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cointelpro
The FBI Is Still Targeting Black People for Entrapment
The COINTELPRO era never ended, as Black people bear the brunt of FBI surveillance. The war on terror gave a new rationale for using paid informants to entrap Black people. Romeo Langhorne is the latest victim of a government-created crime.
Jul 17, 2022
Romeo Langhorne is the latest victim of an FBI phony terror entrapment scheme. On July 7, 2022 he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for uploading a bomb-making video. Langhorne didn't make a bomb. He uploaded a video while under the direction of an FBI informant. The video had in fact been produced by the government.
More than 20 years after September 11, 2001 Americans are still being told that they are at risk of terrorist attacks. The color-coded risk assessments, NSA surveillance of all electronic and internet activity continues. The threat of terror attacks is the justification for encroaching on civil liberties and phony terror schemes concocted by informants still get headlines and give legitimacy to the continued violations of our rights.
Langhorne is a 32-year-old Black man who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He fits the description of nearly every person whom the FBI has speciously claimed to be a terrorist in the past 20 years. They are Black Americans, Muslims from this country or immigrants who are often vulnerable economically or emotionally. The list of people who were said to have planned acts of terror are victims of intimidation and entrapment from informers who are the ones who lead them to commit the act for which they are convicted.
In this case, Langhorne pleaded guilty to "probably at some point" pledging allegiance to ISIS. The plea is meaningless when no one is ever acquitted. Pleading guilty in this case gets a 20-year sentence, taking the chance of pleading innocent when the prosecutorial deck is stacked against the defendant means risking many more years in prison when the inevitable guilty verdict is reached.
John Leombruno, Langhorne's attorney described the scenario which occurs in most terrorism prosecutions, "Acting in an undercover capacity, they initiated conversations with Mr. Langhorne and incited the production of a video that would inform individuals on how to make an explosive...To make certain that a prosecution of the defendant would occur, the government produced the actual video in question (and), circled back to Mr. Langhorne when the interactions and conversations between them grew cold."
Langhorne shares the same fate with music Tarik Shah, the Liberty City Seven, and the Newburgh Four. All were targeted by FBI informants. In the case of the Liberty City Seven no crime was committed and the Newburgh Four supposed bombing plot was led by the informant, who created the crime himself.
Little has changed since this Black Agenda Report commentary in 2010, which stated that the true purpose of these entrapments is, "... to terrify the American public, so that they will surrender their civil liberties - possibly the greatest extortion scheme in U.S. history." Of course, Black targets are the most useful, as they always "fit the profile" when some wrongdoing is being concocted.
In the wake of the September 11 attacks, congress passed the Patriot Act, far-reaching legislation that has impacted civil liberties ever since. At the time it was said to be temporary, yet it has been renewed like clockwork, without opposition or even minimal questioning from members of Congress or the corporate media.
Langhorne was under surveillance from 2014 until his arrest in 2019. We see the usual hyperbolic claims of terroristic intent along with vague assertions of pledges to ISIS or another organization. In all these years there have been no Jihadist terror events in the U.S. Plots are produced by paid snitches and the wheels of injustice grind on and on.
Giving "material support" is a catch-all phrase that can mean anything that prosecutors want. Any statement can be called a pledge of support to ISIS. The end result is that of the 979 terror charges filed since September 11 only 7 individuals have not gone to jail. A guilty plea in cases such as these proves absolutely nothing.
So 32-year-old Romeo Langhorne gets 20 years in federal prison followed by 15 years of supervision. He will be a senior citizen by the time he is truly free from law enforcement. No one had anything to fear from him or the hundreds of others who have been prosecuted. Apparently, there aren't any real terrorists working in the U.S. If they do exist the feds can't find them. They can only find hapless dupes to persecute and prosecute so that the people don't question what their government does in their names.
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Should We Fight a War on White Terrorism?
There’s a strong argument to shift law enforcement resources from Muslim organizations to domestic white terrorists — but expanding the war on terror is a riskier proposition.
Aug 22, 2019
Although its precise scale is hard to measure, violent white supremacy is clearly a problem in the United States.
From El Paso to Pittsburgh, the fears and fantasies of an immigrant invasion, a liberal Jewish betrayal, and a righteous race war have motivated surgically targeted slaughter. With law enforcement -- especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) -- seemingly more concerned with "black identity" and "animal rights/environment extremists," our so-called "War on Terrorism" looks more distorted than ever.
Should we be trying to even the score?
Although it is tempting to embrace Senator Elizabeth Warren's call for white supremacy to be treated as domestic terrorism, any widening of the current, more narrow "war" should be approached with caution. History suggests that repression of these movements may well succeed, but also bring a troubling mix of unintended consequences.
The Old Wars on White Terrorism
The obvious analogue to today is the 1960s. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover long held that national security was under attack not from the architects of near-daily atrocities in "Bombingham," Alabama, or from a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, but instead the Black Panther Party and the unruly, allegedly Communist-sponsored "agitators" of the Civil Rights movement.
Hoover had to be cajoled, belatedly, by President Johnson before the FBI promised, in September 1964, to "expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize the activities of the various Klans and hate organizations" across the country.
By 1970, 17 field offices were participating in this "counter-intelligence program" (COINTELPRO), which included tried-and-tested methods like the "manipulation of informants, anonymous letters, and friendly press services" to foment conflicts among the leaders of white supremacist organizations. The Bureau even exposed the Jewish descent of the Nazi Party's Midwest Coordinator.
By most accounts, these typically dirty tricks -- honed by their deployment against civil rights leaders -- were effective in undermining groups like the Klan.
The story was different when the federal government was confronted with its first bout of "White Terror" after the Civil War. Initially disorganized violence against newly emancipated African Americans solidified quickly into a politically inspired assault on Reconstruction: The Civil War-era Republican Party's attempt to build something like a biracial democracy in the South.
Although our received image of Southern racism is the grinning, poor, illiterate white man ogling at a burning black body, the original Ku Klux Klan was more country club than trailer park -- formed and sustained by prominent politicians, decorated Confederate veterans, and former slaveholders.
This embedding of the Klan in respectable society ensured its expansion throughout the late 1860s. Only in 1870, with Ulysses Grant in the White House, and after the harrowing Ku Klux Klan Congressional hearings, did a counter-terrorism plan develop.
By our standards, the Enforcement Acts -- passed by Congress in 1870 and 1871 -- were relatively tame, focusing, for the most part, on beefing up the newly created federal Department of Justice.
But the third of these acts provided for a true emergency power: The president could suspend the writ of habeas corpus in pursuit of white terror organizations.
Grant, it seems, was genuinely appalled by Klan violence, and did not hesitate to act on his new authority in response to rampant terrorism in South Carolina. Yet resistance to "Bayonet Rule" -- including from within his own party -- combined with a devastating economic crisis and deepening Republican divisions to leave most of the former Confederacy to the mercy of well-armed "Redeemers" intent on restoring the Old South.
In this, the first American war on white terrorism, the terrorists unquestionably won.
What Can We Learn?
These historical episodes could be interpreted simply: If Ulysses Grant had a J. Edgar Hoover and a COINTELPRO instead of an overstretched army and a reticent Congress, Reconstruction might have had a fighting chance of success. The civil libertarians may not like it, but the only remedy for white supremacy is our strongest possible repressive medicine.
Today, however, this argument raises two difficult questions.
First, would repression actually work? It is not hard to identify people who march around with bedsheets on their heads or swastikas on their sleeves. Navigating the largely online network of the "alt-right" movement is less straightforward: leaderless, dispersed, and rarely traceable to a specific organization.
Second -- and much more difficult -- could repression backfire?
A combination of old-school and modern methods -- infiltration, surveillance, hacking, propaganda -- is surely at least capable of disrupting the activities of white terrorist groups. But here the civil libertarians do have a point: Extreme powers used for one purpose can easily be recycled for something else.
Britain passed a Public Order Act to restrict fascist demonstrations, and the government deployed it against communists; the US Congress established a House Un-American Activities Committee with the goal of exposing Nazis, only to turn it overwhelmingly against the left; and France's Lellouche Law -- aimed at hate speech -- has more recently targeted pro-Palestinian activists.
Even in supposedly strong democracies, checks and balances have struggled to reverse these repressive cycles. We could boot President Trump out of office and craft a new counter-terrorism law carefully directed at white supremacists, but it will still be interpreted and enforced by Trump-packed courts, an unaccountable national security bureaucracy, and more than a few rogue local law enforcement agencies. The end result is unlikely to be pretty.
The Real Risk of Overreaction
After the El Paso shooting on August 3, the FBI called for a law much like this.
Apparently rooted in common sense, these proposals should be viewed skeptically. The alternative is not necessarily to do nothing, or, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested, to offer an olive branch to young men "in the grips of hatred."
There is a strong argument for reallocating the resources of law enforcement away from mosques, Muslim Student Associations, and games of cricket, and toward the real threats posed by white supremacists. But the last thing we should encourage is an expanded "War on Terror."
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Why We Should Teach About the FBI's War on the Civil Rights Movement
Mar 01, 2016
This month marks the 45th anniversary of a dramatic moment in U.S. history. On March 8, 1971--while Muhammad Ali was fighting Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, and as millions sat glued to their TVs watching the bout unfold--a group of peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they could find.
Keith Forsyth, one of the people who broke in, explained on Democracy Now!:
I was spending as much time as I could with organizing against the war, but I had become very frustrated with legal protest. The war was escalating and not de-escalating. And I think what really pushed me over the edge was, shortly after the invasion of Cambodia, there were four students killed at Kent State and two more killed at Jackson State. And that really pushed me over the edge, that it was time to do more than just protest.
Delivered to the press, these documents revealed an FBI conspiracy--known as COINTELPRO--to disrupt and destroy a wide range of protest groups, including the Black freedom movement. The break-in and the government treachery it revealed is a chapter of our not-so-distant past that all high school students--and all the rest of us--should learn, yet one that history textbooks continue to ignore.
In recent years, current events discussions in my high school history and government classes have been dominated by names that have piled up with sickening frequency: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland. In looking at the Black Lives Matter movement as a response to these injustices, my class came across a 2015 Oregonian article, "Black Lives Matter: Oregon Justice Department Searched Social Media Hashtags." The article detailed the department's digital surveillance of people solely on the basis of their use of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. My students debated whether tying #BlackLivesMatter to potential threats to police (the premise of the surveillance program) was justifiable. Most thought it was not. But what the Oregonian did not note in the article, and what my students had no way of knowing, was the history of this story--the ugly, often illegal, treatment of Black activists by the U.S. justice system during the COINTELPRO era.
My students had little way of knowing about this story behind the story because mainstream textbooks almost entirely ignore COINTELPRO. Though COINTELPRO offers teachers a trove of opportunities to illustrate key concepts, including the rule of law, civil liberties, social protest, and due process, it is entirely absent from my school's government book, Magruder's American Government (Pearson).
One district textbook for U.S. history teachers investigating Black activism of the 1950s and 1960s is American Odyssey (McGraw Hill). In a section titled "The Movement Appraised," the book sums up the end of the Civil Rights Movement:
Without strong leadership in the years following King's death, the civil rights movement floundered. Middle-class Americans, both African American and white, tired of the violence and the struggle. The war in Vietnam and crime in the streets at home became the new issue at the forefront of the nation's consciousness.
Here we find a slew of problematic assertions about the era, plus a notable absence. Nowhere does American Odyssey indicate that, in addition to King's death and Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement also had to contend with a declaration of war made against it by its own government.
American Odyssey is not alone in its omission. American Journey (Pearson), another textbook used in my school, similarly makes no mention of the program.
The only textbook in my district to mention COINTELPRO is America: A Concise History (St. Martin's), a college-level Advanced Placement history text. Limited to a single sentence, its summary and analysis is wholly incomplete: "In the late 1960s SDS and other antiwar groups fell victim to police harassment, and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and CIA agents infiltrated and disrupted radical organizations."
Why do textbook writers and publishers leave out this crucial episode in U.S. history? Perhaps they take their cues from the FBI itself. According to the FBI website:
The FBI began COINTELPRO--short for Counterintelligence Program--in 1956 to disrupt the activities of the Communist Party of the United States. In the 1960s, it was expanded to include a number of other domestic groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. All COINTELPRO operations were ended in 1971. Although limited in scope (about two-tenths of 1 percent of the FBI's workload over a 15-year period), COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging First Amendment rights and for other reasons.
Apparently, mainstream textbooks have accepted--hook, line, and sinker--the FBI's whitewash of COINTELPRO as "limited in scope" and applying to only a few organizations. But COINTELPRO was neither "limited in scope" nor applied only to the organizations listed in the FBI's description.
Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover describes the goal of one arm of COINTELPRO--against the Black liberation movement--in a now-declassified 1967 document:
The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.
The plan to "neutralize" Black activists included legal harassment, intimidation, wiretapping, infiltration, smear campaigns, and blackmail, and resulted in countless prison sentences and, in the case of Black Panther Fred Hampton and others, murder. This scope of operations can hardly be described as "limited." Moreover, these tactics were employed not just against every national civil rights organization but also against the antiwar movement (particularly on college campuses), Students for a Democratic Society, the American Indian Movement, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and others.
One way to appreciate the wide net cast by COINTELPRO is to look at the final report of the Church Committee. In the early 1970s, following a number of allegations in the press about over-reaching government intelligence operations, a Senate committee chaired by Democrat Frank Church of Idaho began an investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies. Their 1976 report states: "The unexpressed major premise of much of COINTELPRO is that the Bureau [FBI] has a role in maintaining the existing social order, and that its efforts should be aimed toward combating those who threaten that order." In other words, anyone who challenged the status quo of racism, militarism, and capitalism in American society was fair game for surveillance and harassment. Rather than "limited," the FBI's scope potentially included all social and political activists, an alarming and outrageous revelation in a country purportedly governed by the protections of speech and assembly in the First Amendment.
Luckily, we do not need to rely on corporate textbook publishers and the FBI for our resources and curriculum. Thanks to the Media burglars, and their suitcases full of stolen documents, we now have access to memos from this FBI program of destruction. In my curriculum, I have pulled together documents from the FBI's website and from the book The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States, edited by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall. These documents reveal the FBI's attempts to infiltrate and disrupt the Black Panthers, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, and others; they reveal an attempt to blackmail Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. using illegally acquired recordings of purported marital infidelities, and a suggestion that he commit suicide. They reveal campaigns of misinformation, where FBI agents planted lies in newspaper and magazine coverage of activists.
I also use the fabulous episode "A Nation of Law?" from the documentary Eyes on the Prize, which details COINTELPRO's 1969 murder of Fred Hampton in Chicago. Hampton--a leader of Chicago's Black Panther Party--was a young and inspiring advocate of Black liberation attempting to build a "rainbow coalition" of groups across racial lines. After months of official harassment, he was shot and killed during an FBI-sponsored police raid on his home as he slept in his bed. He was 21 years old.
Together, these resources provide students an opportunity to understand the government-sponsored war against Black activists. And though the COINTELPRO documents have long been public, it is a story that history textbooks continue to ignore, leaving students to swallow the false assertion of books like American Odyssey that the movement simply "floundered" after King's death.
Textbook publishers' disregard for the history of COINTELPRO is one more example of the crucial importance of the Black Lives Matter movement, a movement that lays bare the systemic dangers faced by Black people in America while simultaneously affirming and celebrating Black life. What I attempt in my classroom is a Black Lives Matter treatment of COINTELPRO, where we reveal the injustice of the program while affirming and celebrating the promise of the activists it sought to silence. Just as Black Lives Matter activists use video footage to convince a wider public of what African Americans have long known about police brutality, teachers can use our classrooms to shine a light on history that has long been available but systematically ignored by our textbooks. We need a curriculum that emphatically communicates: Black history matters.
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