If you’ve never heard of COINTELPRO…you should have as it gave birth to the Patriot Act and the Bush Crime Family’s covert and overt infringements on our civil liberties.

COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) is a program of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States.

The COINTEL program has once again stepped out of the shadows recently due to the death of Mark Felt, the infamous Deep Throat” who was Bob Woodward secret “mystery person” that helped bring down then President Richard Nixon and his administration.

It turns out that Mark Felt ran COINTELPRO during the period major unrest in the late ’60s, early ’70s.  The Civil Rights Era was morphing into the Anti-Vietnam War era and the Black Panthers and the Radical Anti-War protesters were in their prime. 

COINTEL targeted both violent and non-violent organizations alike, such as:

• the infamous Weathermen
• Ku Klux Klan
• Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference
• American Nazi Party
• Black Panther Party
• Nation of Islam
• and the 60s Anti-war movement

A later investigation by the Senate’s Church Committee 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.

NOTE: The FBI would never let little things like Supreme Court rulings stand in the way of them doing their job. COINTELPRO was the Patriot Act on steroids

The Counter Intelligence Program helped destroy the movements of the 60s including the Anti-war movement which I was a participant in at the time.

Abbie Hoffman, one the most enlightened, effective, and entertaining political activists ever to emerge in this country, was for years targeted, along with the Yippies, as part of the FBI’s COINTEL program, designed to derail the Peace Movement in the United States.

Since COINTELPRO was used mainly against the progressive movements of the 1960s, its impact can be grasped only in the context of the momentous social upheaval which shook the country during those years.

All across the United States, Black communities came alive with renewed political struggle. Most major cities experienced sustained, disciplined Black protest and massive ghetto uprisings. Black activists galvanized multi-racial rebellion among GIs, welfare mothers, students, and prisoners.

The FBI and police instigated violence and fabricated movement horrors. Dissidents were deliberately "criminalized" through false charges, frame-ups, and offensive, bogus leaflets and other materials published in their name.

Counterintelligence" was a misnomer for the FBI programs, since the targets were American political dissidents, not foreign spies. But since there was no oversight at the time, the FBI did whatever it wanted……and I mean whatever!

The program was secret until 1971, when an FBI field office was burglarized by a group of left-wing radicals calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. Several dossiers of files were taken and the information passed to news agencies. 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 the Final Report of the Select Committee COINTELPRO was castigated in no uncertain terms:

"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 of First 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."

Methods
According to Brian Glick, in War at Home, COINTELPRO used a broad array of methods, including:

1. "Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. 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."

2. "Psychological Warfare From the Outside: The FBI and police used myriad other "dirty tricks" to undermine progressive movements. 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."

3. "Harassment Through the Legal System: The FBI and police abused the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. 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, ‘investigative’ interviews, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters."

4. "Extralegal Force and Violence: The FBI and police threatened, instigated, and themselves conducted break-ins, vandalism, assaults, and beatings. The object was to frighten dissidents and disrupt their movements. In the case of radical Black and Puerto Rican activists (and later Native Americans), these attacks—including political assassinations—were so extensive, vicious, and calculated that they can accurately be termed a form of official ‘terrorism.’".

The FBI also conducted "black bag jobs", warrantless surreptitious entries, against the targeted groups and their members. A Black Bag Job or Black Bag Operation is a covert entry action undertaken by a police force or intelligence agency. …

Illegal surveillance
The Final report of the Church Committee concluded:

"Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. 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 informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone "bugs" surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous — and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations — have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity. Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed — including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. 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 — including those whose principal duty is to enforce the law –have violated or ignored the law over long periods of time and have advocated and defended their right to break the law.
The Constitutional system of checks and balances has not adequately controlled intelligence activities. 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."

Did you ever think that you were being spied on? That you were under surveillance…your house, car or office bugged with someone watching…listening to your every word.

Of course not…..why would someone be interested in what I am doing or what I have to say?