Introduction and Preface by STTPML Collective
As veterans of the U.S. military, we all took the same oath that all federal employees take especially those in law enforcement and the judiciary: to uphold, defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. That Constitution declares itself to be, as all Constitutions must have, the supreme law (standard and principles) of the land, with the word “Supreme” meaning just what it means to a reasonable and prudent person impelled by law for follow it: supreme as in nothing in domestic law that contradicts it trumps it–rather the reverse–and only those covenants, principles embodied in ratified treaties under international law, covered in the “supremacy clauses” required of all constitutions under the Canons of Treaty, trump the U.S. or any other constitution in the event of a conflict between them.
So what does an NSA/CIA employee like Snowden, or some like Daniel Ellsberg do when finding that security classifications have been employed to cover-up crimes, mistakes, dereliction of duty, treason and the like, to protect even information already out in the public domain, and there is a long track record of what happens to whistle-blowers from the inside who follow all the procedures and protocols to expose crimes.? The oath to to uphold, defend and protect that Constitution, and indeed federal law such as 18 USC 4 (Misprision of a Felony) creates a mandate and duty to expose crimes, even if classified, to try to stop them and the harm they are doing to real innocents, that trumps any lower laws including having to do with leaking of classified documents. This is especially the case under exigent circumstances when lives are on the line and those who have followed all the protocols in the past only suffered personal destruction for their efforts.
Busting the likes of Snowden, or indeed these citizens in this article, would be like busting someone for jaywalking as they ran across the middle of a street to stop a rape or assault in progress. And we have all this concern for accepting the consequences of breach of the law by Obama, while Bush and his henchmen, along with now Obama and his own apparent war crimes https://sttpml.org/just-war-and-the-interrelated-predicates-and-precedents-of-nuremberg/skating of into retirement and another edifice to malignant narcissism, megalomania, imperial hubris and deceit called a presidential library.
And the memes and themes of culture, who are the real icons, who the buildings are named after, who are the heroes and who are the villains, what makes a hero or villain, how are everyday people portrayed, what lies are being covered-up or told, what truths are allowed and what are taboo and as defined by who all matter in real ways. Covering-up lies and crimes of the past, as well as continuing to suppress truths awaiting discovery and exposure, is like an aspirin for a brain tumor, or skin cream on a syphilitic rash, that can only delay effective diagnosis and removal of the second-by-second multiplying and mutating pathogens. Lies of the past, covered-up and embedded as truths in the present, only delay and make worse the inexorable fate, under the mounting weight of the internal contradictions in the lie and the lies necessary to support it. They not only pollute and constrain the present, the lies and cover-ups shape and constrain the future.
Throughout all of recorded and much of pre-recorded history, the few (individuals, groups, secret societies, governments, criminals) who have sought to rule and dominate the many, faced many contradictions and what they regarded as threats to their rule; internal contradictions and threats more than external, that eventually brought both the rise and fall of a long succession of social formations, modes of production, empires (or “civilizations” or “complex societies”) over human history that is far from over.
The first contradiction the very very few (even with their functionaries and protectors) who seek to rule the many face, no matter how brutal or slick their rule, is how to get the vast many to accept relative poverty and powerlessness, and just being ruled, by the tiny few who openly show wealth and lifestyles those vast masses have no hope of attaining. Even the most terrifying and brutal rule has its limits when people feel they are already dying by inches daily under the present order, and why not at least go out on one’s own terms, as a free person, choosing his or her time and manner and purpose of death.
The few who have sought to rule the many, and their minions (definite personality types) have the problem of grandiose dreams and plans, with their names on a lot of monuments to themselves, versus real-world constraints (U.S. Constitution, fiscal crises and limits, human resource limitations, strategic resource needs, inept and worse protection by the military and law enforcement etc). As they rely more on more on “technology” to save themselves and their rule of the few over the many, they are forced to increasingly “privatize” for critical skills, capabilities and resources simply not available inside government (partly due to the fact that government and the military do not want a draft unless last resort) and thus more and more Snowdens will show up the future.
But as you read this article below, consider that the present-day FBI building is still named after J Edgar Hoover, even as he has been revealed, through much credible documentation and most importantly in his own words and actions, to have been a malignant narcissist and megalomaniac; a cross-dressing, homophobic hypocrite; a mean, vindictive and retributive bigot; a mobbed-up extortionist and blackmailer of even presidents; a covert pioneer, along with Clyde Tolsen, of same-gender marriage and other arrangements he sought publicly to decry and destroy; simply a criminal and a thug wearing a tie and holding a title he was never fit to hold.
The FBI is part of the “Justice Department”. Imagine a shelter for battered women named after Ted Bundy the serial killer. How about a Center for Holocaust Studies and Lessons named after Joseph Goebbels? How about a building of the “Justice Department” named after the likes of Hoover?
As a matter of full disclosure, some of us, some Vietnam-Era, some Vietnam in-country veterans, were, due to our opposition to the illegal and criminal Vietnam War and other imperial wars of the kind Nazis were hanged for at Nuremberg, who were violating no laws, rather trying to expose the serial violations of law done in our name by the U.S. Government, were targets of the COINTELPRO program exposed by this raid, an infamous program whose essential features and intentions remain today as part of the surveillance and harassment of legitimate questioning citizens exercising their basic rights.
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The Secret Burglary That Exposed J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI
If able to link, please follow whole story and links at http://www.npr.org/2014/01/07/260302289/the-secret-burglary-that-exposed-j-edgar-hoovers-fbi
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CorrectionJan. 7, 2014
An earlier version of this article stated that the burglary took place on a night when millions of people watched a Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier boxing match in their homes on television. However, the match was aired on a closed circuit network in the U.S. and was unavailable in homes.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover is seen in his Washington office, May 20, 1963. The 1971 burglary of one of the bureau’s offices revealed the agency’s domestic surveillance program.
William J. Smith /AP
More than 40 years ago, on the evening of March 8, 1971, a group of burglars carried out an audacious plan. They pried open the door of an FBI office in Pennsylvania and stole files about the bureau’s surveillance of anti-war groups and civil rights organizations.
Hundreds of agents tried to identify the culprits, but the crime went unsolved. Until now.
For the first time, a new book reveals that the burglars were peace demonstrators who wanted to start a debate about the FBI’s unchecked power to spy on Americans. And it’s coming out at a time when the country is weighing the merits of surveillance all over again.
The plotters executed their break-in on a night when millions of people were anxious to hear about a boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier for the world heavyweight championship. The bout wasn’t being broadcast in the U.S. on TV or radio, but networks were giving updates between rounds and millions were tuned in.
The 15-round bout was a brilliant distraction exploited by a group of anti-war activists who set out to burgle a small FBI office outside Philadelphia and expose some of J. Edgar Hoover’s secrets.
Bonnie Raines was one of those activists, and she’s talking publicly about what she did for the first time in 42 years.
“It seemed that no one else was going to stand up to Hoover’s FBI at that time, and we knew what Hoover’s FBI was doing in Philadelphia in terms of illegal surveillance and intimidation,” Raines says. “And we thought somebody needed to confront Hoover and document what many of us knew was happening.”
Stealing From The FBI
Weeks earlier, Bonnie had piled her long hippie hair into a winter cap, put on a pair of glasses and posed as a college student interested in the FBI. She wanted to get a look inside the bureau’s small office in the town of Media, Pa., to case the joint, even if it meant risking imprisonment.
Another member of the team, draft protester Keith Forsyth, was chosen to pick the lock at the FBI office. But when the time came, he got a nasty surprise.
“When I got there, there was a brand-new high-security lock on the door,” Forsyth says.
Forsyth rushed back to confer with the other burglars, and they agreed to keep trying. So he returned to the office, got down on the ground and slowly applied a crowbar to another door.
“It was a great relief, because, you know, the original plan was for me to be in and out in a couple of minutes, and I don’t know how long I spent up there but it was probably at least an hour,” Forsyth says.
Forsyth and the other burglars chose the name of their group carefully.
“We called ourselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI,” says John Raines. He was a professor of religion at Temple University and Bonnie’s husband.
The burglars were sure that Hoover — who ruled the bureau with an iron fist — had been carrying out illegal surveillance on Vietnam protesters and civil rights groups.
“And he was an icon — nobody in Washington was going to hold him accountable,” John Raines says. “He could get away with doing whatever he wanted to do with his FBI, and it was his FBI, nobody else’s.”
The breaking and entering was supposed to get evidence of that spying so Congress and the public could no longer ignore it. Not long after the burglary, reporter Betty Medsger received an anonymous package at her desk at the Washington Post: secret documents. She published the story.
The Burglary
The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI
Hardcover, 596 pages purchase
“The country learned for the first time that the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover was almost completely different from what the country thought it was,” Medsger says.
An Agency Revealed
Medsger’s new book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, covers the history of that episode, and the revelations those documents helped bring to light.
For one, the FBI had been opening files on so-called subversives — including people who simply wrote letters to the editor objecting to the war in Vietnam. The papers also showed the FBI was encouraging agents to infiltrate schools and churches in the black community using secret informants, turning people against each other.
“I think most striking in the Media files at first was a statement that had to do with the philosophy, the policy of the FBI,” Medsger says. “And it was a document that instructed agents to enhance paranoia, to make people feel there’s an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”
Powerful stuff for people like John Raines, who had traveled south as a Freedom Rider and marched in Selma, Ala., on Bloody Sunday.
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“The distinction between being a criminal and breaking laws is very important,” he says. “When the law, or when the institutions that enforce laws [and] interpret laws, become the crime as happened in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, then the only way to stop that crime from happening is to expose what’s going on.”
Before long, the purloined files from that tiny FBI office published by Medsger and other reporters began to attract wide attention. It took years and revelations by other reporters and a congressional investigation led by Sen. Frank Church, but eventually lawmakers did rein in the FBI and the CIA.
Medsger’s new book about the FBI investigation fills in some details. Hundreds of agents were dispatched to find the burglars. The FBI narrowed its search, building profiles of seven prime suspects. But they got almost all of the suspects wrong.
The burglars had been meticulous. They left no fingerprints, and they surreptitiously photocopied the files at the colleges where they taught. FBI agents did visit Raines, but he deflected their inquiries.
“With no physical evidence left from the burglary itself, they were faced with having to sort through a thousand or 2,000 suspects, and that was an overwhelming job, which of course did overwhelm them,” John Raines says. “They never found us.”
The burglars went about their lives, vowing never again to talk or meet to protect their secret. John Raines started writing the first of many books. His wife, Bonnie, a child and family advocate, describes carrying on this way: “In my case, it was working and pursuing a degree and driving carpool.”
A Crime Revealed
After five years, the statute of limitations passed on the crime of burglary, and members of the group say they breathed easier. But still they kept their mouths shut — until one night, years later, when Betty Medsger happened to be eating dinner in the Raines house.
That’s when John Raines mentioned in an offhand way that he had anonymously sent Medsger documents from the FBI burglary in 1971.
“I said, ‘Are you telling me that you were the burglars in Media?’ ” Medsger recalls. “And they said yes. And I was very shocked — and very eager to know more.”
The Raines family helped her locate the others involved in the burglary. Most of them agreed to break their silence four decades after they took on J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI — and won.
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