MLK, Victim Of The Surveillance State

[WilliamPitt]

MLK, Victim Of The Surveillance State
By Charles P. Pierce
Esquire

1/20/2014

The most queasy-inducing part of the president's big NSA speech last week was this passage: In fact, during the course of our review, I've often reminded myself I would not be where I am today were it not for the courage of dissidents like Dr. King who were spied upon by their own government. And as president, a president who looks at intelligence every morning, I also can't help but be reminded that America must be vigilant in the face of threats.

Is there any doubt, had there been a Dr. King in the past two decades who opposed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as vigorously as Dr. King opposed the Vietnam catastrophe at the end of his life, that the full might of the modern American intelligence apparatus would have landed squarely on his head? That his metadata would be unusually -- How you say? -- piquant in the various cubicles at NSA? That some of it would be strategically leaked to strategically important congresscritters and pundits and reporters? That, upon taking office in 2009, this president would have kept in place most of the programs with which that data on our new Dr. King was collected, perhaps tailoring them around the edges, perhaps installing some more weak-tea oversight than was there before, but keeping the basic philosophy behind the programs embedded in the American government as some sort of "balance" between security and civil liberties? I have none.

(snip)

The argument never changes, and it never has changed, from the moment after World War II when it was determined that the country needed a vast intelligence apparatus, and that, occasionally, because mistakes are made, these various institutions would act in an extraconstitutional manner, but that these mistakes would quickly be rectified by a combination of the good faith efforts of the people who made the mistakes, and the white-hot wrath of congressional oversight. (The press has a role, too, but it must be carefully circumscribed, lest the enemy find aid and comfort there.) And thus did the intelligence apparatus become so essential to the "modern liberal state" that Sean Wilentz can claim in The New Republic that the lack of fealty to the imperatives of the surveillance community as demonstrated by Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and Julian Assange is an assault on modern liberal state itself.

Nothing is ever new. In 1976, a congressional committee chaired by Rep. Otis Pike of New York explored various malfeasance by the intelligence community. The committee's support was suppressed by the congressional lapdogs of said community. Daniel Schorr got a hold of a copy and disseminated it, and there was considerable hell to pay. (Schorr resigned from CBS under pressure after refusing to identify his source to a congressional committee.) As it happens, there was long passage in a draft report concerning the ambitions of the NSA...

The rest: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/dr-king-and-surveillance-012014

[legcramp]

1. On October 10, 1963, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy

On October 10, 1963, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy committed what is widely viewed as one of the most ignominious acts in modern American history: he authorized the Federal Bureau of Investigation to begin wiretapping the telephones of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Kennedy believed that one of King's closest advisers was a top-level member of the American Communist Party, and that King had repeatedly misled Administration officials about his ongoing close ties with the man.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/07/the-fbi-and-martin-luther-king/302537/

Thus giving rise to Bill Bellicheats later "spygate" episode.

Trust no one from Boston.