About those crazy NSA/FBI/CIA conspiracy theorists…
Maybe it's because some of us have long memories.
http://www.alternet.org/books/fbi-spied-new-left-and-lied-about-it-so-conspiracy-theorists-would-sound-crazy?akid=10838.187861.bbz6sv&rd=1&src=newsletter885835&t=5
So let’s make a big show of spying on the man, the investigator suggested. Maybe we could build a spooky-looking mechanism from a bicycle part and an old transistor radio, then drop it off near his front steps one night. “In the event he displayed the contraption to anyone,” the officer argued, “its crude construction would ultimately neutralize any allegation that it originated or is being utilized by the FBI.” And if the target tried to tell people it was a bugging device, they’d ridicule him.
…
It was November 1968, and that was just one of hundreds of operations against domestic dissidents that FBI agents were proposing, and frequently carrying out, as a part of COINTELPRO, a program to disrupt and neutralize political movements that the Bureau deemed subversive. When it was launched in 1956, COINTELPRO had been aimed at the remnants of the Communist Party and at the groups the party had allegedly infiltrated. Gradually the program’s targets had expanded. COINTELPRO–Communist Party USA was joined by COINTELPRO–Socialist Workers Party, then COINTELPRO–White Hate Groups, then COINTELPRO– Black Nationalist/Hate Groups, then COINTELPRO–New Left.
The White Hate Groups effort was a watershed. The previous COINTELPROs had been designed with the Enemy Outside in mind: The Bureau’s target might have nothing to do with Soviet subversion, but the idea that it might be linked to Soviet subversion was always in play. But even J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s famously anti-Communist director, found it difficult to argue that the Reds controlled the Klan. Once the White Hate Groups program began in 1964, the sociologist David Cunningham has noted, many more groups could “be thought of as ‘subversive’ and therefore suitable targets for counterintelligence programs. No longer did a subversive group have to be controlled by or intimately tied to a hostile foreign power.” Because the Bureau was aiming its fire at the radical Right, powerful liberals were happy to sign off on the program, setting a precedent that made it easier later for the Bureau to target the antiwar movement and the Black Panthers.
Under COINTELPRO, FBI agents infiltrated political groups and spread rumors that loyal members were the real infiltrators. They tried to get targets fired from their jobs, and they tried to break up the targets’ marriages. They published deliberately inflammatory literature in the names of the organizations they wanted to discredit, and they drove wedges between groups that might otherwise be allied. In Baltimore, the FBI’s operatives in the Black Panther Party were instructed to denounce Students for a Democratic Society as “a cowardly, honky group” who wanted to exploit the Panthers by giving them all the violent, dangerous “dirty work.” The operation was apparently successful: In August 1969, just five months after the initial instructions went out, the Baltimore FBI reported that the local Panther branch had ordered its members not to associate with SDS members or attend any SDS events.
= new reply since forum marked as read
- This thread will, no doubt, be added to their voluminous files.
Kucinich, Dean, Gore, Grayson, not to mention Wellstone, the Kennedy's and King. I'm sure there is a website list out there. But most of this information is mixed up with nutbag conspiracy theories so that referencing them will then discredit you as equally insane.
See, in the mainstream people are either all right or all wrong, which is the real insanity. Someone can be right on all the issues, but a poisonous meme is injected into the body politic that erases all that, a scream, a misquote, being associated with an artistic imaginative original thinker--and voila! They are disappeared, out of the running. But the truth is--and most people KNOW THIS but play along--all these people did was wander off the owners ranch, colored out if the lines, and proved they could not be owned or controlled enough.
This is my turf, the edge, and I am proud of it. I investigate odd stuff, I LOVE original and adventurous people--and it has rewarded me with a rich life full of experiences far off most people's map. It is who I am, but it has been frustrating. Like many old timers here I wrote of the Bush&Co coup, terrorist and religious ruse, plunder of resources foreign and domestic, all to change the foundation of our government not long after 911 (wish I saved my posts!)--not to say 'I told you so' but as an example of what living on the edge of this manufactured over culture has wrought--years of being called crazy, a conspiracy theorist, and a far left liberal.
I believe there is a place for everyone in this world, conservatives have their place, people who thrive in disciplined environments are as needed as free thinking philosophers and artists. But we have to integrate better, this is why many old cultures have unfamiliar and familiar language-- to facilitate comraderie between strangers before ever discussing business, politics or religion. Americans just launch in and 'get to the point'-- but in so doing we are susceptible to fragmentation and division because of our diversity. As a
nation we have to have common ground or we are done--we will be broken apart by these war mongers as they have used racism and fear to divide other nations in order to plunder their lands.
America needs to look in a REAL mirror, undistorted, in order to go on--at our wounds, racism, violence, sexism--and ignorance projected upon us by the moneyed elite who are AFRAID of a free thinking ADULT and creative populace who do not allow themselves to be shackled and blinkered with their propaganda and intimidation. We sorely need more original thought, creativity, compassion and civil discourse to displace the egotistical posturing and politicization of our human rights that has starved us of our collective sense of purpose and true history.
In the name if all who have written, fought and died, for the traumatized, incarcerated, oppressed, those under dictatorships, we have to contine to push forward and call for the national conscience to emerge and shine again.
I tried to post this response 2x & it said this was locked? Now it's ok 