The late Richard Masato Aoki,  famed street fighting ’60s radical who armed San Francisco Bay Area  Black Panthers, has been implicated as an FBI informant. Surprise,  surprise.

The sight of armed Black Panthers prompted Governor Ronald Reagan to sign gun control in California.  Aoki’s role in arming them has always had a special place in the state’s  history. Now one wonders about the revelation’s significance in the  FBI’s connection to Black Panther run-ins with the police.

The Bureau’s involvement should not surprise anyone familiar with its  long record of infiltrating fringe political groups to disrupt them,  entrap activists, elicit violence, and generally make trouble.

Then called the Bureau of Investigation, the agency early on became  obsessed with powerless political extremists. It rounded up more than  50,000 alleged draft dodgers during World War I and was instrumental in  the Palmer raids that detained thousands of radicals in 1919 and 1920  and deported over five hundred to Soviet Russia.

For decades, American presidents used the FBI to spy on political  opponents—FDR targeted his critics and LBJ snooped on presidential  challenger Barry Goldwater’s staff.

But the most infamous FBI program was COINTELPRO—the Bureau’s  Counter Intelligence Program—that engaged in espionage of groups,  both peaceful and violent, mostly left-wing but some right-wing, from  1956 to 1971, at the height of J. Edgar Hoover’s directorship. During  this period, according to the journalist James Bovard,  “Over 2,300 separate operations were carried out to incite street  warfare between violent groups, to wreck marriages, to get people fired,  to smear innocent people by portraying them as government informants,  to sic the IRS on people, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black,  communist, or other organizations.”

Continue: http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=3419