US Appeals Court rules FBI

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B8P FBI INCA SWP members demonstrate outside the court: trade unions scarcely mobilised at all The dramatic five year struggle by the US Socialist Workers Party to gain access to evidence of illegal activity by FBI now stands at the crossroads.

The present stage of development starkly indicates the political weaknesses in the SWP's mammoth $40 million tawsuit against the government for harassment and disruption of the Party.

On March 19 a Court of Appeals ruling unanimously overturned a July 6, 1978 order by Judge Thomas Griesa instructing Carter's Attorney General Griffin Beli to hand over files on eighteen of the 1,300 informers the FBI has admitted using in its illicit surveillance of the SWP.

Supreme Court This means that the fight to force the FBI to release these files is once again delayed, and has to be pursued in the Supreme Court.

But the SWP has simultaneously taken two other initiatives which, if successful, could undercut their Supreme Court appeal, and end up with the eighteen files consigned safely back to the vaults of the FBI's dirty tricks department.

On the one hand SWP lawyers have requested Judge Griesa to appoint a special officer of the court to go through all 1,300 informer files and, sift out information that would. reveal the identities of the FBI's stool pigeons, to present a public report on the illegal activities documented in the files.

While this would doubtless produce an impressive catalogue of the FBI's organised crime, it would also seriously THE John Lister question whether the full files on the eighteen informants need ever be released.

On the other hand the SWP on March 23 staged a news conference outlining a proposal to the Justice Department to settle the lawsuit on the basis of an injunction against illega surveillance, harassment, infiltration and sabotage of the SWP and its activities, a declaration of the SWP's legal status, and $5 million in damages.

Serious

It is obvious that were the Carter administration to settle on this basis, then the chances of a Supreme Court ruling prising out the FBI files on the eighteen informants would be remote.

• SWP spokesmen Larry Seigle, outlining the Party's proposed settlement, stressed that the leadership regard it as "reasonable and serious...and we think the government should accept it"

Condemning the Court of Appeal ruling, Seigle went on to suggest that it had a 'good' side, in that:

"by letting the government off the hook on the question of the identities of the eighteen informers, which is a secondary issue in its case, clears the way for a settlement of the centra. • issues. (SWP Militant April 6)

However, though it may appear as a "secondary issue" to the SWP, the massive cover-up of the eighteen informers by the FBI has emerged politically as the main question at stake.

Contempt of Court In his determination to conceal the eighteen files, Griffin Bell, the highest law enforcement officer in the USA, has consciously placed ORA himself in contempt of courtand now achieved a Court of Appeals ruling that effectively places him and the FBI above the law of the land.

While this remains the situation, there is no value whatever in the SWP obtaining a court injunction debarring the FBI from its prolonged campaign of spying.

Such a settlement would amount to little more than an opportunist truce. But the Carter regime seems unwilling to clutch such an olive branch which, for all its merits from their standpoint, would still amount to a major setback to the sustained war of attrition waged by the US capitalist state machinery against lęft wing and radical movements.

•This State offensive has been on a massive scale. Information on illicit operations released during the five year lawsuit now amounts to 100,000 pages of FBI and other documents-some of which have been published in the book Cointelpro: the FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom.

As SWP leader George Novack summarised:

"The suit has uncovered authenticated proofs of FBI burglaries; spying on the plaintiffs as well as on Black, antiwar, women's and Chicano movements' activities, poisonpen letters; agent "visits" to landlords, - employers, and relatives, leading to loss of jobs and housing; conniving with adminstrators to get college and school teachers fired; agency attempts to foment dissension within and among their target groups; the use of hundreds of informers to spy on people, steal recards and instigate provocations."

(Militant, July 14, 1978)

This huge operation is admitted to have cost at least $1.68 million dollars simply in regular payoffs to the FBI's ORKERSE PARTY I can't take it anymore.. running from the cops.. Charlie, you've got to quit network of 1,300 narks and tingermen within and around the SWP.

This does not count the special bonuses that would be paid out for break-ins and special provocations, or the cost of illegal phone-tapping, mail tampering and more elaborate stage managed disruptions.

Judge Griesa has made clear in his ruling of June 30, 1978 that:

"The FBI informant files undoubtedly constitute the most important body of evidence in this case, recording in immense detail the activities of the informants and the instructions by the FBI to the informants"

Judge Griesa went on: "The documents show FBI plans to place informants within the SWP and YSA to split the organisation structure and foment dissent.

"According to the documents, the FBI interfered with travel reservations of members, took steps to cause speaker hall rentals to be cancelled, and circulated false information about the times and places of meetings.

"The documents show that the FBI caused local law enforcement officers to make arrests and break up functions, not for the purpose of assisting in the enforcement of local laws, but for the purpose of disrupting the SWP and YSA.

"In one instance the FBI arranged for a raid of a SWP summer camp for alleged state law violations, and considered it a success when the SWP was forced to sell the camp property ...

"It appears that in some cases informants directly participated in the carrying out of disruption activities.

''In other instances the informants furnished the FBI with information which enabled regular agents of the FBI to conduct the disruption activities. • "The observations of the informants assisted the FBI in assessing the success or failure of disruption activities."

To force such information. and much more from the files of the secret political police of the US capitalist state is without doubt a major achievement of the SWP lawsuit."

Raw nerve

And there is no doubt that in pressing the demand for the release of eighteen selected, unexpurgated informer files-a total of some 25 drawers full of raw reports-the SWP campaign has touched the rawest nerves in the capitalist state.

Defence Attorney Fiske has admitted that the government would sooner surrender the whole case-involving payment of the SWP's demanded $40 million damages-than release the files.

He likened the government's position to that of a firm faced with the dilemma of either revealing its "trade secrets" or else losing a court action. But of course the FBI's "trade secrets' are its illègal violations of democratic rights in the USA! • Griffin Bell has stood firm on his contempt of Griesa's court order, in the face of a major legal and constitutional crisis sooner than part with the information.

As a result, the whole affair has now on at least two occasions hit the headlines of the capitalist press throughout the USA, highlighting the role of the FBI.

Shortcomings

But along with this historic success in putting the forces of repression onto the defensive, the SWP has also demonstrated the shortcomings of its own political method.

The matter has been energetically pursued through the apparatus of the courts-but only in the most superficial and ineffective way has it been taken into the organised US labour movement.

While US radical leaders, feminists and prominent personalities have as usual come forward to put their names to the SWP campaign which they see simply as a 'civil rights' issue, precious few trade unionists have featured even as celebrity platform speakers.

And the major events of the last 12 months have brought no evidence whatever of attempts by the SWP to raise the campaign and fight for support for it within trade union locals.

Thus, despite the fine words of SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes about 'leading the Party into the working class', there has been little, if any, serious attempt to mobilise the workers' movement in support of the SWP's correct demands for the release of the files.

Deportation

There is a parallel here with the continuing struggle by the SWP to prevent the deportation of Mexican socialist Hector Marroquin-a struggle which only recently gained the support of its first major union local.

Though there is nothing unprincipled in the technique of using. a lawsuit to expose the class nature of justice under capitalism, the restrictions that exist on workers' democratic rights, and the naked machinery of state repression, the SWP's petty bourgeois method of protest politics has stripped the campaign of many of its teeth.

Going through the legal motions of fighting for democratic rights and meeting the rebuffs and setbacks inflicted by the capitalist state has significance only insofar as it forms the centre of a campaign within the working class, the goal of which is not primarily a legalistic "vindication' of the SWP or the winning of hefty sums in damages, but the education of militant workers as to the nature of class justice.

Reinforcing illusions But the SWP's bid for a settlement with the government offers no such education.

Rather it reinforces: the worst "democratic" illusions in the burglaries the break-ins hiding out in flea-ridden motels ihe FBI.

the working class.

For if a party describing itself as "revolutionary" shows itself to be prepared to settle a lawsuit for a cash sum plus a meaningless paper • assurance from the viilains of the past that their illegal activity will cease in the future, then what, if any., lessons are to be learned by workers from the whole experience?

At best militants and radicals would wrongly see such an outcome as proof that democratic rights can be protected through court action, legal wrangles and reforms within the capitalist system-all the more so if such activities take place in isolation from any attempt to involve the organised working class.

In our view the key lessons can only be learned if the SWP breaks from the reformist notion that their damages claim and the demand for an injunction against FBI spying is the "central issue" , and recognises that the crucial question now is to mobilise in order to take into every trade union local, committee and conference the implications of the Court of Appeal ruling that has exempted Attorney General Griffin Belt and the entire FBI from the rule of law.

Essential agitation

This agitation is essential as preparation for a full scale fight against this ruling in . the Supreme Court.

A labour movement conference on the issue should be considered or local initiatives to commit union locals to active involvement.

Rather than seeking any kind of settlement with the capitalist state, the SWP should be seeking means of exposit g more clearly to workers thit this repressive state machinery, supported by both Republicar. and Democratic parties, can be defeated only through the construction of a Labour Party based on the organised strength of the trade union movement with the task of representing workers' independent interests.

Opportunist

There is, however, little likelihood of any such change of course by the SWP leadership, which is tied to the opportunist politics of the "United" Secretariat of the Fourth International (to which it is prevented from affiliation by reactionary US legislation that should also be challenged). • As a result of this political weakness, a campaign that could still strike further heavy blows at the FBI's network of political sabotage seems likely to be kept alive in the next period more through the Carter regime's heavy handed refusal to concede on the issue than any such rigid stand on the part of the SWP

----- pull-quotes -----

informers, including those within the Party's ranks,