FBI Abuse: The Dossiers (5/10/95) By Jeff Cohen & Norman Solomon As the White House pushes to expand FBI powers, some press reports are sounding cautionary notes -- usually vague allusions to the FBI's history of harassing political groups and movements. Although President Clinton says stepped-up FBI infiltration will help prevent violence, the record shows that FBI spying has actually abetted violence. Here are a few of the horrifying details: DICK GREGORY: In 1968, the activist/comedian publicly denounced the Mafia for importing heroin into inner cities. Did the FBI welcome the anti-drug, anti-mob message? No. Head G-man J. Edgar Hoover responded by proposing that the Bureau ''alert La Cosa Nostra to Gregory's attack'' in order to ''neutralize'' the ''rabble-rousing Negro comedian.'' FREEDOM RIDERS: In 1961, black and white civil rights workers boarded interstate buses in the North and headed south in an effort to desegregate buses nationwide. The FBI learned that when the freedom riders reached bus depots in Alabama, the state police were going to give the Ku Klux Klan ''15 uninterrupted minutes'' to beat activists with baseball bats, clubs and chains. The bureau allowed the violence to occur; activist Walter Bergman spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, partially paralyzed. MARTIN LUTHER KING: For years, the FBI used spying and infiltration in a relentless campaign to destroy King -- to wreck his marriage, undermine his mental stability and encourage him to commit suicide. The bureau created dissension among King's associates, disrupted fund-raising efforts and recruited his bookkeeper as a paid agent after learning the employee was embezzling. The FBI used ''media assets'' to plant smear stories in the press -- some insinuating that King was a Soviet agent. One FBI media asset against King in the early 1960s was Patrick Buchanan, then an editorial writer in St. Louis. King was hated and regularly threatened by white supremacists and extremists -- but the FBI developed a written policy of not informing King about threats to his life. Why? Because of his ''unsavory character,'' ''arrogance'' and ''uncooperative attitude.'' PETER BOHMER: For months in the early 1970s, this economics professor and other antiwar activists in San Diego were terrorized -- with menacing phone calls, death threats and fire-bombings -- by the Secret Army Organization, a right-wing paramilitary group. On Jan. 6, 1972, gunshots were fired into Bohmer's house, wounding a friend. After a bombing months later, a trial revealed that Howard Barry Godfrey, co-founder of SAO in San Diego and one of its most active and violent members, had all along been a paid FBI informant. Godfrey testified that he had driven the car from which the shots were fired; afterward, he took the weapon to his FBI supervisor, who hid it. BLACK PANTHER PARTY: Some critics are denouncing the new movie ''Panther'' as an anti-FBI fantasy. But the hard facts about the FBI's war on the Panthers were published in 1976 by the Senate Intelligence Committee chaired by Frank Church. Using paid infiltrators and faked documents, the bureau routinely tried to goad militant groups and street gangs to commit violence against the Panthers. In Chicago, the FBI forged and sent a letter to the Blackstone Rangers gang leader saying the Panthers had a ''hit'' out on him. The bureau's stated hope was that he ''take reprisals against'' the Panther leadership. In Southern California, the FBI helped instigate the murders of four Panthers by a rival political group. CENTRAL AMERICA ACTIVISTS: Many recent news accounts say that FBI abuses pretty much ended with J. Edgar Hoover's death in 1972 and that the Bureau has been in check since the Justice Department issued new guidelines in 1976. Not true. FBI disruption of lawful dissent has continued -- though the terminology has changed from ''counterintelligence'' (COINTELPRO) to ''counterterrorism.'' During the 1980s, groups critical of U.S. intervention in Central America were spied on and disrupted by the FBI. Political break-ins occurred at churches, offices and homes -- and material from the burglaries ended up in FBI files. In the guise of monitoring supporters of foreign terrorists, the FBI compiled files on religious groups and thousands of nonviolent anti-intervention activists. The investigation produced not a single criminal charge. At the center of this spying was FBI official Oliver Revell. Today, Revell (now retired) makes the rounds of TV news shows, complaining that the FBI is too hamstrung to track terrorists. But the FBI has always had the power to infiltrate terrorist groups. The problem has been the bureau's diversion of resources to monitor and harass activists whose only ''crime'' was working for social change. -- Jeff Cohen is executive director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Norman Solomon is co-author of ''Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the News Media.'' Colombia: Where Terrorism Rules (5/3/95) By Jeff Cohen & Norman Solomon In the painful aftermath of the Oklahoma City tragedy, news coverage has gone to great lengths to convey the humanity of victims and the grief of survivors. As a result, the emotional realities of terrorism now seem much more real to Americans. What would it be like to live in a country where terrorists struck with impunity on a regular basis, matching the Oklahoma death toll every few weeks? And what if most of the nation's terrorists -- rather than reviling the government -- were actually aligned with the government, or even part of it? That's the situation in Colombia, where political killings total 4,000 a year, in a South American nation of 33 million people. If a similar proportion of the population were dying from political violence in the United States, that would add up to about 600 people killed by terrorism every week. When U.S. media outlets mention the Colombian carnage, it's usually in stories blaming drug traffickers for the bloodshed. Yet, as journalist Ana Carrigan pointed out this spring in the magazine Report on the Americas, ''the media's single-minded obsession with drugs'' has gotten in the way of telling the truth. Out of 25,491 politically linked killings of noncombatant Colombian civilians during the last eight years, less than 3 percent of the murders were related to the drug trade, according to the Andean Commission of Jurists. Twenty-nine percent of the deaths were attributed to left-wing rural guerrillas and urban insurgents. Contrary to the impression left by U.S. media accounts, Carrigan reports, nearly 70 percent of the political murders with identified perpetrators ''have been committed by the Colombian army and police, or by paramilitary groups and privately financed death squads operating in partnership with state forces.'' In effect, the partnership extends to Washington -- which keeps sending U.S. taxpayers' money to the Colombian government, despite its grisly record: Each year, hundreds of Colombian children -- many of them poor street kids -- are killed by death squads engaged in ''social cleansing.'' Human Rights Watch charges that young people arrested by police are regularly beaten, raped and tortured with electric shocks. Special army units also torture children, viewing them as ''potential informants on their parents.'' ''Political cleansing'' goes on daily. In November 1992, for example, eight children associated with a nonviolent, progressive Christian group were massacred in Medellin. The accused include members of a U.S.-trained police intelligence squad. After a skirmish with guerrillas near Trujillo a few years ago, soldiers and police rounded up dozens of suspected civilian ''sympathizers'' in the town. Their mutilated bodies were later found floating in a river. Some had been burned with blowtorches, others had limbs amputated with a chain saw. Paramilitary groups murdered more than 100 labor unionists in Colombia last year. The U.S. media's favorite plot line -- pitting Colombia's noble authorities against nefarious drug traffickers -- fits in well with rationales for U.S. government aid, providing Colombian police with about $ 18 million annually. Iaddition, Colombia has been a top Latin American buyer of military equipment from the United States; last year's purchases were in the neighborhood of $ 73million. Nine months ago, Manuel Cepeda -- a senator leading the left-wing opposition -- was gunned down on a Bogota street. A paramilitary group, calling itself ''Death to Communists and Guerrillas,'' quickly claimed responsibility. Government investigators have tied the murder to Fidel Castano, a well-known paramilitary chieftain, named on seven current arrest warrants related to massacres. Yet, he continues to move freely between Colombia and his apartment in Paris. In the United States, media attention to Colombia's political violence is sparse -- and skewed. ''The news coverage is completely inadequate because it always seems to focus on so-called drug-related violence,'' says Mario Murillo of the Pacifica radio network's New York station WBAI, who has reported frequently from Colombia. ''The U.S. aid is supposedly used, and justified, in the name of combating drugs,'' Murillo told us. But ''a majority of U.S. aid is actually being used to combat the guerrillas and the civilian... sectors struggling for social change.'' Most of the victims of Colombian terrorism are peaceable civilians - brutally murdered as surely as the victims in Oklahoma City. No less than the people we have seen so often on our TV screens in recent weeks, their loved ones are left behind to weep and to mourn. But the circumstances of such grief are off the media map. Daniel Ellsberg: Vietnam Hero (4/19/95) By Jeff Cohen & Norman Solomon When media commentators get tired of passing judgment on Robert McNamara, some might get around to remembering a man who stood next to him, looking out a window of the defense secretary's office -- as thousands of anti-war protesters below lay nonviolent siege to the Pentagon on Oct. 21, 1967. By then, McNamara now says, he had decided that the war was unwinnable. But what about the man who stood next to McNamara that Saturday afternoon long ago? We've searched through hundreds of mainstream media articles about the current uproar over McNamara's new book. Only a few even mention Daniel Ellsberg. Yet, it would be logical -- and illuminating -- to compare the two men. A quarter-century ago, Ellsberg did what McNamara was never willing to do: denounce the war during its murderous frenzy. In June 1967, McNamara ordered a detailed internal review of U.S. policy-making on Vietnam -- but he insisted on secrecy for the results (which documented a pattern of government deception). Ellsberg, who had been a Department of Defense policy analyst and speech writer for McNamara, leaked ''The Pentagon Papers'' to the press in 1971. McNamara subjugated conscience. Ellsberg took heed. McNamara risked nothing. Ellsberg risked many years -- perhaps the rest of his life -- in prison on federal espionage charges. McNamara went on to a prestigious new career as president of the World Bank. Ellsberg moved on to a path of civil disobedience and other forms of nonviolent resistance against the military establishment he had served. While McNamara was finishing his memoirs in the early 1990s, Ellsberg was launching ''Manhattan Project II'' -- an effort to bring about worldwide nuclear disarmament, putting him at odds with U.S. policy. And this month, while McNamara shuttled from one TV network studio to another, Ellsberg was busy organizing a ''Fast for Commitment to Abolish Nuclear Weapons'' -- now under way as the United Nations holds a 26-day non-proliferation conference. (Fasters are urging a ''global effort to delegitimize and to ban, under international inspection, the possession of nuclear weapons by anyone.'') When Robert McNamara discusses the lessons of Vietnam, he seems pathetic -- and still rather clueless. He asserts that his mistakes were ''not of values and intentions but of judgment and capabilities.'' Like many present-day pundits, McNamara bemoans that Washington persisted in an ''unwinnable'' war. Ellsberg has struggled to come to terms with the moral lessons of the Vietnam War. He is clear: The war would have been just as wrong if it had been ''winnable.'' Both men have prodigious intellects. But McNamara remained emotionally bottled up and ethically paralyzed. That's why it's so infuriating to hear him talk. In contrast, our conversations with Ellsberg have brought into focus not only past courage but also a marvelous ongoing spirit. Ellsberg does not evade the past, nor does he live in it. He sees every new day as an opportunity to create a better future. Yet, even now, mass media rarely publicize Ellsberg's views. Perhaps that's because of a shortage of journalistic fortitude in matters of war and peace. The media's rage toward McNamara these days seems fueled in part by media aversion to self-examination -- as if the more that journalists vent their anger at McNamara, the more they can let themselves off the hook. In recent weeks, you'd get the impression that the American press led the nation's moral revulsion during the war in Vietnam. No way. The national media were gung-ho for years. In early 1968, a Boston Globe survey of 39 major American daily papers found that not one had taken an editorial position in favor of U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. After U.S. soldiers massacred 300 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in March 1968, nearly a dozen major print and TV outlets suppressed the evidence and photos of the blood bath for well over a year -- until a small, independent news service released the information. This month, the media outrage in response to McNamara's book has largely accepted a key premise that made the press so supportive of escalating the Vietnam War in the first place: If the war could be won, it should be fought. Pundits are now furious that McNamara knew the war couldn't be won and didn't say so at the time. Apparently, this country hasn't advanced to the point where -- winnable or not -- the Vietnam War is seen as wrong, wrong, wrong. No wonder the news media are giving us so much from Robert McNamara, and so little from Daniel Ellsberg. Maybe not much has changed, after all. -- Jeff Cohen is executive director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Norman Solomon is co-author of ''Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the News Media.'' The published version was slightly shorter.