leaves dark memories

http://rt.com/Top_News/2010-10-29/cointelpro-fbi-usa-war.html

Published 29 October, 2010, 03:14

Edited 29 October, 2010, 12:28

It has been 54 years since the FBI launched a 
covert war against political dissents known as 
the Counter Intelligence Program or more 
infamously by its acronym COINTEL-PRO.

It is a program buried in the shadows of 
America’s history books; an era known to its 
victims as America’s dirty war against its own citizens.

The targets of such a program included the 
following: The Black Panther Party, The Communist 
Party of America, the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist 
Workers Party, the New Left, the Students for a 
Democratic Society, the American Indian Movement, 
the Chicano Movement, the Puerto Rican Liberation 
Movement, Communist groups, anti-war 
organizations, Hollywood stars sympathetic to 
these groups, and civil rights leaders.

Fueled by the frenzied paranoia of McCarthyism 
and the growth of radicalism, the objective of 
COINTEL-PRO was simple; undermine and destroy popular movements by any means.

Imam Abdul Alim Musa was a member of the Black 
Panther’s Oakland chapter. He recalled “infiltration, destabilization.”

The FBI also went after the Chicano Movement, 
which became known as the Brown Berets and the 
Puerto Rican Liberation Movement.

Carlos Montes was one of the original Brown 
Berets. Montes told RT “The FBI worked with the 
LAPD and the sheriffs to keep the Brown Berets 
and local Chicano movements under surveillance. 
We were victims of agent provocateurs, police 
infiltration. They tried to incite our members to 
commit violence, so they would get arrested, and 
they did and we found out after we got arrested.”

<http://rt.com/Top_News/2010-10-29/cointelpro-fbi-usa-war.html?fullstory>Read 
more

Naji Mujihad, the director of Black August, an 
organization which works closely with Political 
Prisoners said, “Within their [FBI]’s internal 
memos, there were several black leaders whom they 
identified as particular such as Rev. Martin Luther King.”

The FBI’s COINTEL-PRO also engaged in writing 
false letters, articles and newsletters to create 
hostilities towards radical groups that had joined forces.

The FBI fabricated a letter to civil rights 
leader Martin Luther King, Jr. that suggested he 
commit suicide and threatened to expose 
information gathered by the FBI from wiretaps on King.

Hollywood actress Jean Seberg was also a subject 
of COINTEL-PRO. After Seberg supported a number 
of Black Nationalists groups and Native American 
groups, the FBI fabricated fake stories in the 
tabloids that Seberg was impregnated by a Black 
Panther member. The allegations were false, but 
led to a tense relationship with Seberg and her 
husband. Her child died days after it was born. She later committed suicide.

However, King and Seberg were not the main targets.

“They labeled the black panther party as public 
enemy number one,” said Mujahid.

Fred Hampton was one of COINTEL-PRO’s targets; he 
was one of the founders of the Black Panther’s 
Chicago chapter. Hampton was shot to death in his 
apartment, next to his pregnant girlfriend after 
an FBI informant drugged him as he slept. He was 21 years old.

“If you take Fred Hampton, it was outright 
murder, it was murder,” said Imam Musa. "If they 
can't misdirect them, they just kill them. That's 
the rule, that's the history of the United States government."

At the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre the 
American Indian Movement held the US government 
at gunpoint. The FBI moved in immediately to take 
out AIM’s leadership. Dennis Banks was one of the 
leaders of the American Indian Movement.

“The suspicion started to rise after we saw what 
they were doing to the Black Panther party. We 
had a series of meetings with the AIM leadership 
to bring that to our attention, that they might 
be targeting us for infiltration,” Banks said.

After Wounded Knee ended in a stalemate, a reign 
of terror soon gripped the pine ridge reservation 
in South Dakota. Over 60 AIM members were 
murdered and others were drug through the courts.

One of them was Leonard Peltier. He was convicted 
of two life terms in prison for the murders of 
two FBI agents. However, many argue the evidence 
and the witnesses were flawed and corrupted.

Today, in the US and throughout the world, 
Peltier is considered America’s foremost political prisoner.

Naji Mujahid insists COINTEL-PRO created 
political Prisoners. “What we recognize now as 
political prisoners are people who came out of 
this era, out of these tactics that are still in prison.”

However, Mujahid said “the United States 
Government doesn’t recognize having any political prisoners.”

In 1978, the US ambassador to the United Nations 
Andrew Young told a news reporter "there are 
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people whom I would call political prisoners."

Immense political pressure from Congress resulted 
in Young’s resignation the following year.

Before there were the WikiLeak papers or the 
Pentagon papers, there were the COINTEL-PRO 
papers. In the early 1970’s, activists broke into 
the FBI’s field office in Pennsylvania and stole 
thousands of documents pertaining to the FBI’s 
program. Almost immediately, a scandal exploded. 
Top officials from the FBI’s national bureau in 
Washington DC were summoned to Capitol Hill for a 
congressional investigation that exposed the 
FBI’s covert war against political dissidents in the United States.

That investigation was known as the Church 
Committee, it found that “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 COINTEL-PRO 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."

Imam Musa, a victim of COINTEL-PRO, believes the 
FBI's program proved devastating for the 
country’s radical movements. "The modern 
COINTEL-PRO has quieted the people down."

“I think COINTEL-PRO was very dangerous for 
American society and even the American judicial 
system to support that kind of raw terrorism,” said Dennis Banks of AIM.

It was a time known for a culture of 
surveillance, paranoia and suspicion. A moment of 
the past that some argue today has left Americans 
and radical movements in the country in disarray.

The FBI program targeted groups like the Black 
Panthers on the guise that they were trying to 
over throw the US government. They specifically 
targeted individual like Dr. Martin Luther King, 
Malcolm X and other civil rights activists in an 
effort to crush the rise of black people, said 
Dr. Malik Zulu Shabazz, the chairman of the New Black Panther Party.

“COINTEL-PRO is an official action of the US 
government through the FBI and is designed to 
crush the rise of black people and stop the rise 
of a black messiah,” Shabazz said.

The program official operated with the mission of 
preventing a coalition of militant black national 
groups, and preventing groups from gaining influence and credibility.

“They said that Martin Luther King would embrace 
nationalism or embrace national goals of black 
people of achieving a nation and territory of our 
own, or in other terms, self determination," 
explained Shabazz. “Then the goal of the US 
government, which was wicked, which was to kill 
and to assassinate, use sabotage, dirty tricks, 
false evidence and other methods of infiltration 
to stop our movement and to stop our rise towards 
our human rights and divine destiny.”

He added, “The US government owes our people, it 
owes the Indians, it owes the brown people that 
it has insulted with this counterintelligence 
program; it owes us all reparations.”

Today Dr. Martin Luther King is a symbol of peace 
and civil rights. He is highly respected and an 
American holiday honors his life.

“We have reduced Dr. King to a dream. But the Dr. 
Martin Luther King that spoke out against US 
foreign policy in Vietnam, US imperialism around 
the world, that’s the Martin Luther King that was 
wire tapped by Robert Kennedy,” he explained.

Shabazz argued that the counterintelligence 
program continues today, but now it is known as the USA PATRIOT Act.

<http://rt.com/Top_News/2010-10-29/cointelpro-fbi-usa-war.html?fullstory>Watch 
the full interview with Dr. Malik Zulu Shabazz

Published 29 October, 2010, 03:14

Edited 29 October, 2010, 12:28