FBI's Anti-Nazi Training is Hypocritical

By Tim Wise, AlterNet. Posted August 28, 2000.

That I'm no Biblical scholar is an understatement of monumental proportions. And yet, recently I found myself -- for reasons I'll explain shortly -- thinking of the following verse from the book of Matthew, if memory serves:

Why behold the mote in thy brother's eye, but consider not the beam in thine own eye?

Arcane language aside, let it suffice to say this verse has something to do with what we'd now refer to as the "pot calling the kettle black."

Upon reading the headline of my local paper a few weeks ago, I couldn't help but think of these pots, and kettles, and motes, and beams. For there, in black and white was the following:

"Police role in Holocaust added to FBI Agent's training."

According to the article, FBI Director Louis Freeh has implemented new training for Bureau recruits, to "teach of the failure of law enforcement to protect citizen's rights," in Nazi Germany. According to Freeh, the course will demonstrate the evil of law enforcement when it "abandons its mission to protect people," and becomes "an engine of repression."

Applauded by the Anti-Defamation League, the new training takes recruits on a guided tour of the Holocaust Museum and then asks them to write essays on the relevance of the training to their work. One recruit who went through the process explained it had made clear his duty to "preserve human life and protect the civil rights of every man, woman and child."

How nice. Presumably if Hitler ever comes back, this recruit will make sure to stand tall against the impending threat of German fascism, since apparently, that's the only kind worth fretting over, and the only kind capable of teaching the lesson intended here. The pot calling the kettle black, indeed.

One hardly need travel thousands of miles away and a half-century back in time to demonstrate the complicity of law enforcement with repression. Frankly, new FBI recruits would do better to learn about the nefarious history of their own employer, which provides more than enough examples of the same phenomena Freeh seeks to demonstrate.

The new training spends a great deal of time discussing the passivity of German law enforcement in the face of growing repression under the Third Reich. But we needn't look to Hitler's regime for that lesson.

After all, FBI agents were notorious for standing around, watching, and doing nothing while civil rights workers and freedom riders were beaten by racists throughout the South in the 1960's.

Just ask Howard Zinn: he'll tell you how FBI agents looked him in the eye and insisted they had no power to do anything, even as Selma, Alabama police below the Bureau's own window, dragged, beat, and shocked with stun guns those seeking to register black voters.

Or how, in 1964, J. Edgar Hoover waited 37 hours after the disappearance of three other civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi before finally beginning a pathetically weak investigation.

Or how FBI operative, Gary Rowe, rode along with the assassins of Viola Liuzzo, after the Selma to Montgomery march, knowing they planned to kill someone, and yet, did nothing.

And as for the new training's discussion of how law enforcement sometimes takes an active role in repression, here too it's hardly necessary to study German history.

As noted in Michael Linfield's book, Freedom Under Fire, by the late 1920's, the FBI had already compiled an "enemies list" of nearly half-a-million suspected "subversives," and in 1936, even as Hitler was consolidating his power, President Roosevelt authorized the Bureau to spy on organizations considered "dangerous." Four years later, FDR would authorize massive wiretapping by the Bureau, increasing the number of "anti-subversive" investigations to nearly 70,000 annually. From 1947-1952, the FBI conducted roughly 6.6 million "security investigations" of U.S. citizens: about 3000 such actions every day.

And for involvement with direct repression, you can't get much better than the 2,400 or so FBI COINTELPRO operations to "disrupt and neutralize" targeted groups and individuals from the mid-'50-'s to 1971. According to declassified documents and a Senate Committee investigation (about which I doubt FBI recruits are informed), the Bureau actively attempted to discredit and destroy the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and dozens of organizations dedicated to Black, Latino, and Indigenous liberation.

Martin Luther King Jr. may be a revered icon today, but from the early 1960's until his death, the Bureau marked him for political (if not literal) destruction by wiretapping his phones (with the approval of Attorney General and liberal hero Bobby Kennedy), as well as spreading rumors about marital infidelity and sending him letters encouraging him to commit suicide. A month before his assassination, Hoover wrote that there was a need to "pinpoint potential troublemakers" in the black movement, "and neutralize them." William Sullivan -- the agent in charge of the anti-King operation -- told the Senate, "No holds were barred. We've used similar techniques against Soviet agents. We did not differentiate. This is a rough business."

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