JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: COMMENTS TO A STORY ABOUT THE RELEASE OF FBI FILES ON FAMOUS INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST ROBERT PARRY – THERE IS NO PLACE IN A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY FOR SUCH A POLITICAL POLICE FORCE, RESEMBLING EAST GERMANY’S OLD STASI IN MUCH OF ITS WORK – BUT WHO WOULD SENSIBLY CLAIM AMERICA IS A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY? – FBI KEPT FILES ON ANY AMERICAN WHO THOUGHT, WHETHER IN POLITICS OR THE ARTS OR SCIENCE – UNDER J EDGAR HOOVER, IT SERIOUSLY INTIMIDATED AND THREATENED PEOPLE AND YET NOTE HOW HIS NAME REMAINS UP IN BIG LETTERS AT THE HEADQUARTERS – A WORD ON MARTIN LUTHER KING’S ASSASSINATION

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JOE LAURIA IN CONSORTIUM NEWS


“The FBI Investigated Robert Parry

“The bureau’s file on Robert Parry, the founding editor of Consortium News, was released last month”


The FBI investigated virtually anyone whose work wasn't on an assembly-line because the FBI had nothing useful to do, and largely still has not.

If you had a mind, if you thought about ideas - whether in politics or the arts or science - you were investigated. And likely still are. In many cases, “investigation” does not adequately describe what was invasive and intimate spying on prominent citizens.

The FBI has a long and terrible history of abuse, including J Edgar Hoovers years of quietly intimidating politicians in Washington with secrets from their private lives. He was even involved in intimidating Martin Luther King and trying to push him into committing suicide with threatening letters. More than a few serious people believe Hoover’s FBI was likely involved in King’s assassination, so intense was Hoover’s hatred of King.

The FBI is an institution which has no place in a truly democratic state, but then people who read and think know that the United States is not really a democratic state.

It runs a world empire by force of a gigantic military-security machine for the benefit of its oligarchs and giant corporations. It is a slightly-disguised plutocracy. And neither of its money-endowed political parties opposes any aspect of that reality.

Just as they don't oppose the godawful FBI. Some of the top Democrats even worked with people in the FBI to try nullifying Trump's election. Horrible as Trump is, truly horrible, that is not the way things should be done. The FBI was murkily involved in many aspects of the effort.

The past work of the FBI in many ways resembles the work of the infamous Stasi in East Germany.

You'll note despite decades of abuse of every description, J Edgar Hoover's name is still up in shiny big letters at the FBI Headquarters in Washington.

If you want a fuller idea of the FBI’s real record, see:

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/the-dreadful-record-of-the-fbi/