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The Cointelpro Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (Classics Series 8)
Readers anxious about the future of civil liberties under George W. Bush can trace the lineage of political repression meted out by the FBI in the last half century. The original FBI memos reproduced here expose the Bureau's secret, systematic, and sometimes savage sabotage of progressive political activity. The authors examine the treatment of the left from the 1950s Com...more
Hardcover, 500 pages
Published
November 1st 2001
by South End Press
(first published 1990)
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I've been re-reading this book to assign parts of it in my law and social movements class at Harvard this semester. It is such a great resource to share with students to whom this kind of surveillance sounds like paranoid fantasy. I am hoping it will generate a rich discussion about how surveillance politics have changed with technology, and how much more we are consensually surveilled that activists of a previous generation (myspace, friendster, cell phones, credit cards to buy metrocards et...more
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This book reproduces and analyzes cointelpro documents acquired through the FOIA. It is funny how the United States government expects its citizens to obey its laws but yet it goes out of its way to target, harass and persecute people who are not breaking any laws themselves. Which is made even worse when the government is often breaking the very laws they are supposed to uphold in the process.
There are individual chapters in this on black nationalist groups, socialist and communist...more
There are individual chapters in this on black nationalist groups, socialist and communist...more
The Cointelpro Papers should be required reading for high school graduation. It is more important than ever for people to understand the long history of GOVERNMENT spying on American dissidents. The problem of wire tapping, stalking, infiltration of community and political groups and clandestine murders did not start when all this stuff became legal with the Patriot Act in 2002. In fact it is well documented that it was going on in the mid-twenties and possibly earlier.
The part of th...more
The part of th...more
Erik Graff
rated it
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review of another edition
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review of another edition
Recommends it for:
Americans
Recommended to Erik by:
no one
Shelves:
history
Although the FBI has broken laws since its inception, the COINTELPRO program documented in this book ran from the mid-fifties to early seventies. Basically, it was an effort to spy on and subvert individuals, groups and movements seen as domestic threats. One all-too-common practice was to insert FBI agents into political organizations and then have them provoke illegal activities.
FBI penetration of the Communist Party was thorough and extensive. Indeed, it is possible that FBI operat...more
FBI penetration of the Communist Party was thorough and extensive. Indeed, it is possible that FBI operat...more
A wonderfully infuriating book that documents the FBI's aggressive and illegal efforts to discredit and destroy various civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Meticulously documented (most often with photostats of FBI memos and letters), _The COINTELPRO Papers_ illustrates that our government is no stranger to illegal surveillance, assassination attempts, egregious misinformation, illegal leaks, and blackmail on DOMESTIC soil. (For instance, the FBI sent anonymous letters to MLK, Jr. s...more
A book everyone should own if you enjoy having an anthology of damning FBI documents that show how the FBI manipulated and oppressed domestic groups in the 20th Century. Especially blood-curdling is the letter the FBI sent to Martin Luther King Jr. that suggested the best thing for him to do would be to commit suicide...
Brian Markey
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review of another edition
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Recommends it for:
Nutters and conspiracy kooks{}
Recommended to Brian by:
Some guy wearing a trenchcoat
This book is easy to sum up.
It's about balls to the wall documentation about FBI Hooverian Shenanegans in the form of COunter INTELegence PROgrams.
Memos signed by asswipes in the highest level of the FBI detail the infiltration, assassination and sabotage of dissident groups by the FBI. The COINTEL ops were aimed at the Black Panther Party, The American Indian Movement, Martin Luther King, and the Students for a Democratic Society.
Churchill is a bit of a douc...more
It's about balls to the wall documentation about FBI Hooverian Shenanegans in the form of COunter INTELegence PROgrams.
Memos signed by asswipes in the highest level of the FBI detail the infiltration, assassination and sabotage of dissident groups by the FBI. The COINTEL ops were aimed at the Black Panther Party, The American Indian Movement, Martin Luther King, and the Students for a Democratic Society.
Churchill is a bit of a douc...more
This is a solid book about the numerous COINTELPRO operations against the Black Panthers, AIM, and other ethnic radical organizations. More evidence for the brazen abuse of state power.
JUSTICE is served. Exposes their surveillance culture that they have been ashamed of for so long. Includes a chillingly shitty comic drawn by FBI operatives, designed to incite schism between SNCC and the Panthers. The comic would be funnier if it didn't kind of work...never underestimate the power of crude drawing. Anyways this book is full of creepy prints of actual redacted memos and a polical narration of COINTELPRO, the FBI's clandestine politcal program that was exposed when activists brok...more
If ever you wanted to know what the CIA does what the FBI does and how they do it, this is your book. Especially, if you're interested on how the BPP, AIM, The Brown Berets, and the Rainbow Coalition got canned. You can also apply it to today and what's happening now.
lent by a friend who insisted I read it. basically filling in the blanks of my instinctive paranoia.
seeing the reproduced documents, in ink on paper, in your hands, is critically spine-shuddering.
Elizabeth Hills
marked it as to-read
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review of another edition
Shelves:
activism,
politics-public-policy
Daniel Burton-Rose
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review of another edition
Shelves:
civil-rights-black-power,
indiginism
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American Indian writer, political activist and former professor of ethnic studies in Colorado at Boulder from 1990 till 2007.
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Churchill`s writings are mostly about the history of the American Indians and what he calls the genocide on the indigenous people of North America.
An essay of him where he claimed the 9/11 attacks on the world trade center were a response to America`s...more
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