Carl, still done today. When I first started working for the state we would
have union meetings where we would see folks that no one has ever seen before.
With the flattop haircuts and bulky sweatshirts it was obvious they were plain
clothes State Troopers. Then our agency banned all union meetings altogether.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, June 5, 2020 10:59 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: A Short History of US Law Enforcement
Infiltrating Protests
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.
