King and Hoover, encore

[struggle4progress]

January 16, 2006

THIS YEAR'S celebration of Martin Luther King's birthday should be an occasion to reflect on the unlearning of history's lessons. Today, as in the 1960s, federal agencies flout the Constitution in the name of a war against a foreign threat ...

The FBI wiretapped King's home and his offices at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as well as the phones of his colleagues. Agents installed microphones in hotel rooms to obtain information about the ''private activities of King and his advisers," information that could be used, in the words of an FBI memo, to ''completely discredit" them. These taped conversations were then used not as evidence in a legal procedure but in efforts to ruin King's reputation, to force him to stop trying to make America live up to its professed ideals, and even to try to push him to commit suicide ...

Today's FBI seems to be looking for terrorists in all the wrong places, conducting extensive surveillance of such disparate groups as the Vegan Community Project, the Catholic Worker movement, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Hoover would not see that King was striving to save America from its real enemies within. And Hoover's heirs are still burrowing away at Americans' liberties. They confuse the unruliness of free speech with real threats to national security much as Hoover confused the true patriotism of King with Soviet subversion.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2006/01/16/king_and_hoover_encore/