Below is an accurate statement of my personal COINTELPRO experiences except that “Maria” is a fictional name. The original letter was sent separately to all members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. We received no answers from any of them.
From 1989 onward, we sent similar letters to our California senators and representatives. Some did not reply. Others sent non-responsive replies. No one offered any sincere help. Recently, there has been talk in the House of a new COINTELPRO investigation. We can write letters to encourage this proposed investigation. However, it is very unlikely that we can persuade elected representatives to meet their responsibility to us. Only public pressure can force a new COINTELPRO investigation.
We need an organized effort to bring our story to the public in an attempt to arouse public pressure, which can force congressional investigation. This will require the work of many people. I can tell you what to do, but I cannot do all the work for you. We need volunteers with writing and editing skills to work on this major project. Let me know if you can contribute.
I do not recommend that you write letters and send them to anyone at this point. I do recommend that you prepare letters following the guidelines below. They should be reviewed and edited by people who understand what is needed and who can edit them to conform them to the standards that I have set. Good editing is of crucial importance. It is counterproductive to send letters that sound confused and unbelievable.
THINGS TO AVOID:
Avoid repeating my words. Restate your experiences in your own words. Your words may be similar to mine, but we don't want it to appear that you are copying a form.
Avoid going into detailed descriptions of complex experiences. Describe your experiences in the kind of general terms that I have used.
Avoid speculating about the reasons why you were targeted unless you have good reason to believe that you were targeted for political reasons. I will prepare a general explanation of what is behind these operations. I don't want conflicting personal theories in the statements.
I cannot do the editing of statements by myself, but I can lead a team of editors if there are volunteers who will do the basic work.
Bob S bobsdewtell@gmail.com
SAMPLE STATEMENT
The Hon. John Smith
House of Representatives
Washington, DC
Dear Rep. Smith:
I am writing to ask for your help in seeking a new investigation of present-day COINTELPRO operations. These illegal and unconstitutional forms of government agency harassment and crime are rampant today.
Contrary to popular belief, the Church Committee investigations of 1976-78 did not end these covert forms of government persecution of citizens. No legislation was enacted to provide effective oversight or to provide future COINTELPRO victims with any effective remedies. None of the proven government criminals was prosecuted or fired. So the same COINTELPRO operations have continued to the present day.
Our personal experiences are proof that the evil of COINTELPRO lives on today in forms even more vile and destructive than what the Church committee uncovered. We are in touch with other victims who have similar COINTELPRO experiences.
Many of our COINTELPRO experience demonstrate capabilities that could only belong to a government intelligence agency. Other COINTELPRO experiences demonstrate the typical COINTELPRO modus operandi.
These COINTELPRO experiences began for me in 1954 as the result of my activism against McCarthyism while in college. The same experiences began for Maria in 1971. Here is a summary of our personal experiences with COINTELPRO forms of harassment and crime:
Access to our mail: Interception of our most important letters coming and going; long delays in delivery; and tampering with the contents of our mail. We have written dozens of letters of complaint and made dozens of oral complaints about 14 years of mail interference. Neither the postal inspectors nor any postal officials will deal honestly or realistically with the facts. Their evasive, unrealistic responses have caused us to believe that they must know the truth about continuous postal crimes committed against us with the consent of postal officials.
Ability to access the contents of shipments via UPS, Federal Express, Airborne Express, etc., without leaving any evidence of opening the packages. We find clear and unmistakable evidence of tampering and sabotage to the contents of packages delivered by these carriers but no sign of the packages having been opened. The FBI has the capability to open and reseal letters and packages so perfectly that the opening cannot be detected.
Ability to access the contents of safe deposit boxes that we rented at four different locations. They did this repeatedly at each location, taking things from the boxes and putting things in the boxes to let us know that they had been there and that we could not have safety for our personal belongings anywhere. Employees denied that our boxes had been entered.
Ability to enter our apartment and cars at any time without breaking in. We continually see evidence of illegal entries for harassment purposes, not investigative purposes. To let us know that someone has been in our apartment, things are moved from one place to another; cigarette butts and chewing gum are dropped on the floor; human excrement was once left in a waste paper basket. Items having great personal value to us and no value to anyone else are stolen. Evidence and documentation of harassment activities are stolen. We recently discovered the theft of approximately 40 VHS cassettes taping from C-SPAN of House and Senate Judiciary hearings relating to the FBI. Our medications have been openly tampered with and sometimes undetectably altered to produce very noticeable effects. Maria was taking a medication just before going to bed. Sometimes she couldn't sleep all night. Other times she slept so soundly that she had difficulty awaking on time to get to work and felt drowsy all day. The same thing was happening to her dog. Sometimes the dog stayed awake all night walking around the bedroom. Other nights the dog was so unconscious that Maria could not awaken it, and it continued to sleep through the morning. I was sometimes drugged unconscious just after drinking from an open beverage in the refrigerator. Twice I was taken to the emergency room because of apparent poisoning. The FBI budged $23 million in 1993 for r&d to enable it "to defeat modern electronics-based locking systems and the largest multi-laser technologies." (See 1993 FBI Budget request to the White House Office of Management and ``Budget, pp 4-5.) Now you know what they have been using the money for. Any lock that we can put on an apartment door is useless. Our tax dollars are used to pay for the development of state-of-the-art government burglary technology to be used in committing crimes against us.
Ability to know things that we say or do within the "privacy of our home" by means of electronic surveillance devices. This has been proven to us by harassment operations possible only through a knowledge of things that we say in our apartment and an ability to find things of personal value which we have hidden in places that would normally take hours to find. They have entered the living room during the day while we were in other rooms. They steal and are gone in an instant. We know that they have been there when we return to the living room and find something missing that was there minutes earlier. They could only do this by having surveillance equipment to tell them when we are away from the living room. They show us that they are able to watch us in every room at any hour of the day or night.
Ability to keep our phones tapped and to hear our conversations on calls from pay phones. They have demonstrated this capability by arranging harassment requiring use of information that could only be obtained by hearing our phone calls. It makes no difference if we go to a pay phone. The FBI has the capability to tap pay phones instantly. No court order is needed for this or for any other illegal act. The FBI does whatever it has the technological capability to do. It has never been concerned about the illegality of its acts because there has never been anyone to investigate or prosecute its crimes. We get frequent harassing phone calls. Changing numbers doesn't help. Having Pacific Bell put on a three week phone trap stops the harassing calls for those three weeks. As soon as the trap is taken off, the harassing calls resume. The harassers know when the trap is put on and taken off.
Availability of unlimited numbers of people to harass us in various ways. For years they openly followed us and approached us to start strange conversations. When we went to a deserted park area to have a picnic, one person after another came to settle at a point near us until they had us surrounded in a circle. No one else was in sight, but we were surrounded. Every time we went to a coffee shop, someone with a book would come to sit at a table within earshot, order coffee, and pretend to read. This routine was repeated continuously for months to make it appear that we were always under surveillance. If we went to a pay phone, someone would come to stand close enough to hear what we were saying. This was a blatant show of false surveillance purely for harassment. We never saw the same person twice. They showed us that they had an unlimited number of people available to keep repeating the same harassment operations.
Police participation. Local police have traditionally done whatever the FBI has asked them to do. They have become a part of the COINTELPRO machine. They cover up COINTELPRO crimes and sometimes participate in COINTELPRO harassment. For years, we saw police cars always present wherever we went. When Maria was living alone, police cars followed her openly and obtrusively on the streets. She took some Polaroid photos of the cars and took a photo showing a police car license number to the police station to complain about police harassment. The next time that she went to the park where she often walked her dog, approximately 10 police cars showed up and parked just outside the park. Soon afterward, the Polaroid camera and the photos of police cars were stolen from Maria's apartment. West Hollywood police gave me a ticket for parking on a hill without my wheels curbed. I saw several other cars parked without their wheels curbed but with no tickets. I kept the ticket and later started to write a letter complaining about discriminatory ticketing as police harassment. I intended to enclose a copy of the ticket, but before I could finish the letter, the ticket was stolen from the apartment. On one occassion, four police officers awoke Maria in the middle of the night by pounding loudly on her apartment door. They claimed to be looking for someone at her apartment number but at a different street address which did not exist. Police refused to investigate our reports of continuous burglaries.
Ability to obtain cooperation by employees of private business organizations in harassment operations. This might be accomplished by using FBI clout to request cooperation from business managers in harassment operations disguised as legitimate FBI investigative operations. It might be accomplished by bribing employees to participate in harassment without the knowledge of management. The FBI has unlimited funds to pay anyone to do anything. They can get people in any business organization to cooperate.
Ability to alienate friends and relatives through false accusations or false evidence used to create false negative beliefs about us. Friends and relatives suddenly broke off long relationships for no apparent reason or for reasons that made no sense. They tried to destroy my relationship with Maria by planting legal documents harmful to me with our signatures forged on them.
We have no direct proof of responsibility of a specific federal intelligence agency for the COINTELPRO forms of crime and harassment that we experience. It is impossible for the victims of covert government operations to prove responsibility. This is why investigation of COINTELPRO operations by congress is essential in order to determine responsibility and to provide remedies to citizens who have no legal means available to protect themselves against COINTELPRO forms of secret persecution.
Although we cannot prove responsibility of a specific federal agency or of specific government officials, we know that our experiences are typical of the COINTELPRO forms of crime and harassment which were originally developed and carried out by the FBI developed under J. Edgar Hoover and which this agency has been using for more than 50 years against thousands of innocent citizens.
The motive for the covert war against us is consistent with the motive for the covert wars waged by the FBI against innocent citizens throughout its history. Asserting constitutional rights or opposing activities and policies have been reasons for secret government retaliation against thousands of innocent American citizens.
A vast amount of information on this subject is available on the Internet. A Google search for "COINTELPRO" will produce hundreds of thousands of links with documentation of experiences similar to ours. Much of it is historical, but there is substantial evidence of the continuation of COINTELPRO operations to the present day.
The situation since 9-11 has produced extreme infringement on personal liberty. COINTELPRO operations such as we describe are the worst form of government abuse. These illegal and unconstitutional, covert government operations deserve your immediate attention and your serious investigation. We can provide you with much more detailed information about our personal experiences with COINTELPRO harassment and crime.
We are asking you and your colleagues to study information and documentation which we can provide to prove the truth about our long experience with these secret wars by government against innocent citizens. We are asking you to investigate responsibility for these wars and to take the necessary action to bring the wars to an end. We are asking you to restore to us and to all citizens the freedom and the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
Please tell us that you intend to meet this responsibility.
Sincerely yours,
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