An excerpt from Mark Mazzetti's 1-7-14
New York Times article entitled
"Burglars Who Took On FBI Abandon Shadows":
The perfect crime is far easier to pull off when nobody is
watching.
So on a night nearly 43 years ago, while Muhammad Ali and Joe
Frazier bludgeoned each other over 15 rounds in a televised title bout viewed
by millions around the world, burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar and broke
into a Federal Bureau of Investigation office in a suburb of
Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside.
They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they
mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would
become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks
operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups.
The burglary in Media,
Pa., on March 8, 1971, is a
historical echo today, as disclosures by the former National Security Agency
contractor Edward J. Snowden have cast another unflattering light on government
spying and opened a national debate about the proper limits of government
surveillance. The burglars had, until now, maintained a vow of silence about
their roles in the operation. They were content in knowing that their actions
had dealt the first significant blow to an institution that had amassed
enormous power and prestige during J. Edgar Hoover’s lengthy tenure as
director.
Skipping down further in the article we read:
…the document that would have the biggest impact on reining in
the F.B.I.’s domestic spying activities was an internal routing slip, dated
1968, bearing a mysterious word: Cointelpro.
Neither the Media burglars nor the reporters who received the
documents understood the meaning of the term, and it was not until several
years later, when the NBC News reporter Carl Stern obtained more files from the
F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act, that the contours of Cointelpro —
shorthand for Counterintelligence Program — were revealed.
Since 1956, the F.B.I. had carried out an expansive campaign to
spy on civil rights leaders, political organizers and suspected Communists, and
had tried to sow distrust among protest groups. Among the grim litany of
revelations was a blackmail letter F.B.I. agents had sent anonymously to the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital affairs
if he did not commit suicide.
“It wasn’t just spying on Americans,” said Loch K. Johnson, a
professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia
who was an aide to Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho. “The intent of
Cointelpro was to destroy lives and ruin reputations.”
Senator Church's investigation in the mid-1970s
revealed still more about the extent of decades of F.B.I. abuses, and led to
greater congressional oversight of the F.B.I. and other American intelligence
agencies. The Church Committee’s final report about the domestic surveillance
was blunt. “Too many people have been spied upon by too many government
agencies, and too much information has been collected,” it read.
As the
New York Times celebrates these 43-year-old
revelations of government malfeasance, one wonders how long it will take for
the full extent of our present day domestic surveillance operations to be
unveiled as well. 43 years from now, in 2057, will the
New York
Times--or its futuristic equivalent--be publishing articles about those
dim, dark days when every single U.S. citizen was at the mercy
of
a fully operational gangstalking program, the
existence of which few mainstream authorities were even willing to acknowledge
publicly?
As Marshall McLuhan wrote in his 1972 book,
Take Today: The
Executive as Dropout: "Only puny secrets need protection.
Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity."
To read the entire
New York Times article, click
HERE.
