THE FBI
Intimidating Martin Luther King...
"King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own but I am sure that they don't have one at this time that is any where near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. ...
King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant. [sic] You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation."
(anonymous letter from FBI to Martin Luther King obtained from FBI files using the FOIA)
What is the FBI Counterintelligence Program?
COINTELPRO was the FBI's secret program to undermine the popular upsurge which swept the country during the 1960s. Though the name stands for "Counterintelligence Program," the targets were not enemy spies. The FBI set out to eliminate "radical" political opposition inside the US. When traditional modes of repression exposure, blatant harassment, and prosecution for political crimes) failed to counter the growing insurgency, and even helped to fuel it, the Bureau took the law into its own hands and secretly used fraud and force to sabotage constitutionally - protected political activity. Its methods ranged far beyond surveillance, and amounted to a domestic version of the covert action for which the CIA has become infamous throughout the world.
In 1971, only 1% of the paper collected by the FBI had anything to do with organized crime, and 2/3 was devoted to political monitoring and suppression of political activities. The FBI carried out 500,000 investigations on so-called subversives from 1960 to 1974, without a single court conviction.
Not Just the Sixties...
Not only did the FBI infiltrate and disrupt the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, the American Indian Movement, the Puerto Rican Independence movement, Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the Brown Berets and Chicano Moratorium, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers, the women’s movement (during the sixties and seventies) – but they also have infiltrated/disrupted the Central American Solidarity movement during the eighties (a movement that opposed US military intervention in Latin America), Earth First! (during the eighties and up until present – a radical environmental group that does a lot of civil disobedience to stop old-growth logging), the Progressive Student Network (during the eighties), and others.
Should an organization that acts like this be allowed to exist?
"After years spent trying to deal with the effects of COINTELPRO, my rage at the FBI's almost unimaginable evil remains undiminished because I believe that it succeeded in many of its horrifying goals, given the deaths of Martin King, Malcolm X, and other sixties leaders. ...
Since the FBI uses taxpayer dollars to fund its extreme and ridiculous investigations of anyone who expresses dissenting opinions, even resorting to crime -- including theft, encouragement to murder, subornation of perjury, and manipulation of the judicial process -- to achieve its ends, I have always advocated its disbanding."
(William M. Kunstler, civil rights attorney)
References
Most information came from http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointel.htm
Two books available from the Hesburgh library:
“War at Home” Brian Glick. South End Press. 1989.
“The COINTELPRO papers : documents from the FBI's secret wars against domestic dissent.”
Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall. 1990.
Just a couple reasons to not work for the CIA…
Note this list is just a small sample of the CIA’s more notorious actions.
· 1948 – CIA buys Italian elections, stopping communists from winning
· 1953 – CIA overthrows the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran in a military coup, after he threatened to nationalize British oil. Replaces him with the Shah.
· 1954 – CIA overthrows Jacob Arbenz’s elected Guatemalan government on behalf of United Fruit Company for daring to try land reform. The succeeding military dictatorships kill over a hundred thousand people in the next forty years.
· 1957 - 1973: CIA organizes about one coup each year in Laos, to keep the leftist Pathet Lao out of government.
· 1960 to present - dozens of attempts to assassinate Castro.
· 1961 – CIA assassinates elected Congo prime minister Patrice Lumumba, and four years later installs Mobutu who accumulates several billion dollars in Swiss bank accounts before he is kicked out in the late 1990s.
· 1964 – CIA backed coup overthrows Joala Goulart’s government of Brazil
· 1965 – CIA supplies a list of 5000 Indonesian “communists” to the military to kill, overthrows elected president Sukarno, replacing him with Suharto. Suharto remains in power for over thirty years until mass demonstrations force him to resign.
· 1967 – Greece - military coup two days before the elections stops the left from winning.
· 1973 – Overthrew Salvador Allende, elected president of Chile.
· 1975 – CIA involvement in a virtual coup that overturned the Whitlam Labor government in Australia in 1975, when it was feared that Whitlam might interfere with Washington's military and intelligence bases in Australia.
· 1981-1986 - CIA supports Contras in an attempt to overthrow the leftwing government of Nicaragua.
· 1989 – US invades Panama, overthrows Noriega who was on CIA payroll since 1966.
· 1990 – Haiti - Eight months after the US candidate loses the election, a CIA supported coup overthrows leftist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
(Excerpted from: http://home.att.net/~Resurgence/CIAtimeline.html)
Want to Learn More?
For more information read: Blum, William. “Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II” Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995.
Or attend an upcoming lecture featuring professors of Anthropology Victoria Sanford and Greg Downing.
Time and location not yet known. Contact PSA for details.
Want to Get Involved?
If you would like to get active in working for social justice on the campus of Notre Dame and around the world, then you should join the Progressive Student Alliance.
Weekly Meetings: Every Tuesday, 7pm, at 105 O’Shaughnessy, http://www.nd.edu/~psa
To be added to our email list - write: