PRESS: Reporting on Non-Reporting:

...Break-ins were a matter of routine between 1941 and 1966, when a halt was ordered by then-Attorney General Ramsey Clark...

...Spock...

...No one has argued that the famous "Canuck" letter was legitimate and proper, or that it was legitimate and proper to hand out forged campaign releases during the Florida primary in 1972, or that it was legitimate and proper to tap Larry O'Brien's phone...

...Attorney General William Saxbe's statement last November 18, and the 21-page report which he released at the same time, are both good examples of the opacity of official prose but all the same provide plenty of facts from which reporters might have proceeded...

...It is hard to believe that so little could have been done with so much by so many who were indefatigable in their pursuit of those responsible for the Watergate break-in, and it is even harder to explain this bored ho-hum by the editors who might have assigned reporters to go after the story...

...In June a different FBI agent reported that "New Left activities in the Phoenix division are largely dormant at the present time...

...This incident seems to fall into category six of the FBI's sabotage program, "Informing employers, credit bureaus and creditors of members' activities...

...In July, 1968, the agency said Starsky's removal "could be expected to disrupt New Left organizations...

...Morris Starsky...

...The one instance of this activity so far reported in detail ought to make us curious about the rest...

...In describing the FBI's COINTEL-PRO the Justice Department provided no names or identifying detail, and it is not hard to see why...

...They may not know everything, but they know plenty...

...The T,om Charles Huston domestic intelligence plan of 1970, in fact, was largely an attempt to resume such illegal activities...

...The cameras begin to whir...

...It would not be hard to find out what the FBI was doing, although it would be time-consuming and expensive, just as the Watergate investigations were time-consuming and expensive...

...The appointed hour arrives...

...That "etcetera" is a broad admission indeed...

...A story by Nicholas Horrock in the New York Times of January 29 (and followed up by Howard Armstrong in the Post on February 3) reports that the FBI sent five copies of an anonymous letter to members of an academic committee at Arizona State University in 1970 attacking an associate professor in philosophy, Dr...

...In a statement to the Senate Appropriations Intelligence Subcommittee on January 15, the current CIA director William Colby said the agency's domestic operation was authorized by former-director Richard Helms on August 15, 1967, "to look into the possibility of foreign links to American dissident elements...

...What it leaves out is still worse...

...I am sure the Democrats, and I hope the Republicans, would say none...

...What is "legitimate and proper" about trying to disrupt a legal demonstration against the war in Vietnam...

...The Attorney General of the United States rises to speak...

...The targets have been both political parties and private individuals...

...The statement and report outline a 15-year Counter Intelligence Program conducted by the FBI against five categories of domestic political activity: the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, White Hate groups, Black Extremist groups, and the New Left...

...In fact, the political activity investigated by the CIA and "disrupted" by the FBI was entirely legal and, in theory at least, protected by the Constitution...

...One has only to ask the victims, just as one could have learned of the secret bombing of Cambodia by asking the victims...

...In solemn tones the Attorney General announces that a special committee has informed him that an investigative agency of the government answerable to the President, has secretly carried out acts of sabotage against the legitimate political activities of American citizens...

...Seymour Hersh's recent disclosure of domestic political spying by the CIA involves much the same sort of thing...

...The press assembles...

...The CIA never established such "links" but its domestic program was continued until 1973 anyway...

...But even then reporters paid more attention to Mr...

...The report grudgingly concedes that "some COINTELPRO activities involved isolated instances of practices that can only be considered abhorrent in a free society" but goes on to argue that "the overwhelming bulk of these activities were clearly legitimate and proper undertakings, within the scope of the FBI's ongoing responsibilities...

...while accepting at close to face value the agency's justification for investigating "dissident elements" in the first place...

...How many of those 2,370 acts of political sabotage have been exposed in detail by the investigative reporters of our free press...

...The FBI granted the agent official permission to mail the letters in April, 1970, and Starsky was subsequently fired...

...The answer, by my count at any rate, is one...

...The explanation of this odd indifference lies at the heart of much that is wrong with American journalism...

...New Left activists tell endless stories of provocateurs and Don Whitehead's book, Attack on Terror: The FBI Against the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, provides a long, detailed account of just how the FBI proceeds to "neutralize" one of its targets...

...One wonders if the remaining 42, still secret, were any more "legitimate and proper" than the attempt to fire Starsky...

...In practice, if not in theory, the press has been willing to accept the FBI's classification of its targets-White Hate groups, Black Extremist groups, New Left groups-as special exceptions not fully covered by the Bill of Rights...

...One of the documents stolen from the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, on March 8, 1971 (all of them published in the March, 1972 issue of WIN Magazine) says "on the subject of informants, there have been a few instances where security informants in the New Left got carried away during a demonstration, assaulted police, etc...

...Rumors immediately begin to circulate: violations of constitutional rights by the government are about to be confessed which will make the "White House horrors" of Watergate look innocent by comparison...

...The Justice Department said actions of this sort were taken in at least 43 instances...

...Other readily available information makes it clear that the "dissident elements" were simply people active in their opposition to the war in Vietnam...

...The problem is not that reporters or their employers are pusillanimous or venal, but that they are themselves members of the mainstream and share its assumptions...

...It took gall enough to defend "the overwhelming bulk of these activities" when they were disguised as anonymous statistics...

...What the report makes public is bad enough...

...The first two are legal political parties and the last three are clearly catch-all categories which include not only the Ku KIux Klan and the Black Panthers but activists like Martin Luther King, David Dellinger and Dr...

...There is no mention whatever of illegal wiretaps, break-ins, mail covers or the use of agents provocateurs...

...It strikes me as pretty late in the day to be explaining what a "slippery slope" is, and yet the press still fails to see that the only thing unique about Watergate, was the target.Watergate, was the target...

...I know I may sound wrong-headed and perverse here, after two solid years of Watergate reporting in which the press was hardly timid, once it got going...

...The FBI had been keeping an eye on Starsky at least since May, 1968, when an agent in the Phoenix office informed J. Edgar Hoover that "New Left organizations and activities in the Phoenix metropolitan area have received their inspiration and leadership . . . chiefly" from Starsky...

...His white brow shines in the fierce glare of the television lights...

...What is "legitimate and proper" about forging letters in order to arouse suspicion and bitterness between political groups engaging in entirely legal activity...

...mate and proper" was Number 4, "Advising local, state and federal authorities of civil and criminal violations by group members...

...One break-in at the Democratic National Committee brought the roof down...

...Nixon's taxes than they did to his bombing of Cambodia, just as the current controversy over domestic spying by the CIA seems to center on the fact the CIA violated its charter...

...Now imagine that three months have gone by...

...imagine for a moment, if you can stand it, that a press conference has been called by the Department of Justice...

...It is well known, or ought to be by anyone who has been paying attention, that all of these have been common FBI practice...

...2,370 separate acts by the FBI against "dissidents" have elicited editorial tongue-clucking and little else...

...What is "legitimate and proper" about attempts to have opponents of the war fired from their jobs, expelled from their schools, denied loans by banks...

...The best way to determine the legitimacy and propriety of these actions is to ask how many would have been tolerated if directed by a Republican President against his Democratic opponents...

...The sabotage has included the forging of documents, the dissemination of false and defamatory information, economic reprisals, legal harassment, the use of anonymous letters, attempts to turn members of political groups against each other, attempts to distort the legal process, false arrest...

...It was actions of precisely this sort which were systematically directed against New Left and other activists...

...Brought to life in detail they would not only bury the Justice Department in civil suits, but would reveal the CO-INTELPRO for what it was: a broad, systematic and secret attempt to dictate the terms of American political debate by "neutralizing" people who were outside the mainstream...

...But so far no major newspaper has made the attempt...

...They were slow to grasp what was going on in the early days of the civil rights movement, slow to grasp what we were doing in Vietnam, slow to grasp that Watergate was not simply a "third-rate burglary," and they have not yet grasped that the FBI, however many stolen cars it may recover, is primarily a political police...

...According to the Justice Depart- ment the acts of sabotage were of twelve different sorts but the only one which might conceivably be "legitiTHOMAS powers, 1971 Pulitzer Prize recipient and author of The War at Home (Grossman), contributes a regular column to these pages...

...COINTELPRO's stated purpose was to end "threats to domestic order" but in fact the target was dissident political activity, pure and simple...

...The claim that more than 2,000 FBI attempts at sabotage were "legitimate and proper" is breathtaking in its presumption...

...The FBI has never conceded that it uses provocateurs but surely provocation is the correct word for category Number 5, "Use of informants to disrupt a group's activities...

...Furthermore, the Attorney General confesses, this is known to have happened not a score nor even a hundred times, but on no less than 2,370 separate occasions...

...Before 1968, for example, all FBI wiretaps (with the arguable exception of foreign intelligence taps, authorized by President Roosevelt at the beginning of World War II) were illegal...

...That accounted for approximately 190 instances, leaving 2,180 which it would be hard to defend in detail as anything but illegitimate and improper...