The FBI can't investigate white extremism until it first investigates itself [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

Akin Olla

Failing to hold the agency accountable will make a mockery of the Biden administration’s claims to combat the far right

Tue 26 Jan 2021 06.16 EST

Following the fascist riot at the US Capitol, the FBI appears to be finally taking action against white supremacists who have infiltrated police departments across the country. It is odd it took this long – while most news outlets are reporting that the FBI identified this threat almost 15 years ago, the FBI has been aware of white supremacist infiltration of police departments since at least 1961. It has also engaged in the work of white supremacy, spending the last century targeting Black leaders for surveillance. If the new Biden administration is to take seriously the threat of white supremacist infiltration of American institutions, the FBI needs to be held accountable for its past and present actions.

The FBI has a long history of fulfilling the function of white supremacy in the United States. While the Tulsa Massacre was ongoing, the FBI’s predecessor was busy investigating Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association. The FBI’s first director, J Edgar Hoover, waged war on the civil rights movement from its onset. The war was ramped up in the age of Cointelpro, an FBI program designed to surveil, dismantle and destroy any movement working to end racism or capitalist exploitation in the United States. The FBI occasionally investigated white supremacists during this era (1956 to 1971),but spent the vast majority of its resources fighting those committed to Black and Indigenous liberation. And many of the bureau’s investigations of white supremacists were disingenuous; the FBI knew for a fact that the Birmingham police Department had been infiltrated by the KKK, for example, but continued to feed the department information about civil rights activists. During Hoover’s half century as director, the FBI sent a blackmail letter to Martin Luther King encouraging him to commit suicide and was probably involved in the assassination of 21-year-old NAACP and Chicago Black Panther party leader Fred Hampton.

Towards the end of Hoover’s tenure, the FBI even went so far as to allegedly create and arm a far-right paramilitary organization in San Diego for the purpose of disrupting, attacking and potentially assassinating leftwing, particularly Chicano, leaders. On 6 January 1972, the FBI’s secret army attempted to murder Peter G Bohmer, a Marxist economics professor, and Paula Tharp, who had previously worked for an underground newspaper. The offices of that same newspaper had been previously raided twice by the FBI’s army. The army also bombed a movie theater and planned the assassination of leaders of the leftwing Chicano organization the Brown Berets, along with a second attempt on Peter Bohmer. No member of the FBI has been held accountable for these actions.

While the FBI likes to pretend that those were crimes of the past, there are more recent examples of white supremacist behavior in the organization. There is evidence that some FBI agents and other federal agents frequented an annual party called “The Good Ol’ Boys Roundup” from 1980 to 1996. The “Roundup” was known as a whites-only gathering that involved the selling of fake “N----r hunting licenses” and T-shirts with King’s face in a sniper’s crosshairs. While the Department of Justice insists that federal agents weren’t overwhelmingly engaged in racist behavior, their investigation of the Roundup was primarily conducted through interviews with participants of the event itself.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/26/fbi-white-extremism-biden-capitol-attack