Obama Revives Frühmenschen
by Jeffrey Steinberg
Aug. 2—On Jan. 27, 1988, Rep. Mervyn Dymally (D-Calif.), the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, entered an affidavit into the Congressional Record, from an Atlanta attorney and FBI informant named Hirsch Friedman. Friedman provided an eyewitness account of a secret and illegal 40-year, ongoing FBI program, known within the Bureau as "Operation Frühmenschen" ("Operation Primitive Man").
Friedman described Frühmenschen in graphic terms: "The purpose of this policy was the routine investigation without probable cause of prominent elected and appointed black officials in major metropolitan areas throughout the United States." FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and other top Bureau officials, Friedman explained, believed that African-Americans were incapable of serving in high public office, and took it upon themselves to railroad countless African-Americans from elected office, through trumped up charges, and worse.
Several authors have subsequently linked the FBI to the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination—and tied that murder to Frühmenschen, as well.
As the result of Dymally's initial efforts, and a campaign waged throughout the 1990s by the Schiller Institute and a broad spectrum of civil rights activists and other close allies of Lyndon LaRouche, Operation Frühmenschen was widely exposed.
But now, Frühmenschen has been revived, with the full complicity of President Barack Obama and the "Chicago crew" at the White House. A senior U.S. intelligence source has confirmed crucial details of EIR's own investigation into a "marriage of convenience" between the FBI and the Obama White House. A select list of African-American legislators, who have been critical of key Obama policies, have been targetted for destruction, and, in return, the Obama Administration has given the FBI the green light to expand its illegal surveillance programs, targetted at American citizens.
"It is the worst of Chicago politics wedded to the worst FBI abuses of power," one source declared.
Pelosi's OCE
One of President Obama's key allies in this assault on the political leadership of the African-American community is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The day she was sworn in as Speaker, in January 2007, Pelosi vowed to "clean the swamp" of Congressional corruption, and proposed the creation of an independent Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). The proposal was so flagrantly unconstitutional on its face, that several leading Congressional Democrats assailed it publicly, including John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Neal Abercrombie (D-Hi.).
Abercrombie charged that any referral from the OCE to the House Ethics Committee would be tantamount to a guilty verdict. "Any other conclusion by the House Ethics Committee will be seen as a coverup." He raised the crucial question of the source of the complaints to the OCE that would trigger its investigations: "I can't figure out where the ethics complaints come from. Are they dropped off at the door?"
LaRouche was even more blunt: In a July 30 statement, LaRouche declared: "The OCE is not an elected body and it does not have the powers of government. It is totally unconstitutional. It is rotten, and it should be uprooted. The behavior of this thing, and the way it functions, is contrary to the intention of the Constitution. And so, if it passes an unconstitutional ruling, that should be recognized as unconstitutional...."
In the face of strong protests, Pelosi narrowly rammed through a House Resolution, creating the Office of Congressional Ethics, on March 11, 2008. On July 24, 2008, Pelosi and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced the appointment of six OCE board members and two alternates. The chair and co-chair of the body, named by Pelosi and Boehner, were two former Congressmen, David Skaggs, a Colorado Democrat, and Porter Goss, a Florida Republican, who later briefly served under President George W. Bush as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The staff director and general counsel to the OCE, Leo Wise, came to the office from the Department of Justice, where he was a prosecutor in the criminal division, and received a special service award from the FBI.
The Office of Congressional Ethics held its first full session in January 2009, as Barack Obama was being inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States.
Targetting Rangel and Waters
Dingell and Abercrombie's warnings were prophetic. In its short existence, the OCE has zeroed in on a number of leaders of the Black Congressional Caucus, who have all crossed swords with both Pelosi and Obama. At one point earlier this year, all eight of the ongoing OCE investigations were aimed at members of the Black Caucus, a flagrant case of selective prosecution.
While the OCE does not have the power to take action against Members of Congress, its referrals to the House Ethics Committee, and the leaking of details of those referrals to major news outlets, amount to a "star chamber" proceeding.
And, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, the OCE has been fed FBI dossiers on a hit list of Congressmen, predominantly African-American, including material illegally obtained, through unauthorized surveillance and unwarranted sting operations.
The source pointed to the case of former Rep. William Jennings Jefferson (D-La.) as a crucial event in the revival of Frühmenschen. A nine-term Congressman, Jefferson was the first African-American elected to the U.S. Congress from Louisiana, since the end of Reconstruction. In May 2006, the FBI raided his Congressional office, in what some Constitutional scholars called one of the most flagrant violations of the separation of powers in American history. Jefferson was indicted on June 4, 2007, and following his defeat in the 2008 general election, he was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to 13 years in Federal prison on bribery charges.
"The Jefferson case was the green light for the FBI to fully revive Frühmenschen, and the Obama Administration, contrary to the expectations of millions of voters, has done nothing to halt the FBI's latest assault on the African-American political leadership," the source charged.
On Aug. 2, the OCE aimed its guns at longtime California Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters, in an attempted political lynching, based on a bogus charge of "conflict of interest," in which bankers' boy Rep. Barney Frank is a primary witness against her. Like Rangel, Waters is refusing to capitulate to the Ethics Committee, stating,
"I have not violated any House rules. Therefore, I simply will not be forced to admit to something I did not do, and instead have chosen to respond to charges made by the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct in a public hearing."
Obama Speaks
On July 30, President Obama appeared on CBS Nightly News to issue what amounted to a direct threat to Congressman Rangel. Asked by Katie Couric about the just-announced House Ethics Committee bill of indictment against the 20-term New York legislator, Obama described the charges as "very troubling." He went on to say, "He's somebody who's at the end of his career. Eighty years old. I'm sure that what he wants is to be able to end his career with dignity. And my hope is that it happens."
For a professor of Constitutional law—Obama taught for a dozen years at the University of Chicago Law School—the President showed a criminal disregard for the sacred principle of "innocent until proven guilty." Indeed, after a 14-month investigation, the House Ethics Subcommittee that reviewed the charges against Rangel recommended a reprimand, a slap on the wrist. Rangel strongly defended his innocence, and refused to accept the "plea deal" offered to his attorneys in prolonged negotiations. His own declaration before the Committee, released July 29, is a powerful indictment of the whole rotten process (see Documentation, p. 39).
The widely publicized threat against Rangel from the President came just 24 hours after Obama appeared on the ABC-TV morning gossip show, "The View," where he made another blatantly racist comment, describing African-Americans as "a sort of a mongrel people. We are all sort of mixed up."
LaRouche declared: "Not since Woodrow Wilson embraced the Ku Klux Klan and reinstituted segregation throughout the Federal Government, has a U.S. President been so blatant in his racism," LaRouche charged in a July 23 statement, following the White House's pivotal role in the firing of U.S. Department of Agriculture official and civil rights activist Shirley Sherrod, and the anticipation of the House Ethics complaint against Rangel: "It is getting more and more obvious that President Obama intends to exert dictatorial control over the African-American vote, and that the only African-Americans he wishes to see in the United States Congress and in other important elected positions are Uncle Toms who will bow to his every command," LaRouche concluded.
Other Voices Assail Obama Racism
It is becoming painfully obvious to more and more civil rights activists that the Jim Crow charge against Obama sticks, and that he is committed to policies that will roll back some of the most hard-fought and precious victories of the civil rights stuggles of the past decades.
On July 26, an extraordinary coalition of the civil rights organizations issued a 17-page manifesto, denouncing Obama's signature "Race to the Top" educational reform program, charging that the so-called reforms were actually an assault on President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society commitment to equal educational opportunities for all children, regardless of their race or economic standing.
The civil rights groups blasted Obama and his Chicago crony and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, for discriminating against predominantly African-American school districts that will lose Federal funding for failing to meet the "Race to the Top" criteria (see Documentation, p. 42).
The manifesto was directed personally to the President: "Dear President Obama: You say you believe in an equal education for all students, but you are embarking on education policies that will never achieve that goal and that can do harm to America's school children, especially its neediest. Stop before it is too late."
There is no way that Obama, left to his own devices, will "stop before it is too late." The only way to save the nation is for the American people to wake up to the fact that Obama, as LaRouche has warned, repeatedly, since April 2009, is a failed personality, hell-bent on the destruction of the United States. Until he is safely, Constitutionally removed from office, the United States will remain in grave peril. Unless he is out of the Presidency by early Autumn—well before the November elections, the nation is doomed.
