Meatspace,

[Faustine]

> 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.