Selective Leaks: The Shallowness Of Deep Throat

[Itsthetruth]

CounterPunch
June 2, 2005

Selective Leaks from Corruption Central
The Shallowness of Deep Throat
By DAVID PRICE

Now we know that the Hoover-less FBI played a very large role in the Watergate scandal. But something that is lost in the current focus on Mark Felt is the universe of things known to Deep Throat that he didn't bother leaking to the American public. Chief among these was J. Edgar Hoover's secret longstanding illegal campaigns to destroy legal domestic political organizations of which he disapproved. These included a wide range of organizations such as the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, an assortment of racial equality groups, various peace groups and socialist and communist organizations, gay rights and gender equity groups-but these also included surveillance campaigns of things like book buying co-ops and public utility districts.

While the FBI's COINTELPRO became known in 1971, the extent of Hoover's interference with American democracy was not known for years. Mark Felt was a Hoover devotee who worked on these very COINTELPRO operations, but he did not feel the need to leak documents on the damage done to American democracy by these illegal campaigns.

Last year I was probably one of the few Americans who read Felt's (1979) book, "The FBI Pyramid: From the Inside," his inside account of his years working in J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Felt deeply admired Hoover as he directed Hoover's FBI inspection division, more popularly known as the "goon squad," the unit of agents who traveled the country seeing to it that local agents followed Hoover's often twisted and illegal directives.

Now we know that Felt used this book simply to wink at future generations who would know him best as Deep Throat, dethroner of a corrupt American president. With hindsight, Felt's book is an odd monument justifying the anti-democratic campaigns of the FBI to a world that would come to know him as the man to took down Nixon for his administration's illegal acts.

http://www.counterpunch.org/price06022005.html