COINTELPRO, Anyone?

From my Book Proposal, "The War On The 60s" -

On a night in March 1971 when much of the country was watching the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier boxing-match, a group of activists broke into the two-man FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, with a crowbar, and emptied the file cabinets of more than a thousand documents.

They called themselves The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, and the papers revealed years of systematic wiretapping, infiltration and media manipulation designed to suppress any challenge to the status quo.

16 days later, over the Government's objections, the “Washington Post” revealed that it had received an envelope with 14 FBI documents, detailing how the bureau had enlisted a local police chief, mail carriers and a switchboard operator at nearby Swarthmore College to spy on campus and black activist groups in the Philadelphia area.

The “burglars” were never identified; and the American public heard for the first time a sinister new word,: "COINTELPRO". Short for the FBI's "secret counterintelligence program," this was created to investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the U.S. 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."

It wasn't until 1975-76 that the Senate mounted a full-scale investigation, known as the Church Committee after its chair, Sen. Church of Idaho. They found that the FBI, working with local Police forces, ignored the law and the Constitution....

“Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.”