Word: cointelpro
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...blatant disregard of privacy through illegal wiretapping and surveillance; its history of domestic surveillance, including the successful endeavors to stop sabotage during World War II; and the bureau's gratuitous entries into foreign espionage. In his most documented chapters Ungar details the outrageous violations made under the name of COINTELPRO, the counter intelligence program, to harass left-wing groups. Still, Ungar did not embark on this mammoth project with a master design. He wasn't out to prove that the FBI has been a source of evil throughout the Twentieth Century. And he didn't try to prove conspiracy theories...
...Saxbe could forbid dirty tricks by the FBI, why did not earlier Attorneys General order Hoover to halt COINTELPRO? In his statement, Kelley maintained that the Attorneys General from William P. Rogers in 1958 to Robert Kennedy in 1961 to John Mitchell in 1969 knew about COINTELPRO. In response, Nicholas Katzenbach, who held the office in 1965, said that he had never heard the term COINTELPRO. While he knew of some legal bureau activities involving the Klan, said Katzenbach, he was unaware of any disruptive campaign against groups such as CORE or the S.C.L.C. Ramsey Clark, Lyndon Johnson...
Notion of Tyranny. With COINTELPRO being disowned and defended, Democratic Congressman Don Edwards called into session his Judiciary subcommittee on civil and constitutional rights. Edwards had some special credentials to conduct a hearing into the role of the FBI: he had been an FBI agent. With Kelley listening, Edwards said: "I suggest that the philosophy supporting COINTELPRO is the subversive notion that any public official, the President or a policeman, possesses a kind of inherent power to set aside the Constitution whenever he thinks the public interest or 'national security' warrants it. That notion is the postulate...
...years past, Congress has been unable-or unwilling-to mount the kind of effort necessary to exercise any real power of review over the FBI while it was Hoover's fiefdom. At the end of the day, Edwards declared that the COINTELPRO episode showed the need for "much stricter oversight of the FBI." Edwards feels that Congress is ready to take on the job, one made politically easier because extremist activity has abated hi recent years. Indeed, the General Accounting Office-Congress's monitoring agency-is already planning to review the domestic spying operations...
...formed to protect the Socialist Workers Party and, by establishing a precedent, to do the same for other groups by taking legal action and organizing support work. One of the problems which PRDF encountered was that of getting the federal government to either confirm or deny the existence of COINTELPRO. On January 7, 1973, the Socialist Workers Party filed suit on behalf of its members and those of its youth affiliate, the Young Socialist Alliance, against defendants Nixon, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Mitchell, Dean, Huston, Mardian, and unknown others. The suite demanded $27 million in damages and, more importantly, a permanent injunction...