COINTELPRO - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. COINTELPRO (a portmanteau derived from COunter INTELligence. PROgram)It was a series of covert, and at times illegal. Edgar Hoover issued directives governing COINTELPRO, ordering FBI agents to . Kennedy personally authorized some of these programs. Tactics included anonymous phone calls, IRS audits, and the creation of documents that would divide the American communist organization internally. Howard, a civil rights leader, surgeon, and wealthy entrepreneur in Mississippi who had criticized FBI inaction in solving recent murders of George W. Lee, Emmett Till, and other blacks in the South. Martin Luther King, Jr. Under pressure from Hoover to focus on King, Sullivan wrote: In the light of King's powerful demagogic speech. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security. Hoover responded by publicly calling King the most . You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation. While an FBI spokesman has denied that the FBI was . The Pulitzer Prize- winning biography of Malcolm X by Manning Marable asserts that most of the men who plotted Malcolm's assassination were never apprehended and that the full extent of the FBI's involvement in his death cannot be known. King was said to have potential to be the . The CIA launched its own domestic espionage project in 1. Operation CHAOS. The FBI monitored and disrupted the campaign on a national level, while using targeted smear tactics locally to undermine support for the march. A later investigation by the Senate's Church Committee (see below) stated that . 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. In 1. 97. 6 the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, commonly referred to as the . 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 .
For 15 years (1956-1971) the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ran a broad and highly coordinated domestic intelligence / counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO (COunter INTELligence PROgrams). What was originally deemed as a justifiable effort to protect the US during the Cold War from. Through a secret program called the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), there was a concerted effort to subvert the will of the people to avoid the rise 'of a black Messiah' that would mobilize the African-American community into a meaningful political force. This documentary establishes. Many, like himself, Conway charged, were victims of frame-ups orchestrated under the infamous FBI Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Speaking on the Democracy NOW news program, Conway thanked the millions of people who worked tirelessly to.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. Indeed, nonviolent organizations and individuals were targeted because the Bureau believed they represented a . The Black Nationalist program, according to its supervisor, included . The CPUSA program targeted not only Communist Party members but also sponsors of the National Committee to Abolish the House Un- American Activities Committee and civil rights leaders allegedly under Communist influence or deemed to be not sufficiently . The Socialist Workers Party program included non- SWP sponsors of anti- war demonstrations which were cosponsored by the SWP or the Young Socialist Alliance, its youth group. The Black Nationalist program targeted a range of organizations from the Panthers to SNCC to the peaceful Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and included every Black Student Union and many other black student groups. New Left targets ranged from the SDS to the Inter. University Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy, from Antioch College (. Charles Lindbergh. President Truman received inside information on a former Roosevelt aide's efforts to influence his appointments, labor union negotiating plans, and the publishing plans of journalists. President Eisenhower received reports on purely political and social contacts with foreign officials by Bernard Baruch, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The Kennedy administration had the FBI wiretap a congressional staff member, three executive officials, a lobbyist, and a Washington law firm. US Attorney General. Robert F. Kennedy received the fruits of an FBI wire tap on Martin Luther King, Jr. He also requested purely political intelligence on his critics in the Senate, and received extensive intelligence reports on political activity at the 1. Democratic Convention from FBI electronic surveillance. President Nixon authorized a program of wiretaps which produced for the White House purely political or personal information unrelated to national security, including information about a Supreme Court Justice. Groups that were known to be targets of COINTELPRO operations includecommunist and socialist organizationsorganizations and individuals associated with the Civil Rights Movement, including Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Many techniques were used to accomplish this task. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents. Psychological warfare: The FBI and police used myriad . They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated or strong- armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials and others to cause trouble for activists. They used bad- jacketing to create suspicion about targeted activists, sometimes with lethal consequences. Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, . This resulted in numerous deaths, among which were San Diego Black Panther Party members John Huggins, Bunchy Carter and Sylvester Bell. When asked about why he thinks the Black Panthers were targeted he said, . During the early sixties, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and the human rights movement, the police in the United States became increasingly militaristic. They began to train out of military bases in the United States. The Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA) supplied local police with military technology, everything from assault rifles to army personnel carriers. In his opinion, the Counterintelligence Program went hand- in- hand with the militarization of the police in the Black community, with the militarization of police in America. Appearing before the court, an FBI agent testified that he believed Pratt had been framed, because both the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department knew he had not been in the area at the time the murder occurred. Hoover fired back a memo implying the agent's career goals would be directly affected by his supplying evidence to support Hoover's view that the BPP was . In one memo he wrote: . Edgar Hoover personally communicated these insinuations to President Johnson. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret and biased informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone . Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory, harmful and vicious tactics have been employed. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials. While the agencies often committed excesses in response to pressure from high officials in the Executive branch and Congress, they also occasionally initiated improper activities and then concealed them from officials whom they had a duty to inform. Governmental officials. Until recently the Executive branch has neither delineated the scope of permissible activities nor established procedures for supervising intelligence agencies. Congress has failed to exercise sufficient oversight, seldom questioning the use to which its appropriations were being put. Most domestic intelligence issues have not reached the courts, and in those cases when they have reached the courts, the judiciary has been reluctant to grapple with them. In some cases, the FBI conducted investigations of people affiliated with activist groups for . Also, the FBI extended investigations of some of the groups . The IG report also found that FBI Director Robert Mueller III provided inaccurate congressional testimony about one of the investigations, but this inaccuracy may have been due to his relying on what FBI officials told him. Several authors have suggested the American Indian Movement (AIM) has been a target of these operations. Authors such as Ward Churchill, Rex Weyler, and Peter Matthiessen allege that the federal government intended to acquire uranium deposits on the Lakota tribe's reservation land, and that this motivated a larger government conspiracy against AIM activists on the Pine Ridge reservation.! Tatum. Mass surveillance in the United States.
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