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The FBI COINTELPRO Program


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Cointelpro and Divisive Hate

 

The very point of the FBI?s COINTELPRO strategy of the 1960s was paranoia, divisive hatred, and ultimately cannibalization of radical opposition movements in the United States. And it was grimly successful. Now that there are signs that US police agencies are reviving such tactics, it is imperative that activists learn from the mistakes of their counterparts two generations ago, and find rational, principled, humane and above all tactically astute ways to respond.

 

The FBI?s own webpage on COINTELPRO (from a section entitled ?FBI Records: The Vault?) states that the agency launched ?COINTELPRO?short for Counterintelligence Program?in 1956 to disrupt the activities of the Communist Party of the United States. In the 1960s, it was expanded to include a number of other domestic groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. All COINTELPRO operations were ended in 1971. Although limited in scope (about two-tenths of one percent of the FBI?s workload over a 15-year period), COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rights and for other reasons.?

 

Documents released under public pressure in the program?s aftermath in the 1970s revealed that COINTELPRO?s stated goal was to ?expose, misdirect, destroy and neutralize? the Black Panthers and other oppositional groups. The Klan was never a serious target. Apart from the Panthers, top targets were the American Indian Movement, Puerto Rican independence movement, and New Left. Bitter fruits of COINTELPRO included the police murder of scores of Black Panther leaders and adherents, most famously Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago, and the frame-ups and wrongful convictions of many others, including Geronimo Pratt and Dhoruba Bin Wahad?both of whom spent two decades in prison before their convictions were overturned. Many veteran Panthers remain in prison today.

 

 

https://www.popularresistance.org/learn-the-lessons-of-cointelpro-dont-repeat-the-mistakes/

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yawn...

 

 do a thread on the black panther movement and it's shiny, happy moments with white people.

 

I'm tired tonight, but I'll leave this here for now, since you are interested.

 

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At least one of you has contracted, methinks, advanced Trumpism (or possibly Clintonism).  The job of the police is to enforce only the existing laws, all of  the existing laws and to not  choose which ones to ignore or break in the pursuit of a greater  good.    

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All I care about is, they keep their filthy paws off my money!!!

 

Anyone who has amassed any amount of money owes at least a small debt, to the whole of society. For propagating, contributing and sustaining the very system that let you earn this money, a system that was largely funded no doubt by tax payer money as well as private funds.

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In order to make sure as to what the whole issue is (or I think it is), I will quote excerpts from the Wikipedia.  My own text/comments will be in red.

 

COINTELPRO encompassed disruption and sabotage of the Socialist Workers Party (1961), the Ku Klux Klan (1964), the Nation of Islam, the Black Panther Party (1967), and the entire New Left social/political movement, which included antiwar, community, and religious groups (1968). A later investigation by the Senate's Church Committee (see below) stated that "COINTELPRO began in 1956, in part because of frustration with Supreme Court rulings limiting the Government's power to proceed overtly against dissident groups ..."[31] Official congressional committees and several court cases[32] have concluded that COINTELPRO operations against communist and socialist groups exceeded statutory limits on FBI activity and violated constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and association.[1]

The program was successfully kept secret until 1971, when the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI burgled an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, took several dossiers, and exposed the program by passing this material to news agencies.[33] Many news organizations initially refused to publish the information. Within the year, Director J. Edgar Hoover declared that the centralized COINTELPRO was over, and that all future counterintelligence operations would be handled on a case-by-case basis.[34][35]

Additional documents were revealed in the course of separate lawsuits filed against the FBI by NBC correspondent Carl Stern, the Socialist Workers Party, and a number of other groups. In 1976 the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, commonly referred to as the "Church Committee" for its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, launched a major investigation of the FBI and COINTELPRO. Journalists and historians speculate that the government has not released many dossier and documents related to the program. Many released documents have been partly, or entirely, redacted.

The Final Report of the Select Committee castigated conduct of the intelligence community in its domestic operations (including COINTELPRO) in no uncertain terms:

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. The legal questions involved in intelligence programs were often not considered. On other occasions, they were intentionally disregarded in the belief that because the programs served the "national security" the law did not apply. While intelligence officers on occasion failed to disclose to their superiors programs which were illegal or of questionable legality, the Committee finds that the most serious breaches of duty were those of senior officials, who were responsible for controlling intelligence activities and generally failed to assure compliance with the law.[1] 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 ofFirst 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.  ????

 

 

And now we come to the Chomskian suggestion that the removal of Nixon from office served to keep the worse aspects of COINTELPRO secret

 

?.. In a 1996 'Big Idea' interview with BBC journalist Andrew MarrNoam Chomsky suggests that the revelation of COINTELPRO was actually vastly more significant than Watergate,[36] exposure of which happened at exactly the same time. While Chomsky doesn't allege a conspiracy per se, he seems to imply that the apparently convenient timing might suggest that President Nixon could have been sacrificed to drown out media interest in COINTELPRO[37] or that at the very least, the fact that the full extent of the COINTELPRO programme remains relatively unknown is proof that the press has done a poor job in investigating the FBI's activities even once they have been admitted. It was later revealed that the secret Deep Throat source who tipped off Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to the Watergate break-in source was FBI Associate Director Mark Felt for reasons which, according to Chomsky, have never been conclusively explained ?.. 

 

  My overall understanding is that the COINTELPRO program was a criminal enterprise by people who should have been sent to gaol.

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(Red text my own words)

 

 

i think you should re-read history. drugs, radical black power muslims, skyjackings and assassinations/murders of the police were parts of the motif.

 

Perhaps it is you that is grossly misinformed in this instance.

 

The Free Breakfast for School Children Program was a community service program run by the Black Panther Party as an early manifestation of the social mission envisioned by founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale along with their founding of the Oakland Community School, which provided high-level education to 150 children from impoverished urban neighborhoods. Inspired by contemporary research about the essential role of breakfast for optimal schooling, the Panthers would cook and serve food to the poor inner city youth of the area. Initiated in January 1969 at St. Augustine's Church in Oakland, California, the program became so popular that by the end of the year, the Panthers set up kitchens in cities across the US, feeding over 10,000 children every day before they went to school.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Breakfast_for_Children

 

 

Certainly some Panthers had drug problems, just like many other people did and do. But as a party they were anti drugs and anti drug dealing. They would sometimes rob drug dealers and destroy the drugs publicly, rather than turn the contraband over to law enforcement, because corrupt cops would sell the drugs back to the dealers.

 

The Panthers did not have anything against white people, they were against racists.

 

If you want to talk about police assassinations, just look at the murder of 21 year old Chicago Black Panther community leader Fred Hampton.

 

Fred Hampton (August 30, 1948 ? December 4, 1969) was an American activist and revolutionary,[3] chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party(BPP), and deputy chairman of the national BPP. Hampton was assassinated while sleeping at his apartment during a raid by a tactical unit of the Cook County, IllinoisState's Attorney's Office, in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department and theFederal Bureau of Investigation in December 1969. A civil lawsuit filed in 1970 resulted in 1982 in a settlement of $1.85 million. The background and events of Hampton's murder have been chronicled in several documentary films.

 

Automatic gunfire then converged at the head of the south bedroom where Hampton slept, unable to awaken as a result of the barbiturates the FBI infiltrator had slipped into his drink. He was lying on a mattress in the bedroom with his fianc?e, who was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with their child.[22] Two officers found him wounded in the shoulder, and fellow Black Panther Harold Bell reported that he heard the following exchange:

"That's Fred Hampton." "Is he dead?... Bring him out." "He's barely alive. "He'll make it."

Two shots were heard, which were later discovered were fired point blank in Hampton's head. According to Johnson, one officer then said:

"He's good and dead now."[8][25]    

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton

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This was a group that made reading Mao's little red book a requite to membership. The results of Mao's revolutionary takeover in China illustrate just how dangerous groups like the Black Panthers really were. They were an outfit hell bent on destabilizing the US to help foment a violent, socialist proletarian takeover. People who romanticize about the Black Panthers either aren't aware of these facts or are sympathetic to Marxism/Maoism.

 

It's great that they fed thousands of kids, but at the end of the day they wanted to indoctrinate and later recruit these children into their party. Ultimately, there's nothing noble nor praise worthy about the Black Panthers.

 

 

The Panthers were black nationalists and rallied behind phrases like "black power." If white nationalists rallied around the phrase "white power," would you not consider them to be out-and-out racists? The man who popularized the phrase "black power" publicly stated that that black power was a movement meant to "smash everything western civilization created." In a way he sort of accomplished this goal, although in a limited scope--black communities today are cannibalized through self-defeating violence. It was out of these black nationalist movements that arose criminal gangs like the Crips (allegedly an acronym for Community Revolutionary/Reform Interparty Service). That's the legacy of the Black Panthers.

 

 

File 1789, it's true that the Panthers were anti capitalist. Its true that they were promoting black power, but there is a difference between saying black power and saying white power. Whites historically we can pretty much agree I think have had power. Blacks never really had any until very recently. To compare the white power slogan with black power is not symmetrical in this case. The black panther movement was very positive for the communities they were active in, and even inspired populist struggles in other countries. To say that there is nothing praise worthy or noble about the movement is ignorant, if you took some time for yourself to look into the group subjectively, there's no way you could make a statement like that in good faith.

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The party was created as a result of violence, and intimidation suffered by the members. To say that the Panthers promoted Black power through violence and intimidation is false. These were and still are tools that the government employs, through the military and law enforcement agencies and more recently private armies for hire as well.

Edited by Tzatziki
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  • 6 months later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Fascinating.

Those who are obsessed with law and order, and who want to round up parents of US citizens because they broke traffic law, aren't probably concerned with the abuse of power and law-breaking by the NSA, CIA, FBI.

The same people who were more upset with the revelation of torture not the act of torture.

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  • 4 years later...

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