Chapter 1-The Rise of the Police State
Chapter 3 –COINTELPRO
Chapter 4 — Universal Public Surveillance
Chapter 5 — Other Surveillance
Chapter 6 — Searching for Anarchists, or Maybe Just Political Activists
Chapter 7 — Winning the Information War
Chapter 8 — Arbitrary and Unaccountable Law Enforcement
Chapter 9 — The Militarisation of the Police
Chapter 10 — Occupy Wall Street
Chapter 11 — Intimidating the Media & Subverting the Press
Chapter 12 — The Short Road: Democracy to Fascism
Chapter 13 — The Next American Revolution? Anticipated Civil
Chapter 2 -- The FBI
Police State America - Volume One free e-book
Most people, including most Americans, are surprised to learn of the history of the FBI’s involvement in monitoring and disrupting peaceful, dissident activity in the United States. This agency has a long history dating back to the 1950s of mass surveillance, of targeting of people based on political ideology, of efforts to disrupt the movements for social justice, for efforts to shut down black liberation movement, the antiwar movement. Despite its fabricated image as America's highest-level police force, the FBI has always functioned primarily as America's political police force, with a responsibility to undermine and destroy any political developments that would challenge the existing order. The FBI has for the best part of a century operated as the secret police of the elite establishment against the people, similar to the political police forces in any repressive fascist state, and engaging in all manner of illegal acts which often included murder. It has developed to an art the techniques of performing "sting" and entrapment operations. Its agents have on countless occasions planned and initiated acts of terrorism and violence through the use of dissidents they had cultured and trained, often infiltrating opposing groups, inciting them to violence, and providing them with weapons and explosives. The Church Congressional Committee produced documentation of the White House use of the FBI or previous agencies for the purpose of political repression as far back as 1920, with these practices continuing into the present, and by the 1970s and 1980s there were countless revelations about the abuses of the FBI, the CIA, and other security agencies.
J Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigaton, (right) and his associate, Clyde Tolson at the Joe Louis and Jack Sharkey fight at Yankee Stadium, New York on 18th August 1936. This image is from the files of the United States National Archives. (Photo by Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)
The FBI has always been willing to use false claimsand false charges to eliminate real or imagined political threats. The Director of the FBI, Edgar J. Hoover, once wrote that "The purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt(political enemies) and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge." One needn't have been dangerous or threatening to attract the attention of the FBI; it was often sufficient to be politically objectionable in some way. Many political dissidents in the US have been killed, with many more framed and convicted for crimes of which they were innocent, spending decades in prison. Countless numbers of political activists were simply neutralised through a long list of illegal tactics. The record of these activities is long and frightening; there has been little the FBI would not do to prevent American citizens from engaging in unapproved political activity.
The FBI has a long history of having people imprisoned and even executed on flimsy or false evidence, many of whom have been proven innocent in later years. The Washington Post reported in 2013 that authorities had known for years that flawed forensic work by FBI examiners had led to convictions of innocent people, but FBI officials had never investigated the cases. This has been a repeated pattern for the agency. Multiple problems of false convictions have appeared several times in the past, usually when whistle-blowers revealed the problems to the media. Very recently, the Department of Justice began an unprecedented review of old criminal cases and found many in which FBI "experts" convicted innocent people by using exaggerated scientific testimony. In one case, a Supreme Court stayed the conviction of a man only hours before he was to die by lethal injection. He had been convicted on FBI testimony of a double homicide, but evidence of his innocence that had been hidden by the FBI surfaced at the last moment.
Federal prosecutors in DC have in recent years increasingly acknowledged that "errors by an elite FBI forensic unit" led to wrongful convictions, many of those wrongfully convicted having spent 25 or more years in prison before being cleared. One of the difficulties in re-opening these cases is that too often the original evidence somehow 'disappeared' when challenged, requiring other forms of modern testing necessary to prove innocence. There are now thousands of these questionable convictions being re-examined, almost all of them originating from the early 1980s and onward, false FBI convictions being yet another part of the Great Transformation. More than that, for decades the justice system refused to release information as to which convictions relied on the potentially-tainted evidence of this 'elite FBI forensic unit'.
This saga of tainted FBI prosecutions is resembling the auto recalls by General Motors - increasing by the week, with no end in sight. In 2014 it was revealed that nearly every FBI criminal case examined by the Justice Department included flawed or fraudulent forensic testimony. It was so bad that the massive examination of past cases that was mandated by the Justice Department was put on hold by the FBI because it was simply incapable of facing the vast extent of past manipulation and illegality. It required a year of increasing pressure by the Justice Department to re-commence the investigations, which revealed that almost every single FBI case reviewed, covering the past at least 20 years, was hopelessly tainted. And contrary to FBI claims of a 'rogue examiner', this has proven to be a systemic weakness infecting the entire justice system in America.
In May of 2014, Clyde Haberman wrote an article in the NYT detailing how the FBI's vaunted crime lab had convicted countless thousands of innocent people on supposed 'scientific' evidence that has now been proven false. A 2009 Report by the National Academy of Sciences found "serious problems" with methods routinely relied on by prosecutors and the police that included fingerprinting, blood typing, weapons identification, shoe print comparisons, handwriting, bite marks and hair testing. DNA has now been added to the list. One non-profit group specialising in freeing those wrongly convicted has succeeded in hundreds of false DNA matches alone. As far back as 1997, the FBI's own inspector general reported that the bureau’s crime lab was often sloppy. "Technicians were found to have exaggerated the reliability of their findings beyond the bounds of science, typically slanting their conclusions in the prosecution’s favor. A forensics expert who used to work in the federal lab, claimed there was "absolutely a disconnect between what I could say as a scientist and what the prosecutors, or the defense attorneys, wanted me to say". In 2012, the FBI reached an understanding where it agreed to "stay within the confines of known science", and is examining several thousand old cases to determine if faulty lab evidence played a role in guilty verdicts. It appears so far that innocence is proven in about half of all old cases subject to new DNA testing.
Newly-released documents show that the FBI has consistently targeted all political activist groups for surveillance, typically categorising them as criminal, subversive or terrorist. Groups devoted to such diverse activities as animal rights, promoting bicycle lanes, or complaining of increases in electricity rates, have been infiltrated, spied upon, labeled as subversive anarchists, and often threatened, intimidated and arrested. One group protesting the Iraq war was designated as an anarchist white supremacist group and therefore dangerous to the nation. Many individuals have been included in a nationwide US terrorist database, for just such activities. The list of tactics and dirty tricks engaged in by the FBI over many decades, is astonishing to non-Americans and could never exist in a civilised nation. Americans are misled into believing that because one of them can make disparaging political comments without apparent state censure, this applies to the entire nation. But if that one person's views surface in the public realm and begin to gain traction, the full brutal power of the state will quickly descend. Ask Martin Luther King.
When the FBI took a dislike to a person, they would do any or all of the following: they would spread derogatory information and circulate vicious false rumors to the victim's family, friends and business associates, often by planting false information in the media. They would send anonymous letters containing death threats or accusations of marital infidelity; they would bully and frighten employers into firing their victims, or coerce landlords into evicting victims from their homes or places of business. The FBI specialised in having the IRS perform spurious tax audits and prosecuting fictitious violations. They would often interrogate a victim and his associates, making their interest publicly known, so as to intimidate the victim and destroy his reputation. They would intimidate groups into cancelling speaking invitations by political activists and would often arrest and prosecute these people on fabricated charges. The FBI performed vast numbers of illegal wiretaps and surveillance activities on victims and their associates, often threatening them, and more than occasionally would physically assault activists, sometimes causing serious injuries. And they were well-known for breaking into their victims' homes and offices and vandalising the premises. All of these were commonly done to intimidate dissidents or truth-tellers into silence, and to destroy them if they could not be silenced. In addition to their own actions, FBI agents would often make use of impressionable people who could be used as dupes to further the agency's work. They would incite these people to forcefully disrupt meetings, infiltrate peaceful demonstrations and turn them violent, attack local police, and often perform bombings and other acts of violence.
Martin Luther King friend and photographer was FBI informant. Ernest Withers, who was trusted by civil rights leader to sit in on strategy meetings spied on black activists and white radicals. Source
Since the early days of Edgar J. Hoover, theFBI has been notorious for compiling lists of names and histories to accompanythose names, all having proven useful for various acts of intimidation, blackmail and extortion. Today,the FBI receives much local competition from the NSA, especially in the areas of extortion and blackmail of public figures and politicians, but still seems to have the lower-level terrorists all to itself. One of its more despicable activities is entrapping or setting up individuals to commit crimes - in circumstances where they would never have done so on their own - only so it can arrest them for doing so. But much worse, it appears to have developed a habit of doing domestically within the US what the CIA and the NED do so proficiently outside the US - searching out radicals and extremists, inciting their passions, inflaming their emotions, funding them, providing them with arms and explosives and encouraging them to commit various acts of violence or terrorism, in service of the state. One judge stated that "Only the government could have made a ‘‘terrorist' out of" a person charged in her courtroom. There have been a great many of these sting operations conducted during the past 10 or 12 years, and no small number prior to that time.
The situation has become so uncontrolled that when the FBI claims to have stopped 50 terrorist acts in recent years - as they did claim - it was proven that 49 of them were fabricated, and the 50th was trivial. It now seems that virtually every "terror" case in the US in recent years has had the FBI’s fingerprints all over it, including the Boston Marathon 'bombing'. "According to the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved an FBI sting operation. The FBI typically uses informers or dupe agents to establish relations with these people and act as messengers to carry out the FBI sting. The informers are often criminals or ex-criminals who participate because they are seeking leniency on criminal charges and hope to avoid prison or obtain a reduced sentence. They encourage and assist others to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI and, under the FBI’s guiding hand, they provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism." I won't reproduce a list here; a quick internet search for "FBI entrapment" will tell you most of what you need to know.
According to an article published in the New York Times on April 28, 2012, titled, "Terrorist Plots, Hatched by the FBI": "The United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years - or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.
But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested." And further, "The FBI has for many years mounted carefully orchestrated sting operations or 'entrapment', where even individuals with no apparent predisposition to commit a crime are induced to do so by US government agents. They seek out susceptible individuals and set traps for them, encouraging and inciting them to commit acts of violence, and then arresting these dupes on charges of terrorism when they attempt to carry out these acts. Often, they find people whose only 'crime' would appear to consist of comments made in a public chat room."
*Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
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