When
most Americans think of domestic terrorism, they probably think about
the Oklahoma City bomber, white supremacists who wallow in Nazi
nostalgia, racists who spray gunfire in black churches and lone-wolf
psychopaths like the one who murdered at least 59 people in Las Vegas on
Oct. 1.
Not the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It’s thinking outside that narrow box.
In a report that was never supposed to be made public, but was on Oct. 6 by foreignpolicy.org, the F.B.I.’s Counterterrorism Division has concluded that there is a real threat from the “black identity extremist” movement.
It
said “Black Identity Extremist (BIE) perceptions of police brutality
against African Americans” has been responsible for “an increase in
premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and
will very likely serve as justification for such violence” in the
future.
Wait, what exactly is black identity extremism? The answer is: nothing.
It’s a fiction, as others have powerfully argued, including Andrew Cohen, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice.
But that doesn’t make the report any less sinister. As Cohen pointed out, the
F.B.I. has a “history of surveillance and intimidation of black
Americans that frequently goes beyond legitimate law enforcement into
paranoia, racism, and political expediency.”
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The F.B.I. document
takes pains to say that the mere exercise of constitutional rights to
protest and even the “rhetorical embrace” of violent tactics “may not”
constitute extremism. But the danger — or even the aim — is that the
entire racial justice movement gets painted with the brush of terrorism.
The
next time there is an act of violence by an African-American against
police officers, brace yourself for the right-wing media or the attorney
general or the tweeter in chief to seize on the phrase “black identity
extremists.”
It has already happened. Fox News obligingly used videotape of Black Lives Matter protests as the backdrop for its credulous account of the report after it was published.
The
report inevitably draws comparisons to the notorious Cointelpro
operations against black activists in the last century. But it would be
unfair to say the F.B.I. has not made any progress since J. Edgar Hoover
ordered the agency to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise
neutralize” what he called “black nationalist hate-type organizations.”
The language of the new document is more cagey. But the sentiments are chilling.
The
report “conflates black political activists with dangerous domestic
terrorist organizations that pose actual threats to law enforcement,”
the Congressional Black Caucus said in a letter asking for a meeting
with the F.B.I.
“It
relies on a handful of obviously terrible incidents to paint black
Americans who exercise free speech against witnessed police brutality as
possible violent extremists,” the letter said. (It was referring to six
cases since 2014 in which the F.B.I. said the black identity menace was
behind attacks on police officers, including the reprehensible shooting
of 11 police officers, five of whom died, in Dallas on July 7, 2016.)
The
F.B.I. draws a line from the killing by a police officer of Michael
Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 to all those other cases and warns of a
“surge” in ideologically motivated violence against the police.
The
report also draws a line from the activists of the ’60s and ’70s to the
“extremists” of today. The black threat, it said, had simply been
dormant.
There is no such connection. The F.B.I. failed even to make any real connection among the six incidents it cited.
The
authors of the report act as though there is doubt about the
institutional racism in our country and in some police forces. (I am not
saying all white police officers are racists.)
The
F.B.I. document talked about “perceived injustices against
African-Americans” — perceived by anyone who is really paying attention.
The
counterterrorism division said it “considered” the possibility that
violence against the police is not driven by their phantom B.I.E.s but
decided that was “very unlikely.”
Fifty
years ago, Hoover’s F.B.I. spied on civil rights leaders, including
Martin Luther King Jr. It forged letters to create friction between
rival black-power movements, which led to a shooting at the University
of California in Los Angeles in 1969 that left two dead. Undercover
police officers were responsible for framing 21 Black Panthers for a
fake bombing conspiracy in New York in 1969.
The list goes on and on.
There
is a slippery slope between this kind of intelligence assessment and
acts of repression. The F.B.I. has slid gleefully down that slope
before. It must not be allowed to do so again.
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