RSN: A Short History of US Law Enforcement Infiltrating Protests

04 June 20

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A Short History of US Law Enforcement Infiltrating Protests

Ryan Grim and Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
Excerpt: "It is a historical fact, as this episode illustrates, that law enforcement frequently infiltrates progressive political movements using agent provocateurs who urge others to engage in violence. It is also a historical fact that, more rarely, such provocateurs commit acts of violence themselves."

hen Harry, George, Tom, and Joe showed up at a warehouse outside Philadelphia rented by protesters, organizers were immediately suspicious. The men claimed to be “union carpenters” from the Scranton, Pennsylvania, area who built stages — just the kind of help the protesters needed. They were preparing for the Republican National Convention in 2000, where the party would be nominating George W. Bush. Across the country, allied organizers were planning similar protests for the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.

One of the hallmarks of the social justice movement at the time was its puppets. Organizers were coming off successful protests in Seattle in November 1999 against the World Trade Organization, and in Washington, D.C., in April 2000, against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and had managed to reshape the politics of globalization. Soaring papier-mache puppets, rolled through the streets on individually constructed floats, projected a festive air, capturing sympathetic media coverage and countering the authorities’ narrative that the protesters were nihilists simply relishing in property destruction.

The four carpenters were good with a hammer, but much about them had protesters wary they were in fact infiltrators. In conversation, “they were not very political or well informed,” recalled Kris Hermes, an organizer, in “Crashing the Party,” his memoir of the affair. They were older and more muscular than most protesters, he wrote, and they insisted on drinking beer while working, despite the organizers’ ban on drinking in the warehouse. In discussions and meetings, they asserted the right of protesters to destroy property and to physically resist arrest. The movement’s intentional lack of hierarchy left organizers with little ability to act on their suspicions of infiltration, even as they were becoming more deft at sussing out such provocateurs.

On August 1, the first full day of the Republican convention, police surrounded the warehouse, known as the “Ministry of Puppetganda,” executed mass arrests, and confiscated the puppets, floats, signs, and other materials to be used in upcoming marches. The police lied, publicly saying that organizers had been planning violent demonstrations and hinting darkly at bomb-making materials being hidden in the warehouse. That roundup presaged other mass arrests of protest leaders throughout the week, followed by beatings inside the jail and even a $1 million bond.

When the warrant for the warehouse raid was unsealed, it finally confirmed that Harry, George, Tom, and Joe had been state troopers assigned to infiltrate the group and produce a pretext for a raid. All of the charges against the puppeteers were eventually dropped, and the saga would eventually cost the city millions in lawsuit settlements (with much of the legal work led by radical attorney Larry Krasner, who is now Philadelphia district attorney).

It is a historical fact, as this episode illustrates, that law enforcement frequently infiltrates progressive political movements using agent provocateurs who urge others to engage in violence. It is also a historical fact that, more rarely, such provocateurs commit acts of violence themselves.

The media pays little attention to such infiltrators, for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, corporate media has never taken much enthusiasm in questioning government action in the midst of riots or major demonstrations, unless that action goes wildly over the line or targets members of the media. The subject of provocateurs is also fraught  from the perspective of protesters and movement organizers, as it can lead to paranoia that undermines solidarity and movement building. It is often conflated with the trope of “outside agitators” and used by authorities or other opponents of the protesters to delegitimize the anger on display, giving some protesters or their supporters an incentive to downplay the reality of the provocations.

The intensity of the conversation around protests that turn violent, and the life-or-death consequences of winding up on the wrong side of public opinion, leaves little room for a nuanced discussion. Were such a conversation possible, it would be easy to talk about the difference between the anger of a crowd and the actions it ultimately takes. An angry crowd that remains nonviolent and engages in zero property destruction is no less legitimately angry than one that does. Often the only difference is in whether and how the anger is triggered and escalated.

In protests across the country over the past week, the clear actor escalating the violence generally hasn’t been a protester or even a right-wing infiltrator, but the police themselves. In rally after rally, people have observed that looting and destruction only began after police charged and beat a crowd, or fired tear gas or rubber bullets into it. In other cases, it can take just one act by a protester to light the spark. Given the chaotic nature of the protests, it’s probable that everyone being blamed for property damage has played some role. But as the protests continue, and President Donald Trump calls for ever more violent methods of repression, the possible role of police provocateurs in protests is worth bearing in mind.

In 2008, Francesco Cossiga, one of the most important political figures in post-World War II Italy, provided a rare glimpse behind the curtain at how the world looks to people at the top of governments facing large-scale protests.

Cossiga had served as prime minister and then president of Italy. Before that, in the late ’70s, he led the Ministry of the Interior. During that period, he was notorious for the brutality with which he put down left-wing demonstrations led by students. This is how the New York Times reported the situation in 1977: “Extremists among the students have created chaos in a number of Italian cities with a wave of shooting and destruction.”

As Silvio Berlusconi’s administration faced similarly threatening protests, Cossiga urged them to rerun his playbook:

[They] should do what I did when I was interior minister. … Pull back police from streets and colleges, infiltrate the movement with provocateurs ready for anything [emphasis added], and for ten days let protesters devastate shops, burn down cars, and set cities aflame. Then, emboldened by popular support … police should have no mercy and send them all to the hospital. Not arrest them, because prosecutors would just free them right away, but beat them all and beat the professors that encourage them.

The Times appears to have mentioned the possibility that government provocateurs were behind some of the violence once — and then not as fact, but as an accusation of “leftwing parties and newspapers.”

Cossiga had been a professor of constitutional law and was a centrist Christian Democrat. When he became prime minister in 1979, Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to Italy saw this as an “excellent development,” and Cossiga maintained a strong relationship with America. There is no direct line between Cossiga and today’s protests in the U.S. But his example indicates that it’s no fevered conspiracy theory to believe reasonable, reputable figures see provocateur tactics as legitimate — even if most of them are more circumspect in public.

The best documented use of provocateurs by the U.S. government occurred during the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counter-Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, from 1956 to 1971. The reason the documentation is available is because a group of citizens broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania — coincidentally, just a short drive from the warehouse targeted by police in 2000 — and stole files that they then passed to the media. This, in turn, led to congressional investigations, which pried loose more information.

In one notorious example in May 1970, an informant working for both the Tuscaloosa police and the FBI burned down a building at the University of Alabama during protests over the recent Kent State University shootings. The police then declared that demonstrators were engaging in an unlawful assembly and arrested 150 of them.

In another well-known case, a man nicknamed “Tommy the Traveler” visited numerous New York State colleges, posing as a radical member of Students for a Democratic Society. He encouraged acolytes to kidnap a congressman and offered training in Molotov cocktails. Two students at Hobart College acted on his suggestions and firebombed the campus ROTC building. Eventually it came out that his full name was Tommy Tongyai, and he had worked both for local police and the FBI.

The list goes on and on from there. A John Birch Society member turned FBI informant helped assemble time bombs and placed them on an Army truck. An FBI informant in the radical political organization Weather Underground took part in the bombing of a Cincinnati public school. A prominent member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War — and FBI informant — pushed for “shooting and bombing,” and his advocacy apparently did indeed lead to a bombing and a bomb threat. An FBI informant in Seattle drove a young black man named Larry Ward to a real estate office that engaged in housing discrimination and encouraged him to place a bomb there; the police were waiting and killed Ward. Thirteen Black Panthers were accused of a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty after receiving 60 sticks of dynamite from an FBI informant. After 28 people broke into a federal building to destroy draft files in 1971, an FBI informant bragged, “I taught them everything they knew.” All 28 were acquitted when his role was revealed.

The FBI also allowed informants within right-wing organizations to participate in violence against progressive activists. Gary Thomas Rowe, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in 1960, provided the FBI with three weeks warning that the Klan was planning attacks on Freedom Riders arriving in Alabama from the north. The FBI stood by and allowed the attacks to occur. Local police gave the Klan 15 minutes to assault the activists. In those 15 minutes, the white supremacists — including Rowe — set the Freedom Rider bus on fire in an attempt to burn them alive.

Rowe may also have played a role in the infamous 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls. He was in the car with three other Klansmen in 1965 when they chased down and murdered Viola Liuzzo, a mother of five from Detroit who’d traveled to Selma. Rowe received immunity for testifying against his compatriots, and was given a job as a U.S. Marshall by Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general.

Local police informants without apparent connections to the FBI got into the act too. A deputy sheriff enrolled as a student at SUNY Buffalo and helped students build and test bombs. Another informant posed as a student at Northeastern Illinois State College, led sit-ins for Students for a Democratic Society, and encouraged compatriots to sabotage military vehicles.

Soon after COINTELPRO was uncovered in 1971, the FBI announced that it was halting all such activities. Mark Felt, the assistant FBI director now also known to be the infamous “Deep Throat” source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, later said that the bureau had made no effort to see that “constitutional values are being protected.”

When and whether the FBI ever stopped, however, is an open question. In 1975 an informant told the New York Times that he had engaged in COINTELPRO-like activities until he’d left the previous year. This included encouraging a Maoist group to blow up a bus at the 1972 GOP convention in Miami.

In any case, police forces in the U.S. continued the same tactics. In 1978, an undercover officer encouraged two hapless young activists to seize control of a television tower in Puerto Rico. When they arrived, they were gunned down by 10 policemen. Tellingly, when Puerto Rican government asked the FBI to investigate what happened, the FBI gave the government a clean bill of health. A top FBI official later called this a “coverup.”

After 9/11, the FBI got back in the business of encouraging violent acts in a big way — although they were generally much more careful to step in before the violence actually occurred. When journalist (and Intercept contributor) Trevor Aaronson examined U.S. prosecutions for international terrorism in the decade after the attacks, he found five examples of actual plots. By contrast, 150 people were indicted in sting operations that existed only thanks to the encouragement of the FBI and its informants. According to Aaronson, “the FBI is much better at creating terrorists than it is at catching terrorists.”

The same tactics have been used to generate purported domestic terrorism plots. In 2008 environmental activist Eric McDavid was sentenced to 20 years in prison for plotting to damage the Nimbus Dam in California. Eight years later, a judge ordered him released because the FBI had withheld evidence regarding a government informant. In 2012, the FBI and its informant essentially created a plot to blow up a bridge in Cleveland out of whole cloth, and dragged five Occupy activists into it.

Most recently, the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division invented something called the “Black Identity Extremism” movement. As portrayed by an FBI report, the threat from the imaginary movement reads as strikingly similar to that allegedly posed by black organizations during the days of COINTELPRO. The National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives said this “resurrects the historically negative legacy of African American civil rights leaders who were unconstitutionally targeted and attacked by federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.”

That brings us to the present day. On the one hand, this history doesn’t mean that the FBI or local police are currently acting as provocateurs during the current unrest. But it does mean that such activity is clearly one avenue that is open to U.S. police forces looking to undermine protests and escalate violence.

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“He was, from the beginning, trying in his humblest form to show he was not resisting in no form or way,” said Maurice Lester Hall. “I could hear [Floyd] pleading, ‘Please, officer, what’s all this for?’” Hall recounted. “He was just crying out at that time for anyone to help because he was dying... I’m going to always remember seeing the fear in Floyd’s face because he’s such a king. That’s what sticks with me, seeing a grown man cry, before seeing a grown man die.” Hall, 42, was reportedly arrested Monday on outstanding warrants on felony possession of a firearm, felony domestic assault and felony drug possession. But Hall said, after his arrest, he was questioned for hours by a Minnesota state investigator about Floyd’s death—not about his outstanding warrants.

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Social Media Is Making Racial Trauma Worse. The DSM Needs an Update.
A.T. McWilliams, Slate
McWilliams writes: "I don't know if my struggle with anxiety began before or after a police officer shouted 'Keep your hands where I can see them!' as he pulled alongside my parked car."

I only know that the following months were filled with sleepless nights, including many spent replaying every sound from the incident: the whoop of the siren—shrieking as it spun in red flashes; the slam of the police car door as the officer approached my window; and the bark of his criminalizing question, “What are you doing in this neighborhood?” 

Just when I thought my restless routine was done after so many weeks, I’d close my eyes and see four angry furrows etched into the officer’s forehead. Then, I’d feel sweat drip down mine as I recalled the way his fingers trailed his belt—inching closer to his pistol grip as he waited for my trembling reply: “I live here, officer. I live right across the street.” 

By the time I watched George Floyd shout “Momma!” as the suffocating knee of a Minneapolis police officer dug into his neck, I was well aware of why some days I couldn’t sleep through the night, or I didn’t want to leave bed, or I’d lost my appetite, or I couldn’t focus at work, or I felt a stabbing pain in my stomach every time I scrolled through Twitter. 

To many Americans, news of Floyd’s death simply marked another viral police killing—tragic, but like most trending topics, fleeting and inconsequential. But for me, and black people across the United States, every tweet, headline, and image sharing news of Floyd’s murder builds into a daily deluge of trauma—flooding our psyche, leaving us afraid to drown. 

I’ve felt this pain each of the several times I’ve been racially profiled by the police. And more commonly, I’ve felt it with each traumatic post I’ve read about Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, David McAtee, and other innocent black people who lost their lives at the hands of the police. 

This familiar pain is a symptom of black people’s shared post-traumatic stress disorder—a uniquely American epidemic, 400 years in the making. And as viral police killings force black Americans to repeatedly endure secondary trauma—or the emotional stress that results from witnessing the trauma of others—this country must reckon with not just its policing crisis, but also the hidden cost: the unjust spread of a black American stress disorder that is undiagnosed, untreated, and—in the age of social media—ubiquitously spread. 

While secondary racial trauma is still a nascent research topic, firsthand experiences with racism have long been proven to cause higher rates of PTSD for people of color as compared with white people. It should come as no surprise that black people, who are the most likely victims of police violence and hate crimes in America, are also most likely to live with this mental illness. 

Following Michael Brown’s death, researchers began surveying Americans to understand the national impact of viral police killings, and proved their measurable impact on the black American psyche. According to one 2018 study in the Lancet, about half of the black Americans surveyed had been exposed to one or more police killing of an unarmed black person in their state in the previous three months. According to this research, black Americans are exposed to two additional poor mental health days each year due to this police violence. That is 55 million poor mental health days per year collectively, not far from the mental health impact of chronic diseases like diabetes. Conversely, white survey respondents experienced no discernible mental health impact after being exposed to news of unarmed black people killed by police officers. 

While white Americans can typically endure news of police brutality unscathed, black Americans are forced to tend to wounds many of their co-workers or friends may never see, including those that grow to become anxiousness or depression. 

The wounds you cannot see are always the slowest to heal. And in this case, they reopen every time black Americans learn of one of the hundreds of black people killed by police each year—many of whom are memorialized as trending topics across Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, transforming social media into a boundless source of secondary traumatic stress. 

“We already know that engaging in social media, whether it’s race related or not, yields higher rates of depression and anxiety,” Riana Anderson, a professor at the University of Michigan who focuses on black mental health, told me. “This is especially true for black children, who face far more discrimination than other young people on the internet.” 

Anderson described research released earlier this year showing that black adolescents experience discrimination five times every day—compounding the secondary trauma of seeing innocent black people die on film. When I asked Anderson how black people across ages should care for their mental health following a death as widely broadcast as Floyd’s, her advice was simple: “Stay away from social media.” She continued: “We’re at war right now. And just like in war, your body must do what it can to protect itself from the environment. Survival is the goal, so you must focus on being psychologically well.” 

While millions of traumatic headlines, images, and videos fill social media feeds each minute, the American Psychiatric Association has yet to qualify such distressing content as a diagnosable cause of PTSD. According to the APA’s fifth Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the effective bible of psychiatric diagnoses, secondary trauma as caused by electronic media shared outside of the workplace is not a sufficient determinant of PTSD. But many black psychiatrists across the country are demanding that social media’s endless deluge of brutalized black bodies be taken into account. 

“Such a stipulation just doesn’t make sense for the black experience in America,” said Danielle Hairston, a psychiatrist at Howard University and the president of the APA’s Black Caucus. Hairston compared media-based distress to witnessing loss in your own family. “If every day, you’re seeing a video of someone who looks like you—someone who could be you or your family member—murdered or beaten, what’s the difference between that and you experiencing it in your own family?” 

Since 2015, Hairston and her colleagues have urged an update to the DSM-5 that recognizes such traumatic media exposure and called for cultural sensitive treatment for media-based retraumatization. She has also encouraged the provision of community resources for patients following viral police brutality, supports that rarely reach black communities—even for the black adults who are diagnosed with a mental illness, only 30 percent receive treatment compared to 49 percent of white Americans. 

All corners of society should be identifying ways to equitably bolster the mental health of black people right now. Company leaders should offer paid time off for their black employees, and if possible, offer free or subsidized counseling for them and their families. Schools, whether they serve young children or adults, should create spaces for black students to gain mental health support and treatment. 

Without treatment, the anxiety and depression borne from PTSD risks transforming into anger, sometimes righteous and useful and sometimes not. As James Baldwin put it in words that have in recent weeks—like the images of George Floyd’s murder—spread across Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook: “to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time.” 

Those who tweet or post Baldwin’s quote often omit the following critical sentence of the passage. The challenge of that anger is  “how to control that rage so that it won’t destroy you.” 

Baldwin’s sagely reflection on rage is meaningless without his subsequent call for self-preservation. In the war against racial injustice, our mental health is our greatest armor. If we want to do good, we must be well. 

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There is likely more carbon dioxide in the air now than at anytime in 3 million years

According to readings from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the amount of CO2 in the air in May 2020 hit an average of slightly greater than 417 parts per million (ppm). This is the highest monthly average value ever recorded, and is up from 414.7 ppm in May of last year.

Carbon dioxide levels are the highest they’ve been in human history, and likely the highest in 3 million years. The last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere, global average surface temperatures were significantly warmer than they are today, and sea levels were 50 to 80 feet higher.

The continuing rise in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere may sound surprising in light of recent findings that the coronavirus pandemic, and the associated lockdowns, had led to a steep drop in global greenhouse gas emissions, peaking at a 17 percent decline in early April.

But the total amount of CO2 that winds up in the atmosphere is driven not only by human emission levels, but also through processes on the land surface (especially forests) and in the oceans that fluctuate on a yearly basis.

According to a Scripps news release announcing the findings, CO2 emissions reductions on the order of 20 to 30 percent would need to be sustained for six to 12 months in order for the increase in atmospheric CO2 to slow in a detectable way.

“The buildup of CO2 is a bit like trash in a landfill. As we keep emitting, it keeps piling up,” said Ralph Keeling, who directs Scripps’s carbon dioxide monitoring program, and whose late father, Charles David Keeling, began measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in 1958.

“The crisis has slowed emissions, but not enough to show up perceptibly at Mauna Loa. What will matter much more is the trajectory we take coming out of this situation,” he said.

The rate of increase of this long-lived greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is accelerating.

In the 1960s, the annual growth rate was about 0.8 ppm per year. It doubled in the 1980s, and eventually climbed to 2.4 ppm per year during the past decade. Multiple lines of evidence show the cause of this increase is greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, said Pieter Tans, who leads NOAA’s Carbon Cycle Greenhouse Gases Group.

The Scripps researchers found the average atmospheric CO2 concentration for May 2020 was 417.16 parts per million. Using different calculations than the Scripps team, NOAA researchers found the peak monthly value was slightly lower, at 417.1 ppm.

The annual high typically occurs in May before CO2 levels temporarily ebb as trees and plants in the Northern Hemisphere absorb vast quantities of the planet-warming gas during the summer growing season. Though CO2 levels exhibit a seasonal cycle, the overall upward trend is clear.

The rate of increase from last May to this May was slower than it was in the comparable to 2018 to 2019 period, but natural factors such as El Niño events in the tropical Pacific Ocean and changes in terrestrial carbon sinks, such as forests, can have a large influence on this from year to year, Tans said.

El Niño events can contribute to drought and extreme heat in large areas of the world, Tans says, noting they can weaken the ability of forests and other lands to soak up carbon dioxide, leading to a higher natural contribution to atmospheric CO2 levels.

The combination of record fossil fuel use and mild El Niño conditions between May 2018 and 2019 can explain the above average increase in atmospheric CO2 of 3.5 ppm that year.

Wildfires and deforestation can add to the increase in atmospheric CO2 as well, though their influence ultimately is overwhelmed by the global burning of fossil fuels.

According to Rob Jackson, an emissions expert with Stanford University and the Global Carbon Project, emissions from wildfires were up in 2019 and 2020, contributing to the May peak, as was Brazil’s land emissions due to deforestation and burning.

This year’s May CO2 peak marked an increase of about 2.4 ppm compared with a year ago. The 2010 to 2019 average rate of increase is precisely the same at 2.4 ppm per year, according to NOAA. The decline of El Niño during the past year may help explain why the increase in the last year was not as large as the previous, Tans said.

Because atmospheric levels of CO2 are cumulative, they will continue to increase until net emissions are cut to zero. They will not decrease until human activities and natural ecosystems are removing more greenhouse gases than is going into the air.

Molecules of CO2, a global warming agent, can remain in the atmosphere for up to 1,000 years.

Scientists warn that we’re on course to reach 450 ppm by mid-century, where levels would need to stop increasing to have a decent chance of meeting the goals in the Paris climate agreement, which seeks to limit climate change to well below 3.6 degrees (2 Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2100.

Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech, says the new findings underscore the need to act now. “It is a reminder that climate change is not on pause in any way, shape or form,” she said.

Keeling says it would take a sustained drop in emissions, rather than a sudden decline related to the coronavirus pandemic, to show up more clearly in measurements of atmospheric CO2. “What really matters here is setting a new trajectory,” he said.

Jackson, who conducted the analysis of emissions declines due to the pandemic with colleagues from the Global Carbon Project, said the findings are not surprising given how the planet’s carbon cycle works.

“This result is disappointing but expected in an atmosphere that is both big and variable,” he said via email.

“We estimated that fossil carbon emissions dropped 8 percent [during] January through April, from 12 billion metric tons in 2019 to 11 billion in 2020,” he said. “A billion tons is a lot, but not so much that we can find it with statistical confidence in a noisy signal.” 

It’s important not to take the wrong message from the current finding, Jackson emphasized. “We shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that the effect of covid-19 on emissions is trivial or that climate progress is impossible. It isn’t. Short-term changes in anything are hard to detect in something as big as the atmosphere.” 

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