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The Militant (logo)
Vol. 82/No. 8 February 26, 2018
(front page)
The FBI, US rulers’ political police, is the enemy of the working class!
BY TERRY EVANS
Since it was tasked with going after revolutionary-minded workers and
“subversive activity” in 1939, the FBI has an unbroken record of
trampling on political rights.
In their frenzy to derail the Donald Trump presidency, the liberal press
and middle-class left are increasingly championing the rulers’ political
police — the FBI and the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act courts. Democrats in Congress, American Civil Liberties Union
spokespeople and more, say that what the FBI is doing is necessary and
good. They seek to reinforce former FBI chief Robert Mueller’s witch
hunt against the Trump administration.
But the FBI is a deadly enemy of the working class. Its reason for
existence is to spy on and disrupt the working-class,
revolutionary-minded political fighters and others the propertied rulers
choose to target.
The liberals are trying to defend the FBI against a short memo by
Republican Congressman Devin Nunes that reports how agency operatives
and lawyers used deceptive methods to get a warrant to go after a former
adviser to the Trump campaign. They did not acknowledge the source used
was bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic
National Committee.
Christopher Anders, deputy director of the ACLU, claims Nunes’ account
is false. What Nunes recounts simply bears out the fact that FBI bosses
— along with President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice and the
Hillary Clinton campaign — were trying to derail Donald Trump’s campaign.
Democratic Congresswoman Jackie Spier called for defense of “our
intelligence community” and its work seeking to buttress Mueller’s
“investigation” into whether Trump colluded with Moscow to influence the
election. Like grand juries and all such bodies, the special counsel
starts with a target and digs around for “evidence” to get them. Neither
the FBI nor Mueller’s freewheeling probe are “ours” as Spier claims.
The FBI was set up to defend the class interests of the capitalist
rulers. It has been the spearhead of decades of attacks on working-class
militants, Black rights fighters, opponents of Washington’s wars and
many others.
Historically, the liberals have led drives to attack political rights in
the interests of the propertied rulers. President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt unleashed the FBI on the Socialist Workers Party and others in
the labor movement who were campaigning against the U.S. rulers’ drive
to make working people the cannon fodder in the fight for spoils in the
second imperialist world war.
The FBI engineered the frame-up that imprisoned 18 leaders of the
Socialist Workers Party and others in the class-struggle leadership of
the Teamsters union in Minneapolis.
In 1939 Roosevelt signed a secret executive order tasking the FBI with
stamping out “subversive activities.”
When Assistant Attorney General Robert Keuch was asked what that meant
during the 1981 trial of the SWP’s lawsuit that challenged decades of
FBI attacks on the party, he said the White House was trying to stop
those like the SWP “who were trying to influence public opinion to keep
the United States out of war.”
The secret FISA courts were set up so the FBI didn’t have to go to a
regular court to get a warrant, to keep its requests to target and spy
on people veiled in secrecy. They are an integral part of the agency’s
frame-up operations.
They rubber stamp 99.99 percent of spying requests. The written request
of the FBI’s proposal for a warrant to wiretap an official of the Trump
campaign remains under wraps.
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