The Hoover/Kennedy persecution of M.L. King and your rights?

Hoping to prove the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was under the influence of Communists, the FBI kept the civil rights leader under constant surveillance. The agency's hidden tape recorders turned up almost nothing about communism. But they did reveal embarrassing details about King's sex life -- details the FBI was able to use against him.

The almost fanatical zeal with which the FBI pursued King is disclosed in tens of thousands of FBI memos from the 1960s. The FBI paper trail spells out in detail the government agency's concerted efforts to derail King's efforts on behalf of the civil rights movement. The FBI's interest in King intensified after the March on Washington in August 1963, when King delivered his "I have a dream speech," which many historians consider the most important speech of the 20th century. After the speech, an FBI memo called King the "most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country."

The FBI began secretly tracking King's flights and watching his associates. In July 1963, a month before the March on Washington, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover filed a request with Attorney General Robert Kennedy to tap King's and his associates' phones and to bug their homes and offices.

In September, Kennedy consented to the technical surveillance. Kennedy gave the FBI permission to break into King's office and home to install the bugs, as long as agents recognized the "delicacy of this particular matter" and didn't get caught installing them. Kennedy added a proviso -- he wanted to be personally informed of any pertinent information.

But the long list of bugs in his hotel rooms picked up just enough about King's love life.

Hoover's contempt for King's private behavior is clear in the memos he kept in his personal files. His scrawl across the bottom of positive news stories about King's success dripped with loathing.

When King learned he would be the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, the FBI decided to take its harassment of King one step further, sending him an insulting and threatening note anonymously. A draft was found in the FBI files years later. In it the FBI wrote, "You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that." The letter went on to say, "The American public ... will know you for what you are -- an evil, abnormal beast," and "Satan could not do more."

The letter's threat was ominous, if not specific: "King you are done." Some have theorized the intent of the letter was to drive King to commit suicide in order to avoid personal embarrassment. "King, there is only one thing left for you to do," the letter concluded. "You know what it is ... You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation."

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/31/mlk.fbi.conspiracy/index.html

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

{ At the point that this started the FBI became an criminal organization. Virtually everything it did against King and his followers was illegal and immoral. Ironically while Hoover and Robert Kennedy were amassing a huge file on Martin Luther King, Mr. Hoover was also building massive files on both Kennedy brothers. It would be easy to blame this totally on Hoover but the truth is whenever the government is scared of it's own people it uses it's police and intelligence gathering agencies against those very people. The American people.

I have little doubt this is going on today what with the paranoia of the war on terrorism .....{the more apply named "war on tourism" as my friend oskar calls it} against Arab and Muslim Americans. Many on the right seem convinced that such measures are necessary and support the Bush/Cheney administrations and their war on our liberties and rights.

You do not defeat your enemies by becoming them. You do not defeat your enemies by destroying your own democracy and rule of law. That is what the Bush administration has been doing in our name. Remember the saying that came out of the Vietnam war?  " We had to destroy the village to save it". That is what Bush has been doing.

" Those who would give essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"

may be the most important of all Benjamin Franklin's statements. He said it in 1759 and it's especialy true today. We diregard his words at out own peril. What use is it .....if at the end of the war we have defeated terrorism only to find we are no longer free? Someone once said "America will never be defeated by an outside enemy. If we fall, it will be from within." I think that is closer to the truth. However it won't be an home grown terrorist group who does it but .....us.....ourselves who will have allowed the Government to take our liberties and rights away in the name of protecting us. What do you think?}

Rose