https://socialistaction.org/2018/04/24/democrats-extol-the-fbi-and-national-security-state/
Democrats Extol the FBI and National Security State
/ 3 days ago
May 2018 Robert Mueller - Scott Applewhite:AP
Former FBI chief Robert Mueller has been placed in charge of an
investigation into links between Trump and Russia.
By BARRY SHEPPARD
The most effective way to counter Donald Trump’s reactionary policies is
through mass action. The Democratic Party hopes to steer movements and
individuals opposed to Trump into support of its candidates. While this
trap of “lesser evil” politics has proved to be a failure over and over
again for the past eight decades, there is another, outright
reactionary, content to the Democrats’ current anti-Trump campaign.
The Democrats, their supporters in the mass media, and most self-styled
“progressives” are on a drive to whitewash the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) in the current squabble between the FBI and Trump
concerning Russia.
They also accuse Trump of violating “national security,” and not
sufficiently defending “classified” information and furthering leaks of
such state secrets to WikiLeaks—which is implied to be in collusion with
Russia against the United States. All wings of the Democrats have fallen
in line behind this campaign, with even Senators Bernie Sanders and
“reformer” Elizabeth Warren going along, even if quietly.
According to the Democrats and their followers like CNN, former FBI
directors Robert Mueller, who is heading up an investigation into
collusion between Russia and Trump, and James Comey, whom Trump fired
last year, are completely above any criticism, absolutely endowed with
sterling characters, and utterly straight arrows.
Moreover, the FBI itself is the “greatest law enforcement agency in the
world,” according to one commentator. The reality is that the FBI is one
of the most important of the array of political police agencies in the
U.S. government, and has been from its beginning.
The FBI traces its origins to the early 1900s, to agencies formed to
investigate federal crimes, under the Department of Justice. In 1909, it
was named the Bureau of Investigation. With the entry of the U.S. into
WWI, the Bureau was charged with investigating draft resisters,
violators of the Espionage Act of 1917, and immigrants suspected of
socialist or anarchist views. Organizations like the anarcho-syndicalist
Industrial Workers of the World, the Socialist Party, and Socialist
Labor Party were also included.
During the war, the radical press was largely suppressed and there were
arrests of radical leaders. Unlike other parties in the Second
International, the U.S. Socialist Party did not support the war. This
was especially true of the left wing of the SP, whose best known
spokesperson was Eugene Debs. Debs supported the Russian Revolution,
although he did not join either of the two formations that would later
fuse to form the Communist Party, which was also put on the Bureau’s hit
list.
In June 1918, Debs gave a fiery speech in Canton, Ohio, in which he
blasted the war and supported the Russian Revolution. He was arrested
under the Espionage Act, convicted, and after appeals were denied,
imprisoned. The Espionage Act is still being used today as a tool
against radical dissent (more below).
Debs, in jail, was nominated by the SP for its presidential candidate in
1920, in spite of his sharp criticisms of the right wing of the party,
including its attacks on the Communists. He received one million votes,
3.4 percent.
Edgar Hoover joins the FBI
After the war, the man who was to mold the FBI for half-a-century, J.
Edgar Hoover, joined the Bureau. During the “Red Scare” of 1919-1920,
Hoover worked under Bureau Director Mitchell Palmer to help carry out
mass arrests in what became known as the “Palmer Raids.”
J. Edgar Hoover Conferring with President Elect Richard Nixon
J. Edgar Hoover huddles with Richard Nixon.
Deeply opposed to socialism and the Russian Revolution, Hoover came into
his own. He set up a card index system listing every radical leader,
organization, and publication in the United States. By 1921 he had
amassed some 450,000 files. More than 10,000 suspected communists were
arrested in this period, and many immigrant radicals deported.
Hoover became Bureau Director in 1924, a post he held until his death in
1972. In that whole period the Bureau (renamed the FBI in the 1930s) was
the main anti-communist, anti-Black, anti-union, etc., witch-hunting
tool of the government. Without going into this whole history, here are
some highlights: in the 1930s, Hoover was instructed by Roosevelt to
keep tabs on communist organizations and other “suspected” individuals.
He was quite zealous in carrying out this directive, even listing
Roosevelt’s own wife, Eleanor, and other liberals.
Of course, under surveillance were militant leaders of the great labor
upsurge of the 1930s that created the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO). Socialists and communists were among those leaders.
The FBI was instrumental in the Roosevelt administration’s use of the
1940 Smith Act to indict and convict leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist
Workers Party of “conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the U.S.
government.” Among the defendants were leaders of the Teamsters’ union.
This was part of taming the union movement in preparation for the
upcoming war.
May 2018 SWP Smith Act
Defendants in the 1940 Smith Act trial of supporters of the Socialist
Workers Party and the Teamsters Union.
During WWII, the FBI expanded its arsenal of wiretaps and other
electronic surveillance of “subversives.” After the war, the FBI was
instrumental in carrying out the anti-communist witch-hunt begun by the
Democratic Truman administration in 1947. The new “Red Scare” deepened
over the next decade, in the context of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
The FBI worked closely with the witch-hunting committees in Congress,
the House Un-American Committee (HUAC) and in the Senate under the
chairmanship of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Thousands in the union
movement, the government, churches and even Hollywood were purged,
prosecuted, and persecuted. The right wing of the labor bureaucracy was
only too pleased to join in to remove militants in the unions.
As part of the witch-hunt, Hoover established a special anti-gay unit,
to root out gays in the government and increase the persecution of gays
generally. McCarthy charged that gays and communists had taken over
parts of the government and the Democratic Party.
McCarthyism, as the campaign become known, grew to include grassroots
committees across the country. It represented an incipient fascist
movement, finally cut short by alarmed sections of the ruling class,
which did not need fascism at that time as it wasn’t threatened by any
working-class upsurge.
Black rights
When a new stage in the Black movement began with the Montgomery bus
boycott challenging racist apartheid in the South in 1955-56, Hoover
established a secret program called COINTELPRO (counter intelligence
program) to combat it and communists, socialists, and believers in
democracy who supported Black rights.
As the radicalization of the 1960s and early 1970s developed,
spearheaded by the civil rights and Black Liberation movements, as well
as the youth radicalization centered on the anti-Vietnam-war movement,
COINTELPRO expanded. All Black and antiwar (and later women’s and gay
and lesbian liberation) groups were targeted in addition to the
socialist organizations already in the FBI’s sights.
One result of this radicalization was the exposure of the secret
COINTELPRO program in the 1970s, when activists broke into an FBI office
in Pennsylvania and found the documents. Other revelations were made by
a lawsuit brought by the Socialist Workers Party, supported by the
entire left except the Stalinist groups, against government spying,
break-ins, and other illegal activities directed against the SWP, that
also exposed the same dirty tricks against many other groups. Others
also brought actions revealing FBI crimes.
MAY 2018 COINTELPRO
The Black Panther Party was a major victim of the FBI’s disruption
efforts against Black activist groups.
In the reaction against “The Sixties” that has developed increasingly
since, the FBI and other political police agencies have regained their
former role. Just two more recent examples: One was the FBI spearheading
the anti-Muslim witch-hunt, including frame-ups and entrapments, after
the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. This campaign was headed by then FBI
director from 2001 to 2013, Robert Mueller—now the Democrats’ darling.
Another was the exposure by Edward Snowden of the vast gathering of
phone, e-mail, and other messages of all Americans and many others
internationally by the National Security Agency. The NSA says it only
records the time, and sources and recipients, of these messages. It only
actually reads them when it wants to.
When the Black Lives Matter protests erupted, James Comey, then director
of the FBI, denounced it as anti-police. (In the 2016 election Comey
also opened investigations against candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald
Trump. In doing so, he was following in the shoes of Hoover, who
compiled dossiers over the years of important government figures, to be
able to hold embarrassing material over them. Trump fired Comey when he
wouldn’t give up his investigation of the new president.)
What is referred to as “the intelligence community”—all the political
police agencies—is also extolled by the Democrats who hope Mueller will
be able to get rid of Trump. This “community” has released statements
that it has proof of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections
(all countries meddle in the affairs of others if they can, with the
U.S. being meddler in chief.)
The hope is they will find collusion between the Trump campaign and the
Russians to help elect Trump. But the “intelligence community” says it
can’t give its “proof” because to do so would betray “national
security.” They all swear their present secret facts are much better
than the secret facts they asserted in the lead-up to the disastrous
invasion of Iraq about Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” facts
that turned out not to exist.
The “virtues” of national security
The Democrats also extol the virtues of “national security.” What is
meant by “national security?” It means the security of U.S. imperialism.
A case in point was the conviction carried out by the Obama
administration of Chelsea Manning under the Espionage Act for releasing
“classified” information about U.S. war crimes in Iraq. One document she
released was a video taken by U.S. soldiers of their executing Iraqi
civilians from a helicopter gun ship, while chuckling about it.
Besides the case of Eugene Debs, this Act was used only twice before
2008. Then Obama used it nine times, convicting whistleblowers of
revealing government crimes, not of conveying any information to a
foreign government or organization. It now hangs over the head of
Snowden and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. Who were these people spying
for? I guess the people of the U.S. and the world.
A high-up aide in Trump’s White House, Robert Porter, has recently been
exposed as a wife beater, and was forced to resign. The Democrats
correctly brought Trump to task for defending Porter. But they are more
and more centering on the fact that Porter had access to “classified”
material, and demanding that there be better background checks before
people can see such government secrets.
Hundreds-of-millions of documents are hidden by the U.S. government
under the “classified” label. They are secret for a good reason. Most
would reveal information about U.S. crimes or other embarrassing
material that would harm U.S. capitalist and imperialist interests if
the people of the U.S. and the rest of the world knew about them.
The Democrats and their apologists, by burnishing the sordid record of
the FBI, by defending the Espionage Act, hiding U.S. crimes and
embarrassing information under “national security” and the “classified”
label do not further the struggle against Trump’s real crimes of war,
racism, misogyny, homophobia, massive attacks on workers’ living
standards, etc. They do the opposite. They further the increasing
consolidation of the national security state, which furthers the
development of authoritarianism, like Trump’s.
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April 24, 2018 in Civil Liberties, Democratic Party, Police & FBI, Trump
/ U.S. Government.
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