Government subverts its own ideals By ALLAN M. JALON
Thirty-five years ago Wednesday, a group of anonymous activists broke into the small, two-person office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Media, Pa., and stole more than 1,000 FBI documents that revealed years of systematic wiretapping, infiltration and media manipulation designed to suppress dissent.
The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, as the group called itself, forced its way in at night with a crowbar while much of the country was watching the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight. When agents arrived for work the next morning, they found the file cabinets virtually emptied.
[This break-in] remains one of the most lasting consequential (although underemphasized) watersheds of political awareness in recent American history, one that poses tough questions even today for our national leaders who argue that fighting foreign enemies requires the government to spy on its citizens. The break-in is far less well-known than Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers three months later, but in my opinion it deserves equal stature.
Found among the Media documents was a new word, “COINTELPRO,” short for the FBI’s “secret counterintelligence program,” created to investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the United States. Under these programs, beginning in 1956, the bureau worked to “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles,” as one COINTELPRO memo put it, “to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”
The Media documents — along with further revelations about COINTELPRO in the months and years that followed — made it clear that the bureau had gone beyond mere intelligence-gathering to discredit, destabilize and demoralize groups — many of them peaceful, legal civil rights organizations and anti-war groups — that the FBI and Director J. Edgar Hoover found offensive or threatening. …
The sheer reach of a completely politicized FBI was one of the most frightening revelations of the Media documents. … “Neutralize them in the same manner they are trying to destroy and neutralize the U.S.,” one memo said.