Ursula Wolfe-Rocca has taught high school social studies since 2000. She is on the editorial board of Rethinking Schools and was the Zinn Education Project Organizer/Curriculum Writer for the 2018-2019 school year. (Originally published on March 1, 2016 by The Zinn Education Project)
[Suppressing the History of FBI violations of the Constitution Can Facilitate What Edward Snowden called “Turnkey Tyranny,” and It’s Almost Too Late (Ray’s adds a few comments after the following text of Wolfe-Rocca’s excellent article.)]
Text Follows
Why We Should Teach About the FBI’s War on the Civil Rights Movement
This month marks the 45th anniversary of a dramatic moment in U.S. history. On March 8, 1971—while Muhammad Ali was fighting Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, and as millions sat glued to their TVs watching the bout unfold—a group of peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they could find.
Keith Forsyth, one of the people who broke in, explained on Democracy Now!: I was spending as much time as I could with organizing against the war, but I had become very frustrated with legal protest. The war was escalating and not de-escalating. And I think what really pushed me over the edge was, shortly after the invasion of Cambodia, there were four students killed at Kent State and two more killed at Jackson State. And that really pushed me over the edge, that it was time to do more than just protest.
Delivered to the press, these documents revealed an FBI conspiracy—known as COINTELPRO—to disrupt and destroy a wide range of protest groups, including the Black freedom movement. The break-in, and the government treachery it revealed, is a chapter of our not-so-distant past that all high school students—and all the rest of us—should learn, yet one that history textbooks continue to ignore.
In recent years, current events discussions in my high school history and government classes have been dominated by names that have piled up with sickening frequency: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland. In looking at the Black Lives Matter movement as a response to these injustices, my class came across a 2015 Oregonian article, “Black Lives Matter: Oregon Justice Department Searched Social Media Hashtags.” The article detailed the department’s digital surveillance of people solely on the basis of their use of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag.
My students debated whether tying #BlackLivesMatter to potential threats to police (the premise of the surveillance program) was justifiable. Most thought it was not. But what the Oregonian did not note in the article, and what my students had no way of knowing, was the history of this story—the ugly, often illegal, treatment of Black activists by the U.S. justice system during the COINTELPRO era.
My students had little way of knowing about this story behind the story because mainstream textbooks almost entirely ignore COINTELPRO. Though COINTELPRO offers teachers a trove of opportunities to illustrate key concepts, including the rule of law, civil liberties, social protest, and due process, it is completely absent from my school’s government book, Magruder’s American Government (Pearson).
For U.S. history teachers investigating Black activism of the 1950s and 1960s, one district textbook is American Odyssey (McGraw Hill). In a section titled “The Movement Appraised,” the book sums up the end of the Civil Rights Movement: Without strong leadership in the years following King’s death, the civil rights movement floundered. Middle-class Americans, both African American and white, tired of the violence and the struggle. The war in Vietnam and crime in the streets at home became the new issue at the forefront of the nation’s consciousness.
Here we find a slew of problematic assertions about the era, plus a notable absence. Nowhere does American Odyssey indicate that, in addition to King’s death and Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement also had to contend with a declaration of war made against it by its own government.
American Odyssey is not alone in its omission. American Journey (Pearson), another textbook used in my school, similarly makes no mention of the program.
The only textbook in my district to mention COINTELPRO is America: A Concise History (St. Martin’s), a college-level, Advanced Placement history text. Limited to a single sentence, its summary and analysis is wholly incomplete: “In the late 1960s SDS and other antiwar groups fell victim to police harassment, and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and CIA agents infiltrated and disrupted radical organizations.”
Why do textbook writers and publishers leave out this crucial episode in U.S. history? Perhaps they take their cues from the FBI itself. According to the FBI website:
The FBI began 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 1 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.
Apparently, mainstream textbooks have accepted—hook, line, and sinker—the FBI’s whitewash of COINTELPRO as “limited in scope” and applying to only a few organizations. But COINTELPRO was neither “limited in scope” nor applied only to the organizations listed in the FBI’s description.
Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover describes the goal of one arm of COINTELPRO—against the Black liberation movement—in a now-declassified 1967 document:
The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.
The plan to “neutralize” Black activists included legal harassment, intimidation, wiretapping, infiltration, smear campaigns, and blackmail, and resulted in countless prison sentences and, in the case of Black Panther Fred Hampton *** and others, murder. This scope of operations can hardly be described as “limited.” Moreover, these tactics were employed not just against every national civil rights organization, but also against the antiwar movement (particularly on college campuses), Students for a Democratic Society, the American Indian Movement, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and others.
One way to appreciate the wide net cast by COINTELPRO is to look at the final report of the Church Committee. In the early 1970s, following a number of allegations in the press about over-reaching government intelligence operations, a Senate committee chaired by Democrat Frank Church of Idaho began an investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies. Their 1976 report states: “The unexpressed major premise of much of COINTELPRO is that the Bureau [FBI] has a role in maintaining the existing social order, and that its efforts should be aimed toward combating those who threaten that order.”
In other words, anyone who challenged the status quo of racism, militarism, and capitalism in American society was fair game for surveillance and harassment. Rather than “limited,” the FBI’s scope potentially included all social and political activists, an alarming and outrageous revelation in a country purportedly governed by the protections of speech and assembly in the First Amendment.
Luckily, we do not need to rely on corporate textbook publishers and the FBI for our resources and curriculum. Thanks to the Media burglars ******, and their suitcases full of stolen documents, we now have access to memos from this FBI program of destruction. In my curriculum, I have pulled together documents from the FBI’s website and from the book The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States, edited by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall.
These documents reveal the FBI’s attempts to infiltrate and disrupt the Black Panthers, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, and others; they reveal an attempt to blackmail Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. using illegally acquired recordings of purported marital infidelities, and a suggestion that he commit suicide. They reveal campaigns of misinformation, where FBI agents planted lies in newspaper and magazine coverage of activists.
I also use the fabulous episode “A Nation of Law?” from the documentary Eyes on the Prize, which details COINTELPRO’s 1969 murder of Fred Hampton in Chicago. Hampton—a leader of Chicago’s Black Panther Party—was a young and inspiring advocate of Black liberation attempting to build a “rainbow coalition” of groups across racial lines. After months of official harassment, he was shot and killed during an FBI-sponsored police raid on his home as he slept in his bed. He was 21 years old.
Together, these resources provide students an opportunity to understand the government-sponsored war against Black activists. And though the COINTELPRO documents have long been public, it is a story that history textbooks continue to ignore, leaving students to swallow the false assertion of books like American Odyssey that the movement simply “floundered” after King’s death.
Textbook publishers’ disregard for the history of COINTELPRO is one more example of the crucial importance of the Black Lives Matter movement, a movement that lays bare the systemic dangers faced by Black people in America while simultaneously affirming and celebrating Black life. What I attempt in my classroom is a Black Lives Matter treatment of COINTELPRO, where we reveal the injustice of the program while affirming and celebrating the promise of the activists it sought to silence.
Just as Black Lives Matter activists use video footage to convince a wider public of what African Americans have long known about police brutality, teachers can use our classrooms to shine a light on history that has long been available, but systematically ignored, by our textbooks. We need a curriculum that emphatically communicates: Black history matters.
*** Fred Hampton: Please mark December 4, 2019 on your calendar — the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Fred Hampton. Civil rights attorney Jeffrey Haas, a friend of Ray’s, “has written the book” on this: The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther.
Haas knows; he was there at the outset, and doggedly pursued the case. Here is a short blurb: It’s around 7:00 a.m. on December 4, 1969, and attorney Jeff Haas is in a police lockup in Chicago, interviewing Fred Hampton’s fiancée. She is describing how the police pulled her from the room as Fred lay unconscious on their bed. She heard one officer say, “He’s still alive.” She then heard two shots. A second officer said, “He’s good and dead now.” She looks at Jeff and asks, “What can you do?” The Assassination of Fred Hampton is Haas’s personal account of how he and People’s Law Office partner Flint Taylor pursued Hampton’s assassins, ultimately prevailing over unlimited government resources and FBI conspiracy.
Order Jeff’s book for your local high school library. And here are two documentary films you might also recommend:
****** Media burglars: An exceptionally powerful resource is a film named “1971” by Johanna Hamilton, which is available via Netflix and in other outlets. Here’s one review:“An extraordinary film about one of the most important acts of civil disobedience in modern American history. “1971” offers much-needed historical context for understanding the urgent issues of surveillance and dissent in the United States.” – Professor Beverly Gage, Historian at Yale University
What follows is a short description of what the “Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI” succeeded in doing 48 years ago. On March 8, 1971 eight ordinary citizens broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, a town just outside Philadelphia, took hundreds of secret files, and shared them with the public. In doing so, they uncovered the FBI’s vast and illegal regime of spying and intimidation of Americans exercising their First Amendment rights.
On the night of the “Fight of the Century” boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, the activists, calling themselves the “Citizens’ Commission” to Investigate the FBI, picked the lock on the door to the small FBI field office. They took every file in the office, loaded them into suitcases, and walked out the front door.
Mailed anonymously, the documents started to show up in newsrooms. The heist yielded a trove of damning evidence that proved the FBI was deliberately working to intimidate civil rights activists and Americans nonviolently protesting the Vietnam War. The most significant revelation was an illegal program overseen by lifelong FBI director J. Edgar Hoover known as COINTELPRO – the Counter Intelligence Program.
Despite searching for the people behind the heist in one of the largest investigations ever conducted, the FBI never solved the mystery of the break-in, and the identities of the members of the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI remained a secret. … until a few years ago.
Footnote: If you’re game for still more after watching “1971,” you may wish to view another edifying, encouraging film in the same genre: “The Camden 28.” This one is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcdWk74LQdw . It runs for 1 hour and 23 minutes.
“The Camden 28” is a 2007 documentary film about 28 members, mostly from the “Catholic Left” who were arrested on August 22, 1971 for attempting to break into a draft board in Camden, New Jersey. Because the Camden 28 were nonviolent and were altruistically motivated, they provided a much greater threat to the FBI and U.S. government: the growing religious opposition to the Vietnam war could not be written off easily as extremist, so they had to be brought down. But weren’t; there is quite a surprise ending.
“The Camden 28” was written, directed, and produced by Anthony Giacchino. In 2007, it was aired as part of PBS’s Point of View series. Critics gave the film high praise. It received an 88% “Fresh” rating on “Rotten Tomatoes” and a Writers Guild Award nomination for Best Documentary Screenplay.
Please raise your hand if you ever heard of the film. :-((
Keep your hand up if you think you know why.
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Ray’s comments:
Apparently, it only takes about four decades for a secret agency like the FBI to “rehabilitate” itself. And the process is greatly facilitated by the seemingly deliberate amnesia characteristic of the “liberal” media these days. Here, for example, is Eugene Robinson a regular columnist and an Associate Editor of the Washington Post and so-called “liberal political analyst” on MSNBC, gushing over the FBI in defending it from charges it committed crimes in the Russia-gate-now-become-deep-state-gate epic.
The title itself speaks volumes: “Trump has picked a fight with the FBI. He’ll be sorry.” Robinson begins: “Presidents don’t win fights with the FBI. Donald Trump apparently wants to learn this lesson the hard way. “Most presidents have had the sense not to bully the FBI by defaming its leaders … Most members of Congress have also understood how unwise it would be to pull such stunts. But Trump and his hapless henchmen on Capitol Hill, led by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), have chosen the wrong enemy. History strongly suggests they will be sorry. … The idea that the likes of Trump and Nunes are going to put a scratch on the FBI”! https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/messing-with-the-fbi-trump-doesnt-know-history/2018/02/01/53f94f62-0788-11e8-94e8-e8b8600ade23_story.html
Why All This?
Because we are indeed close to what Edward Snowden called “turnkey tyranny” and, as was the case 85 years ago in Germany, “liberal” commentators like Eugene Robinson are helping turn the key. The charitable explanation now, as then, is naiveté. I strain to be that charitable.
And now, with former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe joining fellow perjuror, the ineffable former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, on CNN the media/deep-state consortium, so to speak, are hell bent on lending a hand toward proving that Trump would be foolish to “pick a fight with the FBI.”
The denouement may come as early as this fall. And the outcome will go a long way toward showing who is actually running this country. In polite society, one is not supposed to utter the word “fascism,” but that’s where we seem headed.
Legal Kimchi? In a mostly unrelated matter — related only insofar as it also provides additional evidence (if such were needed) that NPR has deteriorated into a transparent propaganda tool of the Washington Establishment — NPR suffered a major loss on August 7. A federal judge affirmed a lower court decision to allow a lawsuit to proceed relating to the neuralgic issue of DNC employee Seth Rich, who was murdered on July 10, 2016 — and who so-called “conspiracy theorists” (like Ray) think played a role in the leak of DNC emails to WikiLeaks.
The day after the Court decision, NPR enlisted the help of discredited Yahoo! News pundit Michael Isikoff (author, with David Corn, of the fiction-posing-as-fact novel Russian Roulette), giving him 37 minutes on its popular Fresh Air program to spin yarn about how the Seth Rich story got started. You guessed it; it was the Russians. No, we are not making this up; see: https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/
Imagine, “persuasive sourcing” required to separate fact from opinion! What a terrible precedent, were it to be applied to the saga of Russia-gate.
Uh-Oh! Bigger Fish Could Be Fried in “Discovery”
The judge’s decision means the lawsuit can now proceed to the discovery stage, which will include demands for documents and depositions from the parties involved. So, we’ll have to wait to see if the Court will acquiesce to the usual Executive Branch objections that information regarding the murder of Seth Rich must be withheld as a state secret? Hmmm. What would THAT tell us?
By Ray McGovern On Wednesday, August 7, 2019, Dr. Wilmer Leon, host of “The Critical Hour” chose an Intercept article of August 4, 2019 by Micah Lee titled The Metadata Trap: The Trump Administration Is Using the Full Power of the U.S. Surveillance State Against Whistleblowers” for a discussion with Chris Garaffa, a web developer and technologist, and Ray. ( For Lee’s Intercept article, see: https://theintercept.com/2019/08/04/whistleblowers-surveillance-fbi-trump/ .)
Those who read through Micah Lee’s article are left with the distinct impression that, unless you have the extraordinary devotion to the Constitution and are ready for the worst to happen to you (two uncommon traits displayed in action by Edward Snowden), well FAGETTABOUTIT. You will face insuperable odds; they will catch you for sure. Snowden’s rare escape from the clutches of the Deep State is the only exception to this rule. Think about where WikiLeaks Julian Assange ended up; and Chelsea Manning is again behind bars.
FAGETTABOUTIT.
In fairness, this may not have been Lee’s intent, and what he describes seems close to the new reality. But he offers little hope that, with all the tools available to government, a whistleblower stands much chance of blowing the whistle and remaining undetected.
Here’s how Dr. Leon set up the conversation:
A recent Intercept article reads, “Government whistleblowers are increasingly being charged under laws such as the Espionage Act, but they aren’t spies. They’re ordinary Americans, and, like most of us, they carry smartphones that automatically get backed up to the cloud. When they want to talk to someone, they send them a text or call them on the phone. They use Gmail and share memes and talk politics on Facebook. Sometimes they even log in to these accounts from their work computers.”
Why does this matter, and how should journalists react?
Not Risen to the Challenge
Well, we know how former investigative journalist James Risen has chosen to react. This was fresh in Ray’s mind since, in an interview Monday on The Hill’s “Rising,” apropos of nothing, Risen decided to call former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney a “conspiracy theorist” on Russia-gate, with no demurral, much less challenge, from the hosts. (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OxZEhN9RBYstarting at minute 2:35.)
Since having-done-good-work-in-the-past-and-now-not-so-much Risen can be considered a paradigm for what has happened to so many Kool-Aid drinking journalists and , Ray plans to write soon about Jim’s transition from investigative journalist to stenographer. Contributing causes? Micah Lee’s article makes it abundantly clear that the traditional sources within the intelligence agencies, whom Risen was able to cultivate discreetly in the past, are too fearful now to even talk to him. Those at the top of the relevant agencies, however, are only to happy to provide grist. And Topic A, of course, is Russian “interference” in the 2016 election. And, of course, “There can be little doubt” the Russians did it.
“Big Jim” Risen, as he is known, jumped on the bandwagon as soon as he joined The Intercept, with a fulsome article on February 17, 2018 titled “Is Donald Trump a Traitor?” (See: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/16/trump-russia-election-hacking-investigation/ .) A couple of excerpts might provide some taste for Jim’s metamorphosis trimming his sails to the prevailing winds. As seen below, Jim shows himself just as susceptible as virtually all of his fellow “journalists” to the epidemic-scale HWHW virus (for Hillary Would Have Won):
“This, my first column for The Intercept, will focus on … the evidence that Russia intervened in the election to help Trump win. It is already compelling, and it grows stronger by the day.
“There can be little doubt now that Russian intelligence officials were behind an effort to hack the DNC’s computers and steal emails and other information from aides to Hillary Clinton as a means of damaging her presidential campaign. …
“To their disgrace, editors and reporters at American news organizations greatly enhanced the Russian echo chamber, eagerly writing stories about Clinton and the Democratic Party based on the emails, while showing almost no interest during the presidential campaign in exactly how those emails came to be disclosed and distributed. The Intercept itself has faced such accusations. The hack was a much more important story than the content of the emails themselves, but that story was largely ignored.”
You got that exactly backwards, Jim. Where you been? The “mainstream media” echo chamber worked very effectively to divert attention from the highly embarrassing content of the emails (showing the dirty tricks used to sabotage Bernie Sanders). The echo chamber music was all about Why did those dastardly Russians hack into the DNC, with John McCain calling the alleged “hack” “an act of war.” Don’t you remember?
Good Advice From Another “Big Jim”
Here’s how Huckleberry Finn’s black friend, Big Jim, answers Huck’s question about accommodating to the conventional wisdom — in this case on slavery: ”Just because … everybody believes it’s right, that don’t make it right.”
In a long interview with Consortium News Editor Joe Lauria a few months ago in New Zealand, Kim.com provided a wealth of detail, based on what he described as first-hand knowledge, regarding how Democratic National Committee documents were leaked to WikiLeaks in 2016. Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney joined Lauria and co-host Elizabeth Vos, in commenting on Lauria’s interview with Kim.com, which was shown during the fourth edition of CN Live last Friday. https://consortiumnews.com/2019/08/02/watch-cn-live-kim-dotcom-bill-binney-mike-gravel-on-episode-4/
The interview with Kim.com is broken down into three segments, each with following commentary. The segmented interview starts at minute 45:35 and goes to 1:58:15, with intermittent commentary and with Binney adding still more remarks until minute 2:15:00. George Szamuely adds his own remarks at the end until minute 2:34:30.
There they go again, the incorrigible Joe Lauria & and the Nevertheless-She Persisted Elizabeth Vos, practicing the forgotten art of agenda-free journalism — including actually interviewing key players like Michael Isikoff, Ed Butowski, and Kim Dot.com.
IMPORTANT: The evidence presented by Kim.com about Seth Rich can be verified or disproven if President Trump summons the courage to order the Director of NSA to dig out the relevant data, including the conversations to which Kim.com refers — and if the NSA Director complies with the order (which, sadly, is not a foregone conclusion). Trump has flinched more than once rather than confront the Deep State — and this time there are a bunch of very well connected, senior Deep State practitioners who could end up in prison. George Szamuely, the wrap-up commentator, expressed doubt that Trump has it in him to face them down.
Szamuely’s doubts are surely warranted, and the smart money should be put on his view. The question this time around, though, is whether Attorney General William Barr, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, and special DOJ investigator John Durham — not to mention Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham — will come up with such such tangible, convincing proof that Russia-gate was a fraud from the get-go, that the President will overcome his fears.
If he does, and if he gives his investigators freedom to pursue the evidence where it leads — without fear or favor vis-a-vis the Deep State — the die will be cast. But don’t expect Brennan, Clapper, Comey, et al. to go without a major fight. The next several months are bound to be highly interesting. Among other things, they are likely to provide good insight into who is in actually in charge in Washington.
Lawrence wrote an equally good piece last August (See *** below) marking the first anniversary of the Memorandum in which VIPS told the President of forensic evidence casting doubt on the claim that Russia, or anyone else, hacked into the DNC. Here’s how that article started:
A year has passed since highly credentialed intelligence professionals produced the first hard evidence that allegations of mail theft and other crimes attributed to Russia rested on purposeful falsification and subterfuge.
Well, another August is here — still without any credible substantive challenge to VIPS’ main conclusions in 2017. And now, even U.S. District Judges are scratching their heads, asking (in legalese) Where’s the beef?
The way that so many people still have their heads in the sand, there is the (sad) prospect that that Patrick Lawrence will have to write a three-years-after piece next August. As Mark Twain is said to have warned, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” Plus, after three years of “Russia-Russia-Russia” in the corporate — and even in some “progressive” — media, this conditioning will not be easy to reverse. Here’s how one observer described the situation last week, in a comment under one of Ray’s pieces on Consortium News:
“… One can write the most thought-out and well documented academic-like essays, articles and reports and the true believers in Russiagate will dismiss it all with a mere flick of their wrist. The mockery and scorn directed towards those of us who knew the score from day one won’t relent. They could die and go to heaven and ask god what really happened during the 2016 election. God would reply to them in no uncertain terms that Putin and the Russians had absolutely nothing to do with anything in ‘16, and they’d all throw up their hands and say, “aha! So, God’s in on this too!” … [Emphasis added.]
“It’s the great lie that won’t die. The cog-dis is simply too much.”
Includes a short clip of the “near universally praised” Robert Mueller testifying to a gutless House Intelligence Committee, blowing intelligence smoke about the dangers from Iraq a month before the U.S./UK attack.
