From: harelb@MATH.CORNELL.EDU (Harel Barzilai)
Newsgroups: alt.activism,talk.politics.misc
Subject: RE-FRAMING DISSENT AS CRIMINAL SUBVERSION (part 3 and 1/2)_
Date: 27 Jul 92 05:52:25 GMT
Organization: misc.activism.progressive on UseNet ; ACTIV-L@UMCVMB

Topic 45        Repression & Paradigm Shift Frame       Response  3 of  4 
cberlet@igc.org
Public Eye Network      10:09 am  Jul 25, 1992 


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In <Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars  
Against the Black Panther Party and the American  
Indian Movement,> Ward Churchill & Jim Vander  
Wall wrote a chilling account of the murderous  
tactics used against non-white political  
activists during the FBI's COINTELPRO  
(Counterintelligence program) and in the years  
that followed. <6> When some academics  
challenged their thesis the writers produced  
<COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's  
Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United  
States,> which uses numerous actual FBI  
documents to make a strong case for convincing  
skeptics that COINTELPRO-type activity continued  
after the name was shelved and represented an  
institutionalized form of repression rather than  
aberrant acts of individual agents. <7> Both  
books discuss the way in which political  
repression involves portraying the targeted group  
as essentially an outlaw formation. Brian Glick,  
in <War at Home, discusses how false stories  
are used to frame dissident groups as  
violent or criminal. <8> 

The techniques and goals of COINTELPRO were  
eerily repeated in the FBI's organized campaign  
against CISPES (The Committee in Solidarity with  
the People of El Salvador). In <Break-Ins,  
Death Threats and the FBI: The Covert War Against  
the Central America Movement>, Ross Gelbspan, a  
veteran <MI>Boston Globe> reporter writes about  
the pattern of robberies reported by persons and  
groups opposing Reagan administration policies in  
Central America. <9> Hundreds of offices, homes,  
and cars were broken into, files were ransacked  
or stolen, but valuable equipment was left  
untouched. Several years, hundreds of interviews  
(some with FBI infiltrators), and many thousands  
of pages of FBI files later, Gelbspan concludes  
the perpetrators of the robberies will probably  
remain a mystery. What is firmly established,  
however is that the FBI repeatedly lied to  
Congress about the extent and purpose of its  
investigations into the same network of Central  
America activists victimized by the robberies.  
Gelbspan documents how the FBI forged  
back-channel ties to far-right anti-communist  
groups in the U.S. and a shadowy network of  
government agencies and death squads in El  
Salvador, and how the press was used in the  
campaign.  

COUNTERSUBVERSION AS PARANOID OBSESSION  

Attorney Michael Krinsky, who had represented the  
NLG, was not surprised when he learned the FBI  
had waged a five-year surveillance war against  
CISPES in a fruitless search for terrorists and  
subversives. This scenario precisely repeated the  
pattern Krinsky and the National Emergency Civil  
Liberties Committee fought in its lawsuit against  
the FBI on behalf of the National Lawyers Guild.  
Krinsky charges that FBI "subversion/terrorism"  
investigations can never really end, because they  
can never really succeed in accomplishing the  
FBI's primary goal--and that goal is not  
investigating criminal activity, but proving the  
pre-conceived notion that dissent is fueled by  
treason. Krinsky agrees with author Frank Donner  
that the term terrorism is merely a device used  
by the FBI to justify its political mission.  

"This is the theory under which the FBI has kept  
subversion investigations running for 45 years  
now," says Krinsky:  

"They believe there is a subversive element out  
there trying to infiltrate and destroy our  
government. Infiltration is by definition covert,  
and therefore, to safeguard our government from  
this secret plot, the FBI has to know everything  
about everybody. The fact that the FBI never  
finds any evidence of this subversive  
infiltration merely demonstrates to the FBI how  
clever the subversives really are." 

Even when their Justice Department superiors  
repeatedly terminate these types of  
investigations because they result in no evidence  
of wrongdoing, and only show the non-criminal  
nature of the targeted group, the true believers  
simply bide their time and then open another  
investigation under a different file name. The  
examples of NLG and CISPES confirm the pattern.  
When the FBI agents could not find the  
non-existent KGB candygram to CISPES, they merely  
ignored their own evidence and redoubled their  
efforts to pursue the group. In the NLG case,  
Krinsky notes:  

"The FBI investigated the NLG for over three  
decades, moving from one pretext to another,  
without being " 

hindered by the fact that none of their  
suspicions proved to be based in fact. As soon as  
one pretext was challenged by a court or the  
Justice Department administrators, the FBI would  
abandon that pretext and embark on a supposedly  
new investigation using a different pretext.  

CRIMES, MISDEMEANORS, AND AMAZING FANTASIES  

Among the investigative categories used to  
justify FBI spying on the NLG: Front for the  
Communist Party, Fomenting Prison Rebellion,  
Front for the Weather Underground, and Violation  
of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. No  
criminal charges were ever filed against the NLG  
and each investigation was terminated  
unsuccessfully when no evidence of criminal  
activity was found. Ann Mari Buitrago, a file  
specialist from the Fund for Open Information and  
Accountability, was hired by the Center for  
Constitutional Rights to read and analyze the FBI  
files on CISPES. Her conclusions:  

"The files show a long train of abuses and  
usurpations, pursuing invariably the same  
object--the destruction of the people's right to  
know and to assemble in order to express opposing  
views on public policy. " 

"The FBI is still reaching into the Hoover-era  
bag of tricks to fight dissent. They are feeding  
their fantasies that the Red Menace is  
everywhere. It is an obsessive belief...and like  
all fantasies, facts do not put it to sleep." 

The process is not just a historical oddity.  

<Intelligence Requirements for the 1990s:  
Collection, Analysis, Counterintelligence, and  
Covert Action> <10> is a collection of  
hard-line recommendations which provides what  
academic Diana Reynolds calls a "blueprint for  
creating a virtual U.S. police state". This  
shopping list for the guardians of post-  
Constitutional America is a sequel to the  
equally-onerous "Intelligence Requirements for  
the 1980s" which was used as a guide by the  
Reagan administration. <11>  

The occurrence of paradigm shift may serve as an  
early indicator for political repression. If so,  
it is important to note that the environmental  
movement and the movement seeking civil rights  
and equality for gay men and lesbians are both  
experiencing paradigm shift. 


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