Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
FBI questioning US Libyans: report
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| An anti-US rally in Manila © AFP Ted Aljibe |
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The FBI is questioning Libyans living in the United States in a bid to identify spies or agents, and obtain information useful for the allied campaign, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The intelligence-gathering campaign also aims to disclosing any potential revenge attacks planned or encouraged by longtime Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi against US citizens, the Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter. But the FBI is not responding to intelligence about any specific plots.
FBI agents, who began their interviews this week, are initially focusing on people with personal or professional ties to Libya, it added, noting early estimates put the number of potential interviewees in the thousands.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is focusing on those Libyans remaining in the United States on visas, people involved in the matter told the newspaper.
Other objectives of the effort allegedly include finding any individuals seeking to gather intelligence in the United States on behalf of Kadhafi and obtaining information about Libya that could help US and allied military personnel involved in the bombing campaign there.
CIA personnel are allegedly already in Libya gathering intelligence about Kadhafi forces and the opposition.
The Journal compared the FBI's Libya campaign to Operation Darkening Clouds, which was launched in 2003 at the outset of the US-led invasion of Iraq. Information was obtained on over 130,000 people for that effort.
© AFP -- Published at Activist Post with license
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut
NOTE: Paul Krassner, for those of you who aren't familiar with him, is the former editor of The Realist and an original member of the "Yippies." He has allowed me to post this excerpt from his book, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut, which chronicles his creative activism and the establishment's (especially the FBI's) reaction to it.
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut is available only at Paul's homepage, where you can watch a 20-minute video of him reading from the book at the Winnipeg Comedy Festival and purchase copies of the Disney Memorial Orgy poster.
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut is also available as an e-book from Amazon Kindle.
Howard Rasmussen was not his real name. Actually, he was an FBI agent working in their New York office. One day in October 1968, he was reading Life magazine. He saw those photos of me – playing basketball in my loft, lying on the floor of an airport – accompanying a rather complimentary profile. Then he sat down at his typewriter, creatively trying to choose every word so carefully that it would reek of credibility, as he composed the following letter to the editor of Life on plain stationery:
Sirs:
Your recent issue (October 4th), which devoted three pages to the aggrandizement of underground editor (?) Paul Krassner, was too, too much. You must be hard up for material. Am I asking the impossible by requesting that Krassner and his ilk be left in the sewers where they belong? That a national magazine of your fine reputation (till now that is) would waste time and effort on the cuckoo editor of an unimportant, smutty little rag is incomprehensible to me. Gentlemen, you must be aware that The Realist is nothing more than blatant obscenity. Your feature editor would do well to read a few back issues of The Realist. Try the article in 1963 [sic] following the assassination of President Kennedy, which describes disgusting necrophilism on the part of LBJ. To classify Krassner as some sort of “social rebel” is far too cute. He's a nut, a raving, unconfined nut. As for any possible intellectual rewards to be gleaned from The Realist – much better prose may be found on lavatory walls. If this article is a portent of things to come in Life, count me out, gentlemen, count me out.
Howard Rasmussen
Brooklyn College
School of General Studies
Before he could be permitted to mail the letter to Life, he was required to send a copy of it to FBI headquarters in Washington, along with this memorandum:
The 10/4/68 issue of Life magazine contained a three page feature on Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist and self-styled “hippie.” Krassner is carried on the RI of the NYO.
Bureau authority is requested to send the following letter to the editors of Life on an anonymous basis. It is noted that the Life article was favorable to Krassner.
Howard Rasmussen was merely doing his job, writing that poison pen letter, but is that how taxpayers' money was supposed to be spent? I had broken no law. The return memo – approved by J. Edgar Hoover's top two assistants, Kartha DeLoach and William Sullivan – was addressed to Mr. Floyd and Mr. Shackelford at the New York office, and stated:
Authority is granted to send a letter, signed with a fictitious name, to the editors of Life magazine. Furnish the Bureau the results of your action.
NOTE: Krassner is the Editor of The Realist and is one of the moving forces behind the Youth International Party, commonly known as the Yippies. Krassner is a spokesman for the New Left. Life magazine recently ran an article favorable to him. New York's proposed letter takes issue with the publishing of this article and points out that the The Realist is obscene and that Krassner is a nut. This letter could, if printed by Life, call attention to the unsavory character of Krassner.
Life magazine never published Howard Rasmussen's letter to the editor. However, they did publish this letter:
Regarding your article on that filthy-mouthed, dope-taking, pinko-anarchist, Pope-baiting Yippie-lover: cancel my subscription immediately!
Paul Krassner
The Realist
There were Howard Rasmussens all over the place. One FBI memo tried to smear Tom Hayden with the worst possible label they could invoke – FBI informer. The FBI distributed a caricature depicting Black Panther leader Huey Newton “as a homosexual,” and ran a fake “Pick the Fag” contest, referring to Dave McReynolds as “Chief White Fag of the lily-white War Resisters League” and “the usual Queer Cats – like Sweet Dave Dellinger and Fruity Rennie Davis.” They always took pains to “Insure mailing material utilized and paper on which leaflet is prepared cannot be traced to the Bureau.” In that context, “Bureau authority was received for New York to prepare and mail anonymously a letter regarding [an individual's] sexual liaison with his step-daughter (Age 13) to educational authorities in New Jersey” where he was a teacher.
In 1969, the FBI's previous attempt to assassinate my character escalated to a slightly more literal approach. This was not included in my own Co-Intel-Pro (counter-intelligence program) files but, rather, discovered elsewhere by Sam Leff. At the Chicago convention, he had erased the line between anthropologist and activist. Later, as a Yippie archivist, he investigated a separate FBI project calculated to cause rifts between the black and Jewish communities. He found this: Julius Lester had allowed a black teacher to read an anti-Semitic poem on his program over WBAI in order to showcase an artistic expression of the outrage behind that point of view. As a result, the station was picketed. The FBI reprinted the poem on a flyer with the photo of a picketer holding a placard reading Do Not Use Jews for Scapegoats. This leaflet was “aimed at individuals of Jewish background active in the New Left and who, until recently, gave open sympathy to Lester's revolutionary ideas.” Then the FBI produced a WANTED poster featuring a large swastika. In the four square spaces of the swastika were photos of Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Mark Rudd of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), and myself. Underneath the swastika was this copy:
LAMPSHADES! LAMPSHADES! LAMPSHADES!
New York radio station WBAI recently featured programs under the tutelage of black revolutionary Julius Lester of the Guardian and Leslie R. Campbell, sometime teacher at JHS 271, from which it appeared that the only solution to Negro problems in America would be the elimination of the Jews. May we suggest the following order of elimination? (After all, we've been this way before.)
*All Jews connected with the Establishment.
*All Jews connected with Jews connected with the Establishment.
*All Jews connected with those immediately above.
*All Jews except those in the Movement.
*All Jews in the Movement except those who dye their skins black.
*All Jews (Look out, Jerry, Abbie, Mark and Paul!)
Once again, this flyer was approved by the FBI director's top aides:
Authority is granted to prepare and distribute on an anonymous basis to selected individuals and organizations in the New Left the leaflet submitted. . . . Assure that all necessary precautions are taken to protect the Bureau as the source of these leaflets.
NOTE: NY advised that Julius Lester, a revolutionary Negro writer for the Guardian, had recently featured one Leslie Campbell, a teacher at a Brooklyn high school, during one of his regular broadcasts over radio station WBAI. During the broadcast, Campbell read a poem which contained anti-Semitic statements. This and other broadcasts by Lester have resulted in organized picketing at WBAI and much comment in the press. NY suggested a leaflet be prepared captioned: “Wanted: by Julius Lester” and containing pictures of several New Left leaders who are Jewish. This leaflet would refer to this broadcast and suggests facetiously the elimination of these leaders. Station WBAI is an ultra-liberal organization which has attacked the Bureau, as well as other Government agencies in the past. NY's proposal would lend fire to this controversy surrounding WBAI and also create further ill feeling between the New Left and the black nationalist movement as Lester is a spokesman of this latter group.
And, of course, if some overly militant black had obtained that flyer and “eliminated” one of those “New Left leaders who are Jewish,” the FBI's bureaucratic ass would be covered: “We said it was a facetious suggestion, didn't we?”
Oh, yes, one other thing. It turned out that J. Edgar Hoover himself was a raving, unconfined nut.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Good News! COINTELPRO Is Back!
COINTELPRO (spook speak for Counter Intelligence Program) was a decades-long operation by the FBI to infiltrate and undermine organizations it saw as subversive to the corporate feudal state. During the 40-plus-year operation, the FBI targeted civil rights groups, women's groups, labor organizations, anti-war groups, environmental groups, congressmen, judges, journalists, celebrities and anyone else it deemed dangerous to its skewed concept of liberty.
The program was exposed when a group of leftist radicals burglarized an FBI field office in Pennsylvania and gave classified documents to the press. The program faced further scrutiny during the Church Committee hearings a few years later. The FBI supposedly ended the program in the wake of these revelations, but as recent activities indicate, it appears COINTELPRO is alive and well.
COINTELPRO or some similar program was probably responsible for the bombing of Earth First! activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. And the FBI continued its surveillance of journalist David Halberstam long after the program had supposedly ended, contributing to speculation that the program continues to this day.
And the recent raids on anti-war activists in Minneapolis and Chicago are clearly part of the same kind of operation, especially considering the efforts of Daniela Cardenas and Karen Sullivan.
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