FBI Goes Snooping, Liberties Burned Again

Fourteen years ago this April a Senate select committee, chaired by the late Frank M. Church of Idaho, issued a devastating report on an FBI program referred to in bureaucratese as COINTELPRO.

For nearly a generation the agency had been involved in a variety of illegal activities that were designed to chill the First Amendment activities of scores of organizations and hundreds of thousands of individuals opposed to, among other things, racism at home and military involvement in Southeast Asia. Under J. Edgar Hoover’s guidance, the bureau had conducted surveillance of the protest rallies and demonstrations that it could not prevent, attempted to discredit such progressive leaders as Martin Luther King Jr. as well as many others, and did everything that it could to inhibit Americans from supporting or participating in causes of which the agency disapproved.

As a result of the revelations, both the House and the Senate established committees to oversee the FBI’s operations. In addition, the bureau adopted new guidelines--intended, it insisted, to prevent any repetition of COINTELPRO’s excesses. The general public was bombarded with frequent and fervent agency pronouncements that the old FBI was dead and in its place was a new bureau, ultra-sensitive to the constitutional right of all citizens to express themselves on any issue without official harassment or impediment.

That picture was rudely shattered last week with the release of a number of FBI files obtained as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of CISPES (the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador). CISPES is a national organization seeking to build support for the government opposition in that country and to end U.S. intervention in Central America. Even though only one-third of the 3,756 pages of its reports concerning CISPES was released by the bureau, what was turned over clearly revealed that little had changed since the Church committee investigation. The leopard’s roar may have been somewhat muted, but its spots were as visible as ever.

The released CISPES documents demonstrate that the FBI, undoubtedly reflecting the Reagan Administration’s views, regarded any person or group expressing dissatisfaction with American policy in Central America as virtually traitorous.

“(I)t is imperative at this time to formulate some plan of attack against CISPES and specifically against individuals,” the New Orleans office communicated to the Washington headquarters--a call to action so reminiscent of those in the ‘60s targeting King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the ACLU, the NAACP, CORE, the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society and the Nation of Islam, to name but a handful, that its revelation caused shock waves among many who had lived through that turbulent decade.

Although the bureau now vehemently denies that it was investigating any organization other than CISPES, the released files contain the names of more than 150 distinct groups, some of them religious organizations or trade unions. The once-repudiated concept of “front groups,” so prevalent during the McCarthy era, was dredged up by the agency in order to enable the investigation to expand far beyond CISPES chapters and affiliates to any of the legions of organizations whose work may have brought them into contact with CISPES or its members.

It is a fearsome thing when a supposedly free, open society resorts to political investigations as a regularly maintained function of one of its chief law-enforcement agencies. It is even more paradoxical (and incalculably dangerous to democratic institutions) when such activities were so roundly condemned when they first surfaced 14 years ago. The old and highly sensible adage “Once burned, twice shy” seems strangely out of mode in a nation whose citizens should, from sad and bitter experience, know far better. It is high time for those dormant congressional oversight committees to get to horse before the snoopers finally succeed in giving the First Amendment its ultimate quietus.

Sixty years ago Justice Louis Brandeis wrote: “Decency, security and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law into himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine, this court should resolutely set its face.”

And so should the FBI.