War at Home: Covert Action against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do about it (South End Press Pamphlet Series) [Paperback]

Whether you are a social activist or a person interested in hisory and current events this short book is an important read. It's a little known fact that the federal government, when it is not funding terrorists like Osama bin Laden, uses millions of tax payer dollars each year to surveil, harass, and disrupt legitimate First Ammendment activities of groups it disapproves of here in the United States. Glick documents these activities (often referred to as COINTELPRO for the FBI program of the same name) and gives human rights, peace, civil rights and environmental groups (the most frequent targets) an undertanding of how these anti-democratic operations work and how to indentify and counteract them. As one of the founding fathers said: "The price of Liberty is eternal vigilance" and this is an important work in that grand tradition.

This little pamphlet is an absolutely indispensable primer on covert government repression for activists in the US and abroad.

Glick lays out a meticulously documented capsule history of systematic US government repression against activist groups since the 1920s, with particular focus on the 1960s. Drawing on the government's own documents as well as activist's accounts, Glick shows how the FBI and local police forces used a wide range of tactics from spying to harassment, disruption, false arrest, and cold-blooded murder to divide, demoralize, terrorize, immobilize, and behead the social movements of the 1960s.

But above and beyond this eye-opening and outrageous account, Glick offers concrete, specific, and practical advice for activist groups that will face these same vicious and unrelenting government attacks as the struggle for freedom and justice continues.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough to those who, as Ashanti Alston put it, "care, and dare" enough to challenge the powers-that-be.

WAR AT HOME (1989)
by Brian Glick

This small booklet details the actions of the FBI's infamous Counter-Intelligence Program, also known as "COINTELPRO". Author Brian Glick is a former member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) who as a lawyer worked on the defense counsel for Black Panther Geronimo Pratt. The booklet asserts that rather than being discontinued in the 1970s, Cointelpro activities are still in use to this day.

The first chapter is an overview of Cointelpro's officially recognized period, concentrated mostly in the 1960s. The FBI had started to monitor Communist groups in the 1950s, but the multitude of radical groups that developed in the sixties led to a substantial rise in surveillance activities. Groups targeted were predominately left-wing, socialist or communist in orientation, including the Socialist Workers Party, Communist Party USA and the Students for a Democratic Society. Nobody was more aggressively targeted than the Black nationalist groups such as the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam. Perhaps the most controversial of their targets was Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement. The FBI used several different strategies to disrupt the groups. One was that they would fabricate correspondence between a figure in one group and send it to another. For example they might make up an angry letter made to look like it was written by a Communist Party member and mail it to the Black Panthers. This was done to prevent a cohesive alliance from forming between the disparate groups.

The second chapter lays out what the author believes are the targets of the New Cointelpro. Some of these are continuations of the 1960s incarnation, such as Black and Latino groups. Newer targets allegedly include the women's movement, gay rights groups and various labor unions. Although it is clear that the government was involved in many of the "legal problems" of the former Black Panthers, the booklet gives less direct evidence of FBI involvement in relation to these other groups. It does, however give an example of a former FBI operative named Joe Barton who was to work on creating a phony political group called the "Red Star Brigade". Presumably this group would be to attract radical elements from the Left and perform disruptive activities. In fact the Justice Department also did this in the 1990s by using agents such as Andreas Strassmeier to plan criminal activities in order to create fears of the militia movement. The Phoenix office of the FBI caused a lot of controversy a few years ago when they published a pamphlet on how to identify terrorists from the left and the right. The front of the brochure warned "if you encounter any of the following, call the Joint Terrorism Task Force". One of the things to watch out for was if somebody is "making numerous references to the Constitution"!

The last chapter is about how activists can deal with the political realities of modern Cointelpro. It is essentially a list of guidelines on how to guard against infiltration, bad publicity and surveillance techniques. Obviously the government has now been afforded a lot more tools to do these things in the "post-September 11 world" which makes it even less likely that our leaders will be held accountable. Both John McCain and Barack Obama voted in favor of a bill legitimizing surveillance powers with very little oversight, so the solution is probably not going to come from the "top-down".

This booklet is short and to the point. If you need to explain what Cointelpro was in only a few words, this is a pretty good guide. One thing I could've done without is the cartoons by Abbe Smith. My guess is that these were intended to add humor to the text, but all they do is steer you towards apathy and cynicism. In any case they aren't funny at all! The booklet is very readable if you aren't distracted by this. It is a good distillation of the Cointelpro activities and shows that domestic spying didn't begin with the PATRIOT Act.

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