"The truth, always the truth--at all costs"
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| 2668 01/03/2006 Spying on the San Diego Street Journal (and other Americans) David E. Kaplan |
| [U.S. News & World Report] 1/9/06 The Good Old Bad Old Days The years 1969 and '70 were tough ones for the San Diego Street Journal, a muckraking, underground newspaper staffed by a ragtag group of antiwar activists and grad school dropouts. Vigilantes led by an FBI informant wrecked the paper's printing equipment, firebombed the car of one staffer, and nearly shot to death another. Among the Street Journal 's reporters was a young Lowell Bergman, whose later exploits as a 60 Minutes TV producer would be portrayed by Al Pacino in the movie The Insider. "We were targets along with a lot of other people," recalls Bergman. "By 1971 we'd all left town." The assault on the Street Journal was part of a massive campaign of government spying and dirty tricks directed for a decade against civil rights, antiwar, and other '60s-era activists. The war on the underground press, which at its peak claimed some 7 million readers a month, included efforts by the FBI, the CIA, Army intelligence, and local police to spy on and disrupt alternative newspapers. "There was a genuine concern that these organizations were attempting to create chaos or even bring down the government," recalls Buck Revell, a 30-year FBI veteran who later helped reform the bureau's practices. "But the tactics were obviously inappropriate and even illegal." Civil liberties activists worry that the institutional memory of those years has faded, as U.S. security agencies fill with young agents unfamiliar with the abuses of the past. Dirty tricks. How bad were the bad old days? Congressional investigations in the mid-1970s uncovered a harrowing record of wrongdoing. From 1960 to 1974, the FBI created files on more than 1 million Americans and carried out over a half-million investigations of people deemed "subversives" --most of them engaged in constitutionally protected free speech. The FBI's counterintelligence program, dubbed COINTELPRO, made it the bureau's business to harass civil rights and antiwar protesters, and agents ran a covert program to incite violence among African-American groups. Among the FBI's targets was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom agents wiretapped and attempted to blackmail and discredit with anonymous letters. Other agencies were similarly out of control. The NSA had monitored every overseas cable sent or received by Americans since 1947. Internal Revenue Service tax data had been misused for political purposes. The CIA, despite a ban on domestic spying, ran Operation Chaos, with a database of 1.5 million Americans that included composer Leonard Bernstein and author John Steinbeck. Army intelligence operatives marshaled investigations against 100,000 Americans during the Vietnam War. These and other abuses led to a series of reforms by Congress, reining in the security agencies and establishing intelligence oversight committees. But Americans need to remain vigilant, say veterans of that era. Warns Loch Johnson, who as a Senate staffer played a key role in drafting the reforms: "You have to ensure that you don't lose the very value that you're fighting for, which is democracy." -David E. Kaplan [Copyright 2006 U.SW. News & World Report] |
