Tracked by Spies and Informers

http://gangstalkingworld.com/Media/2010/02/tracked-by-spies-and-informers/

EXCERPTED FROM ABOVE LINK:

By Julia a. Shearson
Friday, May 01, 2009

The February 26, 2009 revelation in the Los Angeles Times that FBI domestic intelligence informant and ex-convict Craig Monteilh and others were paid handsomely to spy on Muslim Americans in their houses of worship in Southern California should come as no surprise. Such domestic intelligence gathering (and associated claims of attempted entrapment, as with Monteilh) has a history in the United States.
The annals of modern domestic surveillance in America are contained in the massive 1976 Church Committee Reports of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The reports, drafted by the Senate in the wake of the Watergate scandal, should have ended domestic intelligence abuses, but in the post-9/11 climate, their warnings and descriptions of crimes against liberty go unheeded. The chapter entitled “The Use of Informants in FBI Domestic Intelligence Investigations” begins:

“Men may be without restraints upon their liberty; they may pass to and fro at pleasure: but if their steps are tracked by spies and informers, their words noted down for crimination, their associates watched as conspirators—who shall say that they are free?”

This quote was borrowed from Sir Thomas May, 19th century author of The Constitutional History of England. May railed against the use of such spying practices by “continental despotisms” and claimed that “the freedom of a country may be measured by its immunity from this baleful agency.”

The Church Reports (available on the Internet) are worth reading in light of the FBI’s consolidation of domestic intelligence powers in the waning days of the Bush administration. The December 1, 2008 issuance of the new investigative guidelines by Attorney General Mukasey was a major step in reconstituting the FBI as the United States’ premier domestic intelligence agency, along with the Department of Homeland Security and the Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

This new post-9/11 domestic intelligence regime—coupled with unchecked power, information technology, lack of congressional curiosity, and lax Department of Justice oversight—has put the Bill of Rights in peril. The FBI cannot both serve the Constitution and get into the domestic intelligence trenches. History proves this.

Take just one investigative tool at the FBI’s disposal, the domestic intelligence informant. The Church Reports note that, “The paid and directed informant is the most extensively used technique in domestic intelligence investigations” and that once the criteria for opening an intelligence case were met, informants could be “used without any restrictions.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, the funding allocated for the intelligence informant program was twice that allocated for organized crime informants. At the height of the civil rights era there were more than 7,400 informants in the Ghetto Informant Program alone.