Deep Throat and COINTELPRO

I have several books on COINTELPRO and their papers relating to the Black Panthers and Native-American dissident groups. Noam Chomsky writes briefly on Deep Throat and COINTELPRO, a program that in my experience few still know about:

The fact that you hadn’t heard of COINTELPRO—and that there isn’t a word about it in the current “Deep Throat” coverage—tells us quite a lot about the dominant moral and political culture.

COINTELPRO was a program of the national political police, carried out through four administrations, with a very wide range of targets… ranging in methods up to direct political assassination. It was formally terminated after it was exposed in the courts in the early 70s.
Someone in [Mark aka “Deep Throat”] Felt’s position surely knew about it. I have no idea what he was involved in, and don’t see that it matters much. Responsibility went right up to the White House, through four administrations.

COINTELPRO was vastly more significant than Watergate, which was a tea party in comparison. The difference is that Watergate was annoying to powerful people, who struck back, while COINTELPRO targeted people who were weak, vulnerable, dissident, and in other ways remote from centers of power. Therefore anything done to them passes without concern among those who matter. As we have seen for 30 years, and see right now.

If you are unaware of COINTELPRO, the Wikipedia sez:

COINTELPRO is an acronym (’COunter INTELligence PROgram’) for a program of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. Although covert operations have been employed throughout FBI history, the formal COINTELPRO operations of 1956-1971 were broadly targeted against organizations that were (at the time) considered to have politically radical elements, such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to organizations whose stated goal was the violent overthrow of the US government such as the Weathermen, to racist and segregationist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The document that launched the COINTELPRO operations against Black groups directed FBI agents to “track, expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities” of these dissident movements and their leaders.

It is interesting to note that the existence of COINTELPRO was uncovered by one of the most prolific dissident groups in the modern era, The Weather Underground, the “self-described ‘revolutionary organization of communist men and women’ formed by splintered-off members and leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).”