To KING from J Edgar

[Octafish]

FBI's "Suicide Letter" to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dangers of Unchecked Surveillance

BY DIA KAYYALI
Nov. 14, 2014 Electronic Frontier Foundation

The New York Times has published an unredacted version of the famous “suicide letter” from the FBI to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The letter, recently discovered by historian and professor Beverly Gage, is a disturbing document. But it’s also something that everyone in the United States should read, because it demonstrates exactly what lengths the intelligence community is willing to go to—and what happens when they take the fruits of the surveillance they’ve done and unleash it on a target.

The anonymous letter was the result of the FBI’s comprehensive surveillance and harassment strategy against Dr. King, which included bugging his hotel rooms, photographic surveillance, and physical observation of King’s movements by FBI agents. The agency also attempted to break up his marriage by sending selectively edited “personal moments he shared with friends and women” to his wife.

Portions of the letter had been previously redacted. One of these portions contains a claim that the letter was written by another African-American: “King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all us Negroes.” It goes on to say “We will now have to depend on our older leaders like Wilkins, a man of character and thank God we have others like him. But you are done.” This line is key, because part of the FBI’s strategy was to try to fracture movements and pit leaders against one another.

The entire letter could have been taken from a page of GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group (JTRIG)—though perhaps as an email or series of tweets. The British spying agency GCHQ is one of the NSA’s closest partners. The mission of JTRIG, a unit within GCHQ, is to “destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt enemies by discrediting them.” And there’s little reason to believe the NSA and FBI aren’t using such tactics.

The implications of these types of strategies in the digital age are chilling. Imagine Facebook chats, porn viewing history, emails, and more made public to discredit a leader who threatens the status quo, or used to blackmail a reluctant target into becoming an FBI informant. These are not far-fetched ideas. They are the reality of what happens when the surveillance state is allowed to grow out of control, and the full King letter, as well as current intelligence community practices illustrate that reality richly.

CONTINUED w/links...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-and-dangers-unchecked-surveillance

[Smarmie Doofus]

1. Exactly.

>>>The implications of these types of strategies in the digital age are chilling. Imagine Facebook chats, porn viewing history, emails, and more made public to discredit a leader who threatens the status quo, or used to blackmail a reluctant target into becoming an FBI informant. These are not far-fetched ideas. They are the reality of what happens when the surveillance state is allowed to grow out of control, and the full King letter, as well as current intelligence community practices illustrate that reality richly. >>>>

What.... on *earth*... do defenders of the Surveillance State think tptb are going to DO w. all this information they're collecting on everyone *COVERTLY*?

Is there no one alive who is over 55 y.o. ?

Does no one remember Watergate, Cointelpro, CIA assassinations?

No one remembers the coup in Chile?

Does anyone even READ their own history anymore?

[Octafish]

2. Hannah Arendt put the goal of wholesale surveillance into words.

The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in "The Origins of Totalitarianism," is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.”

via Chris Hedges

For those wondering about the conservative aim to eliminate the Department of Education and buy high school history textbooks from Texas:

“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” ― Hannah Arendt

Thank you for standing up to the fascist warmonger greed head traitors, Smarmie Doofus. They fear most in this world Justice and Truth.

[Ghost in the Machine]

3. K& 5th R! Thanks for the post, Octafish, the surveillance state has been in effect for a long time,

and has only gotten worse with new technology. "Big Brother is watching you" was no myth, and still holds true today as evidenced by FACTS.

I know for a fact that even here, in our DU community, some of our posts are monitored. I know it's fact because some of MY posts have been monitored, writing about my long buried past and knowledge of certain notorious 1%er Biker Gangs and White Supremacist Gangs.

The *reason* I know is because the knowledge was over 25 years ago, I cut all ties, moved several States away, have a VERY SMALL CIRCLE OF FRIENDS who know NOTHING about my past, but I have been stopped and questioned about some things by the local LEOs here.

Keep in mind the fact that I had never been arrested for any kind of criminal activity due to these gangs or anything else involving them, then explain to me just HOW the local LEOs here would know ANYTHING about me and my past. It doesn't bother me, as I have nothing to hide & nothing to tell, but the question still lingers: HOW would they have known, other than monitoring posts here? I have not even mentioned the gangs by name in YEARS, I just say like I did above: "notorious 1%er Biker Gangs and White Supremacist Gangs".

For all that I know, I *could* just have my on too tight, too...

Your posts are always informative, enlightening, educational and, most importantly, appreciated. Thanks for your tireless efforts at keeping due dilligence on Democracy!

Peace,

Ghost

PS: It took me a while to write this due to household distractions. When I started, I was the 5th rec, and there were no comments! It will be interesting to see where it is when I hit "post".

[Octafish]

6. Allen Dulles BFEE had the negatives on Hoover.

The Stasi State came from the workings of Wall Street and Big Oil's lawyer dealing with the NAZIs before, during and after WW2.

From an outstanding review of David Talbot's latest, from DUer James DiEugenio

[font color="green"]"I am delighted to come to Harlem and I think the whole world should come here and the whole world should recognize we all live right next to each other, whether here in Harlem or on the other side of the globe. We should be glad that Castro and Khrushchev came to the United States. We should not fear the twentieth century, for the worldwide revolution, which we see all around us is part of the original American Revolution." -- Sen. John F. Kennedy, NYC, 1960[/font color]

(The Devil's Chessboard, p. 350)

SOURCE: http://www.ctka.net/2015/TalbotDulles.html

The BFEE don't believe in democracy in Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Iran, or Nicaragua.

Never see that history on tee vee or mentioned in the newspaper when talking about wars without end and the disappearing middle class and all the gun violence in the rotting cities and places where people gather. Thank goodness for DU.

[gratuitous]

4. Unredacted?

It looks like a name in the next-to-last line of the fourth paragraph has been covered over somehow. I wonder who it was?

Yeah, that's what persecution looked like back in the day. This is official government business paid for with everyone's tax dollars. Remember that when you hear Kim Davis or Donald Trump or some other publicity hound complaining about being persecuted for their beliefs or practices.

[Octafish]

8. Good catch, gratuitous. That space left blank.

I can't find a reason online for the blank. I tried fitting "Marilyn Monroe" in there, but who knows? It may have been blank on what was sent to Dr. King and his family.

Some believe the letter was written by William Sullivan, an assistant director, who headed the FBI's surveillance of Dr. King. I am not sure who wrote the damn thing.

While it doesn't read like the work of a kind soul, the editing marks on the typos show someone who applies professional editing symbols. Seeing their use by blackmailers for their correspondence is eye opening. When the typist has to go over "fraudulent," it almost gives them away. Hoover's FBI avoided organized crime like the plague.

[SoLeftIAmRight]

5. another great post

many thanks

[Octafish]

9. What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals

By BEVERLY GAGE
The New York Times, NOV. 11, 2014

The note is just a single sheet gone yellow with age, typewritten and tightly spaced. It’s rife with typos and misspellings and sprinkled with attempts at emending them. Clearly, some effort went into perfecting the tone, that of a disappointed admirer, appalled by the discovery of “hidious (sic) abnormalities” in someone he once viewed as “a man of character.”

The word “evil” makes six appearances in the text, beginning with an accusation: “You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that.” In the paragraphs that follow, the recipient’s alleged lovers get the worst of it. They are described as “filthy dirty evil companions” and “evil playmates,” all engaged in “dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk.” The effect is at once grotesque and hypnotic, an obsessive’s account of carnal rage and personal betrayal. “What incredible evilness,” the letter proclaims, listing off “sexual orgies,” “adulterous acts” and “immoral conduct.” Near the end, it circles back to its initial target, denouncing him as an “evil, abnormal beast.”

SNIP...

When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. received this letter, nearly 50 years ago, he quietly informed friends that someone wanted him to kill himself — and he thought he knew who that someone was. Despite its half-baked prose, self-conscious amateurism and other attempts at misdirection, King was certain the letter had come from the F.B.I. Its infamous director, J. Edgar Hoover, made no secret of his desire to see King discredited. A little more than a decade later, the Senate’s Church Committee on intelligence overreach confirmed King’s suspicion.

Since then, the so-called “suicide letter” has occupied a unique place in the history of American intelligence — the most notorious and embarrassing example of Hoover’s F.B.I. run amok. For several decades, however, only significantly redacted copies of the letter were available for public scrutiny. This summer, while researching a biography of Hoover, I was surprised to find a full, uncensored version of the letter tucked away in a reprocessed set of his official and confidential files at the National Archives. The uncovered passages contain explicit allegations about King’s sex life, rendered in the racially charged language of the Jim Crow era. Looking past the viciousness of the accusations, the letter offers a potent warning for readers today about the danger of domestic surveillance in an age with less reserved mass media.

The F.B.I.'s entanglement with King began not as an inquiry into his sex life but as a “national security” matter, one step removed from King himself. In 1961, the bureau learned that a former Communist Party insider named Stanley Levison had become King’s closest white adviser, serving him as a ghostwriter and fund-raiser. The following year, Attorney General Robert Kennedy approved wiretaps on Levison’s home and office, and the White House advised King to drop his Communist friend. But thanks to their surveillance, the bureau quickly learned that King was still speaking with Levison. Around the same time, King began to criticize bureau practices in the South, accusing Hoover of failing to enforce civil rights law and of indulging the racist practices of Southern policemen.

This combination of events set Hoover and King on a collision course. In the fall of 1963, just after the March on Washington, the F.B.I. extended its surveillance from Levison and other associates to King himself, planting wiretaps in King’s home and offices and bugs in his hotel rooms. Hoover found out very little about any Communist subterfuge, but he did begin to learn about King’s extramarital sex life, already an open secret within the civil rights movement’s leadership.

CONTINUED...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html

PS: You are most welcome, SoLeftIAmRight. The thought that my political heroes -- the Kennedy brothers -- would use their official powers to "go after" King once was most troubling to me. I could not understand the "Why?" until the anti-communist/national security part meets the political: They needed the South to get reelected in 1964.

[Javaman]

7. hoover was a petty cruel control freak. nt

[Octafish]

10. JFK had to order Hoover to integrate the FBI.

James Carroll, the son of an FBI man promoted by JFK to be the first head the Defense Intelligence Agency, provides detail:

Another reason we felt like princes as we entered that auditorium was the FBI's role as the front line of Bobby Kennedy's own twin preoccupations: the fight against the Reds, for which he'd first become famous as an aide to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and his newly launched campaign against Jimmy Hoffa. Bobby Kennedy, we felt, would look on us as special allies in the struggles he took most seriously. So imagine my surprise when what Bobby -- the hair, the teetch, the rolled-up sleeves -- chose to speak about that day was neither Reds nor the mob but the rights of colored people. In my mind, the NAACP might as well have been on the attorney general's list of subversive organizations, thought I knew as little about it as I did about the Lincoln Brigade.

I remember the shrill pitch of his voice and the open palm of his hand slapping the podium. I remember his direct invitation to come back to Washington after graduation to join a new American crusade. "My fundamental belief," he said once, and I recall his saying something like it that day, "is that all people are created equally. Logically, it follows that integration should take place everywhere."

Fundamental belief? Powerfully faced with his, I had to admit that it was mine too. I remember, as it were, a light going on in my dull head: the flip side of "created equal" is "integraton." It was an era when such lights went on all over the place. Arthur Schlesigner Jr. reports that after Bobby Kennedy and an aide took an early tour of the Justice Department, Kennedy asked, "Did anything occur to you as strange in our visit around the offices?" The aide referred only to how hward everyone seemed to be working. Kennedy repolied, "But did you see any Negroes?"

SOURCE: "An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us," pp. 129-130.

http://bit.ly/1nvAHpu

Hoover was conflicted. How can one control one's equals?

[elias49]

12. That's pretty disturbing!

Thanks for this post.

[Octafish]

14. Didn't stop with Dr. King. In 1970 Hoover's FBI worked to destroy actress Jean Seberg.

Her crime was supporting justice, equality and fairness for African Americans.

FBI agents followed procedures and filed the proper paperwork in order to smear her.

Evidence exists that J. Edgar Hoover was personally aggrieved by Seberg fraternizing with the Black Panthers, as a blonde Aryan Hollywood icon, her “racial betrayal” was deemed acutely unacceptable.

-- http://waxpoetics.com/features/articles/insidious-tale-actress-jean-seberg-fbis-cointelpro-film-kill/

What makes me sad is so many people today have no clue.

[rusty fender]

13. I'd bet that Hoover hired Ray

to kill King. The establishment was scared to death that King would turn the country against the Vietnam war.

They desperately needed to get rid of him.

[Octafish]

15. Attorney William Pepper has pretty much indicted the US Government in Dr. King's murder.

An Act of State

by DOUGLAS VALENTINE
CounterPunch, FEBRUARY 11, 2003

Bill Pepper’s book, An Act of State: the Execution of Martin Luther King (Verso, 2003), is a book whose time has come. It is required reading for anyone interested in how they illegitimate Bush regime will wield its ill-gotten power, not against Iraq, but against dissenters here in America.

An Act of State tells the story of how Martin Luther King was killed, not by James Ray, a bumbling patsy, but by a Memphis policeman in league with the Mafia, backed by soldiers — some armed with high-powered rifles, others with cameras to film the event — in a special Military Intelligence unit. The story is broad and deep and implicates high-ranking officers in all the American intelligence and security branches. And it stars Raoul, the assembly line worker now living under government protection. Raoul guided James Ray after his prison escape to a bathroom in a seedy Memphis hotel, above a greasy spoon cafe owned by a sad sack named Loyd Jowers, a creepy old white man having sex with Betty, a 16-year-old black girl. Betty, they say around Memphis, got hooked on drugs and had several illegitimate kids.

Pepper, who resides in Cambridge and spends his time practicing law in United States and the United Kingdom, assembles Jowers and Betty and about 70 other witnesses to make a convincing argument that Jowers and known and unknown members of the U.S. government conspired to kill MLK. Indeed, the argument convinced a jury of exactly that in a civil suit brought by the King family against Jowers and the U.S. government. The trial was held in Memphis in 1999, but the Department of Justice, as Pepper explains, buried the verdict beneath an avalanche of lies and distortions, with a little help from its friends in the media.

Most importantly, Pepper makes it clear that assassinations of this sort could happen on a regular basis in Bush’s war-mongering America, where wiping out his political opposition under the guise of fighting terrorism will, if the Imperial wizard has his way, become de rigueur. Quoting Thomas Jefferson, Pepper asserted on C-Span 2’s book show that only through a revolution can we stop the budding fascist dictatorship that is incrementally afixing its jackboot to our collective neck.

Pepper’s ability to capture this revolutionary spirit, which MLK embodied, is the beauty of the book. Even if Pepper never follows some of the most important leads, like, for example, what CIA agent Marrell McCollough doing on the balcony of the Lorrain Motel while King was lying there dying? McCollough had infiltrated the local black power group, the Invaders, and was part of an Invader-staffed security group that Jesse Jackson allegedly disbursed moments before the assassination. Do we want to know about this? And Pepper doesn’t ask who the other guy was on top of the fire station roof overlooking the Lorrain Motel that fateful day, April 4th 1968? We know Sergeant Greene was there, but who was the guy from the 112th Military Intelligence unit from down in Fort Sam Houston, Texas? Maybe that guy was a CIA assassin!

Even without the answers to these overarching questions, Bill Pepper truly makes a case that it was an Act of State that intentionally silenced Martin Luther King and his message of peace, justice and racial harmony, a message that hasn’t been heard as eloquently for 35 years, and which, only through the voices of modern American revolutionaries will ever be heard again on the airwaves and on network news. Read the book, and be inspired to act against the state.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/02/11/an-act-of-state/

More on William Pepper here: http://www.williampepper.com/index.html

[rusty fender]

16. Thanks for that info