Politifact delivered a “pants on fire” slam to Fox News on Friday because one of its commentators asserted that the Federal Bureau of Investigation “has become America's secret police.” The FBI has legions of new champions nowadays among liberals and Democrats who hope that its probes will end Donald Trump’s presidency. This is a stunning reversal that may have J. Edgar Hoover spinning in his grave.
In order to boost the credibility of the FBI’s investigations of the Trump team, much of the media is whitewashing the bureau’s entire history. But the FBI has been out of control almost since its birth.
A 1924 American Civil Liberties Union report warned that the FBI had become “a secret police system of a political character.” In the 1930s, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court feared that the FBI had bugged the conference room where justices privately wrangled over landmark cases, as Tim Weiner noted in his “Enemies: A History of the FBI.” In 1945, President Harry Truman noted that “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction.” And FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover compiled a list of 20,000 “potentially or actually dangerous” Americans who could be rounded up and locked away in one of the six detention camps the federal government secretly built in the 1950s.
From 1956 through 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program conducted thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to smear innocent people by portraying them as government informants, to sic the IRS on people, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, communist, white racist, antiwar, and black organizations (including Martin Luther King Jr.). These operations involved vast numbers of warrantless wiretaps and illicit break-ins and resulted in the murder of some black militants. A Senate Committee chaired by liberal Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) issued a damning report on FBI abuses of power that should be mandatory reading for anyone who believes the bureau deserves deference today.
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4 comments:
Today, in America, police officers (and especially FEDERAL officers) have access to technology and devices that were only dreamed about years ago.
Couple that with wide open, full on elimination of restrictions and limitations on what they can legally do and you have what we have today.
Warrant-less searches on a scale never seen before. SECRET evidence, trials and prisons. In America. Surveillance of all Americans in every form possible. Even our mail is photographed front and back (every piece of it).
Phone calls being diverted to police devices and monitored -- without warrant. Your car and phone are tracked constantly.
Banks report your activities - secretly- to the Feds.
The results are then used to blackmail and coerce citizens.
Throughout history, WITHOUT FAIL (read that again), men in power seek to retain that power and increase that power, by whatever means necessary. For our own good of course.
That is ALWAYS the story -- "it's for our safety....our protection."
If you don't think so, you can be imprisoned, bankrupted, ruined, re-educated, or killed. There is ALWAYS a "bad guy" that needs to be checked Privacy? It only protects terrorists...you don't need it. Free speech? It causes a lot of "trouble". Habeas Corpus? It only slows us up. MILLIONS CHEER!! ?? We just want to protect you!!!
Right up to the point the rest of the citizenry hang them and their Nazi cohorts.
KEEP CHEERING.
I think before it is all over with the FBI and the Democrats are the "Russian Conspiracy".
The IRS is America's KGB !!! FBI is the STAZI !!!
Behind a good man in power is a great woman! Ponder that for a moment!
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