Editing Police Statism (section)

====[[File:COINTELPRO.png]] COINTELPRO====

[[File:COINTELPRO.png]] COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert and illegal projects actively conducted from 1956 to 1971 by [[File:FBI.png]] Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic American political organizations the FBI deemed subversive and a threat to national security. COINTELPRO was organized by the founder of FBI, J. Edgar Hoover who had by 1956 become increasingly frustrated by U.S. Supreme Court decisions that limited the Justice Department's ability to prosecute people for their political opinions, most notably communists. This lead to him initiating covert "dirty tricks" program under the name COINTELPRO with the original purpose of disrupting CPUSA and keeping close tabs on individuals with communist sympathies such as [[File:Chaplin.png]] Charlie Chaplin. COINTELPRO soon expanded to target a plethora of other organizations and movements which included [[File:Fem.png]] feminist organizations, [[File:Hippie.png]] The New Left and the anti–Vietnam War movement, and most notably the civil rights movement and [[File:Blacknat.png]] Black Power movement. Among the black activists and civil rights leaders targeted by COINTELPRO were [[File:Socneocon.png]] Bayard Rustin, [[File:MLK_Jr.png]] Martin Luther King Jr., [[File:MalcolmX.png]] Malcolm X, [[File:BlackMarxism.png]] Fred Hampton, [[File:Angela Davis.png]] Angela Davis, [[File:AntiRacism.png]] Viola Liuzzo, [[File:Mediastocracy flair.png]] Jessica Mitford, among many other. 

Every US President from the 1950s-1971, [[File:Ike.png]] Dwight D. Eisenhower, [[File:JFK.png]] JFK, [[File:Lyndon B. Johnson.png]] LBJ, and [[File:Nixon.png]] Richard Nixon was complicit in FBI's illegal activities to a certain extent and Attorney General [[File:RFK_Sr.png]] Robert F. Kennedy personally authorized some of the programs.

The program was secret until 1971 when the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI burgled an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, using the boxing match known as the Fight of the Century between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in March 1971 as a cover to pull off the heist, took several dossiers, and exposed the program by passing this material to news agencies.