On 6/5/20, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Infiltration, a proud American tradition!
Even back prior to the 20th century our government relied on
"snitches" to report on the activities of efforts by the Working Class
to organize protests and strikes. Pinkerton agents were often used to
infiltrate and exacerbate violence. FBI infiltrators were referred to
as, "Stool Pigeons", and later on as "stoolies". These stoolies
showed up wherever organized protesters met. In the late 30's andd
early 40's, my folks were members of the Queen Anne Communist Party, a
member of the American Communist Party. It was a left wing legal
political party, supporting the right of labor to organize, the right
to decent housing, the right to medical care, the right to public
education for all children, and the right to speak out without fear of
reprisal. But of course the Ruling Class felt threatened. Under the
leadership of "Give 'em Hell' Harry Truman, the Communist Party was
outlawed, and supporters of the Working Class were forced to go
underground. By that time however, my folks had dropped out of active
membership, although they did continue friendships from the old CP
days. Among these friends was a young couple. They had joined the
Party prior to Truman's decision, and had been very outspoken and
active. When McCarthy began his Witch Hunt, these two lovely people
showed up to testify on behalf of Senator McCarthy's House Unamerican
Activities Committee.
And back in the 1940's when the Boeing Aero Machinists were striking
and demanding better wages and fringe benefits, Boeing cut a deal with
the Teamsters Dave Beck, to organize a Teamster Union with a Right to
Work clause in its rules. The two groups fought tooth and tong, and
not always fairly. My dad had one friend who tried to drive a Boeing
truck across a picket line, and was hauled out of his seat and beaten
so badly that he ended up in the emergency ward. Another buddy of
Dad's, a leader in the Aero Mechanic's Union, had to mount huge flood
lights at the corners of his house, to keep demonstrators from busting
down his doors or setting fire to his house. When a group of men
gathered around my Dad's friend's car in the Boeing parking lot, and
began to trash it, a group of cops stood around watching without doing
anything to stop them.
Yes sir! Those were the "Great Days" of our past America. And
Donald Trump is leading the way right back to them.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/5/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
A Short History of US Law Enforcement Infiltrating Protests
By Ryan Grim and Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
04 June 20
When Harry, George, Tom, and Joe showed up at a warehouse outside
Philadelphia rented by protesters, organizers were immediately
suspicious.
The men claimed to be "union carpenters" from the Scranton, Pennsylvania,
area who built stages - just the kind of help the protesters needed. They
were preparing for the Republican National Convention in 2000, where the
party would be nominating George W. Bush. Across the country, allied
organizers were planning similar protests for the Democratic National
Convention in Los Angeles.
One of the hallmarks of the social justice movement at the time was its
puppets. Organizers were coming off successful protests in Seattle in
November 1999 against the World Trade Organization, and in Washington,
D.C.,
in April 2000, against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank,
and
had managed to reshape the politics of globalization. Soaring
papier-mache
puppets, rolled through the streets on individually constructed floats,
projected a festive air, capturing sympathetic media coverage and
countering
the authorities' narrative that the protesters were nihilists simply
relishing in property destruction.
The four carpenters were good with a hammer, but much about them had
protesters wary they were in fact infiltrators. In conversation, "they
were
not very political or well informed," recalled Kris Hermes, an organizer,
in
"Crashing the Party," his memoir of the affair. They were older and more
muscular than most protesters, he wrote, and they insisted on drinking
beer
while working, despite the organizers' ban on drinking in the warehouse.
In
discussions and meetings, they asserted the right of protesters to
destroy
property and to physically resist arrest. The movement's intentional lack
of
hierarchy left organizers with little ability to act on their suspicions
of
infiltration, even as they were becoming more deft at sussing out such
provocateurs.
On August 1, the first full day of the Republican convention, police
surrounded the warehouse, known as the "Ministry of Puppetganda,"
executed
mass arrests, and confiscated the puppets, floats, signs, and other
materials to be used in upcoming marches. The police lied, publicly
saying
that organizers had been planning violent demonstrations and hinting
darkly
at bomb-making materials being hidden in the warehouse. That roundup
presaged other mass arrests of protest leaders throughout the week,
followed
by beatings inside the jail and even a $1 million bond.
When the warrant for the warehouse raid was unsealed, it finally
confirmed
that Harry, George, Tom, and Joe had been state troopers assigned to
infiltrate the group and produce a pretext for a raid. All of the charges
against the puppeteers were eventually dropped, and the saga would
eventually cost the city millions in lawsuit settlements (with much of
the
legal work led by radical attorney Larry Krasner, who is now Philadelphia
district attorney).
It is a historical fact, as this episode illustrates, that law
enforcement
frequently infiltrates progressive political movements using agent
provocateurs who urge others to engage in violence. It is also a
historical
fact that, more rarely, such provocateurs commit acts of violence
themselves.
The media pays little attention to such infiltrators, for a variety of
reasons. On the one hand, corporate media has never taken much enthusiasm
in
questioning government action in the midst of riots or major
demonstrations,
unless that action goes wildly over the line or targets members of the
media. The subject of provocateurs is also fraught from the perspective
of
protesters and movement organizers, as it can lead to paranoia that
undermines solidarity and movement building. It is often conflated with
the
trope of "outside agitators" and used by authorities or other opponents
of
the protesters to delegitimize the anger on display, giving some
protesters
or their supporters an incentive to downplay the reality of the
provocations.
The intensity of the conversation around protests that turn violent, and
the
life-or-death consequences of winding up on the wrong side of public
opinion, leaves little room for a nuanced discussion. Were such a
conversation possible, it would be easy to talk about the difference
between
the anger of a crowd and the actions it ultimately takes. An angry crowd
that remains nonviolent and engages in zero property destruction is no
less
legitimately angry than one that does. Often the only difference is in
whether and how the anger is triggered and escalated.
In protests across the country over the past week, the clear actor
escalating the violence generally hasn't been a protester or even a
right-wing infiltrator, but the police themselves. In rally after rally,
people have observed that looting and destruction only began after police
charged and beat a crowd, or fired tear gas or rubber bullets into it. In
other cases, it can take just one act by a protester to light the spark.
Given the chaotic nature of the protests, it's probable that everyone
being
blamed for property damage has played some role. But as the protests
continue, and President Donald Trump calls for ever more violent methods
of
repression, the possible role of police provocateurs in protests is worth
bearing in mind.
In 2008, Francesco Cossiga, one of the most important political figures
in
post-World War II Italy, provided a rare glimpse behind the curtain at
how
the world looks to people at the top of governments facing large-scale
protests.
Cossiga had served as prime minister and then president of Italy. Before
that, in the late '70s, he led the Ministry of the Interior. During that
period, he was notorious for the brutality with which he put down
left-wing
demonstrations led by students. This is how the New York Times reported
the
situation in 1977: "Extremists among the students have created chaos in a
number of Italian cities with a wave of shooting and destruction."
As Silvio Berlusconi's administration faced similarly threatening
protests,
Cossiga urged them to rerun his playbook:
[They] should do what I did when I was interior minister. . Pull back
police
from streets and colleges, infiltrate the movement with provocateurs
ready
for anything [emphasis added], and for ten days let protesters devastate
shops, burn down cars, and set cities aflame. Then, emboldened by popular
support . police should have no mercy and send them all to the hospital.
Not
arrest them, because prosecutors would just free them right away, but
beat
them all and beat the professors that encourage them.
The Times appears to have mentioned the possibility that government
provocateurs were behind some of the violence once - and then not as
fact,
but as an accusation of "leftwing parties and newspapers."
Cossiga had been a professor of constitutional law and was a centrist
Christian Democrat. When he became prime minister in 1979, Jimmy Carter's
ambassador to Italy saw this as an "excellent development," and Cossiga
maintained a strong relationship with America. There is no direct line
between Cossiga and today's protests in the U.S. But his example
indicates
that it's no fevered conspiracy theory to believe reasonable, reputable
figures see provocateur tactics as legitimate - even if most of them are
more circumspect in public.
The best documented use of provocateurs by the U.S. government occurred
during the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Counter-Intelligence
Program,
or COINTELPRO, from 1956 to 1971. The reason the documentation is
available
is because a group of citizens broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania -
coincidentally, just a short drive from the warehouse targeted by police
in
2000 - and stole files that they then passed to the media. This, in turn,
led to congressional investigations, which pried loose more information.
In one notorious example in May 1970, an informant working for both the
Tuscaloosa police and the FBI burned down a building at the University of
Alabama during protests over the recent Kent State University shootings.
The
police then declared that demonstrators were engaging in an unlawful
assembly and arrested 150 of them.
In another well-known case, a man nicknamed "Tommy the Traveler" visited
numerous New York State colleges, posing as a radical member of Students
for
a Democratic Society. He encouraged acolytes to kidnap a congressman and
offered training in Molotov cocktails. Two students at Hobart College
acted
on his suggestions and firebombed the campus ROTC building. Eventually it
came out that his full name was Tommy Tongyai, and he had worked both for
local police and the FBI.
The list goes on and on from there. A John Birch Society member turned
FBI
informant helped assemble time bombs and placed them on an Army truck. An
FBI informant in the radical political organization Weather Underground
took
part in the bombing of a Cincinnati public school. A prominent member of
Vietnam Veterans Against the War - and FBI informant - pushed for
"shooting
and bombing," and his advocacy apparently did indeed lead to a bombing
and
a
bomb threat. An FBI informant in Seattle drove a young black man named
Larry
Ward to a real estate office that engaged in housing discrimination and
encouraged him to place a bomb there; the police were waiting and killed
Ward. Thirteen Black Panthers were accused of a plot to blow up the
Statue
of Liberty after receiving 60 sticks of dynamite from an FBI informant.
After 28 people broke into a federal building to destroy draft files in
1971, an FBI informant bragged, "I taught them everything they knew." All
28
were acquitted when his role was revealed.
The FBI also allowed informants within right-wing organizations to
participate in violence against progressive activists. Gary Thomas Rowe,
who
infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in 1960, provided the FBI with three weeks
warning that the Klan was planning attacks on Freedom Riders arriving in
Alabama from the north. The FBI stood by and allowed the attacks to
occur.
Local police gave the Klan 15 minutes to assault the activists. In those
15
minutes, the white supremacists - including Rowe - set the Freedom Rider
bus
on fire in an attempt to burn them alive.
Rowe may also have played a role in the infamous 1963 bombing of the 16th
Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young
girls.
He was in the car with three other Klansmen in 1965 when they chased down
and murdered Viola Liuzzo, a mother of five from Detroit who'd traveled
to
Selma. Rowe received immunity for testifying against his compatriots, and
was given a job as a U.S. Marshall by Lyndon Johnson's attorney general.
Local police informants without apparent connections to the FBI got into
the
act too. A deputy sheriff enrolled as a student at SUNY Buffalo and
helped
students build and test bombs. Another informant posed as a student at
Northeastern Illinois State College, led sit-ins for Students for a
Democratic Society, and encouraged compatriots to sabotage military
vehicles.
Soon after COINTELPRO was uncovered in 1971, the FBI announced that it
was
halting all such activities. Mark Felt, the assistant FBI director now
also
known to be the infamous "Deep Throat" source for Bob Woodward and Carl
Bernstein, later said that the bureau had made no effort to see that
"constitutional values are being protected."
When and whether the FBI ever stopped, however, is an open question. In
1975
an informant told the New York Times that he had engaged in
COINTELPRO-like
activities until he'd left the previous year. This included encouraging a
Maoist group to blow up a bus at the 1972 GOP convention in Miami.
In any case, police forces in the U.S. continued the same tactics. In
1978,
an undercover officer encouraged two hapless young activists to seize
control of a television tower in Puerto Rico. When they arrived, they
were
gunned down by 10 policemen. Tellingly, when Puerto Rican government
asked
the FBI to investigate what happened, the FBI gave the government a clean
bill of health. A top FBI official later called this a "coverup."
After 9/11, the FBI got back in the business of encouraging violent acts
in
a big way - although they were generally much more careful to step in
before
the violence actually occurred. When journalist (and Intercept
contributor)
Trevor Aaronson examined U.S. prosecutions for international terrorism in
the decade after the attacks, he found five examples of actual plots. By
contrast, 150 people were indicted in sting operations that existed only
thanks to the encouragement of the FBI and its informants. According to
Aaronson, "the FBI is much better at creating terrorists than it is at
catching terrorists."
The same tactics have been used to generate purported domestic terrorism
plots. In 2008 environmental activist Eric McDavid was sentenced to 20
years
in prison for plotting to damage the Nimbus Dam in California. Eight
years
later, a judge ordered him released because the FBI had withheld evidence
regarding a government informant. In 2012, the FBI and its informant
essentially created a plot to blow up a bridge in Cleveland out of whole
cloth, and dragged five Occupy activists into it.
Most recently, the FBI's Counterterrorism Division invented something
called
the "Black Identity Extremism" movement. As portrayed by an FBI report,
the
threat from the imaginary movement reads as strikingly similar to that
allegedly posed by black organizations during the days of COINTELPRO. The
National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives said this
"resurrects the historically negative legacy of African American civil
rights leaders who were unconstitutionally targeted and attacked by
federal,
state, and local law enforcement agencies."
That brings us to the present day. On the one hand, this history doesn't
mean that the FBI or local police are currently acting as provocateurs
during the current unrest. But it does mean that such activity is clearly
one avenue that is open to U.S. police forces looking to undermine
protests
and escalate violence.
