Long before 9/11, the government had maintained a comprehensive spying program to fend off any perceived threats to the American system. Except that the targets of this surveillance were not threats to anything except to the status quo. This was Cointelpro, short for counter-intelligence program, an FBI operation that began in the 1940s and ended in the mid-1970s, the post-Watergate era and Congress and the media began taking a hard look (for the first) time at the massive bureaucracy put in place by notorious FBI head J. Edgar Hoover.

Cointelpro spied on thousands of Americans, and sometimes that surveillance went beyond tapped phone calls and intercepted correspondence. That kind of surveillance is bad enough, but the FBI also destroyed lives and played a role in domestic political assassinations in the name of "national security." Nearly all this surveillance and disruption was focused on left-wing Americans who strongly opposed the status quo through anti-Vietnam war protests, support for revolutionary movements around the world and advocacy against a U.S. economic system in favor of more egalitarian policies. Cointelpro is a dark period in American history, and this country is a much freer place without it.

Why is all of this relevant, decades after Cointelpro shut down? Because Cointelpro records are still coming to light. Sometimes Cointelpro went after celebrities as opposed to local, anonymous leftists. A decade ago, it was revealed that the Nixon administration tried like the devil to deport former Beatle John Lennon. This time around, records show that the government was surveilling radical historian Howard Zinn, a hero to many progressives for his landmark book, A People's History of the United States, which examined American history from the perspective of civil rights and labor activists and the other social movements which stood up against unjustified war and economic policies. This book is a rite of passage for many college students who were force-fed stories about American exceptionalism for 12 years in grade school.

As summarized by Raw Story:

On Friday, the FBI released a 243-page file on Zinn, who died in January at age 87. The release describes the historian as "radical." The documents show the bureau taking an active interest in Zinn since the late 1940s, when he was a student at New York University. The interest continued through the 1950s, as Zinn worked on his PhD at Columbia University.

When the FBI again took an interest in Zinn in the 1960s, documents show the bureau evidently tried to have the historian fired from his job as professor at Boston University.

In a document from the Boston FBI office (see PDF file here), an FBI "source," whose name was redacted from the publicly released documents, was quoted as being outraged over Zinn's comment at a protest that the US had become a "police state" and that prosecutions of Black Panther Party members were creating "political prisoners."

The bureau's Boston office then indicated it wanted to help the source in his or her campaign to unseat Zinn. "[The] Boston [office] proposes under captioned program with Bureau permission to furnish [name redacted] with public source data regarding Zinn's numerous anti-war activities ... in an effort to back [redacted] efforts for his removal."

The new Cointelpro records on Zinn show the government was obsessed with the Brooklyn-born university professor who served as a fighter pilot in World War II. He turned against the Vietnam war and led rallies in the 1960s and 1970s. One of his targets was government surveillance against anti-war activists. Did he know the government was spying on him? He probably suspected it.

So the FBI tried to have Zinn fired from his job, in part, because he criticized the FBI's repressive tactics. This may sound shocking to anyone not familiar with Cointelpro, but it's actually par for the course. That the government could go after high profile people like John Lennon and Howard Zinn for their left-wing activism shows how ruthless the so-called anti-communist crusade really was. Anyone could be a target, and many people were. This kind of surveillance was totally illegal, and it further confirms my view that the United States did not fully become a democratic country until the day that Congress shut down Cointelpro in the mid-1970s.