Let's remind ourselves what life was like before the Church commission:
.."The Church Committee revealed the enormous scope of the operations against anti-war demonstrators, civil rights activists and left-wing political parties. This included the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program discredit, or otherwise neutralize” left-wing opponents of government policy. FBI headquarters alone developed over 500,000 domestic intelligence files on US citizens.
In addition the committee found:
At least 26,000 individuals were at one point catalogued on an FBI list of persons to be rounded up in the event of a “national emergency.”
Nearly a quarter of a million first class letters were opened and photographed in the US by the CIA between 1953 and 1973, producing a CIA computerized index of nearly 1.5 million names.
Separate files were created on approximately 7,200 Americans and over 100 the course of the CIA’s Operation CHAOS (1967-1973), aimed at crushing the student anti-war movement.
Millions of private telegrams sent from, to, or through the US were obtained by the National Security Agency from 1947 to 1975 under a secret arrangement with three US telegraph companies.
An estimated 100,000 Americans were the subjects of United States Army intelligence files created between the mid-1960s and 1971.
Intelligence files on more than 11,000 individuals and groups were created by the Internal Revenue Service between 1969 and 1973 and tax investigations were started on the basis of political rather than tax criteria.
The Senate committee also found that these agencies sent anonymous letters attacking the political beliefs of targets in order to induce their employers to fire them. Similar letters were sent to spouses in an effort to destroy marriages. The committee also documented criminal break-ins, the theft of membership lists and misinformation campaigns aimed at provoking violent attacks against targeted individuals.
One of the most infamous operations uncovered by the Church Committee was the FBI’s campaign to “neutralize” civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. This included an extensive surveillance program to obtain information about the “private activities of King and his advisers” to use in order to “completely discredit” them. The FBI mailed King a tape recording made from microphones hidden in hotel rooms. As one agent testified, this was an attempt to destroy King’s marriage. The tape was accompanied by a note suggesting that the recording would be released to the public unless King committed suicide.
The FBI’s Cointelpro operations against the Black Panthers involved the killing of several leaders, including Fred Hampton, by the Chicago police, as well as the frame-up and imprisonment of scores of others.
Referring to this period, Ashcroft made a passive reference to “abuses” that have been “alleged about the FBI decades ago.” The attorney general assured one and all that he and the president would never allow the FBI to use its new powers to crush political dissent or civil liberties. Like his boss in the White House, Ashcroft’s answer to concerns over the gutting of democratic rights is,
“Trust me.”
All quiet in libertarian Blogistan.
