Islam and human rights

In the west it's the common habit that every good thing attributes to them and they proved as this world is blessed with it due to them. However before the Islam the world was steeped in ignorance and unaware of any such things. This is Islam which explains the way of livings to the world and now the west adopted all the teachings of Islam mentioned in Quran and Hadith before 1400 years.

Islam is to complete religion in which Allah Almighty has given the complete guidance about every aspect of the life in a clear manner. It's the only religion who emphasize on peace. It gives rights to each human being as well as animals. The human rights that Islam protects are the life and property of every citizen is consecrated, whatever his religion is, is either that he is Muslim or not. Human equality is highly focuses majorly and not one is considered superior or favored because of their race, assets or power. The criteria of superiority are only faith and piety. The annual pilgrimage to Makah the Prophet (PBUH) has given the complete charter of human rights. Its each and every word enlightened all the aspects of human life. It clearly mentions the rights of servants and asked them to treat properly.

Racism is a major problem of today's modern world has completely finished in Islam. And its practical example can be seen on the annual pilgrimage at Makah every year. Where Muslims from all over the world come together and perform hajj without any difference. Where slave and king offers the prayer together.

Islam is the religion of complete justice as said in Quran:"" truly God commands you to give back trusts to those to whom they are due, and when you judge between people, to judge with justice... " "(4:58)"

The human killing is totally restricted and the government is responsible for the protection of the all the nations and their assets. Even women have more privileged and special care is associated with her either she is mother, wife, sister or daughter. Hence Islam gives the complete coding of life embedded in its teaching. And the human rights are completely and perfectly mentioned in it.

You can read out more about such informative topics about Islam and specifically about misconceptions about Islam. Just logon to Muslim Academy and find out more about Islam. I you want direct interaction, you can join Muslim Academy Forum as well where you will meet active community who can answer your questions which you have in your mind about Islam.

Samad Khan Aslam - CEO of SKYS Web Solutions - is contributing his writings to Muslim Academy by which is a website founded by Chirstopher Fransworth - Lawyer in USA - to teach Arabic and to eliminated the misconception in the world about Islam. The other aim of Muslim Academy is to remove the distancias and difference between the West and Muslims. Daily tens of writers submit their posts for Muslim Academy.

Civilizaciones occidentales del siglo XXI, inmigración, multiculturalismo y derechos humanos

The uncontrollable steady build-up of variegated societies in the west, and which has been going on from the time when the Europeans first felt the economic need to engage in massive imports of domitable manpower 500 years ago from Africa and the Middle East, has resulted in such unexpected social slants in a politically changing world that, unfortunately, does not seem to be stepping away from its basic protectionist principles. And this has been aggravated by more recent influxes of economic and political migrants from the third world, in search of a better life, and has ended up causing various social and judiciary concerns that now touch the most deprived and disfranchised social strata of these nations, vastly composed by both the descendents of former human imports and the current immigrants, all of whom now seem to be categorised on similar social classes if not the same class. As a consequence, psychological tensions have permanently settled in and have overpowered the humanistic aspirations of the resulting so-called 'multicultural societies' that, yet, were so copiously endorsed by these Western nations at the time of need. It, therefore, seems that there is now an imperative necessity to enforce new types of subtle institutional injustice onto these types of human species that still do not seem to fit even in diversity.

These problems are sharply manifest in issues of discrimination and phobia towards race, faith and even ideology, which affect very much of our daily lives today in these Western nations. As a human soul, I take these issues quite seriously. this is even why I take trouble writing this type of articles - I have also resolved many of such difficult issues in my recent book: Third Mind (2006) - because not only do these difficult issues cramp our sense of social cohesion and national consolidation in whatever political structure to which we 'belong' in the West, they also impinge on individuals' ability, skills and good will to play their part and fulfil themselves in their respective societies for being unfortunate enough to carry the stigma of new fascist definitions of the term 'immigrant'.

Somebody once made a sarcastic remark to me during a conversation in which we were discussing this subject by saying that in Britain today, many people spend 80% of their time fighting for their rights; the remaining 20% of their time can only help them achieve a sad, rebellious and sloppy subsistence. And most of the reasons that turn a great number of people into that regrettable breed are racial, religious and ideological differences, which many of us see as relevant factors for cultural distinctiveness and, therefore, social incompatibility between humans. And, in the mind of many of us, it seems that the right culprit to charge for this societal dis-ease is what i may call the 'uncultivable seeds of multiculturalism'.

What I want to do in this article - the length of which, I am afraid, might be quite annoying to you, dear reader, but probably worth taking a look at - is to argue that if there is anything at all that may lead people to feel different from one another to the point of being unable to share the same society harmoniously, it is most certainly not 'multiculturalism'; and, if it is, it must have very little or nothing to do with religion, race or ideology; because none of these three concepts has itself much to do with 'culture'. In fact, what I am going to try and show here is that the concept of 'culture' has been so increasingly ill-defined and misapprehended over the past century by media agents, scholars and politicians so much so that it has resulted very easy for people to raise cultural arguments in issues that are not cultural at all, because just anything is now seen as culture. I will take shortcuts all the way through the article to make it a bit easy, although these shortcuts themselves may take a few paragraphs to be made intelligible.

So, take the concept of religion, as my first shortcut, and just think of some politicians and journalists who appear on your television screen almost every evening and who, quite insistently, seem to be adamant to publicise the sense of tolerance that they have shown in allowing their countries to become multicultural, not least of all that these countries are actually multicultural, but because the adjacent plant of a mosque to a church in Birmingham City is, very often, for them, an outstanding factor of 'multicultural' Britain.

My objective here is to suggest, probably against your expectation, that the coexistence of a Muslim and a Christian in Birmingham does actually not imply that Britain is multicultural. What I mean is that there is a big difference between the concept of culture and the concept of religion. A multi-religious society is not a multicultural society, because religion does really not equal culture. Many of us may be surprised at this declaration. But I am going to show why I say this.

A religion is an order of faith centred on a spiritual wisdom or an ideology and practised through a number of ritual acts and social attitudes. This is surely where the problem lies. Religious practices do display a certain number of social attitudes. And because, for some people, social attitudes and ways of life are often seen as cultural features, then religion ends up vetting the wrong label: culture.

Just take these benign examples of social attitudes and ways of life that happen to overlap with the concept of culture in order to understand what I am trying to say here. You will find, for example, many Latin-Americans who see their cultural identity through the steps of a Salsa dancer, not least that Salsa is a culture but because Salsa is part of their way of life, that is to say, an outstanding feature of their social behaviour. And they end up calling it culture. You could also think of the case of binge drinking, which is part of the English society's way of life and that is often referred to as a culture by some people in England.

Now, the reason why social attitudes and ways of life cannot, in my approach, be confounded with the notion of cultural identity is simply because it is perfectly practical for different societies to display similar social attitudes and ways of life whilst they themselves do not come under the same cultural identity at all. Dr Jeremy Narby had already pointed this anthropological fallacy in The Cosmic Serpent (2001) by noting that different cultures can perfectly make similar discoveries and display similar ways of life either out of a mere chanceful coincidence or due to emulation (because societies do copy from others). For example, the fact that many English people dance Salsa today does not force them to sharing the same cultural identity as the Cubans; they just happened to like and therefore copy this amazing dance from a different society that has its own cultural identity. And this is a characteristic that religions also display: they can be practised by people from very diametrically divergent cultural identities either because of the fact that religions are held from some basic moral principles that most human societies coincidentally share or because they are most often exported from society to society where they end up incurring some similar attitudes shared between all those who practice them irrespective or their basic different cultural identities. The fact that English Catholic priests and French Catholic priests display similar attitudes does not imply that the French culture and the English culture are the same. It simply means that they practise the same religious tradition whilst remaining 'culturally' different.

And not only that, religious traditions, like any other traditions, are mostly inventions that often spring from within societies that already have their own attitudes and ways of life that then end up interfering in the way in which these religions are to be practised; therefore, the practice of a religion invented and worked out in Arabia, for example, will ineluctably display some of the social features that are typically inherent to the Arab way of life and that may have existed even before the invention of the said religion. And these social features may happen to be shared between different societies that would, yet, be under different cultural identities in essence, because these societies themselves may either be geographical contiguous (which often lead cultures to borrowing from one another's way of life even before they happen to practise any religion at all) or due to the fact that once a religion is born in a determined society, some of that society's attitudes that end up being incorporated into the practice of that religion - now seen by some people as inherent to that religion - may end up being shared between all societies that end up adopting that religion even though not only would these societies themselves be under different cultural identities in essence, but also the social attitudes that they may end up sharing thorough the sharing of that religion may themselves not have been invented for the sole purpose of practising that religion, but rather as the result of a mere chanceful incorporation of these pre-existing social attitudes into that religion once invented.

If one takes Islam, which is the case to which I am intending to refer here, one will see that there is an incredible number of attitudes that are now seen as typically Islamic attitudes even though they actually have nothing to do with Islam but rather with the Arab way of life and that did exist far before Muhammad himself was born. For example, if one takes a closer look at a typical catholic Madonna one might be surprised that the Holy Virgin Mary looks very much like a Muslim woman, not least that she was, but because women from many Middle Eastern societies, including Jewish and Arab women, have often shared similar ways of life, including the covering of their head with a scarf of some particular shape, and this had prevailed even before Islam and Christianity were invented. So, even the idea that the Arab woman's scarf is an Islamic symbol can be an absolute absurdity, otherwise an Essenian, Carmelian woman like Mary would not have had worn a scarf.

Such common attitudes between different societies that are themselves under different cultural identities are often held from geographical proximity, as I have just said, and sometimes a case for traditional proximity too whereas the concept of tradition is also frequently confounded with the concept of cultural identity. Yet, traditions have more to do with the practice of customs, whereas customs are habitual practices and usages that establish familiarity and constitute a common law between individuals or societies that have some specific historical links from particular historical events. The Thanksgiving celebration or even the Pancake Day, for example, can stand for illustration as far as the concept of tradition is concerned. Even individual families have particular family traditions. Commemorating the anniversary of a special ancestor in a particular way can be a family tradition.

Now, because some traditions are formed out of historical events, they can be shared between different societies, because different societies can share a common history. The remembrance of the Holocaust by all nations that shared the misadventures of the Jews in Germany is a good example of this. But this would not mean that the English and the Jews belong to the same cultural identity. They only share one specific historical event that has resulted in a common tradition between them.

Religions themselves often display a number of traditional aspects about them that different individuals from different cultural identities can happen to share and that will have nothing to do with their different cultural identities. For example, the fact that the Spanish and the Zulu share the Christmas tradition today has nothing to do with a common cultural identity between the two. Christmas in itself has become more secular than religious to the point that even pagans celebrate it out of a purely Christian context. Obviously, it has nothing to do with cultural identity.

The connection between religion and a cultural or national identity is, thus, only a matter of philosophical misconception and, sometimes, only a case for some coincidental superfetation. One of these outstanding cases of coincidence is that of the war between the English and the Irish in Northern Ireland and of which modern politicians and journalists quite often refer to as a war between Catholics and Protestants - let alone the paradoxical fact that they both read the same Bible and, therefore, share the same spiritual wisdom.

But the fundamental reasons for the war are not due to some sort of ideological clash between these two Christian trends; otherwise Catholics and Protestants would be at war everywhere in the world. The reasons for the Northern Irish war are strictly connected to such or such a cultural or national identity at odds with another on some historical and political issues. The unfortunate coincidence lies in the fact that some are mainly Catholics whereas others are mainly Protestants. It is only a coincidence not a factor for the war. The Northern Irish war would still have been launched if both of the parties did not practice any religion at all.

And likewise, there are politicians and journalists who, today, speak so relentlessly of 'Muslim countries', and especially since the war on terror was launched by the English and the Americans. Yet, the concept of 'Muslim country' is not tenable in any technical way. Of course, some people may have strong feelings about Islam, and some other people may be sympathetic or express their solidarity to those with whom they share the same faith or even the same ideology. The western part of Ukraine is sympathetic to Western Europe, and vice versa, on the grounds of democracy, which is only a political ideology not a cultural feature.

Indeed, like religious convictions, political ideologies too have the characteristic of bearing a system of thinking that one or some people may have very strong feelings about and even end up seeing in them some form of identity to be fought for or against. Joe McCarty himself - the famous American senator - saw communism that way in the 1950s. But this would not be to say that any nation or part of a nation's identity would hold from the idea of some political ideology or some religion, because none of these is any matter for identity. And perhaps the fact that some countries happen to call themselves 'Democratic Republic of X' or 'Islamic Republic of Y' is misleading many of us. But if we look carefully, we will see that most of such countries fall in the category of countries that do not actually have a true cultural identity, or that they have lost it after being politically or spiritually colonised by some other nations (because this is what colonisation does: kill local cultural identities). So, these countries have to try and build a vacuous identity around some ideology or some religion, in most cases, invented by their political or spiritual colonisers. And sometimes it is a case for political scam: either to cover up the cultural identity vacuum of the country or to instigate some type of provocative propaganda.

Such a country as Iran does quite perfectly fit in this category. The fact that today's Iran calls itself 'Islamic Republic of Iran' cannot have any better technical explanation than the almost total loss of its true cultural identity after the complete erasure of the original Elamite culture that founded that nation by waves of invasions that began with the influence of neighbouring Sumerians and Mesopotamians as well as the Akkadian invasion all the way through to the arrival of the Indo-European Aryan conquerors including the Persians, the Greek, the Turks, the Arabs and the Mongolians - which even caused the region to be called Iran (Indo-European Aryan). So, what today's Iran represents is only an amalgamated mixture of colonial legacies bequeathed by its conquerors, which combine Persian features with those of Assyria and Urartu Turkish and Soviet Armenian, Farsi, Greek, and a strong Arab influence whereby Islam comes in. If we add to this original cultural identity loss and amalgamation the anti-Christian and anti-Jewish propaganda that has animated Iranian politics from the past century, it becomes quite easy to figure out the reason for such an empty provocative name to be endorsed onto the country. And the point that I am trying to make here is that occupational and colonial legacies as well as traditions, ideologies and religions do not constitute cultural or national identities at all. Any citizen or group of citizens from any nation with its own cultural identity can cherish any ideology and practise any religion; and conversely, any nation can practise different political systems and religions.

What has mostly happened throughout history is that some strong leaders, converted in some religion, have often despotically tried to impose their faith onto their people, leaving open the impression, in the long run, that such or such a national identity should be fundamentally connected to such or such a religion.

For example, there are some French right-wing politicians who cry out so constantly that 'France is a Christian nation' (another type of political scam: anti-Muslim propaganda). But they don't notice that the Franks, as a people, did not know anything about Christianity until they were conquered by the Romans and influenced by the Greeks, who both had imported Christianity from Judea. I mean, if French people happen to be Christians today, this is not because the French identity is connected to Christianity in any possible way. It is just that Christianity was exported into France when France was under Roman occupation.

A conqueror's religion, way of life or traditions, can even influence many other aspects of the mode of existence of the conquered. The Western suit, mostly worn in all Negro territories that were influenced by the English or the French, has nothing to do with Christianity or some sort of cultural sameness between the Negroes who wear it and the English or the French, no less than the Arabic jibba, mostly worn in parts of Africa that were conquered or influenced by the Arabs would have anything to do with any mark of cultural sameness between the Negroes who wear it and the Arabs. It has everything to do with sharing lifestyles between different societies whose members admire each other or are influenced by each other in some possible way - whereas the concept of lifestyle in itself is another thing that has more to do with 'tastes' and 'standards of living'. An Englishman can have a Chinese lifestyle by the type of food he eats.

So, neither a way of life, lifestyle, tradition nor a faith is any matter for cultural identity. That is why some of these concepts, especially the imported ones, often bear the danger of causing cultural and identity dislocation in individuals when they are misunderstood and mishandled. This is the case of the poignant issue of faith education, mostly promoted by faith schools. One may be quite surprised to find that it is a vastly marginalizing idea vis-à-vis the standard requirements of education in a dynamic society. It is, for instant, the kind of schools that would discriminate women from higher aspirations in their cultural and political context, or restrict men from a sharper exploration of human intelligence, both of which descend to the abyss of mediocrity and cultural dislocation.

I know English people who, because of their uncontrolled infatuation for Christianity, give old Jewish names to their children instead of English names or, at least, English forms of these names. Such children are, quite unconsciously, meant to believe, to some possible extent, that Christianity is their primary identity or that it is for them a parallel identity to their English identity: not too different from the disturbing issue of Muslims whose English Identity constantly comes into question today for being Muslims.

I know that some people will always force themselves into maintaining that ideologies and religions are paramount to culture or that ways of life and lifestyles are tantamount to identity. But there is no culture or identity called Islam or Christianity or Salsa in this world. Culture is not a social attitude or an ideology or a tradition. Culture - the definition of the identity of a people - has its fundamental basis on language, with all the artistic genius inherent to it: its ability to express art, philosophy, science, technology, politics and spiritual wisdom, all of which ascend to the heavens of human affirmation and are accessible only to native speakers, whatever their beliefs or attitudes. And this is what constitutes nation.

Peace to All

Visit: [http://www.JoeMintsa.net]

Joe Mintsa was born in the present Gabon, central Africa, on May 1st 1974. After completing his studies of philology and American history at the University of Libreville in 1998, he immediately migrated to England for further studies – a sojourn that then turned into a painful journey of reflection on the moral and political crises of his world. After the publication of The Sum of all Doubts (2004) – an essentially aphoristic but extremely sagacious work of fiction on religion and politics – and the release in Paris of his French title: Les Mythes Du Recaptif (2005), Third Mind (2006) is now the book that features his outmost incisive delivery on the subject of the distressing struggles of the most deprived human species of the world, and more particularly African species. Joe Mintsa is a philologist, historian and an accomplished freelance investigator in the field of Political Anthropology. He currently lives in Brighton (UK).

Separate Legal Rights for Minorities?

A number of Muslim Ulema wants that Sharia (Islamic law) introduced in Australia, a secular western nation in which religion and law are kept separate. Most of the Muslims in the country are relatively newcomers. Do given that Islam does not have no separation between religion and the law, these mullahs seek independent legal and cultural existence for members of their religion in a cosmopolitan, multicultural, multi-ethnic and modern nation?

Way back in history, would have been normal for a tribe, which is a collection of families extended bound by blood, found living near another tribe with different cultural traditions. They even can coexist, especially if they were nomadic. In fact, it is also likely that some nomadic tribes camped on the outskirts of agricultural settlements. No doubt the normal pattern of human behaviour - competition or cooperation or tolerant coexistence - would have then applied.

Without however, with the creation of the modern nation States with tribal boundaries implied, the entry of 'outsiders' or foreigners would be subject to control by the rulers of these States. Border control is now applied universally. Usually, immigrants with different cultural values and traditions are kept out of the host society, as they, not us"! As religion for cultural differences are defended by immigrants, coexistence and host communities (hopefully peaceful) is everything that can be exempted.

However, in a nation of migrants collection as Australia, which offers equal opportunities all immigrants regardless of their origin, their cultural traditions or religious, separated affiliations and parallel ethno-religious, legal structures should be avoided. The official policy is the integration (as in a fruit salad), not total assimilation or absorption (as in a mixed soup). Immigrants (first generation Australians) may, for access to equal opportunities prevailing (known as the spirit of 'fair go') give up certain practices (such as wife beating or spit) or even modify their cultural prejudices.

The second generation (the local born) which unconsciously link closely with the host people. This last Yes had evolved over time through the integration of earlier immigrants. The third generation, without any dividing interventions by priests or politicians, is now part of the host population.

Consistent influences in this process are public education, habituation (that is, is comfortable in constant contact through sport or socialization only with those whose ancestors may once have been "them, not us"), and that innate or instinctive to get sample by very young children who has not taught any prejudice on the colour of skin, language and other irrelevant matters.

Most importantly, in Australia, each one is free to pray as they wish, for cooking, dress and eat as they wish and freely speak their language. They are only obligated to accept the institutions and social of the host nation (ie. behavior) mores and respect all other cultural communities. Immigrants know about this as they seek to enter Australia. Do on what basis, by what right can then seek to the host country's institutions altered, especially when religion has been correctly differentiate themselves from the Government?

Different laws and different institutions for each community of immigrants from minority ethnic separatists? How quaint!?

In his second book "The Karma of culture", published under his name of birth Arasa, the author addresses intercultural impacts of various immigrant intake and the potential of Asian values cultural and spiritual influence in Western thought.
The author has published three stories based on the experience with the analysis of ethnic affairs, multiculturalism, citizenship, entry of refugee and migrant settlement assistance under his name of birth, Arasa; and a book of memoirs that overlaps a mixture of history, sociology and personal experiences with an Asian spirituality, under his westernised name Siamese. See http://www.dragonraj.com.

Espiar a los grupos de paz no sorprendentes dice a Vet de derechos civiles

The FBI's current spy and infiltration program "sounds like a COINTELPRO to me," said a spry 76-year-old civil rights movement veteran.

Robert Keglar of Charleston, Mississippi was referring to an earlier FBI secret program -- COunter INTELligence PROgrams or COINTELPROs -- that not only promoted spying on and infiltration of civil rights groups but often harassed activists and pitted them against each other, beginning as early as 1956.

"Of course, we had the state of Mississippi spying on us, too. And even private citizens doing it. No one should ever forget the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission or the White Citizens Councils," Keglar said.

The former teacher and boy scout leader's mother and her friend were tortured and murdered in 1966 for registering voters in Tallahatchie County; his brother was killed when he tried to learn what happened to his mother.

COINTELPRO programs often made havoc of perfectly lawful activities led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC and other civil rights groups including the NAACP, the organization that both Birdia Keglar and Adlena Hamlett belonged to.

As the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, funded by the state's legislature one year after the 1955 murder of fourteen year-old Emmett Till, was initiated to ensure integration would not occur, former FBI and military intelligence agents were hired to spy on Mississippians as the Commission came into power.

On the federal side of the surveillance coin, COINTELPROs were initiated by the FBI in the same year.

Private White Citizens Councils, formed one year earlier in 1955, were also a product of Mississippi's fight to maintain segregation and represented the private voice of the state's leading segregationists.

Councils members included prominent bankers, attorneys, physicians, elected officials, chambers of commerce members, realtors and others.

Byron de La Beckwith, convicted for the murder of civil rights icon Medgar Evers, was a Citizens Councils member.

John Satterfield of Yazoo City, a Methodist leader and president of the Mississippi State Bar Association and the American Bar Association (for two terms), was a member, too.

Sovereignty Commission reports, first publicly released in 1997, are available online through the state's department of archives and include files on some Citizens Councils activities as well.

But COINTELPRO files - if they were ever included in Sovereignty Commission's records - are remarkably invisible. Some Mississippians contend that thousands of Commission files were purged before they were turned over to the ACLU and made public. And that the FBI, Sovereignty Commission and White Citizens Councils worked hand in hand.

"I've always wondered how the information was passed on that pinpointed exactly where my mother and her friend would be at that specific time. Who was spying on them? Who told the Klan where they were going? Who knew what route they were taking?" Keglar asks.

The county's district attorney informed Birdia Keglar's son of the "car accident." But relatives and friends, as well as several "eye-witnesses," reported that she and Hamlett were run off the road, pulled from their car, tortured and murdered by highway patrolmen who were also Klan members. The June 12, 1966 accident was never investigated; Mississippi public officials and the FBI say no reports of the accident exist.

COINTELPRO Discovered in Pennsylvania Break-In

The existence of COINTELPRO came to light back in March of 1971, when a group calling themselves the "Citizens' Committee to Investigate the FBI" broke into an FBI field office -- ironically in Pennsylvania, the same state where current FBI spying charges were lodged this past week - and then provided the press and various members of Congress with secret documents seized from that office, showing the government's involvement in criminalizing dissent.

While FBI and police harassment were suspected by way of surveillance and infiltration during the 1960s, any talk of secret or dangerous CIA-type activity against domestic dissidents would have been dismissed as paranoid had it not been for the evidence picked up in this raid, according to Brian Glick, the author of "War at Home: Covert action against U. S. activists and what we can do about it."

Glick, a New York attorney and social justice advocate, is internationally known for his observations and writing on COINTELPRO operations.

In fact, covert operations have been employed against those who speak out against the government throughout the FBI's history (and even in both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars), including recent FBI monitoring of environmental and animal rights organizations, close watch of anti-war groups by a secret Pentagon program and eavesdropping on domestic communications by the National Security Agency.

The formal COINTELPROs of 1956-1971 were broadly targeted against organizations that were at the time considered politically radical, as well, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Within a year of the 1971 Pennsylvania break-in, former FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover declared the centralized COINTELPRO over, and all future counterintelligence operations to be handled on a "case-by-case basis," an official FBI statement that sounds all too familiar following the more recent spy/infiltration discovery.

Back in 1971, Hoover did not promise that the FBI would stop using COINTELPRO tactics, and more secret documents were revealed through lawsuits filed against the FBI by NBC correspondent Carl Stern and then in 1976 by the "Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate," commonly referred to as the "Church Committee" for its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho.

Millions of pages of COINTELPRO documents remain unreleased, while many released documents were almost entirely censored; just as recently released reports on the FBI's infiltration of the Pennsylvania Peace group, many COINTELPRO documents made available to the public include lines entirely blacked out, making them unreadable.

Also in 1971, the Church Committee concluded that "covert action programs have been used to disrupt the lawful political activities of individual Americans and groups and to discredit them, using dangerous and degrading tactics which are abhorrent in a free and decent society," writes political scientist Howard Zinn.

Where Did COINTELPRO Come From?

COINTELPRO developed out of the anti-Communist hysteria of the Cold War years, leading FBI agents into taking actions against groups that had nothing to do with Communism. The Bureau would take actions against individuals and organizations simply because they were critical of government policy, Zinn writes.

The political scientist found numerous examples of free speech violations in which the FBI targeted people because they opposed U. S. foreign policy or criticized police actions.

Documents assembled by the Church Committee "compel the conclusion that Federal law enforcement officers looked upon themselves as guardians of the status quo." Zinn cites the surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King Jr. as an important example.

But SNCC, with its proactive philosophy, topped the list of targeted programs under "Negro radicals."

And when congressional investigations, political trials, and other traditional legal modes of repression failed to counter the growing movements, and even helped to fuel them, the FBI and police moved outside the law, resorting to the secret and systematic use of fraud and force to sabotage constitutionally protected political activity.

"Their methods ranged far beyond surveillance, amounting to a home front version of the covert action for which the CIA has become infamous throughout the world."

FBI Headquarters secretly instructed its field offices to propose schemes to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" specific individuals and groups.

Close coordination with local police and prosecutors was strongly encouraged. Other recommended collaborators included friendly news media, business and foundation executives, and university, church, and trade union officials, as well as such "patriotic" organizations as the American Legion.

In his research, Glick uncovered a total of 2,370 officially approved COINTELPRO actions that were admitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee, and thousands more have since been uncovered.

Glick lists four main methods used by the agents:

1) infiltration by agents and informers with the intention to discredit and disrupt; 2) psychological warfare from the outside, using "dirty tricks" to undermine progressive movements; 3) harassment through the legal system, making targets appear to be criminal; and 4) extralegal force and violence including break-ins, vandalism, assaults, and beatings to frighten dissidents and disrupt their movements.

The lengthy list of activists coming under attack included Cesar Chavez, Fathers Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, Rev. Jesse Jackson, David Dellinger, officials of the American Friends Service Committee and the National Council of Churches, and other leading pacifists were high on the list, "as were projects directly protected by the First Amendment, such as anti-war teach-ins, progressive bookstores, independent filmmakers, and alternative newspapers and news services."

It was COINTELPRO "that enabled the FBI and police to eliminate the leaders of mass movements in the 1960s without undermining the image of the United States as a democracy, complete with free speech and the rule of law.

"Charismatic orators and dynamic organizers were covertly attacked and 'neutralized' before their skills could be transferred to others and stable structures established to carry on their work."

FBI documents were found disclosing six major official counterintelligence programs, of which three focused on the Civil Rights Movement with top priority given to the "COINTELPRO - Communist Party-USA, with its specific operations conducted on Dr. King, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the NAACP, the National Lawyers Guild.

Also the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee, Women's Strike for Peace, the American Friends Service Committee, and the National Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy.

Officially, the six major COINTELPRO programs (with hundreds of separate operations) were COINTELPRO - Communist Party, USA (CP); COINTELPRO - Social Workers Party (SWP); COINTELPRO - Puerto Rican Independence Movement; COINTELPRO - Black Liberation Movement; COINTELPRO - New Left; COINTELPRO - AIM; and COINTELPRO - White.

Dr. King was a target of an elaborate COINTELPRO plot to drive him to suicide and replace him "in his role of the leadership of the Negro people" with conservative Black lawyer Samuel Pierce (later named to President Ronald Reagan's cabinet) according to revisionist historians including Glick and Zinn, who have come to view King's assassination, as well as Malcolm X's, as domestic covert operations.

Glick cites a letter (Michael Gabriel, "James Earl Ray: The Last Days of Inmate #65477," Cat Yoga Publishing, April, 2004) written by James Earl Ray, in which Ray claimed there was never a trial in the homicide case.

"The government gained control of the attorney representing me, Percy Foreman. Without going into a lot of details, Mr. Foreman maneuvered me into a plea of guilty after he had me sign numerous literary contracts, and then signing all of the proceeds over to him under the guise he would use the money to finance a trial in the MLK case.

"Foreman obtained the plea via various threats: If I didn't enter the plea, the government would probably try my brother Jerry, for conspiring in the MLK shooting, that my father might be returned to an Iowa prison from where he had escaped in 1926, and that he (Foreman), might not put forth his best efforts in a trial."

A label of "Black Nationalist Hate Groups," was the vehicle for the Bureau's all-out assault on Dr. King, SNCC, CORE, the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, "Black Muslims," and the National Welfare Rights Organization.

The Socialist Workers Party and groups supporting or working with Malcolm X and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam were also identified as targets.

Still others organizations were harassed:

The League of Black Revolutionary Workers, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), the Congress of African People, Black student unions, "and many local Black churches and community organizations struggling for decent living conditions, justice, equality, and empowerment."

Additional COINTELPRO operations focused on the destruction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Peace and Freedom Party, the Institute for Policy Studies, and a broad range of anti-war, anti-racist, student, GI, veteran, feminist, lesbian, gay, environmental, Marxist, and anarchist groups.

Also the network of food co-ops, health clinics, child care centers, schools, bookstores, newspapers, community centers, street theaters, rock groups, and communes that formed the infrastructure of the counter-culture, according to Glick.

One example of COINTELPRO-Communist Party-USA harassment involved 18 staffers and supporters of Kudzu, a pro-left, counter-culture newspaper produced in Jackson, Mississippi.

On October 8, 1968, they were attacked and beaten by Jackson deputy sheriffs. Newspaper staffers had already survived a conviction on obscenity charges, the arrest of salespeople, the confiscation of cameras, and even eviction from its offices.

Kudzu was put under direct surveillance by the FBI in 1970. For more than two months FBI agents made daily searches without warrants, according to the coordinator of PEN American Center's Freedom to Write Committee:

On October 24 and 25, Kudzu sponsored a Southern regional conference of the Underground Press Syndicate. The night before the conference the FBI and Jackson detectives searched the Kudzu offices twice. During the search, an FBI agent threatened to kill Kudzu staffers.

On the morning of October 26, FBI agents again searched the office. That evening local police entered the building, held its eight occupants at gunpoint, produced a bag of marijuana, and then arrested them.... A Kudzu staff member commented,

"The FBI used to be fairly sophisticated, but lately they have broken one of our doors, pointed guns in our faces, told us that 'punks like you don't have any rights,' and threatened to shoot us on the street if they see us with our hands in our pockets."

Discovered among these special units was a unique COINTELPRO program focusing on "White Hate Groups," at least on paper.

But Glick and several other researchers argue that COINTELPRO-white appeared only to go after violent right-wing groups, and that the FBI actually gave covert aid to the Ku Klux Klan, Minutemen, Nazis, and other racist vigilantes, under the cover of being even-handed.

Specifically, COINTELPRO documents indicate that some infiltrators discreetly spied for years without calling attention to themselves (like the Soviet moles or sleepers) while others acted as instigators to disrupt meetings and conventions or social and other contacts.

University of Delaware historian Gary May tells the story of slain activist Viola Liuzzo in "The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo," (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, May 11, 2005) who was murdered in 1965 at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan immediately after the Selma, Ala., voting rights march took place.

President Johnson kept close tabs on the investigation and when suspects were taken into custody almost immediately, it seemed the FBI was doing its job with extra diligence; federal informant Gary Thomas Rowe had infiltrated the Alabama Klan five years earlier and quickly pointed out the suspects.

But Rowe's own role in the murder was suspicious, and it turned out that his experiences with the KKK often linked him with other notorious race crimes of the era, including the Birmingham church bombing. As with some other FBI informants, this one played both sides.

Agents spread rumors, made accusations, inflamed disagreements, and caused splits. "They urged divisive proposals, sabotaged activities, overspent scarce resources, stole funds, seduced leaders, exacerbated rivalries, caused jealousy and public embarrassment to groups. They often led activists into unnecessary danger and set them up for prosecution."

One common maneuver, known as placing a "snitch jacket" or "bad jacket" on an activist, damaged the victim's effectiveness and generated "confusion, distrust, and paranoia." The maneuver was used to divert time and energy and turn co-workers against one another, even provoking violence.

"Jacketing" was often done by "carefully orchestrated series of news releases and newspaper articles prepared by the FBI and 'cooperative' reporters."

An activist could be falsely labeled an informer in "FBI-composed anonymous letters" or in other operations, where the FBI arranged for police to release one member of a group that had been arrested together or to single one out for special treatment, "and then spread the rumor that the beneficiary had cooperated."

A snitch jacket was used in 1968 against SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure) along with a "whispering campaign," to "tag Carmichael with a CIA label," Glick wrote, citing a letter from the FBI Director to Washington Field Office, July 1, 1968 and memorandums from Washington Field Office to FBI Director, July 9, and July 10, 1968.

Comedian Dick Gregory, who spent time within Mississippi marching for voting rights and outside of the state raising money to help feed and clothe starving children in the Delta, was also the target of "covert maneuvers" to get the Mafia to move against Black activists ... and the entire leadership of the Communist Party - USA.

Meanwhile, the FBI's "main right-wing beneficiary" was the Ku Klux Klan, Glick and others say. In 1961, the Klan brutalized freedom riders as they arrived in various Southern cities, including Jackson, with "advance information supplied by the FBI."

The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission diligently collected and kept this advance information. The names of civil rights advocates, their complete address, age, and name of employer or school attended were often collected and held in Sovereignty Files, some under the category name, "Freedom Riders Groups and Addresses, Group Numbers and Date Arrived."

The FBI kept talking with Klan members. By 1965, some 20 percent of Klan members were on the FBI payroll, many occupying leadership positions in seven of the fourteen Klan groups across the country, states political scientist Robert Goldstein in "Political Repression in Modern America: 1870 to the Present," (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1978).

Finally, Sovereignty Commission staffers often shared files with FBI special agents running the COINTELPROs, as evidenced by Commission files kept on targets including the Freedom Democratic Party and the Republic of New Afrika (RNA).

One Mississippi Delta SNCC volunteer says she was "exposed" no sooner than she arrived on the job in Holly Springs. An August 18, 1966 story in the Jackson Daily News held that SNCC volunteer Jo Freeman was a "professional agitator" citing "the Burns report" as its major source of information.

Five photographs accompanied the story, including one taken on December 3, 1964 of Freeman speaking from the second floor balcony of the administration building on the University of California, Berkeley campus.

When Freeman's Mississippi SNCC boss saw the editorial, he put Freeman on a bus back to Atlanta. "That thing makes you Klan bait," he told her.

Freeman assumed the FBI was behind her experience in the Delta, even though she did not know about COINTELPRO at the time.

"It had all the earmarks of an FBI plant, requiring connections between California and Mississippi. My belief was reinforced when the FBI's COINTELPRO actions against the Civil Rights Movement in general and its persecution of Dr. Martin Luther King in particular were revealed.

"Not until 1997 did I discover that the actual source of the editorial and photos was the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission (MSC), an official state agency of which I was completely unaware in 1966.

"And only after reading many pages in the MSC files at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History did I realize that I and others like me were not just foot soldiers in the Civil Rights Movement, but cannon fodder in the Cold War," wrote Freeman in her autobiography, "At Berkeley in the Sixties: Education of an Activist, 1961-1965," (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).

Glick and others maintain that literally thousands of important files continue to be withheld, while others have been destroyed. Further, former COINTELPRO operatives report "the most heinous and embarrassing actions" were never committed to writing; the statement of retired FBI Special Agent Arthur Murtagh who appeared before the Select Committee on Intelligence, and who was interviewed by retired FBI Special Agent Wes Swearingen in June 1979, serves as just one example.

Officials with broad personal knowledge of COINTELPRO have been silenced, "most notably William C. Sullivan, who created the [COINTELPRO] program and ran it throughout the 1960s. Sullivan was killed in uninvestigated 1977 'hunting accident' shortly after giving extensive information to a grand jury investigating the FBI, but before he could testify publicly," Glick states.

* * *

And so ...

As internal agency documents released in March raised new questions over federal spying without court authorization - in this case on anti-war Americans - since Sept. 11, 2001, William Crowley, a spokesman for the FBI's Pittsburgh office, "insisted the monitoring was legal and related to an ongoing investigation but gave no details of the probe."

Crowley further stated that when the FBI found no link between its investigation and the center, it ended the surveillance, Jonathan S. Landay of Knight Ridder News Service reported.

The ACLU, meanwhile, contends the documents are the first to "show conclusively" that an anti-war group was targeted for anti-war views. ACLU staff attorney, Marty Catherine Roper, told Landay.

"The documents demonstrate that "Americans are not safe from secret government surveillance, even when they are handing out fliers in the town square, an activity clearly protected by the Constitution."

The Thomas Merton Center, named for an American Roman Catholic monk, poet and author who died in 1968, meanwhile describes itself as a group of people from diverse faiths who believe in "nonviolent struggle" for peace and justice.

Yet an FBI report dated Nov. 29, 2002, defined the center as "a left-wing organization advocating, among many political causes, pacifism."'

The report also noted that the center had cooperated with an Islamic organization in staging an event to promote understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims in Pittsburgh.

"The documents say they were conducting some kind of investigation," Thomas Merton Center director Jim Kleissler told Landay.

"That implies we were under surveillance simply because we were against the war. Our freedoms are being undermined."

No surprise there.

Susan Orr-Klopfer, journalist and author, writes on civil rights in Mississippi. Her newest books, "Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited" and "The Emmett Till Book" are now in print and are carried in most online bookstores including Amazon and Barnes & Noble. "Where Rebels Roost" focuses on the Delta, Emmett Till, Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry, Amzie Moore and many other civil rights foot soldiers. Both books emphasize unsolved murders of Delta blacks from mid 1950s on. Orr-Klopfer is an award-winning journalist and former acquisitions and development editor for Prentice-Hall. Her computer book, "Abort, Retry, Fail!" was an alternate selection by the Book of-the-Month Club.