Did COINTELPRO Ever Go Away? lyrics

Did COINTELPRO really ever go away? Has Washington always maintained a covert spying apparatus for citizens who dissent—or even question the prerogatives or power? Recent revelations suggest that citizens who challenge power structures are kept tabs on, even threatened.

Anyone familiar with the civil rights struggle knows that the FBI’s COINTELPRO surveilled, threatened, and even killed those who challenged white power. Even Dr. Martin Luther King was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. On the day after King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, a top FBI official issued this in a memo:

    ”In light of King’s powerful demagogic speech yesterday...we must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.”

A full spying operation followed: bugs in King’s hotel rooms and his home. His phone was tapped. The FBI captured audio of King’s sexual indiscretions and used it as blackmail to encourage the civil rights hero to kill himself.

COINTELPRO’s exposure in 1971, and the resulting Church Committee ruling, put pressure on the FBI, and Hoover declared an end to the massive spying operation.

But how, then, do we explain rapper Talib Kweli’s detainment at an airport for no other reason than his listening to civil rights firebrand Stokely Carmichael, once named as one of the most dangerous men in America in COINTELPRO doc*ments? How did the authorities know what he was listening to?

”They probably had some sort of bug or some sort of tap or something...they’re looking at me because I’m listening to this speech from forty years ago.”

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WE BREAK DOWN KWELI’S ACCOUNT OF THE EPISODE HERE.
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And how do we explain journalist Jeremy Scahill being contacted by the those at the very top of the military command for his investigative work on then-unknown drone strikes and JSOC activity? Scahill recounted the call to Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman:

    ”[He] wouldn’t tell me how he got my cell phone number, wouldn’t tell me who told him about the story—this is hours from publication—and told me that if we publish the story in the Nation that I would be, quote, on thin ice. That was a direct quote.”

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WE BREAK DOWN SCAHILL’S ACCOUNT OF THE CALL HERE.
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