The Edward Said Team: FBI Involvement in Edward Said's Life

The FBI has had a long lasting reputation of taking an active involvement in monitoring intellectuals such as: William Carlos Williams, Martin Luther King and even Albert Einstein. Why should it be any different for the writer, activist, theorist and critic Palestinian-American Edward Said?

David Price, on behalf of CounterPunch (http://www.counterpunch.org/) filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act to release the FBI file on Edward Said. In response Mr. Price got 147 of the 238 pages of the actual file. There were unusual gaps in the records, which might be explained partly because of USA's Patriot Act where it allows the FBI to negate the existence of certain records.

The majority of the documents describe Said's public work with the American-based Palestinian or Arab organizations. These records also show extensive monitoring of his other Palestinian-American contacts.

As it turns out to the Said family, it was no surprise to find out the secret activities of the FBI, as Edward Said's wife Mariam says :

“ We always knew that any political activity concerning the Palestinian issue is monitored and when talking on the phone we would say ' let the tappers hear this'. We believed that our phoneswere tapped fro a long time, but it never bothered us because we knew we were hiding nothing.”

Despite the varied background of knowledge and involvement not only politically but also culturally of Edward Said, all of his FBI records revealed so farm, were classified under “ Foreign Counter-Intelligence”, and related to “IS Middle East”, which is the Federal Bureau category for Israel.

The records start in 1971 , followed by an in depth background check of Edward Said's citizenship, banking , credit and even voting records, in 1972 after the Munich Olympics.

The Munich Olympics marked the unfortunate event of the murder of the Israeli Olympic Team, by the Black September Organization. Scholar Steve Niva who specializes in the Middle East affirms that “ looking back, this post-Munich period may have marked a historic turning point when statements in support of the Palestinian cause became routinely equated with sympathies for terrorism.”

From 1972-1973, the FBI fuelled an investigation purely from reading up on an older article from the Boston Globe, titled “Columbia Professor Blames Racist Attitude for Arab Israeli Conflict”

After the Yom Kippur War ( Oct 1973 ), the records show several of Said's newspaper articles that summarize his view that Palestine and Israel have been set up to fight against each other throughout history, instead of putting up a fight against the Imperial powers of the time.

In 1978, after Said's published book titled Orientalism no records were kept. The following year, the FBI records showed extensive entries about the 1979 Palestine American Congress (PAC)where thirty six names that were attending were blacked out.

The PAC was the most democratic effort displayed by the Palestine-Americans , in regards to the Palestine issues.

Oddly enough the FBI sealed the rest of the records from 1983 to 1991 as “Secret” until the year 2030. Interestingly enough, the remaining years from 1991 to present have no records either.

In a blatantly obvious conclusion, no matter how many times Edward Said made clear his intentions and theories, and his disapproval for all kind of terrorist actions, the US government continued to invade the Said family's privacy.