The "New" FBI -- J. Edgar Hoover Is Back

News and Opinion for Democrats Against Bush -- Part I a

The "New" FBI -- J. Edgar Hoover Is Back

'If you go around telling people, "We're going to ferret out information on demonstrations," that deters people. People don't want their names and pictures in FBI files.'

--輸merican University constitutional law professor Herman Schwartz, commenting on FBI Intelligence Bulletin no. 89, October 15, 2003, "Tactics Used During Protests and Demonstrations"

Village Voice December 4th, 2003 5:00 PM

Nat Hentoff:

J. Edgar Hoover Back at the 'New' FBI
Classified FBI Bulletin Reveals Tactics at Protests

To read the complete article, click on-- http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0350/hentoff.php [This link was found on the Village Voice website through a Google search on 3/18/04]

Excerpt--

Americans of a certain age remember the FBI's counter-intelligence operation, COINTELPRO, which, during its years of operation from 1956 to 1971, surveilled, infiltrated, manipulated, and tried to provoke criminal activities by entirely lawful civil rights and anti-war demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights to oppose government policies.

In the 1970s, the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities so exposed FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's relentless violations of the Bill of Rights, very much including the First Amendment, that Attorney General Edward Levi葉he best constitutionalist in that office in our history容stablished new FBI guidelines to keep its agents within the bounds of the Constitution. ...

Ashcroft's overturning of the Levi FBI guidelines was perpetrated publicly in May 2002, when he set new FBI guidelines in the spirit of COINTELPRO. As a May 31, 2002, New York Times editorial charged: The FBI now has "nearly unbridled power to poke into the affairs of anyone in the United States, even when there is no evidence of illegal activity." ...

Analyzing [the] classified confidential FBI memorandum, FBI Intelligence Bulletin no. 89, (of which I too have a copy), the October 15, 2003, Times quotes ACLU executive director Anthony Romero: "This bulletin confirms that the federal government is targeting innocent Americans engaged in nothing more than lawful protest and dissent. . . . "

Will somebody in the elite Washington press corps ask George W. Bush if he's heard about the fifth freedom in the First Amendment, "the right of the people peaceably to assemble"?

http://www.villagevoice.com/print/issues/0350/hentoff.php

To read the text of FBI Intelligence Bulletin no. 89, click on this link--

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