As the United States violates international law, murders thousands of innocent Iraqis, runs a far-flung torture and sexual humiliation gulag, the complicit corporate media concentrates on a big time irrelevancy: W. Mark Felt, a doddering former spook and one-time deputy director of the FBI, is hailed as a “hero” for supposedly helping to bring down the Mafia don and war criminal, Richard Nixon.
Yawn.
If ever there was a superfluous news story—in competition with the antics of Paris Hilton—this is it.
In fact, as CBS News points out, it appears Felt wandered out of the closet after all these years because he is in the middle of a book deal. Felt’s lawyer, John D. O’Connor, who wrote an article about his client published in Vanity Fair, told the Early Show the issue is not Felt’s possible book, but rather his “heroic and permanent legacy” (in other words, the old spook wants to be elevated to the pantheon of “great Americans” and other self-serving reactionaries before he dies). According to O’Connor, Felt did not “turn against his government. He was working for the government. He was trying to do his job as a government employee. He was sworn by law to uphold the law, to investigate crime wherever it led him, to do the right thing, not to obstruct justice.”
Leave it to the corporate media to tell only one side of the story—the side that puts the government and its villainous employees in the best possible light. In fact, Mark Felt subverted the Constitution, not by outing Nixon—who was outed because he displeased the plutocracy, the real folks who run the United States—but because he was a COINTELPRO spook. “In 1981, Ronald Reagan granted a presidential pardon to Mark Felt for illegal actions against antiwar activists, including break-ins,” writes Eric Garris. “Those who study history know that the Cointelpro activities supervised by Mark Felt were not limited to surveillance and burglary. During that period, the FBI actively interfered with the internal politics of dissident groups, including starting and inflaming factional struggles. There were many local groups that were under the total control of FBI infiltrators.”
A statement released by the Reagan administration, dated April 15, 1981, commends Felt (and convicted felon Edward S. Miller, the one-time head of Squad 47, the domestic counterintelligence unit in the FBI’s New York Field Office; see Ward Churchill’s Wages Of COINTELPRO Still Evident In Omaha Black Panther Case) for serving “the Federal Bureau of Investigation and our nation with great distinction.” Felt and Miller believed “their actions were necessary to preserve the security interests of our country,” in other words violating the First Amendment rights of certain Americans (conscientious enough to actually petition the government for the redress of grievances) is patriotic. “America was at war in 1972, and Messrs. Felt and Miller followed procedures they believed essential to keep the Director of the FBI, the Attorney General, and the President of the United States advised of the activities of hostile foreign powers and their collaborators in this country.”
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Translation: The above mentioned citizens in opposition to an illegal (and undeclared) war were essentially “collaborators” for “hostile foreign powers,” presumably North Vietnam, a small and impoverished nation attacked by the United States (and, as with Iraq, the attack launched against the Vietnamese was predicated on a big fat lie, namely that the Vietnamese had attacked U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, revealed as a fabrication by Daniel Ellsberg, another “collaborator,” when he released the Pentagon Papers).
As Brian Glick (War at Home, South End Press) writes, with COINTELPRO the “FBI set out to eliminate ‘radical’ political opposition inside the US. When traditional modes of repression (exposure, blatant harassment, and prosecution for political crimes) failed to counter the growing insurgency, and even helped to fuel it, the Bureau took the law into its own hands and secretly used fraud and force to sabotage constitutionally-protected political activity. Its methods ranged far beyond surveillance, and amounted to a domestic version of the covert action for which the CIA has become infamous throughout the world.” As Glick notes, COINTELRPO was a smashing success, even though its cover was blown (by congressional hearings in the 1970s) because it “distorted the public’s view of radical groups in a way that helped to isolate them and to legitimize open political repression” and (probably most importantly) “often convinced its victims to blame themselves and each other for the problems it created, leaving a legacy of cynicism and despair that persists today.”
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Moreover, the vicious tactics of the FBI (and the CIA, supposedly prevented under its charter from partaking into domestic intelligence) are now enshrined and considered perfectly legal under the PATRIOT Act. In 1956, when COINTELPRO began, the government was frustrated by a “liberal” Supreme Court that limited the government’s power to proceed overtly against dissident groups. Of course, we no longer have a “liberal” Supreme Court and thanks to “terrorism” (created by the CIA and its nefarious proxies) our rulers have foisted unconstitutional laws on us, once again discouraging and stigmatizing what was once perfectly legal and accepted behavior (thanks to rights long ago enumerated by James Madison and the first U.S. Congress, now irrelevant).
In other words, all this brouhaha about Mark Felt, who actively subverted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, trumpeted by the corporate media as a hero, is nothing short of disgusting. Also disgusting are the comments of former Nixon toadies, such as the reprehensible convicted criminal, now popular radio talk show host, G. Gordon Liddy, who declared that Felt had “violated the ethics of the law enforcement profession,” in other words he should have taken his “secret” to the grave (meanwhile Liddy is free to make money off his notoriety as a common burglar). Pat Buchanan, a reactionary author and TV pundit (and former Nixon speechwriter), who has but one redeeming value (he’s against the Strausscon all-war-all-the-time master plan), called Felt a “traitor” for acting as “Deep Throat,” in other words putting forward the story (to the former Navy intelligence officer who worked for the CIA, Bob Woodward) designed to remove one Mafia don from office and install another one.
Incidentally, a Google News search (of well over 2,000 articles) on Felt using the keyword “COINTELPRO” this morning returns a miserable two entries—from the People’s Weekly World and Antiwar.com (it really says something when only socialists and libertarians make mention of the fact Mark Felt was a spook subverting the Constitution, a fact completely omitted by our glorious corporate media—who it should be assumed know how to use the Google search engine—and who are hucksters for the ruling elite and various war criminals, thus unable or unwilling to tell us the truth).
Finally, it is appropriate Mark Felt was dubbed “Deep Throat,” originally the title of a 1972 X-rated movie by Gerard Damiano, because what he has done is not only truly and disgustingly inimical to freedom and the Constitution but obscene as well.
Addendum
Meanwhile, our fearless leader and war criminal, George the Lesser, has weighed in on the Felt revelations, a news story that is burning up the corporate venue (since real news is swept under the carpet). “For those of us who grew up—got out of college in the late ’60s—the Watergate story was a relevant story. And a lot of us have always wondered who Deep Throat might have been. And the mystery was solved yesterday,” Bush told a fawning corporate media. “It’s a brand new story.”
Bullshit. It’s not a “brand new story” since the ruling elite knew all along who Deep Throat was (and he did its bidding to get rid of the corporate Costa Nostra Mafia don Richard Nixon). It is sincerely vomit-inducing for Bush to pretend he’s simply just another kid from the 60s following the Watergate story like everybody else when in fact his crime family worked behind the scenes for decades. Bush Senior lived in New York while ambassador to the United Nations during the rigged scandal and records show that he attended cabinet meetings and state dinners in Washington at the time. As well, Bush may have had a hand in bringing down Tricky Dick for personal reasons, as the would-be used car salesman reneged on a promise to make Bush an Assistant Treasury Secretary after Bush lost a Senate run. Nixon dissed Bush a second time when he placed him as chairman of the RNC rather than select him as Agnew’s successor as Vice President.
“I’m looking forward to reading about it, reading about his relationship with the news media,” Bush said about Deep Throat, aka Mark Felt.
Bush takes us for idiots because he knows more about the corporate media than any other president (or, anyway, his handlers know more about the media and how to work it)—he has them in his hip pocket, even though he on occasion pulls out somebody like Michael Isikoff and takes him to the woodshed for a thrashing.
How is it possible the American people continue to buy into this awe-shucks nonsense now that there is in-your-face evidence that Bush lied about Iraq and launched an illegal invasion and occupation, resulting in the criminal destruction of a country and the murder of thousands of innocent people?
But then, the German people did not demand Hitler resign after he started a destructive and ultimately fatal war (for average Germans and a few million other people)—and thus, to paraphrase and expand on George Bernard Shaw, man is an idiot because he never learns from history and continues to repeat the same mistakes, over and over, and forgive (or forget, or never know) lies that are crimes of the century.
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