Why, shades of COINTELPRO!
OK, that was a cheap shot, a blow delivered way below the metaphorical belt. So that I make myself clear, I'll say it bluntly: The Maryland State Police spying on anti-war and anti-death penalty activists in 2005 and 2006 was an offense nothing like COINTELPRO.
Perhaps a brief history lesson is in order. Once upon a time in a happy land called America there lived a man named John Edgar Hoover. John was a patriot. He loved his country, especially after he was appointed director of the FBI.
By the 1950s, John was no longer a happy guy. There were people in his beloved America, he felt, who were out to ruin it. Communists. Socialists. Peace activists. Negroes.
John didn't like one Negro in particular: Martin Luther King Jr. John sent his agents to infiltrate and spy on communists, socialists, peace activists and those Negroes silly enough to think that the Constitution applied to them. John had his minions form the Counterintelligence Program - COINTELPRO for short - to infiltrate various groups.
For some of the black groups, John ordered his agents not only to infiltrate but to disrupt and neutralize. In addition to King, John's favorite target was the Black Panther Party. John's myrmidons used agents provocateurs and informants to create dissension within Panther ranks. Soon there were two Panther factions at war with one another. One eventually became the Black Liberation Army, an organization dedicated to killing cops.
If there's one moral to the little tale told above, one lesson to be learned, it's this: The FBI practically created the Black Liberation Army.
Perhaps that's the price we pay when government agencies go overboard.
What state police agents did to activists a few years ago doesn't quite carry the stench of COINTELPRO, but what they did still stinks. I'm sorry, there's really no kind way to put this.
The anti-war and anti-death penalty activists broke no laws. In fact, they were engaging in constitutionally protected activity. Maryland State Police Superintendent Col. Terrence B. Sheridan didn't address that issue in a statement he released, which Sun reporter Nick Madigan quoted in his article yesterday. That quote should be repeated.
