How We Found Out About COINTELPRO (2014)
monthlyreview.org
monthlyreview.org
What are the odds the FBI has done this more recently than 1971?
> The after-action responses – 50 pages in all – were located by current FBI Director Kash Patel’s team and recently turned over to the House Judiciary Committee and its special subcommittee investigating security failures and weaponization of law enforcement during the Jan. 6 riot.
> The document has proven a bombshell to lawmakers, revealing for the first time that the FBI had a total of 274 agents deployed to the Capitol in plainclothes and with guns after the violence started but with no clear safety gear of way to be recognized by other law enforcement agencies working in the chaos of the riot.
https://justthenews.com/accountability/fbi-bombshell-274-age...
The documents don't mention or imply the officers were plainclothes, it's a lie, that number is regular agents deployed after violence had occurred.
If you consider the response to the violence part of "the Jan 6 debacle", then yes, FBI agents were present.
The documents would NOT specify they were in "plainclothes" because the FBI doesn't wear uniforms, therefore everything would be "plainclothes" by definition. This is both common knowledge but I can personally confirm from my time there. You can dislike the characterization but it is correct.
The more interesting questions:
- Since the FBI primarily an investigative body (in the name) and these were NOT tacteams providing armed support, what was their purpose?
- Further, why did it take almost 5 years for the FBI to identify the man placing the pipebombs? According to reports, no new evidence came to light.
Moving on to the implication and my question:
> Since the FBI primarily an investigative body (in the name) and these were NOT tacteams providing armed support, what was their purpose?
We DO deserve an explanation to that one and unfortunately, "they showed up to address the violence" doesn't resolve this because - as noted - they are NOT uniformed. Therefore, a Special Agent drawing their weapon looks like a random civilian which would only increase the chaos and danger for everyone.
They're not even particularly useful for crowd control because a) they're not uniformed and b) as an Executive agency, they don't have authority in the Capital unless US Capital Police authorizes it.. though that may take the Sergeant at Arms or the Speaker specifically, I haven't reviewed that in quite a while.
Finally, since the FBI has a multi-decade history of instigating issues to be able to stop them, we SHOULD be skeptical until we get a complete and documented explanation.
It's mostly hearsay the only facts are that there were FBI agents deployed and that they were unprepared for riot control. But is riot control their role ? Weren't they supposed to be witnesses to see what was happening and inform other police ?
It was probably messy and you can probably find mismanagement everywhere if you look hard enough (and people to complain about it) but how do you handle a riot organized with the purpose of gaining more time to overturn the result of an election anyways ? (Check out the fake great electors scheme) This is the elephant in the room. To come and whine about political bias after that should be laughed at.
or
https://www.childrenscourt.vic.gov.au/file/cdpp-v-carrick-ps...
Edit to clarify: perhaps the various sentiments described in the replies didn't come about entirely organically
It was striking how different our outlooks were on the effectiveness of protests. Her position was that together, she and her fellow protesters _could_ enact change. When I look around, the stench of preconsigned defeat permeates the space. We've lived in it for so long that we've become blind to it. We've learned to be helpless.
Not to mention, when a fresh face inevitably proposes large scale action, the responses always include FUD about needing to solve the poverty issue first so that participants can even attend such action. The end result is that it's stopped at the idea stage, nothing changes, and six months later a new freah face will repeat the cycle.
Part of the issue is that without social safety nets, much of the public is afraid that missing a week to a month of work will guarantee them homelessness.
In the civil rights era, events like crossing bridges on foot were a key feature, done by people like Martin Luther King. In the modern era, if you see a protest on the golden gate bridge as an example, they'll be called terrorists and people will advocate for violence against them.
I'm pretty sure they were protesting the war with Iraq (Bush the First) in response to Iraq's invasion and capture of oil wells in Kuwait.
But far more clear is my memory of the searing rage of a coworker that day. She was flying on it, the hatred coming out of her mouth.
It shocked me for a couple of reasons. She was close in age to me, just out of school. I think that my college years had led me to presume to most young people would be more sympathetic to opposition of general warfare. There was lots of talk of forcing military enlistment among people our age.
But the main reason was that the trigger for her rage was the temporary threat to her right to drive her car wherever she wanted to.
You think Americans are nuts about their guns, don't you ever threaten their right to kill people with cars.
Any sympathy she could have felt for the protesters' cause was gone because they blocked a highway.
That would not garner much sympathy.
on edit: not to mention I hate crowds.
> You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.
Yes, I'm aware of this. But I think it's surprising to me because decades later, MLK et al. are nearly universally accepted to have been right, but people using the same tactics are not.
But the cyclical propaganda lines do cross the decades. In the Bush 2 years I was rather taken by similarities between discussions of the Vietnam war or Watergate (which I read about in books or heard about from boomers) and what was then current events. A lot of the right wing stuff we've encountered more recently reminds me a lot of the 90s, when Rush Limbaugh or Newt Gingrich bursted on the scene. All of the same talking points go in waves. Nothing new under the sun.
"Evil" is a stronger word than I would use, but I think it's fair to say that blocking the streets is both reckless and extremely antisocial. Making my life harder when I didn't do anything to wrong you doesn't make me more sympathetic to your cause, it makes me think "wow the people who support X are real dicks".
Also I like how you label this as a position espoused by "Internet trolls", as though no normal decent person could be irritated when they get screwed over by protesters.
I think there is a soft self-destruction happening among millennials and beyond in the US and similar societies. They have been so worn down by living in a system that refuses to invest properly in them that they are taking the fatalist route of simply refusing to participate in the building of a future.
Limited procreation, disengaging from politics or mindlessly bandwagoning demagogues, deaths of despair, etc… it’s not universal but the trend lines are certainly worrying.
this sums it up nicely:
"A study from Australia and the United Kingdom by Lorraine Sheridan and David James compared 128 self-defined victims of gang stalking with a randomly selected group of 128 self-declared victims of stalking by an individual. All 128 "victims" of gang stalking were judged to be delusional, compared with only 5 victims of individual stalking."
This follows from Stasi like tactics developed in East Germany which mirror the methods used by COINTELPRO. The Stasi called it Zersetzung, or deconstruction. One difference is that the Stasi didn't have the massive surveillance state that exists today. They also required in person informants on other friends and family. A large portion of the population became informants and participated in the forms of Zersetzung against the states defined target.
Now cell phones and online services, along with constant tracking and surveillance have replaced this need for human informants. They still exist of course, but are just not a requirement.
Some of it is just bored, power tripping law enforcement agents or people in Govt with access to the surveillance state. Even with all the data brokers and sharing, it's possible for a reasonable wealthy person to do this without acting under the color of law.
Hopefully the public will know more about these operations in the near future. The lying, rights violations and gaslighting is all uniquely un-American, and the public needs to hold the state accountable for it.
EDIT: A lot of the YouTube videos about it seem to go off the deep end and include conspiracies like Havana Syndrome or other crazy stuff that does fall under mental illness. This allows actual gang stalking where 3 or more people rely on Govt authority and the surveillance state to target a specific person, usually with the goal to harm them in some way. Often not physically. More reputationally, and so on. Zersetzung was real. Much is known after the fall of the Stasi. It is happening in the U.S.