http://www.independent.org/blog/?p=5565
by Anthony Gregory
April 1, 2010
At the close of World War I, the federal government created the
General Intelligence Division, an agency that eventually morphed into
the modern FBI. One of GID's main tasks was to compile a list of
hundreds of thousands of radicalssocialists, anarchists, labor
activists and antiwar agitators. Thousands were arrested for being
suspected Communists. Hundreds of anarchists were deported to
Bolshevik Russia, the silver lining being that left-anarchists like
Emma Goldman discovered and wrote about the pure horror of Leninism
and the fact that "proletarian dictatorship" was not any sort of
improvement upon the wartime corporatism of the U.S. under Woodrow Wilson.
In the late 1920s, the renamed Bureau of Investigation spied on such
"socialist" threats as Albert Einstein. Under Franklin Roosevelt,
although the FBI continued to keep track of left radicals, it found a
new enemy in the form of opponents of the New Deal. FDR used the FBI
to spy on multitudes of peaceful rightwingers, unleashing a Brown
Scare that was later turned against the left during the McCarthy-era
Red Scare. Roosevelt even spied on his Republican presidential
opponent, Wendell Willkie.
But during the Cold War, Republican and Democratic administrations
again focused the FBI, for the most part, on disrupting the left. Its
COINTELPRO operationa program to "track, expose, disrupt, misdirect,
discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities" of political
radicalswas a great success. FBI'S COINTELPRO forged letters to
bring about violence between the Black Panthers and United Slaves. In
1976, a Senate report showed that the FBI had boasted that "Although
no specific counterintelligence action can be credited with
contributing to this overall situation, it is felt that a substantial
amount of the unrest [among left radical groups] is directly
attributable to this program."
While the FBI was used to infiltrate rightwing anti-Civil Rights and
anti-integrationist activists, it was also targeted against stalwarts
of the Civil Rights movement. The FBI monitored everyone from Martin
Luther King in the 1960s to John Lennon in the 1970s. In the late
70s, the Church Committee reports in the Senate culminated in some
effort to rein in this horribly abusive federal agency.
In the 1990s, the FBI was at the center of the militia scare, with
its snipers and strongmen turned against peaceful separatist Randy
Weaver and his family, and later at the Waco, Texas, standoff with
Branch Davidians, at the end of which FBI agents gassed, shot and
killed dozens of David Koresh's followers at their home at Mt.
Carmel. They used incendiary devices, which might have brought on the
fire, and then lied about it.
It was in this period that the modern left became enamored of the
federal police state and especially the FBI. Almost none of them
stood up for the Branch Davidians. They came to think of FBI agents
as a professional, national and enlightened force populated by such
figures as the Jodie Foster character in Silence of the Lambs, an
agency that enforced civil rights, protected the country from
"rightwing extremists," and overturned the injustices of local,
prejudiced law enforcement.
But during the Bush II era, when the administration was reported to
be reviving COINTELPRO, the left's distrust of national police forces
also became revived. In October 2003, the FBI extensively spied on
peaceful Iraq war protesters, focusing especially on "anarchists. . .
capable of violence." Bush's FBI activities were a throwback to the
post-World War I General Intelligence Division's obsession with
anarchists. In 2005, the ACLU sued to reveal in court that it had
been monitored by the FBI, which had over a thousand pages of
documentation on the organization, as had Greenpeace and other
politically leftist organizations. Religious pacifist groups were
also spied on and infiltrated. And one "terror plot" after another
allegedly discovered and broken up by the administration just in the
nick of time turned out to be a group of poor saps of below-average
intelligence who had been duped by federal informants into saying
something threatening or "planning" a terror attack on American
infrastructure with no chance at all of being successful, and
probably no chance of having even come up with the idea without
federal prodding and agitation. The concern about the return of Cold
War-era FBI infiltration of fringe groups was once again seen on the left.
Now we are back to the Brown Scare, to militia hysteria, to fears
that the out-of-power anti-government right, Christian groups,
separatists, gunowners, opponents of national social programs, census
and tax resisters and so forth are a great threat to American
security. With all the Bush-era anti-Muslim hysteria and war on
terror authoritarianism still in place, we have under Obama a
revitalization of 1990s-style paranoia about "hate groups,"
survivalists and indeed the entire populist right. Just as Bush
conservatives could not differentiate Saddam Hussein from Osama bin
Laden, or an innocent Muslim doing charity work in Pakistan from an
engineer of 9/11, or an antiwar American activist from an
anti-American enemy within giving comfort to the enemy abroad, so too
do the Obama leftists conflate peaceful separatists with violent
racists, peaceful survivalist militia men with Timothy McVeigh.
Every act of violence or alleged plan to commit violence or even
adamant anti-government activism that can be pinned on the "extremist
right"the shooter who murdered a guard at the Holocaust museum, the
man who murdered an abortion doctor in church, the man who flew a
plane through an IRS building, some "militia" members allegedly
planning anti-government violenceall of this is seen as part of a
general trend, even a rightwing conspiracy, one about as coherent as
the neoconservatives' lumping together all anti-US Muslims under the
banner of "Islamofascism." Indeed, I am surprised that not many have
yet warned of the "Christofascist" threat to America, although there
has been plenty of talk comparing the tea party movement to the Nazi
brownshirts and talk that this kind of militia activity is often
associated with "race war," even when the particular subjects at hand
are not even accused of being racially motivated.
And so when a progressive like Rachel Maddow cheers that the Michigan
militia members can be indicted and imprisoned without having done
anything violent, when she reports that the FBI has infiltrated this
group for months and stepped in to arrest them just in the nick of
time, we should not be too surprised when she fails to make the
obvious connection, and fails to be the least bit skeptical of the
federal government's police agents infiltrating a group for months
only to discover that that group's members are saying things about
government that amount to "seditious conspiracy." What kind of
Orwellian world is it when the government can arrest people accused
only of planning to commit violence against government agents and
unleash a "civil war" that we all know is only a fantasy? What kind
of world is it when the very media figure who denounced Bush's
"preemptive war" and Obama's adoption of Bush's "pre-crime" approach
to imprisoning "enemy combatants" in "prolonged detention" before
they commit violence is happy to see a group indicted on federal
charges of talking about committing violencetalk that we can safely
guess was likely incited by the very FBI that had been infiltrating
this group for months? What kind of absurdist dystopia has the left
crying foul when a private citizen infiltrates ACORN, but has no
similar apprehensions about the FBI infiltrating "extremist" groups
and arresting them for "seditious conspiracy"? How can anyone who saw
through the Bush lies of war and crackdowns in the name of "national
security" and stopping madmen from getting "weapons of mass
destruction" really believe that fewer than a dozen Americans with
some rifles and some pipebombs were themselves planning to use
"weapons of mass destruction" in any way that posed a threat to the
U.S. government? And what about the charge of having weapons in
connection to a crimethat crime being the intention of one day
committing a crime?
Of course, preempting people from committing acts of criminal
violence is just and sometimes necessary, but the list of
questionable charges levied at these people, on the tail end of
months of FBI infiltration, would seem to be in a different category,
and at least warrants more critical examination before passing
judgment. One can abhor and condemn the idea of violence and oppose
vehemently the types of acts that these men and women are accused of
planningand certainly, I dowhile still smelling a rat in the way
such sting operations are conducted, or at least demonstrating some
journalistic skepticism that the government's side of the story is
100% accurate and justifies the imprisonment of these people and the
hysteria on which this kind of government activity thrives.
But once again, with their people at the helm of state, the left has
decided to embrace the FBI, take it at its word, assume that people
are guilty until proven innocent once accused of guilt by the police
state that they now see as the guardian of order against rightwing
extremism. Especially strange is the tendency of leftists to fear
rightists out of power even more than in power. The same dynamic can
be seen on the other side. The left and the right love power, and
although that power is often directed against their own when the
other side is at the reins, they cannot abandon the idea that a
police state can be pinpointed only against those they hate, and not
those with whom they sympathize. The responsible, non-partisan and
indeed American thing to do is to harbor extreme skepticism toward
the state when it spies, infiltrates, arrests and imprisons anyone,
and most especially those whose alleged crime is "sedition" or
"conspiracy" or in any way being the enemy of the state.
--
A note on sources: Much of this history is discussed in Geoffrey
Stone's Perilous Times. A lot of the stuff on the FBI's history I
read years back in Roland Kessler's Bureau: The Secret History of the
FBI. A good treatment of COINTELPRO can be found in James Bovard's
Terrorism and Tyranny. On Waco see Carol Moore's the Davidian
Massacre and my Waco archives. And see the ACLU on some of the
surveillance abuses under the Bush administration.
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