From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: WAR AT HOME: POLITICAL REPRESSION IN THE US (3/8)
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1992 08:15:09 GMT

/** pn.publiceye: 23.9 **/
** Written  6:54 pm  Jan 24, 1991 by nlgclc in cdp:pn.publiceye **

The Native American Movement:  1970s FBI attacks on resurgent Native
American resistance have been well documented by Ward Churchill and
others.[f-44> In 1973, the Bureau led a paramilitary invasion of the
Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota as American Indian Movement (AIM)
activists gathered there for symbolic protests at Wounded Knee, the site
of an earlier U.S. massacre of Native Americans.  The FBI directed the
entire 71-day siege, deploying federal marshals, U.S.  Army personnel,
Bureau of Indian Affairs police, local GOONs (Guardians of the Oglala
Nation, an armed tribal vigilante force), and a vast array of heavy
weaponry.

In the following years, the FBI and its allies waged all-out war on AIM
and the Native people.  From 1973-76, they killed 69 residents of the
tiny Pine Ridge reservation, a rate of political murder comparable to
the first years of the Pinochet regime in Chile.[f-45> To justify such a
reign of terror and undercut public protest against it, the Bureau
launched a complementary program of psychological warfare.

Central to this effort was a carefully orchestrated campaign to
reinforce the already deeply ingrained myth of the "Indian savage."  In
one operation, the FBI fabricated reports that AIM "Dog Soldiers"
planned widespread "sniping at tourists" and "burning of farmers" in
South Dakota.  The son of liberal U.S.  Senator (and Arab-American
activist) James Abourezk, was named as a "gunrunner," and the Bureau
issued a nationwide alert picked up by media across the country.

To the same end, FBI undercover operatives framed AIM members Paul
"Skyhorse" Durant and Richard "Mohawk" Billings for the brutal murder of
a Los Angeles taxi driver.  A bogus AIM note taking credit for the
killing was found pinned to a signpost near the murder site, along with
a bundle of hair said to be the victim's "scalp."  Newspaper headlines
screamed of "ritual murder" by "radical Indians."  By the time the
defendants were finally cleared of the spurious charges, many of AIM's
main financial backers had been scared away and its work among a major
urban concentration of Native people was in ruin.

In March 1975, a central perpetrator of this hoax, AIM's national
security chief Doug Durham, was unmasked as an undercover operative for
the FBI.  As AIM's liaison with the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense
Committee during the trials of Dennis Banks and other Native American
leaders, Durham had routinely participated in confidential strategy
sessions.  He confessed to stealing organizational funds during his two
years with AIM, and to setting up the arrest of AIM militants for
actions he had organized.  It was Durham who authored the AIM documents
that the FBI consistently cited to demonstrate the group's supposed
violent tendencies.

Prompted by Durham's revelations, the Senate Intelligence Committee
announced on June 23, 1975 that it would hold public hearings on FBI
operations against AIM.  Three days later, armed FBI agents assaulted an
AIM house on the Pine Ridge reservation.  When the smoke cleared, AIM
activist Joe Stuntz Killsright and two FBI agents lay dead.  The media,
barred from the scene "to preserve the evidence," broadcast the Bureau's
false accounts of a bloody "Indian ambush," and the congressional
hearings were quietly cancelled.

The FBI was then free to crush AIM and clear out the last pockets of
resistance at Pine Ridge.  It launched what the Chairman of the U.S.
Civil Rights Commission described as "a full-scale military-type
invasion of the reservation"[f-46> complete with M-16s, Huey
helicopters, tracking dogs, and armored personnel carriers.  Eventually
AIM leader Leonard Peltier was tried for the agents' deaths before a
right-wing judge who met secretly with the FBI.  AIM member Anna Mae
Aquash was found murdered after FBI agents threatened to kill her unless
she helped them to frame Peltier.  Peltier's conviction, based on
perjured testimony and falsified FBI ballistics evidence, was upheld on
appeal.  (The panel of federal judges included William Webster until the
very day of his official appointment as Director of the FBI.)  Despite
mounting evidence of impropriety in Peltier's trial, and Amnesty
International's call for a review of his case, the Native American
leader remains in maximum security prison.

** End of text from cdp:pn.publiceye **

/** pn.publiceye: 23.10 **/
** Written  7:11 pm  Jan 25, 1991 by nlgclc in cdp:pn.publiceye **

The Black Movement:  Government covert action against Black activists
also continued in the 1970s.  Targets ranged from community-based groups
to the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika and the
surviving remnants of the Black Panther Party.

In Mississippi, federal and state agents attempted to discredit and
disrupt the United League of Marshall County, a broad-based grassroots
civil rights group struggling to stop Klan violence.  In California, a
notorious paid operative for the FBI, Darthard Perry, code-named
"Othello," infiltrated and disrupted local Black groups and took
personal credit for the fire that razed the Watts Writers Workshop's
multi-million dollar cultural center in Los Angeles in 1973.  The Los
Angeles Police Department later admitted infiltrating at least seven
1970s community groups, including the Black-led Coalition Against Police
Abuse.[f-47>

In the mid-1970s, the U.S.  Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
(ATF) conspired with the Wilmington, North Carolina police to frame nine
local civil rights workers and the Rev.  Ben Chavis, field organizer for
the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ.
Chavis had been sent to North Carolina to help Black communities respond
to escalating racist violence against school desegregation.  Instead of
arresting Klansmen, the ATF and police coerced three young Black
prisoners into falsely accusing Chavis and the others of burning
white-owned property.  Although all three prisoners later admitted they
had lied in response to official threats and bribes, the FBI found no
impropriety.  The courts repeatedly refused to reopen the case and the
Wilmington Ten served many years in prison before pressure from
international religious and human rights groups won their release.[f-48>

As the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) began to build autonomous Black
economic and political institutions in the deep South, the Bureau
repeatedly disrupted its meetings and blocked its attempts to buy land.
On August 18, 1971, four months after the supposed end of COINTELPRO,
the FBI and police launched an armed pre-dawn assault on national RNA
offices in Jackson, Mississippi.  Carrying a warrant for a fugitive who
had been brought to RNA Headquarters by FBI informer Thomas Spells, the
attackers concentrated their fire where the informer's floor plan
indicated that RNA President Imari Obadele slept.  Though Obadele was
away at the time of the raid, the Bureau had him arrested and imprisoned
on charges of conspiracy to assault a government agent.[f-49>

The COINTELPRO-triggered collapse of the Black Panthers' organization
and support in the winter of 1971 left them defenseless as the
government moved to prevent them from regrouping.  On August 21, 1971,
national Party officer George Jackson, world-renowned author of the
political autobiography <Soledad Brother,> was murdered by San Quentin
prison authorities on the pretext of an attempted jailbreak.[f-50> In
July 1972, Southern California Panther leader Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt was
successfully framed for a senseless $70 robbery-murder committed while
he was hundreds of miles away in Oakland, California, attending Black
Panther meetings for which the FBI managed to "lose" all of its
surveillance records.  Documents obtained through the Freedom of
Information Act later revealed that at least two FBI agents had
infiltrated Pratt's defense committee.  They also indicated that the
state's main witness, Julio Butler, was a paid informer who had worked
in the Party under the direction of the FBI and the Los Angeles Police
Department.  For many years, FBI Director Webster publicly denied that
Pratt had ever been a COINTELPRO target, despite the documentary proof
in his own agency's records.[f-51>

Also targeted well into the 1970s were former Panthers assigned to form
an underground to defend against armed government attack on the Party.
It was they who had regrouped as the Black Liberation Army (BLA) when
the Party was destroyed.  FBI files show that, within a month of the
close of COINTELPRO, further Bureau operations against the BLA were
mapped out in secret meetings convened by presidential aide John
Ehrlichman and attended by President Nixon and Attorney General
Mitchell.  In the following years, many former Panther leaders were
murdered by the police in supposed "shoot-outs" with the BLA.  Others,
such as Sundiata Acoli, Assata Shakur, Dhoruba Al-Mujahid Bin Wahad
(formerly Richard Moore), and the New York 3 (Herman Bell, Anthony
"Jalil" Bottom, and Albert "Nuh" Washington) were sentenced to long
prison terms after rigged trials.[f-52>

In the case of the New York 3, FBI ballistics reports withheld during
their mid-1970s trials show that bullets from an alleged murder weapon
did not match those found at the site of the killings for which they are
still serving life terms.  The star witness against them has publicly
recanted his testimony, swearing that he lied after being tortured by
police (who repeatedly jammed an electric cattleprod into his testicles)
and secretly threatened by the prosecutor and judge.  The same judge
later dismissed petitions to reopen the case, refusing to hold any
hearing or to disqualify himself, even though his misconduct is a major
issue.  As the NY3 continued to press for a new trial, their evidence
was ignored by the news media while their former prosecutor's one-sided,
racist "docudrama" on the case, <Badge of the Assassin,> aired on
national television.[f-53>

=====================

The Chicano and Puerto Rican Movements:  From 1972-1974, La Raza Unida
Party of Texas was plagued with repeated, unsolved COINTELPRO-style
political break-ins.[f-54> Former government operative Eustacio "Frank"
Martinez has admitted that after the close of COINTELPRO, the U.S.
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) paid him to help destroy
La Casa de Carnalsimo, a Chicano community anti-drug program in Los
Angeles.  Martinez, who had previously infiltrated the Brown Berets and
the Chicano Moratorium, stated that the ATF directed him to provoke
bombings and plant a drug pusher in La Casa.[f-55>

In 1973, Chicano activist and lawyer Francisco "Kiko" Martinez was
indicted in Colorado on trumped-up bombing charges and suspended from
the bar.  He was forced to leave the United States for fear of
assassination by police directed to shoot him "on sight."  When Martinez
was eventually brought to trial in the 1980s, many of the charges
against him were dropped for insufficient evidence and local juries
acquitted him of others.  One case ended in a mistrial when it was found
that the judge had met secretly with prosecutors, police, and government
witnesses to plan perjured testimony, and had conspired with the FBI to
conceal video cameras in the courtroom.[f-56>

Starting in 1976, the FBI manipulated the grand jury process to assault
both the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements.  Under the guise of
investigating Las Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion National Puertorriqueo
(FALN) and other Puerto Rican urban guerrillas, the Bureau harassed and
disrupted a cultural center, an alternative high school, and other
promising community organizing efforts in Chicago's Puerto Rican barrio
and in the Chicano communities of Denver and northern New Mexico.  It
subpoenaed radical Puerto Rican trade union leader Federico Cintron
Fiallo and key staff of the National Commission on Hispanic Affairs of
the U.S.  Episcopal Church to appear before federal grand juries and
jailed them for refusing to cooperate.  The independent labor movement
in Puerto Rico and the Commission's important work in support of Puerto
Rican and Chicano organizing were effectively discredited.[f-57>

On July 25, 1978, an undercover agent lured two young Puerto Rican
independence activists, Carlos Soto Arrive and Arnaldo Dario Rosado, to
their deaths in a police ambush at Cerro Maravilla, Puerto Rico.  The
agent, Alexander Gonzalez Malave, worked under the direct supervision of
the FBI-trained intelligence chief of the island's police force.  The
FBI refused to investigate when the police claimed they were merely
returning gunfire initiated by the activists.  Later it was proved that
Soto and Dario had surrendered and were then beaten and shot dead while
on their knees.  Though a number of officers were found guilty of
perjury in the cover-up and one was sentenced for the murder, the
officials who set up the operation remain free.  Gonzalez has been
promoted.[f-58>

On November 11, 1979, Angel Rodriguez Cristobal, popular socialist
leader of the movement to stop U.S.  Navy bombing practice on the
inhabited Puerto Rican island of Vieques, was murdered in the U.S.
penitentiary in Tallahassee, Florida.  Though U.S. authorities claimed
"suicide," Rodriguez Cristobal, in the second month of a six-month term
for civil disobedience, had been in good spirits when seen by his lawyer
hours before his death.  He had been subjected to continuous threats and
harassment, including forced drugging and isolation, during his
confinement.  Though he was said to have been found hanging by a bed
sheet, there was a large gash on his forehead and blood on the floor of
his cell.[f-59>

The Women's, Gay, and Lesbian Movements:  FBI documents show that the
women's liberation movement remained a major target of covert operations
throughout the 1970s.  Long after the official end of COINTELPRO, the
Bureau continued to infiltrate and disrupt feminist organizations,
publications, and projects.  Its view of the women's movement is
revealed by a 1973 report listing the national women's newspaper <off
our backs> as "ARMED AND DANGEROUS--EXTREMIST."[f-60>

Covert operations also continued against lesbian and gay organizing.
One former FBI informer, Earl Robert "Butch" Merritt, revealed that from
October 1971 through June 1972 he received a weekly stipend to
infiltrate gay publications and organizations in the District of
Columbia.  He was ordered to conduct break-ins, spread false rumors that
certain gay activists were actually police or FBI informants, and create
racial dissension between and within groups.  One assignment involved
calling Black groups to tell them they would not be welcome at Gay
Activists Alliance and Gay Liberation Front meetings.[f-61>

As in the case of the Puerto Rican and Chicano movements, criminal
investigations provided a convenient pretext for escalated FBI attacks
on lesbian and feminist activists in the mid-1970s.  In purported
pursuit of anti-war fugitives Susan Saxe and Kathy Powers, FBI agents
flooded the women's communities of Boston, Philadelphia, Lexington
(Kentucky), Hartford and New Haven.  Their conspicuous interrogation of
hundreds of politically active women, followed by highly publicized
grand jury subpoenas and jailings, wreaked havoc in health collectives
and other vital projects.  Activists and potential supporters were
scared off, and fear spread across the country, hampering women's and
lesbian organizing nationally.[f-62>

** End of text from cdp:pn.publiceye **

/** pn.publiceye: 23.11 **/
** Written  7:12 pm  Jan 25, 1991 by nlgclc in cdp:pn.publiceye **

The Anti-war and New Left Movements:  Government covert action against
the New Left and anti-war movements also persisted, especially as
activists mobilized to protest the 1972 Republican and Democratic Party
conventions.  In San Diego, where the Republicans initially planned to
convene, this campaign culminated in the January 6, 1972 attempt on the
life of anti-convention organizer Peter Bohmer by a "Secret Army
Organization" of ex-Minutemen formed, subsidized, armed, and protected
by the FBI.[f-63>

Movement organizing and government sabotage continued when the
Republican convention was moved to Miami Beach, Florida.  In May 1972,
Bill Lemmer, Southern Regional Coordinator of Vietnam Veterans Against
the War (VVAW), a key group in the convention protest coalition,
surfaced as an undercover FBI operative.  Lemmer's false testimony
enabled the Bureau to haul the VVAW's national leadership before a grand
jury hundreds of miles away during the week of the convention.[f-64>

FBI efforts to put the VVAW "out of business" were later confirmed by
another ex-operative.  Joe Burton of Tampa, Florida, told the <New York
Times> "that between 1972 and 1974 he worked as a paid FBI operative
assigned to infiltrate and disrupt various radical groups in this
country and Canada."  Burton described how specialists were flown in
from FBI Headquarters to help him forge bogus documents and "establish a
`sham' political group, `the Red Star Cadre,' for disruptive
purposes."[f-65>

The same article reported that "two other former FBI operatives, Harry
E. Schafer, 3d, and his wife, Jill, told of similar disruptive activity
they undertook at the bureau's direction during the same period."
Working out of "a similar bogus New Orleans front group, termed the `Red
Collective,'" the Schafers boasted of diverting substantial funds which
had been raised to support the American Indian Movement.

========================

The Labor Movement:  One of <agent provocateur> Joe Burton's main
targets was the United Electrical Workers Union (UE).  The FBI falsified
records to get Burton into UE Tampa Local 1201 soon after its successful
1973 organizing drive upset the Westinghouse Corporation's plan to
develop a chain of non-union plants in the South.  Burton's attacks on
genuine activists repeatedly disrupted UE meetings.  His ultra-left
proclamations in the union's name antagonized newly organized workers
and gave credibility to the company's red-baiting.  Burton also helped
the FBI move against the United Farm Workers and the American Federation
of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).[f-66>

In the mid-1970s, the FBI was instrumental in covering up the murder of
labor activist Karen Silkwood and the theft of her files documenting the
radioactive contamination of workers at the Kerr-McGee nuclear fuel
plant near Oklahoma City.  Silkwood, elected to the Oil, Chemical, and
Atomic Workers local bargaining committee, had amassed proof that the
company was falsifying safety reports to hide widespread exposure to
dangerous levels of highly carcinogenic plutonium.  She was killed when
her car crashed into a concrete embankment en route to a November 13,
1974 meeting with <New York Times> reporter David Burnham.  Her files
were never recovered from the wreck.  While prominent independent
experts concluded that Silkwood's car was bumped from behind and forced
off the road, the FBI found that she fell asleep at the wheel after
overdosing on quaaludes and that she never had any files.  It quickly
closed the case, and helped Kerr-McGee sabotage congressional
investigations and posthumously slander Silkwood as a mentally unstable
drug addict.  Key to the smear campaign were articles and testimony by
Jacque Srouji, a Tennessee journalist secretly in the employ of the FBI,
who later confessed to having served in a long string of 1960s
COINTELPRO operations.[f-67>

In 1979, government operatives played key roles in the massacre of
communist labor organizers during a multi-racial anti-Klan march in
Greensboro, North Carolina.  Heading the KKK/Nazi death squad was Ed
Dawson, a long-time paid FBI/police informer in the Klan.  Leading the
local American Nazi Party branch into Dawson's "United Racist Front" was
U.S.  Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms undercover agent Bernard
Butkovich.  Though their controlling agencies were fully warned of the
Front's murderous plans, they did nothing to protect the demonstrators.
Instead, the police gave Dawson a copy of the march route and withdrew
as his caravan moved in for the kill.  Dawson's sharpshooters carefully
picked off key cadre of the Communist Workers Party (CWP), including the
president and president-elect of two Amalgamated Clothing and Textile
Workers Union locals, an organizer at a third local mill, and a leader
of AFSCME's organizing drive at a nearby medical center.  In the
aftermath, the FBI attempted to cover up the government's role and to
put the blame on the CWP.[f-68>

At the turn of the decade, the Bureau joined with Naval Intelligence and
the San Diego Police to neutralize a militant multi-racial union at the
shipyards of the National Steel and Shipbuilding Company, a major U.S.
naval contractor.  The Bureau paid Ramon Barton to infiltrate
Ironworkers Local 627 when it elected leftist officers and began to
publicly protest dangerous working conditions.  After an explosion from
a gas leak killed two workers, Barton lured three others into helping
him build a bomb and transport it in his van, where they were arrested.
Though the workers entrapped by Barton were not union officials and were
acquitted of most charges by a San Diego jury, the Ironworkers
International used their trial as a pretext for placing the local in
trusteeship and expelling its elected officers.[f-69>

** End of text from cdp:pn.publiceye **

/** pn.publiceye: 23.12 **/
** Written  7:13 pm  Jan 25, 1991 by nlgclc in cdp:pn.publiceye **

Domestic Covert Action Has Persisted Throughout the 1980s

All this and more occurred during a period of liberal reform, when
political activism had somewhat subsided.  The 1980s, by contrast, have
been marked by the rise of right-wing political power and new forms of
popular opposition to reactionary government policy.  Under these
conditions, the danger of domestic covert action is greater than ever.

One indication of the severity of the current threat is the level of
recent political repression.  The incidents reviewed in the Introduction
are marked by the kind of blatant harassment that was consistently used
in conjunction with COINTELPRO:  offices of churches and groups opposing
U.S.  Central America policy conspicuously burglarized; personal papers
of international travelers confiscated by U.S. customs upon their return
at the border; dissidents facing deportation for their political views;
activists hounded at their jobs and in their communities, hauled before
grand juries, and arrested and jailed on false charges.

Even more alarming is the amount of current covert activity that has
come to light.  Since the vast majority of COINTELPRO-type operations
stay hidden until long after the damage has been done, those we are
already aware of represent only the tip of the iceberg.  Far more is
sure to lurk beneath the surface.

Most of today's domestic covert action can be kept concealed because
full government secrecy has been restored.  The Freedom of Information
Act, a source of major disclosures about COINTELPRO, was drastically
narrowed in the 1980s through administrative and judicial
reinterpretation as well as legislative amendment.  Thousands of
government files were shielded from public scrutiny under presidential
directives that vastly expand the range of information classified
"top-secret."  Government employees now face censorship even after they
retire, and new laws make it a federal crime to disclose "any
information that identifies an individual as a covert agent."[f-70>

While restoring full secrecy, the Reagan administration invested covert
action with a new legitimacy.  In the past, such operations were
acknowledged to be improper and illegal.  The Senate Intelligence
Committee condemned COINTELPRO as "a sophisticated vigilante operation
aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of
speech and association."[f-71> From its inception, the CIA was barred by
law from performing "internal security functions."[f-72> Top government
officials took care to insulate themselves so they could deny
involvement if an unseemly operation came to light.  These conditions
established a kind of speed limit, a set of restrictions which the
agencies felt free to exceed, but only by a certain margin.

In the 1980s even this ceiling was lifted.  Reagan and his cohorts
openly embraced the use of covert operations at home and abroad.  They
endorsed such action, legalized it, sponsored it, and raised it to the
level of patriotic virtue.

Within months of taking office, Reagan pardoned W. Mark Felt and Edward
S. Miller, the only FBI officials convicted of COINTELPRO crimes.  His
congressional allies publicly honored these criminals and praised their
work.[f-73> The President continually revived the tired old Red Scare,
adding a new "terrorist" bogeyman, while Attorney General Meese
campaigned to narrow the scope of the Bill of Rights and limit judicial
review of the constitutionality of government action.

>From the National Security Council's offices in the White House
basement, Lt.  Col.  Oliver North proudly funded and orchestrated
break-ins and other "dirty tricks" to defeat congressional critics of
U.S. policy in Central America and neutralize grassroots protest.  He
ran elaborate networks of paper organizations set up by former
government covert operatives who regrouped to do the same work for more
money in the "private sector."  Special Prosecutor Walsh found evidence
that North and Retired Air Force Gen.  Richard Secord (architect of
1960s U.S. covert action in Cambodia) used Iran-Contra funds to harass
the Christic Institute, a church-funded public interest law group which
specializes in exposing government misconduct.[f-74> North also helped
Reagan's cronies at the Federal Emergency Management Administration
develop contingency plans for suspending the Constitution, establishing
martial law, and holding political dissidents in concentration camps in
the event of "national opposition against a U.S. military invasion
abroad."[f-75>

Much of what was done outside the law under COINTELPRO has since been
legalized by Executive Order No. 12333 (December 4, 1981) and new
Attorney General's "Guidelines on General Crimes, Racketeering
Enterprise and Domestic Security/Terrorism Investigations" (March 7,
1983).  For the first time in U.S. history, government infiltration "for
the purpose of influencing the activity of" domestic political
organizations has received official sanction (E.O.12333, <185>2.9).
This prerogative is now extended to the FBI and anyone acting on its
behalf.  It provided a legal pretext for the Bureau's attacks on CISPES
and other opponents of U.S. policy in Central America.

The new executive order asserts the President's right to authorize CIA
"special activities" (the official euphemism for covert operations)
redefined to include activity <anywhere> "in support of national foreign
policy objectives abroad" (<185>1.8(e), <185>3.4(h)).  It legalizes
"counterintelligence activities...within the United States" on the part
of the FBI and the CIA, Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines (<185>1.8(c),
<185>1.12(d)).  "Specialized equipment, technical knowledge, or
assistance of expert personnel" may be provided by any of these agencies
"to support local law enforcement" (<185>2.6c).  All are free to mount
electronic and mail surveillance without a warrant, and the FBI may also
conduct warrantless "unconsented physical searches" (break-ins) if the
Attorney General finds probable cause to believe the action is "directed
against a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power" (<185>2.4,
<185>2.5).  This signals open season on CISPES, sanctuary churches,
anti-apartheid groups, and anyone else who maintains friendly relations
with a country or movement opposed by the administration or who dares to
organize protest against U.S. foreign policy.

Given how much is at stake, we can hardly afford to ignore these many
signs of danger.  The FBI and police have now been fully rehabilitated.
The CIA and military have assumed an expanded homefront role.  Covert
action has been legalized and endorsed at the highest levels of
government.  Official secrecy has been restored.  Government harassment
of domestic dissidents continues unabated.  Evidence of current
infiltration and clandestine disruption is surfacing at an alarming
rate.  Taken together, these developments leave us only one safe
assumption:  full-scale covert operations are already underway to
neutralize today's opposition movements before they can reach the
massive level of the 1960s. 
** End of text from cdp:pn.publiceye **


Xref: sparky misc.activism.progressive:7475 alt.activism:17588 talk.environment:4245 talk.politics.soviet:8478