My posting last night about the FBI infiltration of Common Ground, the New Orleans-based humanitarian/solidarity organization, drove traffic up on my website from about 60 hits a day on January 6 to more than 550 on the 7th.
Most of the hits came from Wired‘s Noah Shachtman, who posted a link to my story on his popular national security blog, Danger Room. The story, and the revelations about this low-life government informer, continue to piss me off.
What the hell was the FBI doing spying on New Orleans activists at a time of complete calamity and in an administration was doing absolute nothing on behalf of the citizens of New Orleans? How dare our internal police send agent provocateurs to disrupt and destroy a humanitarian organization founded by a former Black Panther, staffed by brave and courageous nurses, medical technicians and political activists from around the country, and serving the people in a most fundamental way? What does that say about the Bush administration’s priorities? About the state of our democracy? Not much, in my opinion.
Today one of my co-workers (at a public employees union in DC) remarked to me that he thought Cointelpro – the FBI program to destroy the Panthers and the white left in the late 1960s and 1970s – was over. But apparently it’s not. We need an investigation of the program to send spies into Common Ground and the groups organizing demonstrations against the 2008 Republican National Convention. This was clearly a deliberate program on the part of the Bush administration to break opposition to its policies. It’s a case that demands justice, and truth.
I’m now going through my archives (just obtained from long-term storage) to find my notes on the pathetic spy, Brandon Darby. I may even have him on tape. As he prepares to testify, for the government, at the upcoming trial of two Texan activists, I hope to unravel more about his role infiltrating Common Ground in New Orleans. Meanwhile, check out this interview with the people who exposed Darby on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! show, and another update on Darby from Minnesota’s Pioneer Press/TwinCities.com.
