Lynching Ward Churchill: Critics Now Charge He's A Government Agent!

[Itsthetruth]

CounterPunch
February 24, 2005

Lynching Ward Chuchill
Witchhunts to the Right; Witchhunts to the Left
By FRED FELDMAN

The attacks on Churchill are filled with vague and sinister references to COINTELPRO. As someone who was involved in a suit against the government around the COINTELPRO operations against the Socialist Workers Party (which I belonged to at the time), I read a lot of COINTELPRO documents and lots of court testimony about them.

And I am struck by the resemblance between the charges and factional attacks on Churchill and the content and style of these FBI campaigns to divide and disrupt struggles for progressive social change and democratic rights by setting people up with rumors or "evidence" about their being agents, baiting about racial purity, and so on.

In part, the FBI learned the art of "putting a snitch jacket" on a targeted individual (portraying them as a government agent), and the "tabloid expose" literary style of attack from the Communist Party. Under the influence of Stalin, the Communist Party from the late 20s,and for decades thereafter, tended to accuse all who disagreed including suspected dissidents in its own ranks, of working for various US or international police agencies. And the method was picked up from that source by various left and nationalist organizations, as well as by the FBI.

Instead of fighting the government's witch-hunt, the current attacks on Churchill have the effect of supplementing the rulers' witch-hunt against challenges to their orthodoxy on 9/11 with a witch-hunt within the movement against dissenters and against those suspected - primarily for their opinions, but with other shreds of "evidence" thrown in to sweeten the pot - of being "agents."

No one should be considered a police agent without definitive and tested proof beyond reasonable doubt. Anything else is destructive. There is no convincing evidence that Churchill is a COINTELPRO agent. Therefore he is not. To declare that he is an agent without positive proof beyond reasonable doubtis itself an attack on democratic rights, and a contribution to the rulers' attack on our rights in this case.

http://www.counterpunch.org/feldman02242005.html

[Vladimir]

1. You what?

:crazy:

As someone said the other day... step away from the weed, I repeat, step away from the weed...