Prisoner of Conscience: Terry Albury vs. FBI
Document Type
Poster Presentation
Keywords
Terry Albury, Prisoner of Conscience
Biography
I am an Undergraduate Psychology and Communication double major with a concentration in Public Communication. I was apart of SGA, LSAMP, and Students Human Sex Trafficking which co founded.
Major
Psychology and Communication
Advisor for this project
Stephen Underhill
Abstract
In this paper, I examine how the FBI’s history of targeting the African American civil rights movement against police brutality and racial inequality. This content analysis focuses on the 2021 New York Times interview transcript with former counterterrorism and undercover FBI agent Terry Albury. He was interviewed about his capture, trial, and imprisonment for leaking information to the press about the FBI’s racist post-9/11 operations against what it called “Black Identity Extremists.” Albury’s transcript illustrates how the FBI causes undue panic and fear in law enforcement officers about the civil rights movement. Borrowing from rhetorical theory on prisoners of conscience, I argue that the language used internally by the FBI leads to unnecessary and sometimes fatal force against these organizations and exploits their purposes.
Gerard Hauser states in Prisoner of Conscience “...relationship between the POC and the prison, which is based on the prisoner’s commitments of conscience and the prison’s dedication to breaking his or her strength. The biopolitics of the prison or the camp ostensibly strips the prisoner’s individuating qualification of political conscience. It is enacted through systematic attempts to control the body in a way that puts it beyond oppression, since the oppressed body is one with rights that have been abused.”
Prisoner of Conscience: Terry Albury vs. FBI
In this paper, I examine how the FBI’s history of targeting the African American civil rights movement against police brutality and racial inequality. This content analysis focuses on the 2021 New York Times interview transcript with former counterterrorism and undercover FBI agent Terry Albury. He was interviewed about his capture, trial, and imprisonment for leaking information to the press about the FBI’s racist post-9/11 operations against what it called “Black Identity Extremists.” Albury’s transcript illustrates how the FBI causes undue panic and fear in law enforcement officers about the civil rights movement. Borrowing from rhetorical theory on prisoners of conscience, I argue that the language used internally by the FBI leads to unnecessary and sometimes fatal force against these organizations and exploits their purposes.
Gerard Hauser states in Prisoner of Conscience “...relationship between the POC and the prison, which is based on the prisoner’s commitments of conscience and the prison’s dedication to breaking his or her strength. The biopolitics of the prison or the camp ostensibly strips the prisoner’s individuating qualification of political conscience. It is enacted through systematic attempts to control the body in a way that puts it beyond oppression, since the oppressed body is one with rights that have been abused.”
