What the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, related intelligence agencies and police organizations did covertly to U.S. citizens in the past, the recently passed US PATRIOT and Homeland Security Acts have made legal. As Africans in America we have never enjoyed the freedoms whites boast about in their propaganda rhetoric, but the truth be told neither have Dick and Jane Sixpack. Reviewing the findings of the Church Committee Reports on Intelligence Activities which included COINTELPRO and domestic CIA activities against U.S. citizens (which were illegal but put in play by President Richard Nixon) we discover Big Brother, a euphemism for the police state has been alive and kicking for quite some time. 

Some black folks are familiar with COINTELPRO which was a federal and state government campaign to disrupt destabilize and undermine the black community. Looking at the FBI's own documents you can see the campaign was not just aimed at radical organizations such as the Revolutionary Action Movement, The Black Panther Party for Self Defense or The New Republic of Africa but organizations such as Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s SCLC and the NAACP. The targeting of our community ran the gamut of illegal mail openings, electronic surveillance, infiltration, disruption, smear campaigns, intimidation and harassment, to frame ups to government ordered assassinations. (Type in COINTELPRO or Church Committee Report on your Internet search engine browser and peruse what comes up) 

During the reign of COINTELPRO people of color bore the major brunt of the FBI's covert program. But, white dissidents, radicals and labor unions were targeted also, albeit not with the same lethal ferocity and intent as we were. That was then, today it's a whole different ball game. After 9-11 the Bush cabal effectively brow beat and intimidated most dissent (only Democratic leaders and Tom Brokaw received anthrax laced letters!) and pushed through legislation that rather than preventing or minimizing terrorism, have made the same government activities that were denounced in the Church Committee Report in 1976 legal! Big Brother has been revived and is stronger than ever under the guise of anti-terrorism, public safety and domestic security. 

Whereas under Hoover and the presidents he served, the targets were people of color, dissidents, revolutionaries, visionaries and true lovers of freedom, the new draconian measures passed by a fascist leaning Bush administration (fascism being defined as an autocratic, repressive, rabidly racist nationalistic, militaristic and imperialistic regime) every citizen is a target, one to be watched, spied upon and coerced into doing its bidding. 

White AmeriKKKa is in for a rude awakening. The worst nightmares of the Militia groups, civil libertarians and defenders of the pre New World Order white supremacist lifestyle may soon come true. If the masses don't wake up, galvanize their resources and initiate a counter offensive the fascists will soon implement their plan to restructure AmeriKKKa into a police state that would make Hitler and Stalin blush with envy. Under the guise of making AmeriKKKa safer, of providing protection and security which they dismally failed to do on 9-11 (and for which not one intelligence director, general, or cabinet official has been reprimanded or fired) they now have cunningly given themselves even more power to snoop, spy on, arrest, detain and incarcerate ordinary citizens when they couldn't or elected not to use these powers to prevent 9-11. 

We are used to police power abuses, we know how COINTELPRO and government sanctioned drug smuggling and sales have destabilized our communities and left us more vulnerable to disorganization and attack. The recently passed Homeland Security Act makes it easier for Big Brother to eavesdrop on innocent citizens and violate the Bill of Rights white folks hold so dear in the name of national security. As our ancestors used to say, "what goes around comes around.".    

POSITIVELY BLACK

30 December 2002