Terrorism Investigations on Campus and the New McCarthyism

In: Dissent: a quarterly of politics and culture, Volume 71, Issue 1, p. 100-107

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In the 1960s, the FBI's counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) routinely infiltrated campus antiwar and civil rights groups, investigating thousands of students with the aim of discrediting their activism and destroying their career prospects. After a Senate committee led by Frank Church exposed this practice, the FBI disavowed it and applied a heightened standard for initiating investigations at universities. There is reason to believe, however, that federal law enforcement is facing pressure to relax its self-restraint and investigate pro-Palestinian student activists using a tool not at its disposal in the heyday of COINTELPRO: a nebulous federal statute that imposes prison sentences of up to twenty years for providing "material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization." This statute criminalizes public advocacy that is done under the direction of or in coordination with foreign terrorist groups. There are few legal constraints, however, that would prevent a motivated FBI from using pro-Palestinian speech as grounds for investigating students who have no connection to such a group.