A break-in to end all break-ins - In 1971, stolen FBI files exposed the government's domestic spying program.

[coderman]

heh, wonder who did it?  wonder if 'The Citizens' Commission to
Investigate the FBI' is an idea whose time has come (back again?)

:P

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-jalon8mar08,0,6893224,print.story?coll=la-home-commentary

A break-in to end all break-ins
In 1971, stolen FBI files exposed the government's domestic spying program.
By Allan M. Jalon
ALLAN M. JALON is a longtime contributor to The Times and other
publications on issues of culture and media.

March 8, 2006

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS ago today, a group of anonymous activists broke into
the small, two-man office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation 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.

The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, as the group called
itself, forced its way in at night with a crowbar while much of the
country was watching the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight. When agents
arrived for work the next morning, they found the file cabinets
virtually emptied.

Within a few weeks, the documents began to show up  mailed
anonymously in manila envelopes with no return address  in the
newsrooms of major American newspapers. When the Washington Post
received copies, Atty. Gen. John N. Mitchell asked Executive Editor
Ben Bradlee not to publish them because disclosure, he said, could
"endanger the lives" of people involved in investigations on behalf of
the United States.

Nevertheless, the Post broke the first story on March 24, 1971, after
receiving an envelope with 14 FBI documents detailing how the bureau
had enlisted a local police chief, letter carriers and a switchboard
operator at Swarthmore College to spy on campus and black activist
groups in the Philadelphia area.

More documents went to other reporters  Tom Wicker received copies at
his New York Times office; so did reporters at the Los Angeles Times 
and to politicians including Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota and
Rep. Parren J. Mitchell of Maryland.

To this day, no individual has claimed responsibility for the
break-in. The FBI, after building up a six-year, 33,000-page file on
the case, couldn't solve it. But it remains one of the most lastingly
consequential (although underemphasized) watersheds of political
awareness in recent American history, one that poses tough questions
even today for our national leaders who argue that fighting foreign
enemies requires the government to spy on its citizens. The break-in
is far less well known than Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon
Papers three months later, but in my opinion it deserves equal
stature.

Found among the Media documents was a new word, "COINTELPRO," short
for the FBI's "secret counterintelligence program," created to
investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the U.S. Under
these programs, beginning in 1956, the bureau worked to "enhance the
paranoia endemic in these circles," as one COINTELPRO memo put it, "to
get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."

The Media documents  along with further revelations about COINTELPRO
in the months and years that followed  made it clear that the bureau
had gone beyond mere intelligence-gathering to discredit, destabilize
and demoralize groups  many of them peaceful, legal civil rights
organizations and antiwar groups  that the FBI and Director J. Edgar
Hoover found offensive or threatening.

For instance, agents sought to persuade Martin Luther King Jr. to kill
himself just before he received the Nobel Prize. They sent him a
composite tape made from bugs planted illegally in his hotel rooms
when he was entertaining women other than his wife  and threatened to
make it public. "King, there is one thing left for you to do. You know
what it is," FBI operatives wrote in their anonymous letter.

Under COINTELPRO, the bureau also targeted actress Jean Seberg for
having made a donation to the Black Panther Party. The fragile actress
ultimately committed suicide after a gossip nugget based on a FBI
wiretap was leaked to the L.A. Times and published. The item,
suggesting that the father of the baby she was carrying was a Black
Panther rather than her French writer-husband, turned out to be wrong.

The sheer reach of a completely politicized FBI was one of the most
frightening revelations of the Media documents. Underground newspapers
were targeted. Students (and their professors) were targeted.
Celebrities were targeted. The Communist Party of the U.S.A., the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Non-Violent
Organizing Committee, the Black Panther Party, the Women's Strike for
Peace  all were targeted. "Neutralize them in the same manner they
are trying to destroy and neutralize the U.S.," one memo said.

Eventually, the COINTELPRO memos  some from Media and some unearthed
later  prompted hearings led by Rep. Don Edwards of California and by
Sen. Frank Church of Idaho on intelligence agency abuses. In the
mid-1970s, the wayward agency began finally to be reined in.

It is tragic when people lose faith in their government to the extent
that they feel they must break laws to expose corruption.

But a war that had been started and sustained by lies had gone on for
years. And a government had betrayed its citizens, manipulating their
fear to strengthen its grip on power.

Today, again, many people worry that their government may be on the
road to subverting its own ideals. I hope that the commemoration of
those unknown activists being held today in Media, Pa., will serve as
a reminder that fighting for democracy abroad must remain more than
merely an excuse to weaken civil liberties at home.
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