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The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret War Against Domestic Dissent

a book by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall.


Preface - The Face of COINTELPRO
Guide to the Documents
Introduction: A Glimpse Into the Files of America's Political Police
1. Understanding Deletions in FBI Documents
2. COINTELPRO - CP, USA
3. COINTELPRO - SWP
4. COINTELPRO - Puerto Rican Independence Movement
5. COINTELPRO - Black Liberation Movement
6. COINTELPRO - New Left
7. COINTELPRO - AIM
Conclusion: COINTELPRO Lives On Preface - The Face of COINTELPRO

In many ways, the stark unwillingness of the federal government to accord Leonard Peltier even a modicum of elementary justice is symbolic of the entire AIM experience during the 1970s and, more broadly posed, of the U.S. relationship to American Indians since the first moment of the republic. The message embedded, not only in Peltier's imprisonment, but in the scores of murders, hundreds of shootings and beatings, endless show trials and all the rest of the systematic terrorization marking the FBI's anti-AIM campaign on Pine Ridge, was that the Bureau could and would make it cost-prohibitive for Indians to seriously challenge the lot assigned them by policy-makers and economic planners in Washington, D.C. The internal colonization of Native America is intended to be absolute and unequivocal.
.......
In 1953, just prior to the passage of PL-280, Felix Cohen, one of the foremost scholars of Indian law compared the role of the Indians in America to that of the Jews in modem Germany. He noted that, "Like the miner's canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison air in our political atmosphere ... our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall of our democratic faith." 213 Given that all that happened on and around Pine Ridge occurred long after COINTELPRO allegedly became no more than a "regrettable historical anomaly," 214 Cohen's insight holds particular significance for all Americans. In essence, if we may ascertain that COINTELPRO remained alive and well years after it was supposed to have died, we may assume it lives on today. And that, to be sure, is a danger to the lives and liberties of everyone.
7. COINTELPRO - AIM