Look! Your tax dollars at work – not as you might think, funding public services or fighting crime, but paying agents provocateurs and Nazis to intimidate and provoke those peskily vocal yet peaceful minorities and liberals into violence.
From the Orlando Sentinel via Raw Story:
SENTINEL EXCLUSIVE
Neo-Nazi rally was organized by FBI informantHenry Pierson Curtis | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted February 15, 2007A paid FBI informant was the man behind a neo-Nazi march through the streets of Parramore that stirred up anxiety in Orlando’s black community and fears of racial unrest that triggered a major police mobilization.
That revelation came Wednesday in an unrelated federal court hearing and has prompted outrage from black leaders, some of whom demanded an investigation into whether the February 2006 march was, itself, an event staged by law-enforcement agencies.
The FBI would not comment on what it knew about the involvement of its informant, 39-year-old David Gletty of Orlando, in the neo-Nazi event. In court Wednesday, an FBI agent said the bureau has paid its informant at least $20,000 during the past two years.
“Wow,” Gletty said when reached by phone late Wednesday. “It is what it is. You were there in court. I can’t really go into any detail now.”
You can’t even trust a fascist not to be fake these days. Why, one might almost think they were trying to provoke a reaction they could clamp down on.
It wouldn’t be the first time the FBI attempted to engineer violent political events recently. Before the big post 911 hate-on for the Moslems and antiwar activists, the big ‘danger’ was from the anticapitalist left:
One activist who has had experience with how the DC police handle demonstrators is Rob Fish, a cheerful young man with the Student Environmental Action Coalition profiled in a recent Sierra magazine cover story on the new generation of environmentalists. If you were watching CNN during the protests against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, DC, in April, you would have seen Fish, 22, beaten, bloody and bandaged after an attack by an enraged plainclothes officer who also tried to destroy the camera with which Fish was documenting police harassment.
Fish is a plaintiff in a class-action suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Lawyers Guild and the Partnership for Civil Justice against the DC police and a long list of federal agencies including the FBI. This suit–along with others in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, where the party conventions were held in August; in Detroit, which declared a civil emergency during the June Organization of American States meeting across the border in Windsor, Ontario; and in Seattle–is exposing a level of surveillance and disruption of political activities not seen on the left since the FBI deployed its dirty tricks against the Central American solidarity movement during the 1980s.
Among police agencies themselves this is something of an open secret. In the spring the US Attorney’s office bestowed an award on members of the Washington, DC, police department for their “unparalleled” coordination with other police agencies during the IMF protests. “The FBI provided valuable background on the individuals who were intent on committing criminal acts and were able to impart the valuable lessons learned from Seattle,” the US Attorney declared.
The US’ population hasn’t had it’s legitimate right to dissent so closely spied on, monitored and blatantly interfered with since the worst of the McCarthy years and the days of that paranoid psychotic Nixon. The aim of this covert activity is to discredit people who organise against the Bush administration and to smear them as violent revolutionaries, even to the extent of siccing the far-right on them in the hope of engineering a violent response.
This type of covert entrapment, deliberate provocation and incitement to illegality is known as cointelpro*:
COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) was a program of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. Although covert operations have been employed throughout FBI history, the formal COINTELPRO operations of 1956-1971 were broadly targeted against organizations that were (at the time) considered to have politically radical elements, ranging from those whose stated goal was the violent overthrow of the U.S. government (such as the Weathermen); non-violent civil rights groups such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and violent groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. The founding document of COINTELPRO directed FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of these movements and their leaders.
According to the US government and other reports COINTELPRO officially stopped in 1971.What are all these cointelpro reports then, chopped liver?
There’s currently a leftwing activist and blogger who’s been in jail for over a year in California for refusing to release a samizdat video he made that may have featured possible FBI agents provocateurs attempting to engineer a riot at the San Francisco G8 protests.
Then there’s the mysterious yet ubiquitous supposed peace activist known as ‘Anna’ for instance, who has been doing the rounds of US peace groups attempting to incite them to illegality.
For more background on COINTELPRO and its history see here and Congress’ 1976 report here and for a review of the actual methods, see here.
[*For the pedants, I’m using lowercase cointelpro as the noun for the modern activity rather than COINTELPRO, as that’s the historical acronym for the government programme]
