A Cry to Stamps!

For half a century (OK, really only 48 years) J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI, as well as threatening the hell out of everyone. He did it illegally.

For the last ten years (OK, really 12 years) two presidents have signed off on a program that allows the NSA to collect information on our telephone calls, emails, and text messages. They’re doing it legally.

We had all been saying it for years, all of us “radical” people who couldn’t quite get why we had to sit in Vietnamese rice paddies, watch little kids approach, and wonder if they had bombs under their dirty shirts. We spoke out against the infiltrators, the bugged telephones, the informers, all of the people spying on us as we protested an unjust war.

I miss it, those innocent years before we paid others to fight our wars, and before we gave away our privacy to the government, instead of protesting it. And I may as well confess, I’m mostly of the opinion that Edward Snowden acted correctly when he exposed the secret programs that are spying on us all.

Why?

Because we wouldn’t have known, otherwise. And because everything—OK, much of what—we know about J. Edgar Hoover came from a similar action. Somebody—nobody knows who but you can bet it wasn’t for lack of trying—stole secret files from an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania.

It was a night in 1971, and most of the United States was watching Joe Frazier fight Muhammad Ali. But a guy or guys from the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI grabbed a crowbar, wrenched the 2-man FBI office, and filched the files. All in all, over a thousand documents were taken.

Two weeks later, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times got manila envelopes with copies of documents. There was the report on sending a tape to Martin Luther King; the tape showed King in his hotel room with women, not his wife. That came accompanied by a note: “King, there is one thing left for you to do. You know what it is.”

That presumably meant suicide, which was the option actress Jean Seberg opted for, after a (false) rumor was published saying that the father of her unborn child was a Black Panther, not her French husband.

Want more? Here’s one writer on the subject:

The sheer reach of a completely politicized FBI was one of the most frightening revelations of the Media documents. Underground newspapers were targeted. Students (and their professors) were targeted. Celebrities were targeted. The Communist Party of the U.S.A., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Non-Violent Organizing Committee, the Black Panther Party, the Women's Strike for Peace -- all were targeted. "Neutralize them in the same manner they are trying to destroy and neutralize the U.S.," one memo said.

 Attorney General John N. Mitchell asked Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, saying that doing so could “endanger people’s lives”—those people out there spyi…err, collecting information vital for our national security.

It was only through that one act—forcing a window, raiding two file cabinets—that we understood or rather we knew what we had always known. As well, we got a new term—COINTELPRO, or counter-intelligence program.

A few months after the break-in, Daniel Ellsberg came forth with the Pentagon Papers, which revealed that the government knew early on that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, and that the Johnson administration had lied to the people, and to the Congress. All of that lead to the Church Committee, which has been described as the most—well, here’s Wikipedia….

Together, the Church Committee's reports have been said to constitute the most extensive review of intelligence activities ever made available to the public. Much of the contents were classified, but more than 50,000 pages have since been declassified under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.

The report revealed that it wasn’t just at home that our intelligence system had gone seriously off whack. Here’s more Wikipedia, from the same source:

Among the matters investigated were attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, the Diem brothers of Vietnam, Gen. René Schneider of Chile and Director of Central Intelligence Allen Welsh Dulles's plan, approved by the President Dwight D. Eisenhower, to use the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba.

So now we have a president who is telling us that we should trust these secret programs because there is a mechanism to oversee them and so all is OK. But, in fact, a meeting that was called before the Snowden affair of the heads of the intelligence agencies and Congress had only 48 senators and representatives show up. The meeting was on a Friday afternoon—the boys skipped out early that day.

Oh, and the FISA judges approved every request from the NSA—all 1856 of them. Odd, why am I thinking just now of rubber stamps?

Hmmm, you know, it’s not a bad idea I have. Readers of this blog know that, for seven years, I worked for a small company named Wal-Mart. My efforts in that enterprise consisted largely of sitting a room, pounding on tables, and throwing pencils at small groups of people. That all ended one Friday morning, after the company had done an extensive re-alignment. I was outta line.

So what to do now?

Readers, be the first on your block to buy in. Give yourself a double shot of self congratulations by helping a deserving blogger and your government. For ten bucks (plus handling and shipping, as well as taxes where applicabl… oh, and you ladies down there in Tobago—I know you’re there—I gotta charge more) I’ll send you this valuable item, which you in turn (and in protest) can send to the federal government. The one crucial thing they obviously don’t have….