[THS] US Government Targeting Of Amercian Dissidents

Wed Oct 11 12:47:39 CEST 2006

  http://www.fromthewilderness.com/members/100306_war_you1.shtml

THE WAR ON YOU:

U.S. Government Targeting Of Amercian Dissidents - Part I
[part II follows]

By Carolyn Baker, Ph.D.

October 3rd 2006, 2:47PM [PST] - In the wake of 
National Security Agency’s (NSA) admissions that 
the Bush administration has been wiretapping 
phone conversations of American citizens and last 
week’s Congressional approval of the torturing 
and disappearing of enemies of the state, I have 
watched progressives, wide-eyed with amazement 
(in spite of the earlier passage and renewal of 
the USA Patriot Act), inundate the internet with 
proclamations that the United States has “now” 
become a fascist state. When I wrote, “Hello, You 
Are Now Living In A Fascist Empire” in 2004 and 
“Why I Will Not Vote In 2004”, my inbox was 
deluged with diatribes by progressives against my 
“extremism” and the ease with which I was “giving 
up hope” on America. When Mike Ruppert wrote two 
of his most brilliant and astute articles ever, 
“The ‘F’ Word,”  and what became Chapter 23 of 
CROSSING THE RUBICON, “Eating The Chosen People,” 
FTW was chastised for being paranoid and 
pre-supposing that the American republic had 
already collapsed. Only a few years later, we now 
hear the same progressive voices drawing the same 
conclusions that we drew immediately after 9/11. 
Most continue to maintain some modicum of faith 
in the disgracefully corrupt election process in 
the U.S., and few will confront the irrefutable 
legal and military evidence which confirms that 
the U.S. government orchestrated the September 11 
attacks. But FTW readers and others with an 
incisive map and a working knowledge of American 
history were not aghast when the U.S. Congress 
ruled that torture and disappearance are 
perfectly congruent (I say this with tongue in 
cheek) with the principles elucidated in the 
United States Constitution. Those individuals 
understand that targeting American citizens who 
hold dissident views is almost as old as our 
nation itself and certainly as American as apple pie.

A LONG HISTORY OF TARGETING AMERICAN DISSIDENTS

In 1798, only 11 years after the U.S. 
Constitution was signed by its Framers, when 
tensions between the U.S. and Great Britain were 
accelerating in a lead-up to the War of 1812, the 
Alien and Sedition Acts were passed by Congress 
in the John Adams administration. At that time 
Irishmen and Frenchmen in America were seen as 
potentially dangerous revolutionaries because of 
the recent French Revolution and the Irish 
rebellions. Thomas Jefferson, a lifelong rival 
but also a friend of John Adams, vehemently 
opposed the acts as tyrannical, which indeed they 
were. In fact, one cannot read them without 
wondering if one is reading Congressional legislation in 1798 or in 2006:

The Naturalization Act, which extended the 
residency period from 5 to 14 years for those 
aliens seeking citizenship; this law was aimed at 
Irish and French immigrants who were often active in American politics.

The Alien Act, which allowed the expulsion of 
aliens deemed dangerous during peacetime

The Alien Enemies Act, which allowed the 
expulsion or imprisonment of aliens deemed 
dangerous during wartime. This was never 
enforced, but it did prompt numerous Frenchmen to return home.

The Sedition Act, which provided for fines or 
imprisonment for individuals who criticized the 
government, Congress, or president in speech or print.1

Historian, Howard Zinn, notes that even though 
the legislation “seemed to directly violate the 
First Amendment, 
it was enforced. Ten Americans 
were put in prison for utterances against the 
government, and every member of the Supreme Court 
in 1798-1800, sitting as an appellate judge, held it constitutional.”2

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended 
habeas corpus when after the outbreak of the war, 
Lincoln claimed emergency powers and authorized 
the military to arrest and indefinitely detain 
anyone suspected of aiding the South. Chief 
Justice Roger Taney in Ex Parte Merryman was 
outraged and wrote a lengthy opinion to the 
contrary. The debate has engaged constitutional scholars ever since.

In 1866 in Ex-Parte Milligan, Lambden P. Milligan 
was sentenced to death by a military commission 
in Indiana during the Civil War for engaging in 
acts of disloyalty. Milligan sought release 
through habeas corpus from a federal court. In 
the final opinion, Justice Davis, speaking for 
the Court, held that trials of civilians by 
presidentially-created military commissions are 
unconstitutional. Martial law cannot exist where 
the civil courts are operating. One passage from 
the decision is particularly poignant and 
extremely relevant in a post-9/11 world:

The Constitution of the United States is a law 
for rulers and people, equally in war and in 
peace, and covers with the shield of its 
protection all classes of men, at all times and 
under all circumstances. No doctrine involving 
more pernicious consequences was ever invented by 
the wit of man than that any of its provisions 
can be suspended during any of the great 
exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads 
directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory 
of necessity on which it is based is false, for 
the government, within the Constitution, has all 
the powers granted to it which are necessary to 
preserve its existence, as has been happily 
proved by the result of the great effort to throw off its just authority.3

During the late-nineteenth and early twentieth 
centuries in America, as labor unions organized 
and gathered power, as socialism grew in 
popularity among working and other oppressed 
peoples, industries owned by Rockefeller, Morgan, 
Harriman, Carnegie, and others, began hiring 
their own police forces and goon squads to 
infiltrate labor unions and spy on the political 
and personal activities of union organizers for 
the purpose of bringing arrests and convictions 
and eliminating all socialist activity in the 
nation. The most notorious example was the 
Homestead Strike of 1892, when Pinkerton agents 
killed several people while enforcing the 
strikebreaking measures of Henry Clay Frick, 
acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie.

Before and during World War I the United States 
government became extremely suspicious of 
pacifists such as Scott Nearing and Jane Addams 
who opposed the war on moral grounds and who 
spoke out stridently against imperialism. In 1908 
Theodore Roosevelt was frequently borrowing from 
his Secret Service and using a few agents for 
special investigations into corruption in various 
locations throughout the country. In 1918 during 
the Wilson administration, however, these agents 
began conducting “slacker raids” on the homes of 
men opposed to World War I and who refused to serve in the U.S. military.

The end of World War I and the year 1919 saw the 
beginning of an era known as the Red Scare in 
which the United States government became 
hysterically xenophobic regarding pro-socialist 
foreigners living in the country. Attorney 
General, Mitchell Palmer, hired a young 
investigator, J. Edgar Hoover to lead a witchunt 
against radicalism in America, and Hoover came up 
with over 450,000 names of suspected radicals and 
wrote the first government study of communism 
called “The Report On Radicalism.” Radicals and 
labor leaders had been striking, marching, and 
writing vociferously against government and 
corporate oppression, and in some cases, detonating bombs.

On November 7, 1919, the second anniversary of 
the Russian Revolution, over 10,000 suspected 
communists and anarchists were arrested. Palmer 
and Hoover found no evidence of a proposed 
revolution, but a large number of these suspects 
were held without trial for a long time. The vast 
majority were eventually released, but Emma 
Goldman and 247 other people, were deported to Russia.

On January 2, 1920, another 6,000 were arrested 
nationwide and held without trial. These raids 
took place in several cities and became known as the Palmer Raids.

A. Mitchell Palmer and John Edgar Hoover found no 
evidence of a proposed revolution, but large 
numbers of these suspects, many of them members 
of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 
continued to be held without trial. When Palmer 
announced that the communist revolution was 
likely to take place on May 1st, mass panic took 
place. In New York, five elected Socialists were expelled from the legislature.

An excellent book detailing the Red Scare is 
William Preston, Jr.’s Aliens And Dissenters: 
Federal Suppression Of Radicals, 1903-1933

Much more familiar in the minds of most 
contemporary Americans is the McCarthy Era of the 
post-World War II 1950s. Rather than the use of 
raids or goon squads, the FBI and other federal 
agents utilized blacklisting and paid informants 
to intimidate and criminalize innocent 
professionals in government, educational 
institutions, and the entertainment industry. 
While most traditional historians teach that the 
McCarthy Era ended in the mid-fifties, one need 
only listen to a George W. Bush or Dick Cheney 
rant on terrorism to hear echoes of the exact 
ideology of the deranged Senator from Wisconsin. 
All that is required is to replace the word 
“communist” with the word “terrorist.”

In 1956 a special program was designed by the 
FBI—the Counter Intelligence Program or 
COINTELPRO, which lasted “officially”, until 
1971. In the words of Ward Churchill and Jim 
Vander Wall, authors of THE COINTELPRO PAPERS, 
“it involved a unique experiment. Though covert 
operations have been employed throughout FBI 
history, the COINTELPRO’s were the first to be 
both broadly targeted and centrally directed.” 
[Churchill and Vander Wall’s book is strongly 
recommended and contains a treasure-trove of 
copies of original FBI documents.] While overall 
operations were centrally directed from 
Washington, day-to-day operations involved local 
field offices and required a great deal of 
communication back and forth from Washington to 
those offices. COINTELPRO generated an enormous 
paper trail which was largely kept hidden until 
the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) brought the 
paper trail to light, at which time, the FBI 
discontinued all of its formal domestic 
counter-intelligence programs, but did not cease 
its covert activities against U.S. dissidents. In 
fact, when J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972, the FBI 
“re-packaged” itself as a “new FBI”, but its 
COINTELPRO operations continued covertly. In the 
mid-1970s, the Church Committee, named after its 
founding Chair, Idaho Senator Frank Church, 
released volumes of documentation of FBI and CIA 
abuses. Church and his successor were driven from 
office, and then-National Security Advisor to 
Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, was instrumental 
in blocking the flow of information from the Church Committee to the public.4

Although the original objective of COINTELPRO in 
1956 was to “increase factionalism, cause 
disruption and win defections” inside the 
Communist Party, USA, it soon expanded to include 
disruption of the Socialist Workers Party, the Ku 
Klux Klan, African American nationalist groups, 
the Black Panther Party (BPP), the New Left, and 
the American Indian Movement (AIM). While many 
arrests of members of these groups were made over 
the decades, it is important to understand that 
even in cases where crimes had actually been 
committed, and those cases are few, the FBI 
policy of neutralizing these groups was in place 
prior to the arrests. For example, in 1919, J. 
Edgar Hoover wrote a letter proposing a strategy 
to neutralize African American nationalist 
leader, Marcus Garvey. In the proposal, Hoover 
recommends that the federal government invest 
vast legal resources to contrive a case against 
Garvey in order to make him appear guilty of a 
crime. As Churchill and Vander Hall note, “The 
key to understanding what really happened in the 
Garvey case lies squarely in appreciation of the 
fact that the decision to bring about his 
elimination had been made at the highest level of 
the Bureau long before any hint of criminal conduct could be attached to him.”5

On August 25, 1967, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of 
the FBI, wrote a top-priority memo to all field 
offices clearly defining the purpose of COINTELPRO:

The purpose of this new counterintelligence 
endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, 
discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities 
of black nationalist hate-type organizations and 
groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, 
membership, and supporters, and to counter their 
propensity for violence and civil disorder
No 
opportunity should be missed to exploit through 
counterintelligence techniques the organizational 
and personal conflicts of the leadership of the 
groups and where possible an effort should be 
made to capitalize upon existing conflicts 
between competing black nationalist organizations.6

Included in “black nationalist hate-type 
organizations” were the National Association For 
the Advancement Of Colored People (NAACP) and the 
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) 
under the direction of Martin Luther King, Jr. 
Increasingly, attention was focused on King of 
whom Charles Brennan, FBI counter-intelligence 
specialist, stated: “We must mark [King] now, if 
we have not before, as the most dangerous Negro 
in the future of this Nation from the standpoint 
of communism, the Negro, and national security
it 
may be unrealistic to limit [our actions against 
King] to legalistic proofs that would stand up in 
court or before Congressional Committees.”7

As we know Martin Luther King was assassinated in 
April, 1968 with very few answers regarding his 
murder and multitudinous questions left behind. 
The best analysis of King’s murder, in my 
opinion, is William Pepper’s Orders To Kill and 
his later analysis, An Act Of State. The racist 
J. Edgar Hoover, whose own closeted, bizarre 
sexuality leaves many unanswered questions about 
his prurient curiosities regarding King’s 
personal life, ordered surveillance of King’s 
social activities and friendships, whispering 
incessantly of King’s purported infidelity to his 
wife. In a 1968 memo to field offices, Hoover 
details the strategy for neutralizing black 
liberation activists. Among them: “Prevent 
militant black nationalist groups and leaders 
from gaining respectability by discrediting them 
to three separate segments of the community. The 
goal of discrediting black nationalists must be 
handled tactically in three ways. You must 
discredit these groups and individuals to, first, 
the responsible Negro community. Second, they 
must be discredited to the white community, both 
the responsible community and to ‘liberals’ who 
have vestiges of sympathy for militant black 
nationalists simply because they are Negroes. 
Third, these groups must be discredited in the 
eyes of Negro radicals, the followers of the movement
.”

Before King’s death the Black Panther Party was 
organizing in major cities across America, and in 
late 1967 the Panthers initiated a free breakfast 
program for black children and offered free 
health care to many ghetto residents. By mid-1968 
these measures had been augmented by a community 
education project and an anti-heroin campaign. 
The party was offering a viable strategy to 
improve the overall spiritual and material well 
being of ghetto life. Black community perceptions 
of the BPP were extremely positive and vastly 
different from the perceptions of the white police establishment.

In a September, 1968 memo to COINTELPRO Director, 
William Sullivan, the FBI office in Washington 
ordered that, “
the counter-intelligence program 
against this organization [Black Panther Party] 
be accelerated and that each office submit 
concrete suggestions as to future action to be 
taken against the BPP.”8 The memo continues:

These suggestions are to create factionalism 
between not only the national leaders but also 
local leaders, steps to neutralize all 
organizational efforts of the BPP as well as 
create suspicion amongst the leaders as to each 
others’ spouses and suspicion as to who may be 
cooperating with law enforcement. In addition, 
suspicion should be developed as to who may be 
attempting to gain control of the organization 
for their own private betterment, as well as 
suggestions as to the best method of exploiting 
the foreign visits made by BPP members. We are 
also soliciting recommendations as to the best 
method of creating opposition to the BPP on the 
part of the majority of the residents of the ghetto area.9

The ultimate tactic of “neutralization” was 
outright assassination. In late 1968, William 
O’Neal, working with COINTELPRO had infiltrated 
the BPP and become the bodyguard of a key member 
of the Chicago Black Panthers, Fred Hampton. 
O’Neal supplied the Chicago police and the FBI 
with the floor plan of Hampton’s apartment, and 
on the evening of December 3, slipped a dose of 
secobarbital into a glass of Kool-Aid consumed by 
Hampton who was comatose in his bed when a 
fourteen-man police team slammed into his home at 
4 AM on the morning of December 4. Hampton was 
shot three times in the chest and twice more in 
the head at point-blank range. One year later, 
December 8, 1969 in Los Angeles, the target was 
Geronimo Pratt who unbeknownst to police decided 
to sleep on the floor that night rather than in 
his bed. A barrage of gunfire burst into Pratt’s 
apartment but missed him entirely. This time, the 
Panthers decided to defend themselves, and for 
four hours fought off police refusing to 
surrender until the press and the public were on 
the scene. A U.S. Attorney in San Francisco 
concluded that, “Whatever they are doing, they are out to get the Panthers.”10

In 1971, George Jackson, celebrated prison author 
and honorary BPP Field Marshall, was assassinated 
in San Quentin Prison, an event which not only 
eliminated Jackson but neutralized attorney 
Angela Davis, head of Jackson’s defense 
organization and a leading spokesperson for the Panthers.

In Sacramento the FBI used an infiltrator to have 
the Sacramento chapter of the BPP print a racist 
and violence-oriented coloring book for children. 
When it was brought to the attention of Bobby 
Seale and other Panther members, it was 
immediately ordered destroyed, but the Bureau 
mailed copies to companies such as Safeway, 
Mayfair Markets, and the Jack-In-The-Box 
Corporation which had been contributing food to 
the Breakfast for Children Program in order to 
cause the withdrawal of support for that program.

The FBI has admitted that during the COINTELLPRO 
era it ran some 295 distinct COINTELPRO 
operations against individuals and organizations 
which were broadly or narrowly considered parts 
of the black liberation movement.11

It is important to understand that during the 
so-called COINTELPRO era--and as we shall learn 
in subsequent segments of this series, that era 
never really ended, one strategy used then and 
now is that of plausible deniability. That is, in 
case assassinations or other illegal or 
disrespectable and unpopular activities committed 
by high-ranking officials become public, those 
officials may deny connection to or awareness of 
those acts or the agents used to carry out such 
acts. As noted by Mike Ruppert in “By The Light 
Of A Burning Bridge” FTW over the years has 
frequently been victimized by attacks that 
appeared to have the fingerprints of COINTELPRO 
all over them, down to the use of convicted 
felons to commit those acts, in which case, the 
FBI or whatever agency(ies) are involved can 
plausibly deny connection with such individuals.

Although we hear virtually nothing about 
COINTELPRO in mainstream media these days, 
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney has introduced 
legislation to re-open the investigations of the 
Church Committee into COINTELPRO. As 
Congresswoman McKinney states: “We still to this 
day do not know the full scope of the abusive 
surveillance, targeting, discrediting and 
disruptive tactics and plans of the past.”

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h463.html
2 Howard Zinn, Peoples’ History Of the United States, p.100.

3 http://www.constitution.org/ussc/071-002a.htm

4 https://www.cia.gov/csi/monograph/lawmaker/1.htm

5 Ward Churchill, Jim Vander Hall, COINTELPRO Papers, p.11.

6 Brian Glick, War At Home: Cover Action Against 
U.S. Activists And What We Can Do About It, p.77.

7 Memorandum, William C. Sullivan to Alan H. 
Belmont, August 30, 1963, captioned “Communist 
Party, USA, Negro Question, IS-C.” Document 
quoted in full in U.S. Congress Joint Committee 
on Assassinations, Hearings on the Investigation 
of the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., 
Vol. 6, 95th Congress, 2d Session, U.S. 
Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1978, pp. 143-144.

8 FBI Memo: COINTELPRO Papers, p. 124.

9 Ibid., p. 127

10 Quoted in Elliff, John T., Crime, Dissent and 
the Attorney General, Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, CA, 1971, p. 140.

11 COINTELPRO Papers, p. 164.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  http://www.fromthewilderness.com/members/101006_war_you2.shtml

THE WAR ON YOU:
U.S. GOVERNMENT TARGETING OF
AMERCIAN DISSIDENTS - Part II

By Carolyn Baker, Ph.D.

October 10th 2006, 3:45PM [PST] - In the first 
part of this series we traced the history of the 
targeting of American dissidents from eleven 
years after the Constitution was signed, through 
the origins of the FBI and its COINTELPRO’s 
infiltration, neutralization, and even 
elimination of groups and individuals in the 
Black Liberation Movement. In this segment we 
will briefly consider the targeting of other 
groups during the 1960s and ‘70s and then move 
swiftly into the twenty-first century where we 
are now witnessing unprecedented legislation 
against dissent, in violation of civil liberties.

Simultaneous with the birth of the civil rights 
movement in the sixties was the Free Speech 
Movement which essentially began at the 
University of California at Berkeley in 1963. Out 
of that movement grew the anti-Vietnam War 
movement that swept the campuses of America from 
approximately 1964-1970. During that period it 
was often difficult to separate the various 
freedom movements as white college students 
volunteered their time, and in some cases, their 
lives, to assist the civil rights movement. As 
the Black Liberation Movement gained momentum, 
white students often marched in solidarity with 
such groups as the Black Panthers and the Student 
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Whereas blacks were railing against racial 
oppression, white students were feeling the 
victimization of the military draft and marching 
vehemently against the war at the same time that 
they were burning draft cards, moving to Canada, 
and frequently, going to prison for draft 
evasion. In addition, an unparalleled revolution 
of counter-culture was mesmerizing American youth 
who began questioning the values of their 
parents’ Great Depression/World War II 
generation. In those days, college students had 
more time than most working Americans to read 
books, engage in philosophical and political 
discussions into the wee hours, and experiment 
with psychedelic substances. As they did so, they 
began rejecting on a colossal scale, the 
authority and values of the mainstream 
establishment. It is axiomatic that the 
oppression of movements of color was symptomatic 
of deplorable, unacknowledged racism infecting 
the American psyche, but irrefutably, those in 
power held a special contempt for callous 
disregard for their authority. To be a “nigger” 
was perilous, but to be an “uppity nigger” was 
suicide. Likewise, an entire generation of white 
elders were aghast at the flag-burning, 
sandal-wearing, dope-smoking, long-haired, 
sexually promiscuous, Mao-quoting, bohemian 
anarchists that their children had become. Many 
of these parents were government officials, and 
some worked in the FBI. A May 27, 1968 memo 
written from the Newark office of the FBI to J. 
Edgar Hoover echoed the coercive, imperious 
sentiment of millions of parents of flower children:

It is believed that the non-conformism in dress 
and speech, neglect of personal cleanliness, use 
of obscenities (printed and uttered), publicized 
sexual promiscuity, experimenting with and the 
use of drugs, filthy clothes, shaggy hair, 
wearing of sandals, beads, and unusual jewelry 
tend to negate any attempt to hold these people 
up to ridicule. The American press has been doing 
this with no apparent effect or curtailment of 
“new left” activities. These individuals are 
apparently getting strength and [becoming] more 
brazen in their attempts to destroy American 
society, as noted in the takeover recently at 
Columbia University, New York City, and other universities in the U.S.1

An FBI memo from earlier that month left no doubt 
that the New Left was now an unmistakable target 
of COINTELPRO as its Director, William Sullivan 
wrote: “The purpose of this program is to expose, 
disrupt, and otherwise neutralize the activities 
of this group and persons connected with it.”2

And then came the Chicago Democratic Convention 
of that same year in which Mayor Daley’s Police 
force on national television attacked white 
student protestors in front of convention 
headquarters, arresting and brutalizing hundreds 
while onlookers chanted “the whole world is 
watching”--this just months after the murders of 
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, Jr. 
and in the throes of an escalating Vietnam War.

The following year, as the Vietnam War continued 
to escalate, over a half-million American youth 
immersed themselves in the Woodstock Music 
Festival and for a few days, forgot about things 
like the draft and what they might do with their 
college degrees—should they choose to complete 
them. The fall and winter of 1969-1970 were dark 
days of Nixon’s “Vietnamization” of the war and 
the unpublicized invasion of Cambodia with U.S. 
troops and increased bombings of that nation, 
even as Nixon assured the American people that 
the war was “winding down” because he “had a 
plan.” As the “secret” invasion of Cambodia was 
revealed, a new wave of rage swept across 
American academia resulting in nationwide 
demonstrations, strikes, and the shutting down of 
some campuses. While young white heads had been 
cracked at the Chicago Democratic Convention, 
white students were now slaughtered at Kent State 
University on May 4, 1970. [The link provided is 
to the website of Alan Canfora, one of the survivors of the massacre.]

As a student at a major university in the late 
sixties and early seventies, extremely active in 
antiwar protest politics, I do recall suspicious 
individuals who infiltrated the movement from 
time to time. Generally, they were folks who 
seemed a bit emotionally unstable and were 
incessantly encouraging demonstrators to commit 
increasingly blatant, outrageous acts of 
violence. For example, if a peaceful 
demonstration was planned, they were the ones who 
always called for “trashing” in the form of 
destroying property by breaking windows or 
burning buildings. Whatever the strategy, they 
wanted to escalate. Sometimes they would come 
running in from the sidelines of a demonstration 
claiming to have been hit over the head by a 
police officer brandishing a frightening baton. 
Eventually, folks in the movement caught on to 
their games, but rarely did anyone investigate 
who these people really were. They were no doubt 
paid provocateurs and informants, but at what 
level—local, state, or federal, we never really knew.

Kent State was an extremely significant turning 
point in the student protest movement because 
essentially, it ended it. Indeed some smaller 
protests continued on campuses into the early 
seventies, but the deplorable events that 
occurred on May 4, 1970 successfully sent a 
message to America’s white students: We will kill 
you. On that day, horrified and frightened as I 
was, I realized that while the murdering of four 
innocent students was grotesque and 
reprehensible, people of color had been 
experiencing it in this nation for a very long time.

Beginning in the late sixties and continuing into 
the mid-seventies, the American Indian Movement 
(AIM) demonstrated against U.S. government abuse 
and neglect of its tribes and the corruption of 
reservation politics in collusion with federal 
agencies. Churchill and Vander Hall devote an 
entire chapter in their book to the activities of 
COINTELPRO against AIM which culminated in the 
framing, false conviction, and imprisonment of Leonard Peltier.

During the late seventies, the FBI continued its 
search for two key members of the Weatherman 
faction of Students For A Democratic Society 
(SDS), Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayres, both of 
whom surrendered to the FBI in 1980 after it was 
learned that the FBI had so illegally gathered 
evidence against them that they could not be 
prosecuted for blowing up government buildings. 
Related to this is the reality that in the course 
of the official existence of COINTELPRO, a host 
of laws were broken with what were at the time, 
illegal wiretaps, bugs, and mail openings.3

As previously mentioned in this series, the 
“official” dates for COINTELPRO’s existence are 
1956-1971. To what extent it continued throughout 
the twentieth century, we do not know with 
certainty. What we do know is that immediately 
after September 11, 2001, the bones of COINTELPRO 
resurrected and reincarnated in the form of the 
Department of Homeland Security, the USA Patriot 
Act, PROMIS software, and the Total Information 
Awareness Program, and this series will address 
the specifics of how those entities have targeted 
and are targeting U.S. citizens.

In 2004, Mike Ruppert wrote in Crossing The Rubicon:

If you understand nothing else about the map that 
I have been trying to draw for you, understand 
that the post 9/11 erosion of civil liberties and 
the economic devastation that is being felt here 
at home are opposite sides of the same coin. One 
begets and demands the other, whether the Empire 
consciously considers it or not. And the currents 
of behavior depicted on the map dictate, as 
surely as gravity pulls things down and not up, 
that what has already started can only get worse. 
Until now, in the Empire’s domestic ham and eggs 
breakfast, the American people were playing the 
role of the chicken rather than the pig.4

In Chapter 28 of Rubicon, Mike connects the dots 
between political oppression, the violation of 
civil liberties, and the economic hollowing out 
of American society. This article will not 
explore those connections, but it is essential to 
understand them because the targeting of American 
dissidents is not happening in an economic vacuum.

THE USA PATRIOT ACT
Over eight pages of Rubicon are devoted to the 
Patriot Act, passed in the middle of the night on 
October 26, 2001 and read by only a handful of 
legislators who voted for it. Rubicon offers in 
these eight pages, an extraordinary analysis of 
the act and its impact on civil liberties, which 
every concerned citizen should read and study. 
What may be more surprising, however, is that 
Attorney Jennifer Van Bergen in her article “The 
USA Patriot Act Was Planned Before 9/11” 
positively acknowledges Mike Ruppert’s 
contribution to the discourse on civil liberties 
and states that the Patriot Act was already 
written long before 9/11. She traces the origins 
of the act back to 1950s anti-communist hysteria, 
through the Reagan administration’s proposed 
legislation which became some of the most 
troubling aspects of the Patriot Act, and on to 
the 1996 Antiterroism Act which, “
although it 
had nothing to do with terrorism at all, was 
Republican Senator Orrin Hatch's long-sought 
provision to limit the right of habeas corpus. 
Habeas corpus is the procedure whereby a person 
convicted by a state court can challenge that 
conviction in a federal court. The thing is, 
terrorism cases are brought in federal, not 
state, courts.” According to James X. Dempsey and 
David Cole in their book, Terrorism & The 
Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties In the 
Name of National Security, "Senator Hatch wanted 
to make it more difficult for federal courts to 
order retrials of prisoners where state courts 
had violated the U.S. Constitution.”

This confirms that the inherently 
unconstitutional concepts which the Patriot Act 
made the law of the land were incubating in the 
minds of people in power for decades before the 
Act was even written. One of our principal 
Founding Fathers, James Madison, would have not 
been surprised, and perhaps this kind of tyranny 
is what he had in mind when he wrote, “All men in 
power ought to be mistrusted.”

THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
According to Van Bergen, the proposal for a 
Department of Homeland Security developed in 1998 
with the Hart-Rudman Commission which was known 
as the United States Commission on National 
Security/21st Century, and its report is dated 
January 31, 2001. The Commission recommended "the 
creation of a new independent National Homeland 
Security Agency (NHSA) with responsibility for 
planning, coordinating, and integrating various 
U.S. government activities involved in homeland 
security. NHSA would be built upon the Federal 
Emergency Management Agency, with the three 
organizations currently on the front line of 
border security - the Coast Guard, the Customs 
Service, and the Border Patrol - transferred to 
it. NHSA would not only protect American lives, 
but also assume responsibility for overseeing the 
protection of the nation's critical 
infrastructure, including information 
technology." Clearly, this is the basic blueprint of the Homeland Security Act

Van Bergen also notes that of the twelve 
Hart-Rudman commissioners, nine were members of 
the Council On Foreign Relations (CFR). This 
semi-secret organization of ruling elite is 
comprised, for the most part, not of conservative 
Republicans, but rather moderate to liberal 
Democrats. The bipartisan Hart-Rudman Commission 
was launched in 1998 by Bill Clinton and Newt 
Gingrich to “make recommendations on how the 
United States could ensure its security in the 21st century.” 5

Mike Ruppert spells out clearly what DHS must do:

           The DHS will collect and share 
intelligence vital for its primary mission, which
is the protection of critical infrastructure. In 
the process of doing this, it will access the 
intelligence of state and local agencies and 
“coordinate” the dissemination of that 
information.This means that local police 
agencies, if they want to continue receiving 
federal subsidies and don’t want to look as 
though they aren’t concerned about their 
citizens, will effectively become 
intelligence-gathering units for the federal 
government. In addition the DHS Secretary and his 
employees are also given total access to all 
information in any federal agency, whether 
verified or not on a level of priority equal with 
the President and the Director of Central 
Intelligence.It will also have complete access to 
all banking and stock transaction records; once 
compiled, these records can be shared with any 
foreign government the government wishes to share 
them with. It also allows federal agents to serve 
search warrants issued by foreign governments inside this country.

A PROMIS IS A PROMIS, AND TIA ISN’T SPANISH FOR “AUNT”

In my opinion, some of the most stunning pages in 
Crossing The Rubicon are pages 152-174 in which 
Mike Ruppert discusses in detail what PROMIS 
software is capable of doing and in which he asks this question:

What would you do if you possessed software that 
could think,understand every major language in 
the world, that provided peepholes into everyone 
else’s computer “dressing rooms,” that could 
insert data into computers without people’s 
knowledge, that could fill in blanks beyond human 
reasoning, and also predict what people would do 
— before they did it? You would probably use it 
wouldn’t you? But PROMIS is not a virus. It has 
to be installed as a program on the computer 
systems that you want to penetrate. Being as 
uniquely powerful as it is, this is usually not a 
problem. Once its power and advantages are 
demonstrated, most corporations, banks, or 
nations are eager to be a part of the “exclusive” 
club that has it. And, as is becoming 
increasingly confirmed by sources connected to 
this story, especially in the worldwide banking 
system, not having PROMIS — by whatever name it 
is offered — can exclude you from participating 
in the ever more complex world of money transfers 
and money laundering. As anexample, look at any 
of the symbols on the back of your ATM card. 
Picture your bank refusing to accept the software 
that made it possible to transfer funds from LA 
to St. Louis, or from St. Louis to Rome.

PROMIS was stolen from its owner, Inslaw, Inc., 
by the U.S. government in 1982 and sold to over 
40 countries. The capabilities of PROMIS are 
nothing less than mindboggling for the 
technically unsophisticated, and Elliot 
Richardson, former U.S. Attorney General and 
Inslaw counsel described the PROMIS scandal as 
“far worse than Watergate.” Even as the U.S. 
government was raking in hefty profits from the 
sale of PROMIS, it was not selling all of its 
technical superiority by any stretch of the 
imagination. Commenting on the capabilities of 
PROMIS, Mike Ruppert states that “Mated with 
artificial intelligence it is capable of analyzing not only an individual’s,

but also a community’s entire life, in real time. 
It is also capable of issuing warnings when 
irregularities appear and of predicting future 
movements based upon past behavior.” 6 He asserts 
that not only is it almost certain that PROMIS 
was used in the execution of the 9/11 attacks but 
that its use, along with the Total Information 
Awareness Program will be instrumental in the 
conquest of the American people. Conservative 
Republican William Safire’s chilling remarks on 
civil liberties post-9/11 were quoted in Rubicon 
and elsewhere by Mike Ruppert as Safire railed 
against the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research 
Projects Agency (DARPA) in his New York Times article, “You Are A Suspect.”

According the Electronic Privacy Information 
Center (EPIC) Total Information Awareness (TIA) 
of DARPA was supposedly nixed by Congress when 
“In September 2003, Congress eliminated funding 
for the controversial project and closed the 
Pentagon's Information Awareness Office, which 
had developed TIA. This does not, however, 
necessarily signal the end of other government 
data-mining initiatives that are similar to 
TIA.”7 Indeed this does not signal the end of 
other government data-mining programs.

In May, 2003, in “A Spy Machine Of DARPA’s Dreams”, Wired News reported that:

The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly 
ambitious research project designed to gather 
every conceivable bit of information about a 
person's life, index all the information and make it searchable.

What national security experts and civil 
libertarians want to know is, why would the 
Defense Department want to do such a thing?

The embryonic LifeLog program would dump 
everything an individual does into a giant 
database: every e-mail sent or received, every 
picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone 
call made, every TV show watched, every magazine read.

All of this -- and more -- would combine with 
information gleaned from a variety of sources: a 
GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person 
went, audio-visual sensors to capture what he or 
she sees or says, and biomedical monitors to keep 
track of the individual's health.

This gigantic amalgamation of personal 
information could then be used to "trace the 
'threads' of an individual's life," to see 
exactly how a relationship or events developed, 
according to a briefing from the Defense Advanced 
Projects Research Agency, LifeLog's sponsor.

Someone with access to the database could 
"retrieve a specific thread of past transactions, 
or recall an experience from a few seconds ago or 
from many years earlier ... by using a search-engine interface." 8

TIA is dead? Not according to the observation of 
John Pike, Director of defense think tank 
GlobalSecurity.org who opined that this spy 
machine “looks like an outgrowth of Total 
Information Awareness and other DARPA homeland 
security surveillance programs.” According to an 
L.A. Times article, June, 2006, “
 when Congress 
disbanded the Total Information Awareness 
program, it did not prohibit further research on 
such databanks, or even the use of individual 
databanks. And, according to a recent study by 
the National Journal, the Bush administration 
used that loophole to break the program into 
smaller parts, transferring some parts to the 
National Security Agency, classifying the work 
and renaming parts of it as the Research 
Development and Experimental Collaboration program.” 9

In the next segment of this series, we will 
explore in depth the measures enacted immediate 
after 9/11 which began the legally-sanctioned 
descent of American society into the totalitarian abyss.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 Churchill and Vander Wall, COINTELPRO Papers, p. 181.
2 Ibid., p.177

3 Ibid., p.304

4 Crossing The Rubicon, p. 483.

5 http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/12.03B.jvb.hsa.1.htm

6 Crossing The Rubicon, p. 173.

7 http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/

8 http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,58909,00.html

9 
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-turley24jun24,1,3332362.story?ctrack=1&cset=true 