Monday 21 July 2008

COINTELPRO And The Internet: The Rapist In The Nudist Colony For The Blind

The following is an edited version of the article posted yesterday that contained a lot of spelling and grammatical errors.

COINTELPRO is an acronym designating operations made by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), consisting a series of covert activities purportedly investigative in nature, in the name of national security, prevention of violence, and national cohesion, but in reality illegal and aimed at disrupting what were legal political organizations in the United States of America. The focus of these operations, seen in who bore the brunt the most, was undoubtedly black civil rights first, and peace movements and others second.

The directives governing COINTELPRO were issued by J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI at the time. The MO of the operations, according to these directives, was to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" at every level, meaning attacks were to be made on individuals as well as the entirety of the groups in question, whatever did the trick of destroying the undesirable entity.

The main methods CONTELPRO used to meet its objectives were very similar to the tactics employed by what are known today as gang stalkers, citizen harassment groups or cause stalkers, a term coined by what has now for unknown reasons become (according to me) a wayward, cowardly, collaborator author David Lawson, whose term aptly emphasises “cause” as the motivation. These include infiltration by agents and informants, psychological warfare from the outside that entailed the use of dirty tricks to undermine progressive movements, for example hyped media articles; harassment using the legal, established system, extralegal force and violence that included break ins and vandalism, etc.

Officially, the program started in 1956, and ended in 1971 (15 years later) when the beans were spilt. While the nation watched a Muhammad Ali verses Joe Frazier fight, a group calling themselves The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI two-man office in Media, Pa., and stole more than 1,000 FBI documents that revealed years of systematic wiretapping, infiltration and media manipulation designed to suppress dissent. Two weeks later, these were mailed anonymously to major American newspapers. Unofficially, however, without a shadow of doubt, as evidenced in the bloom of activities that are an improvement upon the methods of old, thanks to diligence and the opportune application of technological advancements, the program has simply grown from strength to strength.

All of Nato’s countries have adopted the methods, including right wing extremist groups, and others in the west who are known to do the establishment’s dirty work for them. What is revealing about this proliferation is that those who were supposed to have been on the FBI’s officially released hit list, the KKK, have become experts at using the tactics against “select” minority members, coincidentally those with high IQ’s and such.

Search, find and destroy missions were obviously centred around political parties and activists, and we can agree carrying out a dirty tricks campaign in a world getting more informed by the day was getting increasingly difficult, which could have been one of the major reasons the American establishment, NATO’s official spokesman on such matters, decided to officially bury the program… in order to show that the entire system was not completely corrupted, that there was still hope; crucially, in order to allay the growing fear in the populace at large of their own government that could spiral out of control if left unchecked.

COINTELPRO continued in the background, wiser through experience, eager not to repeat old mistakes and, despite the official release ruse, still very encumbered in reaching its objectives. There are areas where the core tactics cannot but stay the same. Progressive movements cannot be dealt with any other way than to either halt them in their tracks, or undermine them, which cannot be achieved covertly. Rather than call the police to shoot their premises up, use an illegal organization such as the KKK (or another if the organization in question was not racially based) to take the blame had been the way things were done in the past, but many events reveal this was not working well either. The surreptitious elimination of positive minded leaders, activists, whistleblowers, etc., using elaborate schemes to confuse the populace at large about whodunit could not quite do the trick neither. The operation can only work when the pre-emptive strike is adequate, explicitly stated in a communiqué issued by J. Edgar Hoover himself in relation to black folk, to “Prevent the rise of a "messiah" who could unify, and electrify, the militant Black Nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a "messiah;" he is the martyr of the movement today.”

At fault was a growingly conscious world that was getting less gullible much too quickly.

Americans themselves were by large successfully being kept as ignorant as would allow for the continuation with impunity of the illegal activities the leaders required to carry out to maintain the status quo. The problem were the few among them, including others in other NATO countries, who could not be kept down, who were restlessly, often desperately organizing, fighting back and communicating their worst informed fears across continents. This rest of the world was reciprocating, meaning it was also changing fast, the natives getting ever more informed and, with this, dangerously restless. If America was to maintain it’s lion’s share of the world’s resources in an environment where there is an overabundance of information, the number of individuals that had to be suppressed or outright eliminated was surely on the rise and the means of achieving this ever insufficient, at worst prone to backfire on the leaders.

Something had to be done before it was too late.

In comes the era of the Internet, and the cloud that had once darkened the devil’s skies, heralding their earlier than late demise, began to clear in ways many have not yet grasped.

An operation the likes of COINTELPRO can only work covertly. These activities can hardly be kept covert in a scenario where the bird has already flown. This means COINTELPRO cannot afford to sit around waiting for individuals to develop and organizations to form before going in and assassinating or disrupting them. Such a process is messy and, apart from creating a martyr if a leader is taken out in full view of the public, it also creates followers. Pre-empting all this requires nipping in the bud. It means entering school yards, homes even, any place where people may live and congregate to discover and prevent both the growth of organizations as the development of individuals to the point where they can become active members of such organizations or want their creation. This requires getting people before they even know what it is they are being taken out for, otherwise the war cannot be called covert.

If a given young man has already made attempts to start an organization, made a number of people aware of his intentions, was to recognize surreptitious attacks, he will put two and two together and know that there are parties attempting to prevent him from starting the organization, and relay his findings to others. It will become clear to the public where the regime stands regarding certain issues.

The advent of the World Wide Web age, or the internet, marked by the development of a hypertext system that required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional ones, making it possible for someone to link to another resource online without action by the owner of that resource, led to the era of forums and chat rooms, the new, improved and radical version of bulletin boards. This new found ability to communicate easily with people around the world scared the establishment for the added freedoms it could give everyday, conveniently isolated, appropriately misinformed citizens, but at the same time, because each and every one of us who goes online has an IP address, it gave the evil ones a window into the inner workings of the minds of individual members of society that solved a lot of their search and destroy issues. For the first time ever, instead of using a vast network of mostly unreliable informants and other lookouts, using but a few moderately intelligent goons permanently stationed at such spots, scouring the web for material that could be deemed a threat to the order, those who were but potential threats could now with precision and ease be detected. In the days and years that followed, a lot of people became easy pickings for seasoned COINTELPRO operatives.

I believe the reality that individuals can become targets of covert warfare by simply expressing their minds on online forums, or starting websites with the sole intention of informing others, is slowly beginning to sink in, slowly becoming common knowledge.

I started my very first Internet experiences in the late nineties on forums and chat rooms. I soon used my programming skills and created my very own first website, complete with chat and forums. I quickly gained a sizeable international membership, and, as the moderator, learnt first hand how operatives would flock to the forums, especially when there were some good thinkers around. They would clearly slither their way towards such posters, going to work either attacking them personally rather than responding to what they were saying, sapping them by leading them through convoluted arguments, only to turn around and act the fool, or simply making it hard for them to want to come back using any trick that could achieve this. I witnessed first hand how some other members, especially the very sharp ones, lost mental clarity and sometimes sanity, pointing to the reality they were in most probability being attacked in their own lives. Others would communicate to me how strange things were happening to them, and it would not be exaggerating to say I believe a lot of people are walking around insane, while a lot more have died as a result of attacks that started at places that are as innocent as online forums.

Make no mistakes about this, such attacks continue to this day, only because people are still stuck with the idea the establishment has bigger fish to fry than chasing after a bunch of nobodies who spend the rest of their days posting to forums and chatting. To me, knowing what it takes for COINTELPRO to act, aware of their history, objectives and MO, the fact the internet is being used to detect and eliminate those the system thinks are a threat to the order is as plain as it gets...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

the American government didn't want Medgar Evers dead. President Kennedy spoke in favour of civil rights hours before Evers was assassinated in front of his home, right? or was that just an opportune speech designed to fool the masses?

think about this...

the assassin, Byron De La Beckwith, a dumb Klansman who earned his bread selling fertilizer, also a Marine Corps veteran of World War II awarded the Silver Star, waded, swam, elbowed his way to Medgar Evers' residence through a throng of black people he hated, convinced killing this one man would prevent integration?

go figure...

Anonymous said...

infiltration of forums eventually leads to complete overruning. what new members will be communicating with is a bunch of goons.