Police State America — Volume One
Chapter 1-The Rise of the Police State
Chapter 4 — Universal Public Surveillance
Chapter 5 — Other Surveillance
Chapter 6 — Searching for Anarchists, or Maybe Just Political Activists
Chapter 7 — Winning the Information War
Chapter 8 — Arbitrary and Unaccountable Law Enforcement
Chapter 9 — The Militarisation of the Police
Chapter 10 — Occupy Wall Street
Chapter 11 — Intimidating the Media & Subverting the Press
Chapter 12 — The Short Road: Democracy to Fascism
Chapter 13 — The Next American Revolution? Anticipated Civil
Police State America
CHAPTER 3 –COINTELPRO
By Larry Romanoff
J. Edgar Hoover at Oval Office, White House, Washington, D.C., July 24, 1967. Yoichi R.
Okamoto / Wikimedia
This section should be of particular interest to all those who believe or promulgate the fiction of America as a bastion of freedom of speech and assembly, most especially the freedom to criticise and speak out against the policies of the US government. The FBI has been used as a rather brutal tool against dissenting domestic political groups for many decades, primarily to discredit all those revealing illegalities of government agencies, protesting for change or seeking independence for Puerto Rico or Hawaii or, particularly, those revealing truths of the government’s false flag operations. The program is still in full force today.
COINTELPRO was a secret program operated by the FBI that was meant to undermine the popular upsurge of political dissension which began to sweep the US during the late 1960s and early 1970s, partly in response to the Vietnam war which most people were beginning to see as an inhuman travesty of immense proportion. The name stands for “Counterintelligence Program”, a plan hatched by the FBI to eliminate political opposition inside the US. Working in full cooperation with local police and prosecutors, the FBI created myriad schemes to “misdirect, discredit, disrupt and otherwise neutralize” the many individuals and groups that were politically active and demanding change in the government. The programs, following Bernays’ principles, were meant to distort the public’s view of dissident political groups, to isolate them as enemies of the state, and to use this misinformation to legitimize the brutal repression of political dissension within the US. “By operating covertly, the FBI and police were able to severely weaken domestic political opposition without shaking the conviction of most US people that they live in a democracy with free speech and the rule of law.”
At first, they tried traditional methods of repression, using harassment and prosecution for political crimes, but when these methods failed the FBI secretly used fraud and violence to sabotage this political activity which was supposed to have been guaranteed by the US constitution. Its methods ranged far beyond surveillance and intimidation, and eventually came to imitate a domestic version of the same covert actions for which the CIA has become infamous. As measures to intimidate political dissidents, the agency arranged evictions from homes and offices, the loss of employment, frame-ups and false arrests, break-ins and vandalism, and physical attacks and violence. Many of these actions involved serious physical assaults and the killing of political dissidents. They became so extensive and vicious that as one writer claimed, they “amounted to terrorism on the part of the government”. I have included below details of some of these cases. During this long period of COINTELPRO activity, the FBI openly boasted of its success in having local militants repeatedly “arrested on every possible charge until they could no longer make bail”. Though most people were eventually released, many were convicted of serious charges on the basis of perjured testimony by FBI agents, with more false convictions coming to light even today. This intense legal and police harassment had several objectives.One was that the false arrests would remove the dissident leaders from their activity and from contact with supporters; another was to create huge legal expenses for individuals and groups that might eventually bankrupt anyone who dared to mount political protests in the US. They also spared no effort to paint these political dissidents and protestors as dangerous criminals.
In stark contrast to jingoistic American claims of the independence of the judiciary, the FBI and the US Department of Justice also used these processes to turn US courts into FBI-controlled instruments of political repression. Forced appearances by thousands of individuals before grand juries on charges of being terrorists, were sufficient to dissuade dissidents from further political activity. And in contrast to the utopian American claims about a rule of law, many individuals were jailed during this period without criminal charges or trials, in the same kind of political internment that had been practiced in the most brutal dictatorships. This was neither the first nor the last time the US government would resort to such tactics to silence political dissension, with the US media almost invariably suppressing the information.
The CIA was also heavily involved in this political repression, having infiltrated the Black, student and antiwar movements, and also using its power and contacts to make extensive use of university professors, journalists, labor leaders, publishing houses, cultural organizations and Foundations to mold US public opinion against any political dissension. In recent years there has been increased cooperation between the FBI, the military and the CIA, with political repression within the US now much more sophisticated. Special elite units within the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and the US military are now trained and equipped for what is called “counter-insurgency” or “low-intensity warfare“. These manuals still teach the essential methodology of COINTELPRO, and focus on early intervention to neutralize political opposition before it can take hold. These clandestine operations to discredit and disrupt any sign of political dissension in the US are now institutionalised.
America, as “the land of the free” is a complete myth, an imaginary fairy-tale existing only in the minds of the gullible and uninformed which definition sadly includes a great many Americans.
The FBI also acts to protect the US military and the CIA from public exposure. Over the years, when the US was involved in its brutal and repressive activities in other nations, especially the massive deaths and savage political repressions in South and Central America, it was the FBI who acted to intimidate and threaten political dissidents in the US. When American citizens wanted to travel to Nicaragua or El Salvador to see for themselves the human catastrophes the US had unleashed in those countries, the FBI immediately categorised those citizens with a “terrorist” label, claiming they were traitors to America. They had their trips disrupted, airline and hotel reservations cancelled, their passports and private papers confiscated, their homes and offices burglarised and ransacked, and they were constantly harassed by FBI agents demanding political information. These police actions created such an envelope of fear that it became virtually impossible for American citizens to sustain any kind of political movement or to challenge US government policy.
COINTELPRO was discovered in 1971, when political dissidents broke into an FBI office, stole all their secret files on this activity, and released them to the news media. Until this point, nobody would have believed the US government and its agencies capable of such brutal and illegal political repression. Further information obtained by lawsuits and the public confessions of former agents, eventually created an enormous scandal that threatened the very legitimacy of the American government. In response, the US Congress compelled the FBI (and only the FBI) to reveal part of what it had done, and to promise it would not engage in such activities again. But in the end, nothing changed, and the FBI today is far more criminal than in those earlier years.
Even the US Congress had admitted that the FBI has recently created many fake “terrorist” events in its fabricated sting operations. Operations like COINTELPRO, CHAOS, and OPERATION GARDEN PLOT, or the HOUSTON PLAN were all evidence of a virulent fascism arising in America, all involving the highest levels of military and civilian intelligence and all levels of police agencies in a full-scale attempt to discredit, disrupt and destroy all political dissension and activist movements that sprang up from the 1960s to today. These plans led directly to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, as unacceptable“Black Messiahs”, who might constitute a threat to the ruling elite and the control they exercise through their so-called democratic parties.
When a San Diego newspaper published articles exposing the President’s friends, it was immediately attacked. Bullets were fired into the office, paint splashed over furniture, equipment smashed, records and subscription lists stolen, staff cars firebombed, vending machines vandalized. When the newspaper attempted to relocate to new offices, their prospective landlord was arrested by the police on a fabricated murder charge. Released after an hour of “interrogation”, he told the newspaper they would have to find new offices somewhere else.
Many independent newspapers had their premises or printing presses bombed, some many times, by the FBI for failure to heed warnings about political content. The FBI would publish fabricated stories of sexual or financial misdeeds in “friendly” newspapers. They would give private warnings to radio stations that their broadcast licenses would be revoked if they aired “dissident” content. The objective of these COINTELPRO activities was to block the penetration of political dissension into any channel of American life where public opinion might be molded, to prevent opposing political ideas from attaining any influence over the people. Very simply, any media outlet that was politically objectionable to the secret government was a victim of this kind of brutal political repression by the FBI. The process exists today in more clever, more sophisticated, and more brutal form.
Noam Chomsky wrote of COINTELPRO many years ago in a 2002 book titled Understanding Power, when he stated the following:
“At the exact same time that Watergate was discovered, there were exposures in the courts and through the Freedom of Information Act of massive FBI operations to undermine political freedom in the United States, running back to Roosevelt but really picking up under Kennedy. It was called ‘COINTRELPRO’ and it included a vast range of things … the straight Gestapo-style assassination of a Black Panther leader … organizing race riots in an effort to destroy black movements … attacks on the American Indian Movement, the women’s movement, you name it … fifteen years of FBI disruption of the Socialist Workers Party – that meant regular FBI burglaries, stealing membership lists and using them to threaten people, going to businesses and getting people fired from their jobs and so on. That fact alone … is already vastly more important than … a bunch of Keystone Kops [breaking] into the Democratic National Committee headquarters one time. The Socialist Workers Party is a legal political party after all … And this wasn’t just a bunch of gangsters, this was the national political police; that’s very serious. In comparison to this, Watergate is a tea party.”
*
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at:
2186604556@qq.com
*
This article may contain copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorised by the copyright owner. This content is being made available under the Fair Use doctrine, and is for educational and information purposes only. There is no commercial use of this content.
LARRY ROMANOFF FREE E-BOOKS & PDF ARTICLES
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai, Moon of Shanghai, 2023
