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| | village voice > news > Nat Hentoff by Nat Hentoff |
 | | But the poisonous core of this reorganization is its return to the time of J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO, the counter-intelligence operation—pervasively active from 1956 to 1971—that so disgraced the Bureau that it was forced to adopt new guidelines to prevent such wholesale subversion of the Bill of Rights ever again. |
 | | Under COINTELPRO, the FBI monitored, infiltrated, manipulated, and secretly fomented divisions within civil rights, anti-war, fl, and other entirely lawful organizations who were using the First Amendment to disagree with government policies. |
 | | The guidelines for FBI investigations imposed after COINTELPRO ordered that agents could not troll for information in churches, libraries, or political meetings of Americans without some reasonable leads that someone, somehow, was doing or planning something illegal. |
| www.villagevoice.com /issues/0223/hentoff2.php (821 words) |
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