Civil Liberties: To Hell in a Basket?
Haskell, Gordon K.
ARE THE RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES of the American people being sent to hell in a basket? Or do they stand relatively secure, unaffected by "law and order" counterpressures? Social and political...
...That's a crude sketch of political moods, with the events mentioned merely as bench-marks of change...
...Government demonstrations...
...city and university riots...
...It is quite likely that Nixon will end up by having appointed no less than four justices, and possibly even five, in one term in office...
...and the Nixon-Agnew victory and all that has flowed from it...
...Isaac Langnas was a close friend of the magazine...
...The nature of this activity is such that it is almost impossible to tell whether it has gotten "worse" in recent times...
...I cannot recall that undercover agents ever have played a role in convicting a member of such an organization for an act that was validly illegal...
...It is not clear from his article whether these army sleuths "monitor" "protest politics" solely by attending public meetings and using the files of local police and other agencies, or whether some secretly join the groups involved...
...For Americans to the left of an imaginary center line, the political atmosphere has become smoggier since the assassination of John Kennedy, with only a slight relief during the McCarthy-Robert Kennedy campaign...
...It publishes a booklet periodically which is an "encyclopedia of profiles of people and organizations who, in the opinion of the intelligence command officials who compile it, might cause trouble for the Army...
...One may guess that the higher courts will rule on the basis of procedural defects rather than the constitutional or factual merits of the case...
...Such a clash, say, between the Weathermen or Panthers and the Minutemen or Klu Klux Klan would be an open shoot-out...
...Our rights and our liberties are not in a happy state, it would seem...
...On January 15, the New York Times quoted a former captain in Army intelligence to the effect that his service alone had "nearly 1,000 plainclothes Army investigators" who "keep track of civilian political activity across the country and submit regular reports to a collection headquarters at Fort Holabird, in Baltimore...
...People engaging in espionage, sabotage, arson, theft, or attempts to commit such crimes generally avoid active participation in the political life of any organization...
...The impact of political "intelligence" gathering becomes much stronger when the government gives reason to suspect that it may decide to persecute dissidents, even those who have never dreamed of violating a valid law...
...These changes have affected morale...
...Born in Poland, he came to America as a refugee...
...Exposure, opposition, outcry against every violation of civil rights and liberties—all are essential...
...According to Pyle, this program got started as late as 1965...
...Whether they will decline to appeal a conviction to the Supreme Court, only time will tell...
...Tom Hayden, at least, has expressed a very different intention for himself, which has been reprinted approvingly by New Left publications: We need to expand our struggle to include atotal attack on the courts...
...The people are the jury...
...This is certainly true of the Minutemen on the Right and of both the Weathermen and some Black Panther groups...
...could be estimated with precision sufficient for any valid governmental purpose by such simple devices as reading openly published quotas assigned to branches in fund drives, getting reports on the size of mailings from the post office, attending a few public meetings, etc...
...But the devils of political infiltration, the police frame-up, and perhaps even of the romantic terrorist, will be exorcised only by a change in the political climate that replaces fear and discouragement with confidence and hope...
...The events crucial for answering this question are: the trials of the "Chicago Eight...
...There is no reason for us to become submissive at the courtroom door...
...With Attorney General Mitchell in power, and Nixon and Agnew to back him up, how paranoid does one have to be to worry a bit about one's membership in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, or the ACLU...
...THE SUPREME COURT, at least for the past decade, has thrown its weight overwhelmingly toward a broadening of the concepts of due process, equal protection, and civil liberties in general...
...How hard it must be to resist stepping over the line of legality in an ideological environment that glorifies terrorism and violence...
...The ACLU and the NAACP Legal and Defense Fund did not win all their cases at the highest level, but at times things reached the point at which the competence of civil liberties lawyers could almost be judged by their batting average in victories and defeats...
...Perhaps the government hopes to distract attention from the fact that whatever the original intentions of some or all the defendants, what happened in Chicago was a "police riot" of the worst kind...
...In addition, the judge has delivered himself of a number of startling rulings, including some personally against de * This article was written while the trial (of the"Chicago Seven") was in progress...
...The old liberal coalition has fallen apart, and this permits the other side of the American political character to gain dominance...
...Initially, the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil liberties groups sought to have the indictments quashed on the grounds that the law is unconstitutionally vague, or in confiict with the free-speech and assembly guarantees of the First Amendment...
...banquet last year turned up as a police witness at the Chicago trial...
...It is quite clear that a few of the most "activist" groups which have sprung up during the past five years do not merely talk about armed guerrilla activity, but actually try to engage in it...
...Everything organizations of the "Old Left" planned or did was openly reflected in their publications, for all to read...
...the widespread use of police and other government agents to infiltrate political organizations as re COMMENTS AND OPINIONS vealed in those trials and elsewhere...
...Is their real concern with the constitutionality of the law, or proving the police and their stool pigeons guilty of a frame-up...
...But the defendants—what are they trying to accomplish...
...Now that the light of public attention has been focused on this dirty business, all kinds of "startling" revelations will crop up—but they often will be no more than "discoveries" of very old facts...
...escalation of the war in Vietnam with all its consequences...
...Or in defending the democratic process...
...At least one of the youths arrested for forging tickets and trying to disrupt an L.I.D...
...From Hayden's book Rebellion and Repression.] The conduct of the defendants is perhaps explained by Hayden's quotation...
...But what effect have they had on "our rights and our liberties...
...Disintegration of the civil rights movement with "Black Power" getting the headlines...
...From that moment on, the trial has been a kind of guerrilla theater in a courtroom setting...
...We will win ourparticular cases as well as the general strugglenot by appeals to the Supreme Court or by"deals" with prosecutors but by taking theissues over and over to the public...
...THE CHICAGO CONSPIRACY TRIAL,* like the clashes surrounding the Democratic Convention in November 1968, is as good a model as we could find of the social processes likely to result from a clash of the most extreme forms of American radicalism with the forces now dominant in the federal government...
...Espionage within traditional radical orga nizations serves absolutely no legitimate govern mental interest and is a total waste of the public money, to boot...
...An accomplished linguist in many languages and an expert translator, Langnas had translated from the Russian the famous essay of Sinyaysky, "On Socialist Realism," originally published in DISSENT...
...But if the trial lasts much longer, the Supreme Court to which they are appealing may have changed so much as to turn Hayden's propaganda into prophecy (see below) . POLICE INFILTRATION AND SURVEILLANCE of radical political organizations is nothing new in this country...
...The powerto keep our movement free resides only in the people...
...That political infiltration can have a "chilling effect" on the willingness of all but the most courageous (or foolhardy) to join protest movements is obvious...
...It is harder to combat because there is a greater acceptance for such activity filtering down from the highest levels of government...
...Social and political tensions have been mounting through the late '60s...
...As long as such infiltration is COMMENTS AND OPINIONS being done in the context of a free, hopeful political atmosphere, its effects may be negligible, because only the paranoid will refrain from political activity merely because some reactionary cop may put his name in a file...
...The old labor spy racket, the vigilantes who killed and deported Wobblies, the lynch mobs of the South, all of these could function only with the support, covert or open, of politicians and cops...
...His belief in a democratic and humanist form of socialism was matched by his cheerful nature and optimistic outlook, despite a lifetime of difficulties...
...The above sentence is not the equivalent of: "The Chicago trial is a model of the clash between the extremes of the American political spectrum...
...To prove its case, the Justice Department could not confine itself to proving that some or all of the defendants had publicly proclaimed that they intended to "break up" or "make impossible" the peaceful conclusion of the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968...
...fense counsel which led to an outpouring of statements (and bodies) from all sections of the American bar in outrage at such highhanded treatment of their brethren...
...By "validly illegal" I do not mean, of course, purely political acts which were made illegal by the passage of a law banning some kind of communication, such as the Smith Act which makes it illegal to conspire to advocate overthrow of the government...
...This could turn the whole civil liberties picture around for the next decade...
...They were as much a part of the American tradition as were the movements and martyrs they attacked...
...Or do they stand relatively secure, unaffected by "law and order" counterpressures...
...The court systemis just another part of this rigged apparatusthat is passed off as "open and impartial...
...But recently the Secret Service sent out "Liaison Guidelines" to other law enforcement agencies requesting reports on persons who attempt to "embarrass" high officials, seek redress of imaginary grievances, etc., "make irrational or abusive statements" about office-holders, or take part in "anti-American or anti-U.S...
...Having been denied their motions, the ACLU was told by the defendants that they preferred their own lawyers so that they would be free to conduct their defense in their own way...
...After the fall of Joe McCarthy, the left-of-center felt the exhilaration of troops on the offensive...
...That law makes it a crime to cross a state line for the purpose of fomenting a riot...
...The indictment against the Chicago Eight was brought by a Justice Department headed by the liberal Ramsay Clark, under a very bad law originally directed against civil rights activists...
...If they succeed, they will chill a lot of wild talk that passes for political discourse, but they may also intimidate people from really expressing serious opinions about political issues...
...Proof also had to be submitted that the defendants had then participated in concrete acts to further the objectives of the alleged "conspiracy...
...Today," former Captain Pyle continued, "the army maintains files on the membership, ideology, programs, and practices of virtually every activist political group in the country...
...This kind of thing will be discussed below...
...The Secret Service is supposed to protect the President of the United States, members of his family, and other public officials...
...ISAAC A. LANGNAS 1912-1970 We learn with regret of the sudden death of Isaac Langnas, for many years the chief translator for DISSENT...
...The Justice Department seems determined to chill the possibility of future "Chicagos" by convicting these defendants...
...The political style now modish in the New Left requires ten times as much big talk as action, yet only the stupid or disingenuous contend that all the charges for planning or executing validly criminal acts are frame-ups...
...Thesystem is most threadbare within the militaryand municipal courts, but can be exposed at all levels...
...But no one can be really comfortable about the degree of sophistication judges will bring to bear on determining the validity of grounds adduced for the procurement of such a warrant...
...Government evidence purporting to link the defendants to illegal acts or incitements has been produced almost exclusively by planted undercover agents (with assists from uniformed and plainclothes policemen...
...changes in the Supreme Court...
...Police spies have notoriously been inclined to escalate the importance and drama of their assignments by provocation and entrapment...
...Thus, it is unnecessary to postulate a significant intensification of police infiltration of radical and liberal groups to recognize that the current political situation has made such infiltration both harder to combat and more deadly to a free political process...
...and because the resort to terrorist tactics by even a tiny fraction of the radical movement makes it more difficult for liberals and radicals to argue against all police surveillance...
...The ACLU has urged that all infiltration be subject to a court order (in the same way as a search warrant...
...Whether or not they have left critical Democrats and Republicans alone, only future historians will (possibly) be able to tell...
...ARE THE RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES of the American people being sent to hell in a basket...
...From then on it has been pretty much downhill...
...Most metropolitan police depart COMMENTS AND OPINIONS ments have had special "intelligence" or "Red Squads" for decades, and the FBI has spent tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars spying on groups outside the mainstream of American politics...
...Even such matters as the size of membership, geographic distribution, strength of influence in other mass organizations, etc...
...Now Burger has replaced Warren, President Nixon will appoint a successor to Fortas, and Black and Douglas are the oldest members of the Court...
...Still, one may wonder how much of the hooliganism which passes for political activism is being planned and initiated, led and executed by police spies and infiltrators...
...The freedom rides moved into the victory symbolized by the "Little Rock Nine" and then to the Mississippi summer, and through the early civil rights victories...
Vol. 17 • March 1970 • No. 2
