On 16 Jul 2001, at 15:52, wrote: James A. Donald:
The black panthers were torn apart because they murdered dissidents
Faustine
My point was the feds didn't have to murder anybody--play them off each other and they do it to themselves.
If they were the kind of people who could so easily be tempted to murder dissidents, perhaps the spooks had the right idea.
Still, if you read the documentation, COINTELPRO was quite a formidable program.
Perhaps. The FBI by its very nature tends to do bad things, and we have seen some bad things done by the FBI to people who post on this list.
I took a look at a few web pages reporting COINTELPRO, and found them long on unspecified rumors about things happening to unspecified people at unspecified places and times, and very short on any concrete evidence concerning specific people to which specific things had happened, much resembling web pages reporting widespread use of slaves, or widespread alien abductions.
Sure, I agree that 98+% of what's out there is crap. That's why it's useful to examine sources (like the book I mentioned) consisting of primary documents. Ditch the nutcase exegesis and see for yourself: not perfectly reliable by any means but at least it circumvents a lot of the paranoid hype...
Now obviously we know of some real world activities that correspond to COINTELPRO, notably the attack on Randy Weaver, but it seems to me that there is absolutely zero evidence that the authoritarian and self destructive actions of the radical left during the late sixties, the seventies, and the eighties were the result of evil CIA mind rays. If such evidence existed, it would have been prominently displayed on some of the web pages I encountered.
I think MK-ULTRA is the project the "evil CIA mind rays" people hang their hat on; you're even more unlikely to find reasonable commentary on that one. Embarassing, really.
I find it much more plausible that commies did bad things, things characteristic of commies, because they were bad people.
True: but then there's always the gray area of exactly what's done in the name of "what bad people deserve" that keeps me uneasy about the whole thing. Have you read Gordon Thomas' book about the Mossad, "Gideon's Spies"? He was allowed to interview all the top agency people, so you can be sure nothing got out the agency didn't want out. Even still, it's a fascinating, hard-hitting look at what happens when an organization of brilliant, ruthless people come to exist in a system with limited accountability: hardcore realpolitik at its most elemental. Interesting to compare to the way things get done (and don't get done)in the US. For instance, they don't have any qualms at all about using state-sponsored asassination a tool of policy--it gets the job done, but at what price? How much of a difference does it make that they face a near-immediate threat from all sides; if the same became true of the US would it somehow become a more appropriate strategy? No easy answers.
I did a web search for KGB and COINTELPRO, to find a web page that mentioned bad conduct by all such agencies. I found no relevant hits, from which I conclude that of all the people so vitally concerned about the bad things done by the FBI in the sixties and seventies, not a one is at all concerned about the bad things done by the KGB in the sixties and seventies.
Besides the obvious hypocricy, part of that comes from the unfortunate tendency to care about "what's close to home" at the expense of a more significant larger picture. Come to think of it, I can't believe more isn't on the web about the horrors of the Stasi; did you catch the stories about how they contaminated people with radiation as a form of tracking and had a huge collection of little jars containing scent samples of all dissidents, in case they needed to round them up? Horrible, check it out.
Of course it is reasonable for people in the US to be more concerned about US spies that Soviet spies, since the US spies mostly on US people,
I don't know if that's really true of the US, I'm sure it depends on which agency you're talking about. Given that the NSA is so much larger than the rest of the agencies combined, it stands to reason that tips the scale toward "foreign", but I could be wrong. Not something you can really know without hard data.
and the Soviet Union spied mostly on russian people, but still, zero relevant hits? I find that a little odd. This gives me reason to doubt the sincerity, and therefore the truthfulness, of those reporting COINTELPRO
No doubt, chalk it up to the crap factor. The original documents say a lot though. ~Faustine.