Vol. 80/No. 13 April 4, 2016
(Books of the Month column)
SWP victory over FBI gave tool to defend workers’ rights
The excerpt below is from the introduction to FBI on Trial: The Victory in the Socialist Workers Party Suit Against Government Spying edited by Margaret Jayko, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for March. It chronicles the 15-year lawsuit, Socialist Workers Party v. Attorney General, carried to a successful conclusion by the SWP and the Political Rights Defense Fund. From day one of the lawsuit, the SWP sought to collaborate with all organizations and individuals with a stake in the fight to defend and extend democratic rights.
Copyright © 1988 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
The ruling in this case places a valuable new weapon in the hands of all working people fighting to defend their rights and living standards and all those struggling for progressive social change. It can and should be used widely to win broader freedoms for everyone. The SWP and YSA filed the lawsuit July 18, 1973, in federal court in Manhattan. They charged government agencies with “illegal acts of blacklisting, harassment, electronic surveillance, burglary, mail tampering, and terrorism” against the socialist organizations. They demanded a court injunction to halt these illegal activities and that the government be ordered to pay damages.
The trial opened in New York April 2, 1981, and continued for three months. In eight years of pretrial proceedings the plaintiffs had managed to pry hundreds of thousands of pages out of the secret files of the FBI and other government police agencies, substantiating many of the allegations made in the original complaint. Many of these documents were submitted into evidence at the trial.
Five years after the trial, on August 25, 1986, U.S. District Judge Thomas Griesa ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. The judge found the FBI guilty of violations of the constitutional rights of the SWP and YSA and of their members and supporters.
On August 17, 1987, Judge Griesa issued an injunction barring any further government use of the FBI files on the SWP, YSA, and their members and supporters that had been compiled illegally.
On January 14, 1988, the government served notice that it would appeal Judge Griesa’s rulings. Two months later, just days before the deadline for submitting its appeal brief, the Justice Department withdrew its appeal. This ended the court case. An unprecedented victory for constitutional rights had been won. …
The court ruling provides a compelling summary of the government’s illegal operations against the SWP and YSA as revealed in the case. Judge Griesa dealt extensively with the FBI’s use of informers to spy on and seek to disrupt the SWP and YSA.
His decision details several of the fifty-seven disruption operations conducted by the FBI. These include poison-pen letters, malicious articles planted in the press, instances of harassment and victimization, covert attempts to get SWP members fired from their jobs, and efforts to disrupt collaboration between the SWP and Black rights and anti-Vietnam war groups.
It enumerates 20,000 days of wiretaps and 12,000 days of listening “bugs” between 1943 and 1963. It documents 208 FBI burglaries of offices and homes of the SWP and its members, resulting in the theft or photographing of 9,864 private documents.
Judge Griesa concluded that these government operations were illegal and a violation of the Bill of Rights. He ruled that appeals to “national security”— by the president or anyone else — cannot be used as an excuse to violate the Constitution. “The FBI exceeded any reasonable definition of its mandate and had no discretion to do so,” the judge concluded.
Based on these findings, Judge Griesa ordered the government to pay the SWP and YSA $264,000 in damages. …
Shortly after Griesa’s injunction was issued in 1987, the FBI’s covert spying operation against the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) was uncovered. …
Commenting on the speed of the reaction to news of spying on CISPES, SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes told reporters at a March 17, 1988, press conference announcing the final victory in the SWP case, “I think that people in this country view the FBI and political rights differently than they did fifteen years ago when our case was filed.
“We helped show millions of people in this country that the FBI engaged in a criminal domestic contra operation and is capable of doing so again,” said Barnes.
Coming when they did, the CISPES revelations and the sharp public reaction to them may also have helped tip the balance in a divided Justice Department and White House over whether or not to appeal the court ruling in the SWP case.
“Today’s Contragate indictments, the revelations of FBI crimes against CISPES, evidence of illegal activity on the part of Attorney General Edwin Meese, growing and well deserved skepticism generally regarding the FBI, all have helped create a context in which the government decided it could ill afford another public fight over its unconstitutional operation against the SWP,” commented Barnes.
The SWP leader went on to explain what was gained through this lawsuit: “We said fifteen years ago when we launched the case that the FBI’s purpose was to discourage political activity, to lessen the space for it, to narrow the de facto use of the Bill of Rights, to shrink the confidence of working people and anyone who wants to use their democratic rights, in order to prepare for the war and repression they felt was necessary.”
At a minimum we can say that our victory helps encourage people to engage in political activity, increases the space for politics, expands the de facto use of the Bill of Rights, increases the confidence of working people that you can be political and hold the deepest convictions against the government and it’s your right to do so and act upon them, and weakens their ability to prepare secretly for war and repression.”
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