De historieinteresserte kan få utvidet sin horisont betraktelig utover hva
skolens historiebøker formidler ved å studere følgende utdrag fra
COINTELPRO-dokumentasjonen. For iakttakere av begivenhetene i Genova og
Göteborg vil det være forbausende å se, i hvor høy grad historien gjentar
seg, og tilmed under ledelse av samme type amerikanske presidenter.
Karsten Johansen
http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/copap6c.htm
In December 1969, the New York police once again attacked a peaceful
demonstration, this time on the occasion of an appearance at a local hotel
by President Nixon. Among other things, the cops yanked six people from a
passing van, beat them with riot batons and trundled them into paddy wagons,
apparently for the sole reason that they'd made a gesture indicating "peace"
while driving by, and one had shouted from the window of the vehicle: "This
is what Richard Nixon's fascist police are going to be like, and don't you
forget it." 137
May 1969 saw the so-called "People's Park" confrontation in Berkeley when
students and community people attempted to prevent an area owned by the
University of California, formerly devoted to low-cost housing, from being
converted into a parking lot. When activists began to create a community
park on the lot construction site, police attacked in a fashion which
prompted even so establishmentarian a publication as Newsweek to observe
that they "had gone riot, displaying a lawless brutality equal to that of
Chicago, along with weapons and techniques that even the authorities in
Chicago did not dare employ; the firing of buckshot at fleeing crowds and
unarmed bystanders and the gassing - at times for no reason at all - of
entire streets and portions of [the] college campus." 138 During the week of
this wave of repression in Berkeley, even peaceful marches and
demonstrations were arbitrarily banned, tear gas was sprayed from
helicopters, some 200 persons were badly injured by police clubs and gunfire
(including one who was permanently blinded), and one man - James Rector -
was killed. 139 During the week, California Governor Ronald Reagan strongly
backed these police atrocities, asserting that, "If it's blood they want,
let it be now." 140
The deaths of student demonstrators at the hands of FBI-prepped local police
was hardly a novelty. The first such fatality had occurred in May 1967
during demonstrations at Jackson State College (Jackson, Mississippi) when
cops fired shotguns into an unarmed crowd, killing one and wounding two
others. 141 Three students - Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton and Henry
Smith - were killed and 28 others wounded when South Carolina state troopers
fired without warning on another group of peaceful demonstrators, this time
from South Carolina State College in Orangeburg during February 1968. Most
of those shot were hit while lying prone on the ground, attempting to get
out of the line of fire (in the aftermath, the nine highway patrolmen
identified as having done the shooting were "cleared of wrongdoing" and
promoted). 142 In May 1969, another student, Willie Ernest Grimes, was shot
and killed by police during demonstrations at North Carolina Agricultural
and Mechanical College. 143 During February 1970, a student named Kevin
Moran was killed and two others wounded by police gunfire - and several more
otherwise injured by police and national guardsmen - during demonstrations
which ultimately resulted in the burning of a Bank of America branch
facility. 144 In March of the same year, 12 students were shot and 57 others
injured by police during demonstrations at SUNY, Buffalo. 145
Probably the most notorious incident involving the shooting of student
demonstrators occurred at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970, when
national guardsmen opened fire on a crowd protesting the U.S. invasion of
Cambodia, killing four - Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and
William Schroeder - and wounding nine (several of the dead and wounded were
bystanders rather than demonstrators; one - Schroeder - was even a member of
the campus ROTC unit). 146 Only days before, however, the Ohio guard had
fired on a similar group at Ohio State University, wounding 20. 147 This was
followed, on May 14, by Mississippi highway patrolmen actually firing into a
dormitory at Jackson State (again), killing two Phillip Gibbs and James Earl
Green - and wounding twelve. 148 During July, two students - Rick Dowdell
and Harry Rice - were killed by police at the University of Kansas in
Lawrence , 149 another - Randy Anderson - shot to death on the campus of the
University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, 150 and black organizer Carl Hampton
was gunned down in Houston, Texas. 151 Even as late as November 1972, police
were still shooting student activists; two died as the result of a volley
fired by deputy sheriffs at Southern University in New Orleans." 152
In the last incident, a special commission created by the Louisiana state
attorney general quickly determined there had been "no justification for the
shootings," but the deputies went free 153 It was by then an old story. In
May 1971, a government commission investigating the murders at Kent State
concluded - after a county grand jury had absolved local guardsmen of any
wrongdoing - that the actions of the Ohio guard had been "unnecessary,
unwarranted and inexcusable." 154 Ohio officials nonetheless refused to
bring charges against those implicated, and U.S. Attorney General John
Mitchell declined to convene a federal grand jury to follow up. 155 Ohio, in
the meantime, had indicted 25 Kent State students, ex-students and faculty
on felony charges such as "inciting to riot." 156 A county grand jury
activated after the fatalities at Jackson State perhaps summed up the
official attitude most succinctly when it not only found police killings of
unarmed demonstrators to be "justified," but declared that protestors "must
expect to be injured or killed when law enforcement officers are required to
reestablish order." 157
With the active assistance of the FBI, local police and national guard units
consistently "explained" such conduct as being necessitated by the violent
behavior of the victims themselves. It steadily came out, however, that much
or most of the alleged new left violence was either fabricated or actually
the result of Bureau/ police tactics designed to rationalize the virulence
of the repression before the public. At Kent State, for example, "during the
ten days following the shootings, while the campus was closed, police
ransacked every room among [the university's] thirty-one dormitories,
without warrants, in search of weapons; they found a total of two hunting
weapons [one of which was inoperable], sixty knives, three slingshots,
several BB guns and a yellow button which stated, 'Dare to struggle, dare to
win.'" 158 Still, the state - with active connivance by the FBI - pursued
attempts to blame students in court for the actions of the Ohio National
Guard, a matter which eventually led to Student Body President Craig Morgan
and two others winning $5,000 judgments in malicious prosecution suits. 159
At Ohio State, the official story was that activists closing and chaining
the gates to the campus - allegedly preventing "crowd control" - had
"forced" the guard to fire on demonstrators. It was later revealed that
those who had committed the act in question were in reality members of the
Ohio State Highway Patrol, deliberately attired in such a way as to
impersonate demonstrators before the news media. 160 The use of such
provocateurs to create the appearance of "justification" for even the worst
forms of repression was consistent. Aside from such earlier-mentioned FBI
infiltrators of the new left as William Divale, Phillip Abbott Luce, and
provocateurs such as William Lemmer, Boyd Douglass and Howard Berry Godfrey:
Probably the most-well known agent provocateur was Thomas Tongyai, known as
Tommy the Traveler. Tongyai, who was paid by both the FBI and local police,
spent over two years travelling among colleges in western New York state
urging students to kill police, make bombs and blow up buildings. He
supplied students with radical speakers, literature and films, tried to
organize an SDS chapter at Hobart College, organized SDS conferences in
Rochester and urged students to participate in the Weatherman "Days of Rage"
in Chicago in October, 1969. Tongyai constantly talked violence, carried a
grenade in his car, showed students how to use an M-1 rifle and offered
advice on how to carry out bombings. After some students at Hobart College
apparently took his advice and bombed the Hobart ROTC building, and
Tongyai's cover was exposed, the local sheriff commented, "There's a lot of
difference between showing how to build a bomb and building one." As a
result of disturbances connected with Tongyai's activities on the Hobart
campus, nine students and faculty faced criminal charges, but Tongyai was
cleared by a local grand jury and went on to become a policeman in
Pennsylvania. 161
Similarly, "Horace L. Packer, an FBI informer who was the chief government
witness in the Seattle Eight conspiracy case, testified he was under FBI
instructions to'do anything to protect my credibility.' He testified that
while infiltrating SDS and Weatherman at the University of Washington he
supplied campus radicals with drugs, weapons and materials used for
preparing molotov cocktails. Packer even admitted he supplied and the FBI
paid for paint used to spray the Federal courthouse in Seattle during a
demonstration in February, 1970 - a key element in the charge of conspiracy
to damage federal property which was one of the major charges of the case.
Packer also testified that he used drugs, including 'acid, speed, mescaline'
and cocaine while acting as a [provocateur], that he 'smoked dope all the
time,' that he was arrested several times during campus demonstrations, and
that he had violated the conditions of a suspended sentence he had received
for participating in a Weatherman assault on ROTC facilities at the
University of Washington." 162 Also in Seattle:
Probably the most incredible provocation incident involved an FBI and
Seattle police informer, Alfred Burnett, who lured Larry Eugene Ward into
planting a bomb at a Seattle real estate office on the morning of May 15,
1970, by paying Ward $75, providing him with the bomb and giving him
transportation to the bombing scene. Ward, a twenty two year old veteran who
had been twice wounded and decorated three times for service in Vietnam, was
shot and killed by waiting Seattle police as he allegedly fled after the
bombing attempt, although he was unarmed, on foot and boxed in by police
cars. 163
Burnett, the key player in this Cerro Maravilla-like ambush (see Chapter 4),
was "a twice-convicted felon who had been released from jail as the result
of FBI statements that he could provide valuable information ... Bumett said
later, 'The police wanted a bomber and I got one for them. I didn't know
Larry Ward would be killed! Seattle Police Intelligence Chief John Williams
blamed the FBI, stating, 'As far as I can tell Ward was a relatively decent
kid. Somebody set this whole thing up. It wasn't the police department.'
Subsequently, Seattle's mayor publicly advocated killing convicted bombers
before a Senate committee, and citing the Ward case, noted the incidence of
bombings in Seattle had declined since the slaying. He added, 'I suspect
killing a person involved in a bombing ... might be somewhat of a
deterrent.'" 164
In the so-called "Camden Twenty-Eight" case, the defendants were acquitted
of all charges accruing from their breaking into a New Jersey Selective
Service office and attempting to destroy the draft files therein after the
trial judge instructed the jury to return verdicts of "not guilty" if it
felt the government had gone to "intolerable lengths" and otherwise
conducted itself in a manner "offensive to the basic standards of decency
and shocking to the universal standards of justice" in setting up the
"crime." The prosecution's star witness, Robert W. Hardy, had admitted on
the stand that he had - upon instructions of the Bureau - infiltrated the
group, proposed the action, provided "90 percent" of the burglary tools
utilized, and offered his "expertise at breaking and entering" to allow the
plot to go forward. 165 Elsewhere, "Another campus agent provocateur was
Charles Grimm, who functioned as a local police and FBI informant on the
campus of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Among his activities were
the burning of Dressler Hall on the campus on May 7, 1970 (at the direction
of the FBI, he said), the throwing of three molotov cocktails into a street
on May 14, 1970 and the throwing of objects at police officers on the campus
on May 18, 1970." 166
Among those indicted by a federal grand jury in Detroit on March 6, 1970 for
conspiracy to bomb police and military installations was Larry G. Grathwohl
- reputedly one of "the most militant members" of the SDS Weatherman faction
- an FBI infiltrator, known as a demolitions expert, who gave bomb-making
lessons to the group, regularly brandished both a .357 magnum revolver and a
straight razor, and admitted to the New York Times having personally
participated in the bombing of a public school near Cincinnati in 1969. 167
Charges were dropped against Grathwohl (but not against his alleged
co-conspirators who, by then, had gone under ground), and he "retired" into
the Bureau's witness protection program, eventually writing a sensationally
self-serving account of his exploits entitled Bringing Down America: An FBI
Informer with the Weathermen. 168
Meanwhile, William Lemmer was hardly the only infiltrator/provocateur
attempting to make the VVAW appear "violence prone." For instance, Reinhold
Mohr, a secret member of the Kent State University police force, was
arrested in April of 1972 by local cops while carrying in his car a rocket
launcher and submachinegun he'd been trying to peddle to the campus chapter
of the veterans' organization as a means - as he put it to the intended
buyers - of "furthering the armed struggle against imperialism." Perhaps
ironically, it was Kent State VVAW which tipped the city police that
"there's a nut running around out there with a bunch of automatic weapons."
Although Mohr was clearly in violation of a number of state and federal
statutes, he was quickly released without charges when the chief of campus
security and local FBI agents confirmed he'd "only followed orders" in
attempting to foment violence. 169
Another individual who, by his own account, expended a considerable amount
of time and energy working to subvert VVAW was Joe Burton, a provocateur
active in the Tampa, Florida area from 1972 to '74 (i.e.: after COINTELPRO
had supposedly ceased to exist in 1971). Describing his assignment as being
the "disruption of radical groups" from both the U.S. and Canada, Burton
explained how the Bureau had dispatched counterintelligence specialists from
headquarters to assist him in forging various documents and to establish a
bogus radical organization dubbed the "Red Star Cadre." This front was used
as a prop upon which Burton could "argue from the left" that various bona
fide groups such as VVAW, the United Electrical Workers Union (UE), the
American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and
the United Farm Workers (UFW) were "not militant enough" and to attempt to
lure their members into violence and other illegal activities. 170 A
comparable - if less effective - operation was run by a husband and wife
team, Jill and Harry E. ("Gi") Shafer, III, through a bogus entity called
the Red Star Collective in New Orleans. The Shafers were later used to
infiltrate the support apparatus of the American Indian Movement (see next
chapter), boasting afterwards that they'd managed to "divert" substantial
funds raised for legal defense. 171 (...)
On May 3, seventy-two hundred persons were arrested, the largest total in
American history, with the possible exception of the Palmer Raids. In the
course of making the arrests, police abandoned all normal arrest procedures,
including recording the names and alleged misdeeds of the arrestees.
Hundreds of innocent bystanders, including journalists and government
employees on their way to work, were scooped up in the police dragnet, and
then held in overcrowded jail cells or in a hastily erected outdoor
stockade. In subsequent days, another sixty-two hundred persons were
arrested, including twelve hundred arrested while peacefully listening to a
speech on the Capitol steps on May 5. President Nixon subsequently praised
Washington police for a "magnificent job" and Attorney General John Mitchell
urged local police [elsewhere] to follow the example. Deputy Attorney
General Richard Kleindienst announced that police procedures had been
justified under the doctrine of "qualified martial law," a constitutional
doctrine which was previously unknown, but which had the virtue, as the
Washington ACLU branch pointed out, of imposing "the conditions of martial
law in fact" while avoiding a "formal proclamation with its legal
requirements." 189
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 03-08-01 MET DST