USA: COINTELPRO

SPTIMES: An un-American Activity: Ashcroft's Cointelpro

When Attorney General John Ashcroft announced in May 2002 that he was
lifting restrictions on domestic spying by the FBI - rules that had
been put in place in response to the bureau's excesses during the 1960s and
'70s - he promised the sweeping new powers would be used only 'for the
purpose of detecting and preventing terrorism.' Now we know better. A
classified FBI intelligence memorandum has recently come to light demonstrating
that the FBI is using this new authority to spy on nonviolent antiwar
demonstrators. Ashcroft seems to be ushering us back to the bad old
days of J. Edgar Hoover... The parallels to Hoover's Cointelpro days, when
civil rights leaders and anti-Vietnam protesters were put under surveillance
and sabotaged, are too great to ignore. Ashcroft has exploited the nation's
fears against terrorism - just as Hoover used the communist scare - to
justify the elimination of most protections for citizen privacy.

Progressiv: It's official: Cointelpro is back.
The infamous FBI counterintelligence program of the 1960s and '70s,
which spied on Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and disrupted the Panthers
and the American Indian Movement, is being revived right now by Attorney
General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

FBI headquarters sent out a memo last month to local law enforcement
agencies telling them to gather intelligence on anti-war protesters who
were assembling in Washington and San Francisco, according to The New
York Times. "Report any potentially illegal acts" to FBI counterterrorism
task forces, the memo said.

The basis for viewing these protesters as terrorists is flimsy, as even
the
memo seems to acknowledge. The FBI "possesses no information indicating
that violent or terrorist activities are being planned as part of the
protests," the memo said. So why are they being treated as such?

One law enforcement official suggested to the Times that some
protesters may be acting in league with terrorists by distracting the FBI with a
big demonstration while a terrorist attack is planned for somewhere else.
That's pretty far-fetched, if you ask me

What is CointelPRO?: cointel.org