Update 3: Notice that the Wikileaks revelations were made days before funding for the Afghan war was to be voted on (July 28). Notice also that the revelations did nothing to reduce the funding:

“The House voted 308-114 to pass the almost $59 billion measure to fund Obama’s additional 30,000 troops in Afghanistan and other programs.”

Update 2:  A piece by Jeff Stein published in The Washington Post on July 26, a week before the Daniel Ellsberg’s piece cited in Update 1, also “positions”  the Afghan revelations. Stein draws attention to the information in the Afghan document dump about Hamid Gul, former chief of Pakistan’s chief spy agency:

“Everything that is terrifying about Washington’s relationship with Pakistan can be summed up in the Wikileaks documents on Hamid Gul, a former chief of the ISI, Islamabad’s intelligence service.

“The documents portray Gul as the public face of an underground Pakistani military network that appears to be working to destroy the U.S. effort to create a pro-West Afghanistan.

A hawk-like man with laser black eyes, Gul’s animosity toward the United States is well known. But the audacity of his plotting with the Taliban and even al-Qaeda, as represented in the documents, has the ability to shock.”

Lila: Of course, Pakistan’s involvement with the Taliban isn’t exactly a secret, so I’d like to know why Stein needs to signal the shock to his reader with the journalistic equivalent of a stage-whisper. Perhaps so that the usual counterpoint of left v. right can be set off?

Left: “Wikileaks reveals the truth…and is being persecuted for it.”

Right: “Wikileaks endangers the good guys….they should be slammed for it.”

This shop- worn counterpoint manages to muffle the pedal-point,  the eternal drone in the background of both rightist and leftist arguments –  which is the assumption that the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is itself legitimate.

Naturally, then, the pre-packaged left-right debate also drowns out the questions surrounding the event that bought the GWOT’s legitimacy in the West – 9-11.

Update 1: As though to confirm this reading of Wikileaks’ agenda, the Washington Post of August 1 has a piece by Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, telling us that Wikileaks is indeed like the Pentagon Papers…Ellsberg then lists what else is on Wikileaks’ agenda. That list is quite enlightening…but not in the way Wikileaks probably intended it to be.

The four items on the agenda:

1. The official U.S. “order of battle” estimates of the Taliban in Afghanistan 2.Memos from the administration’s decision-making process between July and December 2009 on the new strategy for Afghanistan 3. The draft revision, known as a “memo to holders,” of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran from November 2007. 4. The 28 or more pages on the foreknowledge or involvement of foreign governments (particularly Saudi Arabia) that were redacted from the congressional investigation of 9/11

Now, from several reports, Julian Assange considers any notion of 9-11 as a government conspiracy “crazy.” Yet, according to the list in the WashPo, he still has an interest in it…..and his interest lies in focusing on the Saudi foreknowledge of it, ala Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9-11.”

Is Assange also interested in Israeli involvement in 9-11, attested to in numbers of reports? Will there be any mention of the stunning  interview of military expert, Dr. Alan Sabrosky, in which he asserts 9-11 was Mossad-related and that this is well-known to the military?

I think not.

(Note: Dr Sabrosky is a former U.S. Army War College Director of Studies, Strategic Studies Institute, and a former holder of the General of the Army Douglas MacArthur Chair of Research).

From that untoward silence, I can extrapolate that the other seemingly anti-war positions on the Wikileaks agenda are rather unlikely to be anything very substantial in the long run. As Chris Floyd points out below, they might well serve exactly the opposite objective..

I remain open to the possibility I could be mistaken. And unlike some others, I don’t find Assange himself a repellent figure. Quite the contrary.  Many visionaries in technical fields do in fact have abrasive, lone-wolf personalities.  But many things simply don’t add up about JA’s story.  My gut instinct is that Wikileaks is being used in the propaganda game….

ORIGINAL POST:

Veteran investigative writer, Chris Floyd, is as skeptical as I am about the value and impact of  Wikileaks” disclosures about Afghanistan:

“In fact, the overall effect of the multi-part coverage of the documents is to paint a portrait of plucky, put-upon Americans trying their darnedest to get the job done despite the dastardly dealings and gooberish bumblings of the ungrateful little brown wretches we are trying to save from themselves. The NYT is quite explicit in this spin:

“[T]he documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.”

So you see, if our noble enterprise is failing, it’s because the Afghans are idiots, the Pakistanis are backstabbers … and the Iranians are behind it all, training Taliban fighters, making their bombs and bankrolling the political opposition to America’s appointed satrap, Hamid Karzai.

Ah, here we get down to it. Here’s metal more attractive for our militarists. The treachery of Iran is a constant theme in the leakage — both in the raw, unsifted, uncorroborated “humint” and in the diplomatic cables of puzzled occupiers who cannot fathom why there should be any opposition to their enlightened rule. It must the fault of those perfidious Persians!

One can only imagine the lipsmacking and handclapping now rampant among the Bomb Iran crowd as they pore over these unsubstantiated rumors and Potomac ass-coverings which are being doled out — by the “liberal” media, no less! — as the new, grim truth about Afghanistan. The Guardian helpfully compiles the incendiary material for them:

Iran is engaged in an extensive covert campaign to arm, finance, train and equip Taliban insurgents, Afghan warlords allied to al-Qaida and suicide bombers fighting to eject British and western forces from Afghanistan, according to classified US military intelligence reports contained in the war logs.

The secret “threat reports”, mostly comprising raw data provided by Afghan spies and paid informants, cannot be corroborated individually. Even if the claims are accurate, it is unclear whether the activities they describe took place with the full knowledge of Tehran or are the work of hardline elements of the semi-autonomous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, ideological sympathisers of the Taliban, arms smugglers or criminal gangs ….”

Yes, no doubt there are a great many “ideological sympathisers” of the Taliban’s Shiite-hating Sunni extremists among the, er, Shiites in Iran. But such nuances don’t matter; all that matters is that you get some headlines out there about “Iran’s covert operations in Afghanistan.” [Because, as we all know, it is an unmitigated evil for any nation to conduct covert operations in another country — unless, of course, that nation is run by nice, clean, English-speaking people.]

The Guardian details a number of raw humint reports on Iranian dastardy, then makes a curious claim for its other sources:

“Summaries of US embassy diplomatic cables and situation assessments contained and distributed through the war logs offer firmer ground than some of the raw intelligence data, given that they are evidently written by American officials and represent an official record, or official evaluation, of high-level meetings.“

Why should the “situation assessments” of ass-covering bureaucrats necessarily be “firmer” than the gossip and denunciations being retailed in the “humint” reports? Especially if they are telling Washington exactly what it wants to hear: the Iranians are behind our manifest failures, both militarily and politically.

The Guardian:

“Summaries of classified diplomatic cables produced by the US embassy in Kabul, contained in the war logs, reveal high-level concern about Tehran’s growing political influence in Afghanistan. Senior US and Afghan officials appear at a loss over how to counter Iran’s alleged bribery and manipulation of opposition parties and MPs whom Afghan government officials dismiss as Tehran’s “puppets”….

“Over the past several months Iran has taken a series of steps to expand and deepen its influence,” says a secret cable sourced to the US embassy in Kabul and written in May 2007 by CSTC-A DCG for Pol-Mil Affairs [combined security transition command deputy commanding general for political and military affairs]. The cable cites the creation of the opposition National Front and National Unity Council, which it claims are under Iranian influence.”

Wow, that’s heavy stuff, man. An apparatchik in the US embassy says that the political opposition to America’s man in Kabul is just Iranian puppetry. Obviously, those Afghan ragheads couldn’t possibly put together an opposition by themselves. (It’s just like that Civil Rights stuff back in the day; it was all a Communist front. You know our docile darkies would never have tried to get above their raising if the Commies hadn’t stirred them up.)

We see here a reflection of one of the enduring principles of the American power structure: that no one could ever have any reasonable objections to the enlightened hegemony of our elites. Any opposition to their dominance and privilege has to come from “outside agitators,” sinister troublemakers driven by motiveless evil to destroy all that’s good and holy in this world.

So in the end, what really is the “takeaway” from this barrage of high-profile “revelations” dished up by these bold liberal gadflies speaking truth to power? Let’s recap:

Occupation forces kill lots of civilians. But everybody already knew that — and it’s been obvious for years that nobody cares. How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom about the war?

Pakistan is pursuing its own strategic interests in the region: interests that don’t always mesh with those of the United States. Again, this has been a constantly — obsessively — reported aspect of the war since its earliest days. How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom about the war?

The Afghan government installed by the occupation is corrupt and dysfunctional. Again, this theme has been sounded at every level of the American government — including by two presidents — for years.  How does this alter the prevailing  conventional wisdom of the war?

There is often a dichotomy between official statements about the war’s progress and the reality of the war on the ground. Again, has there been a month in the last nine years that prominent stories outlining this fact have not appeared in major mainstream publications? Is this not a well-known phenomenon of every single military conflict in human history? How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom about the war?

Iran is evil and is helping bad guys kill Americans and should be stopped. It goes without saying that this too has been a relentless drumbeat of the American power structure for many years. The occupation forces in Iraq began blaming Iran for the rise of the insurgency and the political instability almost the moment after George W. Bush proclaimed “mission accomplished” and all hell broke loose in the conquered land. The Obama administration has “continued” — and expanded — the Bush Regime’s demonization of Iran, and its extensive military preparations for an attack on that country. The current administration’s “diplomatic effort” is led by a woman who pledged to “obliterate” Iran — that is, to kill tens of millions of innocent people — if Iran attacked Israel. The American power structure has seized upon every single scrap of Curveball-quality “intelligence” — every rumor, every lie, every exaggeration, every fabrication — to convince the American people that Iran is about to nuke downtown Omaha with burqa-clad atom bombs.

So once again, and for the last time, we ask the question: How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom about the war?

It doesn’t, of course. These media “bombshells” will simply bounce off the hardened shell of American exceptionalism — which easily countenances the slaughter of civilians and “targeted killings” and “indefinite detention” and any number of other atrocities anyway. In fact, I predict the chief “takeaway” from the story will be this:

American forces are doing their best to help the poor Afghans, but the ungrateful natives are too weak and corrupt to be trusted, while America’s good intentions are also being thwarted by evil outsiders.

For our many War Machinists across the political spectrum, getting this mythological message out via “critical” stories in “liberal” publications will be much more effective than dishing up another serving of patriotic hokum on Fox news or at a presidential press conference. (And in fact, on Tuesday Obama claimed that the leaks actually supported the need for his two death-dealing, destabilizing, terror-exacerbating, corruption-oozing “surges” in Afghanistan.) The way the narrative is being framed at the outset — the small selection of stories being offered as the first “face” of the leaks from the mountains of material as yet unmined — evokes the age-old question: in the end, cui bono?

The war chiefs are assuming that these 92,000 files about the Afghan war were obtained by an American private serving in Iraq, the unfortunate Bradley Manning. (Wikileaks denies that this particular cache comes from Manning.) Manning is already under arrest for the “crime” of leaking something far more disturbing than any written document: a video showing the slaughter of Iraqi civilians by American Apache helicopters in 2007. Washington knows that a couple of moving pictures on the tee-vee have a far greater potential to disturb the moral sleep of the American people than tens of thousands of newspaper reports — or leaked documents — detailing similar killings. (That said, in the end the Apache video has had zero effect on public perceptions of the Iraq War, which most people believe is “over,” or on public support for the murderous machinations of the Terror War in general, which most people believe needs to continue in one form or another, to “keep us safe.”) The only kind of grim truth attended to by anyone in America these days is that which can be shown in moving pictures. (Although the number of people who are upset even by that seems to be rapidly diminishing. That’s why Manning had to be put away.

Ultimately, I suppose on balance it is better to have this material than not to have it. But I still question the usefulness of rolling out mountains of raw “human intelligence” — precisely the same kind of unfiltered junk that was “stovepiped” to build the false case for the mass-murdering invasion of Iraq — about Iran, al Qaeda, Pakistan; even North Korea gets into the mix. None of this can be checked — but all of it will be extremely useful to those who want to build cases for more and more military action, death squads and covert actions around the world.

And it seems very odd that intelligence reports and bureaucratic memos by forces carrying out a prolonged, brutal military occupation of another country are now being treated by “liberal” media outlets as holy writ which paints a “true” picture of the war — a picture that omits any reference to American war-related corruption, for instance, not only in Afghanistan but more especially in Washington, or to America’s wider “Great Game” machinations in Central Asia, involving pipelines, strategic bases and “containing China,” etc.

If I believed anything would come of this document dump, if I believed it would actually lead to, say, the prosecution of even one single person for a war-related crime, or to a genuine debate over the morality of the war in the political and media establishments, or even a 5 point rise in public opposition to the Terror War project, then I would rejoice, and embrace the flashy packages of the NYT, Guardian and Der Spiegel at their own self-inflated valuation.

But I honestly believe that the net effect will be simply to entrench the conventional wisdom about the war in the halls of power — and in the echo chambers of opinion — on both sides of the Atlantic. We have already seen far too many atrocities, brutalities and acts of criminal folly countenanced, when they are not actually praised, far too many times — over and over and over again — in the course of the last decade to believe that these disgorgings of junk intelligence and apparatchik memos will make any difference.

Any difference for the better, that is. For I believe they will supply plenty of ammunition to those bent on further murder and plunder.”

The House sent President Barack Obama a major increase in war funding Tuesday, undeterred by the release of thousands of classified documents portraying a struggling military effort between 2004 and 2009.

Update 2: More evidence of favoritism: On June 11, 2010, the SEC dropped an investigation into Daniel Loeb’s Third Point Capital, one of the hedge funds alleged to be part of a group of hedge funds and speculators that colluded with corrupt journalists, analysts, and regulators to “take down” targeted businesses through illegal short selling and other fraudulent or manipulative practices. The probe began in 2008.

Update: I’m adding a link to a report from Judd Bagley at Deep Capture on the story behind the SEC’s claim on its exemption.

ORIGINAL POST

Comes news that the SEC has now been placed beyond the reach of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. FOX reports (hat-tip to Daily Bell commenter, John Accord):

“Under a little-noticed provision of the recently passed financial-reform legislation, the Securities and Exchange Commission no longer has to comply with virtually all requests for information releases from the public, including those filed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The law, signed last week by President Obama, exempts the SEC from disclosing records or information derived from “surveillance, risk assessments, or other regulatory and oversight activities.” Given that the SEC is a regulatory body, the provision covers almost every action by the agency, lawyers say. Congress and federal agencies can request information, but the public cannot.

That argument comes despite the President saying that one of the cornerstones of the sweeping new legislation was more transparent financial markets. Indeed, in touting the new law, Obama specifically said it would “increase transparency in financial dealings.”

The SEC cited the new law Tuesday in a FOIA action brought by FOX Business Network. Steven Mintz, founding partner of law firm Mintz & Gold LLC in New York, lamented what he described as “the backroom deal that was cut between Congress and the SEC to keep the  SEC’s failures secret. The only losers here are the American public.”

My Comment:

The politicization of the SEC, never in doubt, now has a legal seal. What to expect? Well, for starters,  vengeance against political foes…..

Just as the Afghan war, per Wikileaks, is now only about Bush era war crimes (nothing to do with Obama, no sir, noway..), financial fraud is now all about conservatives….especially conservatives who once financed the “Swift boating” of establishment liberal hopeful, Ketchup king-in-law and heart-throb of the Eurocracy, John Kerry.

Aside: I imagine Patrick Byrne, also conservative, also a financier of the Swift-boaters, and also a repeated target of the SEC, might find this development of urgent interest….

Thus, while mega-billions worth of fraud, racketeering, and outright looting of the Treasury is overlooked with feigned befuddlement (“mistakes were made but there was no wrong-doing” etc., etc.), the SEC does away with the dummy act when it comes to political opponents.

Charles and Sam Wyly are now allegedly guilty of securities fraud of a value of “more than $550 million.”

We rush to add that we’re not defending any one here. By all means, let fraudsters fry, whether large or small, only don’t tell us that there’s no stink…we’ve sensitive nostrils, we smell it.

To wit., by an odd coincidence, $550 million is the sum of the penalty slapped on Goldman Sachs, a penalty widely believed to be several galaxies short of  true come-uppance for this lynchpin of the shadow government.

“On July 29th, 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Charles and Sam Wyly with fraud for violating federal securities laws governing ownership and trading of securities by corporate insiders. The Wyly brothers are alleged to have profited by more than $550 million in undisclosed gains. The charges state that this occurred through the trading of stock in public companies that the brothers were serving as board members. They allegedly, through hidden entities located in foreign jurisdictions, concealed their ownership and trading of those securities.”

So, rewind a bit. Just after various shills for the financial establishment (they know who they are) rush out to scold us sanctimoniously that a breath of criticism for Goldman Sachs is prima-facie evidence of Nazism, and even as assorted Sri Lankan, Chinese, and French miscreants are trotted out as fall guys and red herrings for the bamboozlement of nativist “red-necks” (I use the term ironically) for whom every problem can be stopped at the border, the public is served  up “fraud” in the persons of two bunglers who, if they are guilty, are guilty of offenses that are largely irrelevant and petty next to the monstrous deception of the public by the banking mafia.

We always knew Justice was blind-folded. We didn’t know she was deaf and dumb too.

Update 3: The site which hosts Wikileaks, PeRiQuito (PRQ), is a Swedish internet service provider, reportedly famous both for the notoriety of some of its clients ( it houses pedophilia advocates NAMBLA, as well as Chechen rebels and an anti-copyright group, PiracyBay.org) and for its fierce protectiveness toward them.

Update 2: Assange not only gave the Afghan scoop to three pillars of the mainstream media, he actually endorsed them, an odd gesture for someone who’s publicly disdained the media,

Update:

I found some intriguing material by Assange cited by a Daily Bell commenter, Adam, and I add one quote below, as insight into Assange’s undoubtedly colorful personality:

“The decision as to what should be enforced and what may be ignored is political. This does not mean that rights are unimportant, but rather, that politics (the societal control of freedom) is so important as to subsume rights.”

One shouldn’t perhaps read too much into such statements, but someone could see this as the rationale for Assange’s seeming disregard for privacy rights in his recent incarnation as the Galileo (! – his own language) of cyberspace.

ORIGINAL POST:

From the Wall Street Journal (July 27, 2010):

“In a rare show of bipartisan co-operation the liberal Democrat Kucinich together with the libertarian oriented Ron Paul (R) forced a rare debate on the Afghan war and presence of U.S. military advisors and special forces in Pakistan.”

And this “rare show” occurs soon after the recent disclosure by former hacker Julian Assange’s whistle-blower site Wikileaks of raw intelligence files from the Afghan war? Furthermore, the Wikileaks data dump itself followed hard on the heels of a detailed Washington Post report on the cancerous burgeoning of intelligence agencies in the US government.

If one needed any more evidence that Wikileaks is government-connected, it seems to be here in this media “event”: The media moving seamlessly to reinforce a message, while both ends of the antiwar spectrum act in concert.

However, while the US and UK media seem to have taken Wikileaks at face value, European commentary has been more subdued and even skeptical:

The center-left Berliner Zeitung, in an editorial titled “Disclosure 75,000 Times,” believes the leaks are part of a conspiracy concocted by the U.S. government itself. The newspaper writes: “One can draw two conclusions from the publication of the war logs: A) We need time, more time than has so far been stated publicly, to get to a handle on Afghanistan. So we will need to stay there longer, with even more troops. B) We have not succeeded so far. So we will not succeed in the years to come. So we should leave as soon as possible. … It might be that the reports have found their way into the public arena at this point in time in order to promote the first conclusion. Maybe the source feeding Wikileaks is not as far removed from the American government as we assume. Maybe Wikileaks is being used to create a climate in which the anticipated withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan can be reversed.”

To me, as well, the whole business seems orchestrated….so far as I’ve studied it

(Caveat: I’ve read through only a small portion of the data so far).

Is the data dump a “good guy” outing from the intel agencies themselves. …liberals and libertarians joining force on behalf of reigning in a war gone awry? Or, is it a step in the opposite direction, making the Af-Pak action more doable, which is what this Obama pronouncement seems to suggest?

As I  commented recently at The Daily Bell, where the hard-working editors were at first inclined to take a “wait and see” approach, Wikileaks has always seemed a bit odd to me. As well as to many others, such as, John Young, the founder of the original document disclosure site, Cryptome,.

Assange’s trashing of 9-11 research as conspiracy, the theatrics, the fuzzy background of the founder, the nature of Wikileaks’ global interests (China, the Middle East, the Sudan, the Horn of Africa), and its M.O., all seem suspicious.

Some things reported on the web on his background are also pretty colorful, although I don’t know if they’re true or not:

“Apparently that [Lila: Assange’s] father was a member of a terrifying cult run by a psychotic nurse named Anne-Hamilton Byrne who ran a child-kidnapping cult on the outskirts of Melbourne wherein Ms. Byrne dyed the stolen children’s hair blonde and fed them LSD.)  ( see story here )”

(Of course, even if the story were true, it’s not evidence in itself that there’s anything wrong with Assange’s father, let alone Assange).

More pertinently, there’s the resemblance of Wikileaks’ mandate to that of its name-sake, ex-Chicago commodity trader and porn merchant Jimmy Wales’ intel-addled Wikipedia. All this has raised suspicions from scores of veteran media-watchers, from Alex Constantine to Rush Limbaugh (probably the only time the two have coincided on anything).

This latest disclosure has done nothing to assuage suspicions about the outfit.

More and more, I’m inclined to believe that no politician or major media outlet is to be trusted. None. Period.

However honest they are personally, they end up being used by the dishonest forces around them.

Perhaps we have to admit that politics and the media are not the way things will ultimately change. Perhaps the machinations are too extensive and too sophisticated. This country is, after all, the home of Madison Avenue, and has had a hundred years since Bernays to develop every permutation of meme and sideshow in the game of propaganda.

That goes against the beliefs both of those who see the Internet as the ultimate liberating force (among whom I counted myself until very recently) and those who see it as a sinister force created to lure the population into government data bases.

The Internet has affected…and will continue to vitally affect… the outcome – for short bursts. But every step of the way will be dogged by rear-guard disinformation from the powers-that-be. Over the longer haul, expect these powers to rewrite history, erase evidence, muddy the issues, and subvert truth even as it emerges, bloodied from the welter of events.

The outcome is not as foregone as either Net optimists or Net cynics believe it to be.

A recent article by satirical columnist Joel Stein (Time, July 5, 2010) on Indian immigration to his native Edison (New Jersey) drew a lot of ire from the Indian community in the US.  Libertarians dismissed the anger as PC,  but there was much more to the whole thing than that, including a feeling among  Indians here of being set up as the politically safe fall guy for anti-immigrant backlash. After the censor’s slogan, “anti-Semitic,” the next best thing to deflect anger away from the real miscreants of the financial crisis is race talk. We’d say more, but this is summer and we’d like to spend it in ways more productive to our own well-being…. Continue reading →

As the economy threatens to sag into a double-dip recession and support for Obama plummets,  the powers-that-be pull out their three aces:

1. A bill to regulate the banks – hailed as the stiffest since the Great Depression – passes the Senate 60-39

(what the  bill really does. besides give expanded power to the Treasury, is described here)

2. Goldman settles civil fraud charges brought by the SEC for $550 million (this doesn’t even amount to a slap on the wrist; it’s more like a friendly pat on the fanny)

3. BP suddenly manages to cap the leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico.

Sheer coincidence? Or more theater intended to manipulate the public?

Update: I note that Kurt Nimmo has a piece on the financial regulations at Infowars on July 16, 2010, the day after thist post, entitled “Three-Card Monte.”

The FBI and the Engineering of consent

From Public Eye Magazine, Volume One, Number Two

by Noam Chomsky

It has often been observed that the United States is unusual, among the industrial democracies, in the narrowness of the spectrum of thought and political action, sharply skewed to the right as compared with other societies of comparable social and economic structure. Complex theories have been advanced to explain this intriguing phenomenon. No doubt subtle issues are involved, but it is important not to disregard some quite simple factors. For one thing, American business has been engaged for many years in massive organizing propaganda campaigns directed to what leading practitioners call “the engineering of consent.” The scale is vast and the impact – on the media and school texts for example – quite substantial, far beyond anything to be found in the other industrial democracies. Another central element in the picture is the role of the national political police, the FBI, which for over half a century has been devoting major efforts to engineering of consent in a more direct way: by force. The character and scale of this enterprise is only now beginning to come to light, and the story that is being pieced together is quite a remarkable one.

J. Edgar Hoover rose to national prominence when he was appointed chief of the General Intelligence (anti-radical) division of the Justice Department in 1919, shortly before the notorious “Palmer raids,” in which some 4,000 alleged radicals were rounded up in 33 cities in 23 states, while the Washington Post editorialized that “there is not time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberty” in the face of the Bolshevik menace. Over 200 aliens were subsequently deported. The liberal Attorney General Palmer proclaimed that “the government is now sweeping the nation clean of such alien filth,” with the over-whelming support of the press, until they perceived their own interests were threatened. The “Red Scare” served to control labor militancy, dismantle radical parties, frighten liberals, and buttress an interventionist foreign policy. Hoover’s FBI undertook the very same tasks, and has conducted them with considerable success.

The FBI casts a wide net. For example, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was infiltrated from 1920 to 1943 (NY Times, June 19, 1977, p. 26 and in the 1950’s was secretly cooperating with the FBI in its programs of political and doctrinal control. Even the slightest departures from orthodoxy are not likely to escape the vigilant eye of the Bureau, as political activists have had many opportunities to discover. To site one minor case of which I have personal knowledge, in 1969 I had two teaching assistants who were active in the civil rights and peace movements in an undergraduate humanities course at MIT. The Boston office of the FBI undertook to block their re-appointment, making sure to keep its activities confidential so that “the bureau’s interest in this matter will be fully protected.” An internal memorandum to the Director states that “an established source of the Boston office” at MIT (name blacked out) advised the Bureau that as a result of its efforts, “he was able to have their re-appointments to the staff of MIT canceled.” In fact, the Bureau’s efforts were irrelevant in this case, but the example illustrates very well the nature of its concerns, while raising interesting questions about our academic institutions.

In other cases the FBI went a few steps further. A former student of mine, also active in the peace movement, was teaching at San Diego State College in 1971. According to a report submitted to the church Committee by the ACLU, the FBI provided defamatory information about him to the college administration (and also gained access to confidential college records). Three public hearings were held under college auspices. He was exonerated each time, then summarily dismissed by the chancellor of the California state college system, Glenn Dumke, one of the numerous examples of the treachery of the universities in those years. During this period the same student was the target of an assassination attempt by a secret terrorist army organized, funded, armed and directed by the FBI, which concealed evidence of the crime and prevented prosecution of the FBI agent in charge and the FBI infiltrator who led this organization in its rampage of fire-bombing, shooting, and general violence and terror aimed at the left, all with the full knowledge and cooperation of the Bureau.

In this case, the intended victim of the FBI assassination attempt escaped injury, though a young woman was seriously injured. Others were not so lucky. The most notorious case is that of Black panther leader Fred Hampton, who, along with Mark Clark, was murdered in a pre-dawn gestapo-style police raid – the phrase is accurate – in December 1969, with the complicity of the FBI, which had turned over to the police a floor plan of his apartment supplied by an FBI provocateur who was chief of Panther security. the floor plan no doubt explains the remarkable accuracy of police gunfire, noted by reporters. Hampton was killed in bed, possibly drugged; according to eyewitnesses, murdered in cold blood.

The FBI prank followed an earlier effort to have Hampton murdered by a criminal gang in the Chicago ghetto, the Blackstone Rangers. The Rangers were sent an anonymous letter by the local FBI office informing them that the Panthers were intending to murder their leader, but this effort to incite violence and murder failed. In other cases, the Bureau was more successful. Internal memoranda gloat over the success of the Bureau in fomenting gang warfare and violence in the ghetto, and disrupting such subversive activities as free breakfast programs for poor children in churches.

The record, which is by now extensive, demonstrates that the FBI was committed to attacking the civil rights movement, blocking legal electoral politics, undermining the universities and cultural groups (e.g., the largest black cultural center in the West, in the Watts ghetto), and disrupting political activities of which it disapproved by any means required, including the extensive use of provocateurs, arson, bombings, robbery and murder. Under COINTELPRO alone, its targets included the Communist Party, the socialist Workers party, the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, the various Black movements of the 1960’s, and the entire “New left.” Though the left was not the sole target of the national political police, it was by a large measure the primary target. In scope of activities and level of violence, the criminal programs of the FBI far exceed anything known in other industrial democracies, and surely merit a prominent place in any investigation of “American exceptionalism” that deserves to be taken at all seriously.

There have been a few studies of these activities of the FBI, which surely is one of the more significant criminal organizations in the United States: for example, N. Blackstock, ed., COINTELPRO, Vintage, 1976; M.H. Halperin, J.J. Berman, R.L. Borosage and C.M. Marwick, The Lawless State, Penguin, 1976. But these studies have received little attention, and in fact the documentary record itself, despite its quite appalling nature, has barely created a ripple.

It is striking that the major revelations concerning FBI criminal activities appear precisely at the time of the exposure of the Watergate episodes, frivolous in comparison. It is interesting to contrast the concern accorded to Watergate and to the crimes of the national political police – which I stress again were incomparably more violent, far-ranging and significant in their effect on the cultural and political climate of American life. History has provided us with a controlled experiment to determine whether Nixon’s critics were motivated by a concern for civil and human rights, or by the fact that Nixon, like Joseph McCarthy before him, was directing his weapons at the powerful, always an illegitimate target. The results of this experiment are quite clear-cut and leave little doubt that the furor over Watergate was largely an exercise in hypocrisy.

Quite generally, what Halperin et. al. correctly call “the crimes of the U.S. intelligence agencies” have been ignored or dismissed, even by analysts who focus on the period of the worst excesses and who are particularly concerned with dissent, activism and its limited impact in the United States. To cite one example, Godfrey Hodgson’s much acclaimed 500 page study American in Our Time (Doubleday, 1976) has two trivial references to the FBI and no references at all to COINTELPRO, though he devotes much attention to the fortunes of the civil rights movement, the peace movement, and the American left in general. This unwillingness to take seriously the major role in the repressive forces of the American state is quite typical. It bears comparison to the general reaction to the discovery that the CIA had repeatedly attempted to murder Castro (among other) and was responsible for poisoning of livestock and repeated terrorism directed against Cuba, after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. One can imagine the outrage had it been discovered that Castro was responsible for anything remotely comparable. But when the victims are Cubans and the perpetrators American planners and their agencies, it can all be relegated to (admittedly silly) fun-and-games.

The essay that follows gives welcome insight into the systematic campaigns of intimidation, disruption and violence that have been waged against popular movements or scattered individuals that stray beyond a narrow consensus. It is a record that will not be put lightly aside by anyone who hopes to understand the nature of American society.

Noam Chomsky

Cambridge

March 12, 1978