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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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'Burglars' Revealed: Sixties Activists Who Stole FBI COINTELPRO Files
'On March 8, 1971, a group of eight Vietnam War protestors broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation field office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole hundreds of government documents that shocked a nation.'
Jan 07, 2014
In an exclusive with the New York Times on Tuesday, published to coincide with a new book about a fateful plan more than four decades ago that helped bring down J. Edgar Hoover and expose the dark nature of the FBI's obsessive targeting of the dissident and anti-war left, the original burglars who broke into a bureau field office in 1971 have now stepped forward to discuss the meticulously planned theft that altered the course of modern history.
As the Timesreports:
They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups.
The burglary in Media, Pa., on March 8, 1971, is a historical echo today, as disclosures by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have cast another unflattering light on government spying and opened a national debate about the proper limits of government surveillance. The burglars had, until now, maintained a vow of silence about their roles in the operation. They were content in knowing that their actions had dealt the first significant blow to an institution that had amassed enormous power and prestige during J. Edgar Hoover's lengthy tenure as director.
"When you talked to people outside the movement about what the F.B.I. was doing, nobody wanted to believe it," said one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, who is finally going public about his involvement. "There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting."
The new book, entitled 'The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI' and written by former Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger, traces the history of the time that surrounded the event and explores the motivations of the FBI, led by Hoover, and the anti-war and social justice movements of the late 60's and 70's whose members became targets of the law enforcement agency's clandestine COINTELPRO program.
As the Times article notes, the stolen document that would have the "biggest impact on reining in the F.B.I.'s domestic spying activities was an internal routing slip, dated 1968, bearing a mysterious word: Cointelpro."
And continues:
Neither the Media burglars nor the reporters who received the documents understood the meaning of the term, and it was not until several years later, when the NBC News reporter Carl Stern obtained more files from the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act, that the contours of Cointelpro -- shorthand for Counterintelligence Program -- were revealed.
Since 1956, the F.B.I. had carried out an expansive campaign to spy on civil rights leaders, political organizers and suspected Communists, and had tried to sow distrust among protest groups. Among the grim litany of revelations was a blackmail letter F.B.I. agents had sent anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital affairs if he did not commit suicide.
"It wasn't just spying on Americans," said Loch K. Johnson, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia who was an aide to Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho. "The intent of Cointelpro was to destroy lives and ruin reputations."
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