COINTEL-NO
In political circles, the words “Church Committee” invoke the image of a federal law enforcement apparatus drunk on power and paranoia, bent on imploding some of the civil and racial justice that we’ve come to broadly revere today, including the efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The committee, chaired by Idaho Sen. Frank Church, put out a series of reports in 1975 and 1976 detailing federal three letter agencies’ many covert activities, including disastrous misadventures in Central and South America like the overthrow of democratically-elected Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973.
Yet for many Americans, the most chilling findings were those involving the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, which infiltrated and co-opted domestic political and social movements. It seems now like COINTELPRO’s specter never fully dissipated, as new reporting in The Intercept details how the FBI paid an informant — a convicted felon with a history of violence against women — to join Denver’s racial justice movement during the George Floyd 2020 police brutality protests, take on a leadership role, sow division by accusing other leaders of being informants, and fan the flames of violence.
Perhaps most damningly, informant Mickey Windecker and an undercover officer unsuccessfully tried to entice two local racial justice leaders to sign onto a plot to kill Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, a shocking terrorism plot that no one except the two people on the federal payroll pushed for. Windecker is also credited with organizing some of the violence that marred the otherwise First Amendment-protected activity.
From combatting the Ku Klux Klan and other violent terrorist outfits to fighting organized crime, federal and local law enforcement relies on informants and infiltrators. But the good guys — and those working secretly for them — should not be trying to engineer the very circumstances they’re supposed to be preventing.
Creating crimes to entrap the targeted groups can backfire and also has a chilling effect on protected speech. We have words for countries where government agents actively disrupt domestic political organizing, and none of them are good.