Church Committee: top 3 COINTELPRO activities

[MinM]

Very descriptive chart produced by the Church Committee which may or may not be related to current events.

[MinM]

1. Source

Source

More:

@lisapease: Listing of some COINTELPRO techniques, from the Church Committee report

@lisapease: FBI efforts to prevent anti-war groups (and speakers like Bernie?) from speaking:

[Octafish]

5. Church Committee shows how far USA has fallen since 1975...

Details

The number of Americans and domestic groups caught in the domestic intelligence net is further illustrated by the following statistics:

-- Nearly a quarter of a million first class letters were opened and photographed in the United States by the CIA between 1953-1973, producing a CIA computerized index of nearly one and one-half million names. 13

-- At least 130,000 first class letters were opened and photographed by the FBI between 1940-1966 in eight U.S. cities. 14

-- Some 300,000 individuals were indexed in a CIA computer system and separate files were created on approximately 7,200 Americans and over 100 domestic groups during the course of CIA's Operation CHAOS (1967-1973). 15

-- Millions of private telegrams sent from, to, or through the United States were obtained by the National Security Agency from 1947 to 1975 under a secret arrangement with three United States telegraph companies. 16

-- An estimated 100,000 Americans were the subjects of United States Army intelligence files created between the mid 1960's and 1971. 17

-- Intelligence files on more than 11,000 individuals and groups were created by the Internal Revenue Service between 1969 and 1973 and tax investigations were started on the basis of political rather than tax criteria. 18

-- At least 26,000 individuals were at one point catalogued on an FBI list of persons to be rounded up in the event of a "national emergency".

SOURCE: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/FBI/Church_Committee_Report.html

The fact that Americans were OUTRAGED in 1975 to learn this stuff and today act like tiny, scared kittens when confronted with the massive scale of NSA domestic spying shows how successful their media and crapadaemia have been in dumbing down the population and raising two generations on Trickle Down leftovers.

PS: Lisa Pease is TOPS! Great researcher, writer, and speaker -- and a great person.

[MisterP]

6. Vietnam and Church spooked the spooks HARD, especially once Stansfield Turner was brought in

to clean house; the hardline agents and Pentagon officers became a constituency of their own, an interest group with weight, teaming up with the new think tanks to turn the Team B into a whole movement with a media presence

Brzezinski got Carter dicking around in Nicaragua and Afghanistan and he even launched proto-Reaganomics in response to the late-70s' stagflation--this isn't that Carter's to blame for Reagan, but that interventionism and the Chicago School had managed to take over all the alternatives presented to politicians

[Octafish]

7. Poppy rode to the rescue.

Old news to you, Mister P. May as well be science-fiction to 99% of America.

CIA Chief Bush Suppresses the News

By Robert Gardner
FAIR Exclusive
May/June 1999

Documents obtained by FAIR, released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), show that George Bush, as head of the CIA in 1976, tried to bottle up a news story that exposed the apparent duplicity of another former CIA chief, Richard Helms.

The story, broken on Oct. 1, 1976, by David Martin (now CBS Pentagon correspondent, then with Associated Press), revealed that Helms had given misleading testimony to the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of John Kennedy. Helms testified that the CIA had not "even contemplated" making contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin. Through the FOIA, Martin obtained CIA memos showing that in 1960 the agency "showed intelligence interest" in Oswald and "discussed...the laying on of interviews" with him.

When Bush saw the AP story in the Washington Star, he asked for an internal CIA review to see if the story was true (it was) and if it would "cause problems for Helms." (Helms had lied to a Senate committee about the CIA's role in subverting Chilean democracy and would later be convicted of contempt of Congress.)

After investigating, Bush assistant Seymour Bolten reported back that the exposure of Helms' false testimony to the Warren Commission would probably cause Helms "some anxious moments," though not "any additional legal problems." But Bush was assured that a "slightly better" story had resulted from an Agency phone call to AP protesting that Martin's story was "sloppy." Additionally, Bush was told that an unnamed journalist had "advised his editors . . . not to run the AP story."

Bolten complained to Bush: "This is another example where material provided to the press and public in response to an FOIA request is exploited mischievously and in distorted form to make the headlines." One might more accurately describe it as an occasion where George Bush's CIA pressured one news outlet to back away from an accurate story while using an asset in the press corps to suppress it in another.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1491

Sen. John Tower, R-Texas, was a player at an early age.

Angus Mackenzie: "Secrets: The CIA's War at Home"

EXCERPT...

A month later someone at the CIA leaked the news of MHCHAOS to Sy Hersh at the New York Times. The story, while sparse, made public the fact that the agency was spying on its citizens. Gerald Ford, in office for less than five months, directed William Colby to issue a report on MHCHAOS to Henry Kissinger. As Mackenzie writes, evidently Ford was not informed that Kissinger was well aware of the operation. He adds:
Because of MHCHAOS and Watergate, Congress began to investigate the CIA. On September 16, 1975 Senators Frank Church and John Tower called Colby to testify at a hearing about CIA assassinations. Colby showed up carrying a CIA poison dart gun, and Church waved the gun before the televison cameras. It looked like an automatic pistol with a telescopic sight mounted on the barrel. Producers of the evening news recognized this as sensational footage, and just as surely Colby recognized his days as director were numbered. He had not guarded the CIA secrets well enough.

Colby was fired on November 2, 1975. His successor was George Herbert Walker Bush.....

Mackenzie's account of Bush's rise and and his fall when Carter assumed office is brief, but intriguing. There is much, much more in Secrets about CIA efforts throughout the years in guarding their work from the public in this under-recognized work. The epilogue is entitled "The Cold War Ends and Secrecy Spreads." Mackenzie closes by writing:
Only recently in the history of the world's oldest republic has secrecy functioned principally to keep the American people in the dark about the nefarious activities of their government. The United States is no longer the nation its citizens once thought: a place, unlike most others in the world, free from censorship and thought police, where people can say what they want, when they want to, about their government. Almost a decade after the end of the cold war, espionage is not the issue, if it ever really was. The issue is freedom... Until the citizens of this land aggressively defend their First Amendment rights of free speech, there is little hope that this march to censorship will be reversed. The survival of the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights is at stake.

Succumbing to brain cancer before he turned fifty, Mackenzie sadly did not live to see the meteoric rise of the internet, nor did he live to see 9/11 and the current Bush Administration and their obsessive devotion to secrecy.

This work has relevance to the current situation regarding the agency's efforts to keep George Joannides' records secret.

SOURCE: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=10617

Carter administration was a mere interegnum.

From...

The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld

By Prof Peter Dale Scott
Global Research, March 10, 2014
The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 12, Issue 10, No. 5

EXCERPT...

The Safari Club Milieu: George H.W. Bush, Theodore Shackley, and BCCI

The usual account of this super-agency’s origin is that it was

the brainchild of Count Alexandre de Marenches, the debonair and mustachioed chief of France’s CIA. The SDECE (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage)…. Worried by Soviet and Cuban advances in postcolonial Africa, and by America’s post-Watergate paralysis in the field of undercover activity, the swashbuckling Marenches had come to Turki’s father, King Faisal, with a proposition…. [By 1979] Somali president Siad Barre had been bribed out of Soviet embrace by $75 million worth of Egyptian arms (paid for… by Saudi Arabia)….95

Joseph Trento adds that “The Safari Club needed a network of banks to finance its intelligence operations,… With the official blessing of George Bush as the head of the CIA, Adham transformed… the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), into a worldwide money-laundering machine.”.96

Trento claims also that the Safari Club then was able to work with some of the controversial CIA operators who were then forced out of the CIA by Turner, and that this was coordinated by perhaps the most controversial of them all: Theodore Shackley.

Shackley, who still had ambitions to become DCI, believed that without his many sources and operatives like [Edwin] Wilson, the Safari Club—operating with [former DCI Richard] Helms in charge in Tehran—would be ineffective. … Unless Shackley took direct action to complete the privatization of intelligence operations soon, the Safari Club would not have a conduit to [CIA] resources. The solution: create a totally private intelligence network using CIA assets until President Carter could be replaced.97

Kevin Phillips has suggested that Bush on leaving the CIA had dealings with the bank most closely allied with Safari Club operations: the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). In Phillips’ words,

After leaving the CIA in January 1977, Bush became chairman of the executive committee of First International Bancshares and its British subsidiary, where, according to journalists Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin in their 1992 book ‘False Profits’ [p. 345], Bush ‘traveled on the bank’s behalf and sometimes marketed to international banks in London, including several Middle Eastern institutions.’98

Joseph Trento adds that through the London branch of this bank, which Bush chaired, “Adham’s petrodollars and BCCI money flowed for a variety of intelligence operations”99

It is clear moreover that BCCI operations, like Khashoggi’s before them, were marked by the ability to deal behind the scenes with both the Arab countries and also Israel.100

It is clear that for years the American deep state in Washington was both involved with and protected BCCI. Acting CIA director Richard Kerr acknowledged to a Senate Committee “that the CIA had also used BCCI for certain intelligence-gathering operations.”101

Later, a congressional inquiry showed that for more than ten years preceding the BCCI collapse in the summer of 1991, the FBI, the DEA, the CIA, the Customs Service, and the Department of Justice all failed to act on hundreds of tips about the illegalities of BCCI’s international activities.102

Far less clear is the attitude taken by Wall Street banks towards the miscreant BCCI. The Senate report on BCCI charged however that the Bank of England “had withheld information about BCCI’s frauds from public knowledge for 15 months before closing the bank.”103

CONTINUED...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-state-the-deep-state-and-the-wall-street-overworld/5372843

The coup d'grace was "serving" Pruneface as veep.

George Bush Takes Charge: The Uses of ‘Counter-Terrorism’

By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58

A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.

During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.

Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.

The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: [font size="5"][font color="green"]As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.[/font color][/font size]

SNIP...

Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.

SNIP...

NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985

The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.

[font color="red"]The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.

The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.

Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified.[/font color] The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.

CONTINUED...

CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40.

And nobody's touched CIA ever since.

[MisterP]

8. that's always how the deep state works: there's not a central plot, just constant plottING

but there are several wildly sinister goals: that the rich are blessed by God (Casey, that little heretic) or just need more dough (Poppy, spoilt oil scion); there's the National Security Doctrine (literally imported from the Nazis: von Braun isn't who you have to worry about) that says any dissent is a deadly threat to all civilization and a Red victory; there's media moguls and alliances with the MIC and the fundies and the gunrunners (who all have their own angles)

but everyone's main goal is to keep this space for themselves open, to allow all these plots and personal empires to keep going; the secrecy is important for all the fun it allows the fanatical or the just plain venial (Ollie North was both)

and of course there ARE central plots like the Puzzle Palace's warren (though the desk jockeys often try to rein in the field agents because they know more about the country than just how to overthrow it: the whole Americas desk got purged by 1982 leaving the Pol Pot types in) and Massera and Singlaub's Black International in Buenos Aires and Rome planning to turn all Spanish America into a big coke-fueled student-disappearing machine)

[Octafish]

9. Excellent summation, MisterP!

The spiders spinning away have created an underground empire financed by drugs, war, trading with the enemy, looting S&Ls and banks, and who knows what else.

What Jack Brooks (D-Texas) said...

(Congressman Jack) Brooks summed up the lessons he had learned about government secrecy during thirty-four years in Congress. "Most of the classification, in my judgment, is not to keep our enemies from finding out information. It is to keep the American people and the Congress from finding out what in God's world various agencies are doing and how they are throwing away money, wasting it.... They throw away money like dirt, and lie and cheat and hide to keep Congress from finding out, and, for God's sake, they don't want the American people to find out," he fumed.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/Quotations_SecretsCIA.html

What Speaker Sam Rayburn (D-Texas) said: "If you want to get along, go along."

Unfortunately, that's what's got us in this mess. If we want to get out, it's gonna require mass action.

[MisterP]

10. Ollie North comic book by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brought_to_Light

Moore said afterwards "there are a great number of conspiracies, all tripping each other up ... the main thing that I learned about conspiracy theories is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in the conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy, or the grey aliens, or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control, the truth is far more frightening; no-one is in control, the world is rudderless"

[Octafish]

11. Thank you for sharing that book n stuff.

Christic Institute means the World to me.

Daniel Sheehan had them to rights, yet these bastards are so organized they almost destroyed Christic Institute and continue to commit treason, make war for profit, and loot the Treasury -- and remain free.

[MisterP]

12. also CISPES--they even had death squad agents crawling around Los Angeles to harass them there

of course the bimbos in DC genuinely thought that it was a terrorist group about to plant bombs: they thought the KGB controlled the NYT, WaPo, and Miami Herald, they cited their own propaganda to say all turrsts were Commies, and thought Invasion USA was a documentary

[Octafish]

2. COINTELPRO: What the (Deleted) Was It?

COunter INTELligence PROgram was police state of the art:

COINTELPRO: What the (Deleted) Was It?

Public Eye Magazine, vol. one, number two 1978
by Mark Ryter

(Government) documents on COINTELPRO, the FBI's grand scheme to annihilate organized dissent, [have forced] major changes in perspectives on America's recent political history. The 53,000 pages in the public domain show a daily mapping of a once secret program which played havoc with any group actively opposing American policy through much of the Post World War II era. They reveal a program which manipulated so many events, political processes, and national institutions, that it must be considered one of capitalism's chief editors over the last two decades which did everything possible to erase Left politics from the historical record.

Though most evidence of flagrant illegality like burglary and wiretapping has been blotted out, the 15 year COINTELPRO record is an o'erbrimming bag of dirty tricks. Whatever it took to discredit a group short of "embarrassing the Bureau" was fair game. Informants told of personal and political disputes, natural in themselves, which the FBI then inflamed with selective anonymous mailings.

By amassing detailed data of a group's planned activities and the backgrounds of key members, COINTELPRO could unleash repression through its collaborators elsewhere in the government and in the media without ever soiling its own hands. In this way, the FBI's super-secret program sabotaged events and ruined reputations all along the left/liberal part of the spectrum. VIa COINTELPRO, the Bureau drove wedges between the Black Panther Party and the Students for a Democratic Society, as it did between the Old and the New Left generally.

The damage done by the program can be seen everywhere, behind canceled Marxist lectures, groups deprived of official university recognition, and jobs suddenly lost to "excessive tardiness." Most shockingly, though, was the toll taken on America's black community where COINTELPRO became a death warrant for some of its most courageous and inspiring leaders.

CONTINUED...

http://www.publiceye.org/liberty/Feds/ci-ryter.html

Now they've added supercomputers.

PS: Thank you for an important OP and link to bobthedrummer's important OP, MinM. Somehow, I don't think this important information has turned to history.

[KoKo]

3. A good reference for current events study....whats old is new again

VIa COINTELPRO, the Bureau drove wedges between the Black Panther Party and the Students for a Democratic Society, as it did between the Old and the New Left generally.

The damage done by the program can be seen everywhere, behind canceled Marxist lectures, groups deprived of official university recognition, and jobs suddenly lost to "excessive tardiness." Most shockingly, though, was the toll taken on America's black community where COINTELPRO became a death warrant for some of its most courageous and inspiring leaders.

[Octafish]

4. Frank Church warned us about unrestricted government spying...

The Senator understood what it meant, just with what was police state of the art in 1975...

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

-- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) FDR New Deal, Liberal, Progressive, World War II combat veteran. A brave man, the NSA was turned on him. Coincidentally, of course, he narrowly lost re-election a few years later.

Gee. Spooky. And undemocratic as all get out. Thank you for understanding what is at stake, KoKo.