The FBI has always been a tool of political suppression.

WHEN THE FBI came out with a report on Hillary Clinton weeks before the 2016 election, Democrats were livid.

But so were Republicans… The report said that even though she had committed a crime by negligently using a personal computer for state business, she would not be charged.

Democrats later cheered the FBI as the Mueller Probe began investigating Trump. Investigations are the same thing as a guilty verdict, right?

And Republicans fumed when it surfaced that two agents exchanged anti-Trump text messages. They even discussed ways to subvert the presidential election and choose the winner.

And now Democrats are back to accusing the FBI of being a partisan tool used by whoever is in power. That’s because an FBI investigation could not prove a 36-year-old sexual assault accusation true.

Clearly, no one feels super confident in the FBI. And of course, we shouldn’t. They’re sketchy as all hell.

J. Edgar Hoover set the tone when, as Director of the FBI, he compiled a list of supposedly disloyal Americans. [He fingered a few Communists — and even wrote a bestseller about them — but never once criticized or mentioned the group that created and funded Communism. — Ed.] He’s famous for his enemies lists, in fact. But you didn’t have to break any laws to be considered an enemy.

Let’s not forget that the FBI murdered Vicki Weaver at Ruby Ridge. And they probably assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. — they definitely blackmailed him and encouraged him to kill himself.

More recently the FBI spent three years covering up evidence that they sent snipers to surround Bundy Ranch. They conspired with the Bureau of Land Management to suppress evidence favorable to the Bundys.

The FBI also performs warrantless searches of computers using paid informants on The Geek Squad.

This looks even sketchier in light of their standard operating procedure for entrapping would-be terrorists. They usually provide the plot, equipment, and fake explosives, and then arrest the suspect at the scene.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh also has an interesting relationship with the FBI…

He helped cover up for the FBI’s intimidation of his own witness while investigating the “suicide” of Clinton aide Vincent Foster.

So just consider how untrustworthy the FBI is. And consider how deeply the FBI has infiltrated every area of politics.

The FBI is rotten. And they spread that rot to everything they touch. And they touch everything in the US government.

Therefore, the entire US government is rotten.

You can’t trust the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the top law enforcement agency in the USA. And you can’t trust anything that comes out of the government they have infiltrated.

And we know that it was standard operating procedure from the FBI’s inception to amass damning dossiers on politicians. Then they used blackmail to control them.

Now they can simply make some accusation up and investigate it… which people will assume means guilt.

But the best thing that could happen to America is that we utterly and completely stop trusting this government.

They have proven themselves to be manipulative liars time and time again.

It is impossible to separate the truth from the lies, the real investigations from the political hit jobs.

Lack of trust, lack of faith in this government is a good thing. It brings the responsibility back to you and me.

* * *

There is a dangerous myth that permeates the political arena that government agencies and bureaucrats can somehow be non-political and independent.

How absurd. On the one hand, there are obvious political appointments, like Eric Holder as Attorney General under Obama, or Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State under Trump. Each was clearly chosen to advance the interests of the President, Holder for his radical leftist views and Tillerson for his business ties.

And then there are scarily independent agencies like the CIA and NSA who pretty much do whatever they want, regardless of who heads the Department.

But the FBI is a sketchy mix of independence and politics, and it always has been. From its inception, the first FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made the agency a hotbed of political suppression, with arbitrary arrests and warrantless searches — all “good” if you didn’t like the people being targeted, like commies, right? But a little different when your friends and family and political allies are the victims, as many people have discovered. But, oh, what precedents were set back in the good old days!

But that’s not how the mainstream media are selling it. Will Trump Be The First to Politicize the FBI? asks Politico Magazine. Their concern is that Trump might appoint someone to the position with a political background, rather than a law enforcement background.

From its founding over a century ago until Tuesday afternoon, when James Comey was summarily fired as director, the FBI has been led exclusively by nonpartisan career law enforcement professionals with no background in elected politics.

The bureau, in fact, has been perhaps the last bastion of nonpolitical leadership in Washington–an agency whose powers are so extensive and potentially damaging to American citizens that it has been kept clear of direct political influence.

Of course, this statement is ridiculous; you cannot separate a government agency from politics. They are conflating not having been elected with being nonpartisan or apolitical. Nonsense.

But really Politico inadvertently touches on the main problem with the FBI: It was created to target Americans domestically. The FBI was given broad powers that were not just “potentially damaging” to American citizens — that is exactly who they targeted.

Hoover had a plan, which was never put into practice, to suspend habeas corpus and detain thousands of Americans for not being loyal enough to the United States government. For being a “nonpolitical” leader, he certainly did a lot to suppress political opposition to those in power.

But Hoover was just doing the only thing he knew. That is how he started in government, during WWI.

President Woodrow Wilson created the political monster, appointing Hoover to the War Emergency Board during WWI and tasking him with arresting dissidents and foreigners without trial who “seemed disloyal” to the United States. The raids took place without search warrants, and even though Hoover was the man behind the “Palmer Raids” he escaped the political backlash and was even appointed to clean up the agency — which would soon come to be known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

J. Edgar Hoover shaped the FBI to be the organization it is today.

…he created the Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. The group conducted a series of covert, and oftentimes illegal, investigations designed to discredit or disrupt radical political organizations…

Hoover also used COINTELPRO’s operations to conduct his own personal vendettas against political adversaries in the name of national security…

In 1971, COINTELPRO’s tactics were revealed to the public, showing that the agency’s methods included infiltration, burglaries, illegal wiretaps, planted evidence and false rumors leaked on suspected groups and individuals. Despite the harsh criticism Hoover and the Bureau received, he remained its director until his death on May 2, 1972, at the age of 77.

Politico actually recognizes the fact that Hoover abused his power at the FBI, but still, goes on to say the organization has never been political.

The FBI’s power over the life, freedom and liberty of the American people is unparalleled in U.S. government, and at key points in the bureau’s history–from Hoover’s attempts to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr., to its pursuit of political activists in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s –we have seen the cost of the FBI’s abuse of Americans’ civil liberties…

In the FBI’s entire centurylong history, it has never had an expressly political director. Hoover, for all his machinations as director, had actually spent his career at the Justice Department.

Politico talks about finding a director who is above reproach, who has a stellar record, and who will keep the agency independent and trustworthy. Their solution is to simply find someone who is non-partisan, and who has always worked in the Justice Department… just like J. Edgar Hoover.

If a political organization requires the “right person in power” in order to not be corrupt, then it is a bad organization. It is dangerous, and should not exist because it is impossible to find angels to put into those positions of power. [I would put it somewhat differently: As a very wise man once said, there is no substitute for honorable men. And the American political System rewards and advances only the most dishonorable kinds of men (and women). — Ed]

Perhaps the mainstream media are more concerned over who will be targeted by the FBI. Maybe Politico is really not afraid of the FBI targeting innocent Americans. After all, it has always done that, and who cares.

But what if it turned into a tool of one political faction to be used against another political faction? That’s what they’re really afraid of.

It would be more honest if Politico’s article was summed up like this:

The FBI has long been an enemy of the citizens of the United States and abused their authority by suppressing dissent and intimidating political opposition to the System. But now, the FBI might start to be used against us in the elite political class. That’s totally unacceptable. The only proper targets of the FBI are peasants who don’t know their place.

* * *

Source: based on articles at The Daily Bell

April 13, 1945

THE BALTIMORE Sun editorial on Roosevelt this morning begins: “Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man.” There are heavy black dashes above and below it. The argument, in brief, is that all his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when “he took an inert and profoundly isolationist people and brought them to support a necessary war on a scale never before imagined.” In other words, his greatest fraud was his greatest glory, and sufficient excuse for all his other frauds. It is astonishing how far the Sun has gone in this nonsense. When the English fetched Patterson and John Owens they certainly did an all-out job. I know of no paper in the United States, not even the New York Herald Tribune, that croons for them more assiduously.

Roosevelt’s unparallelled luck held out to the end. He died an easy death, and he did so just in time to escape burying his own dead horse. This business now falls to Truman, a third-rate Middle Western politician on the order of Harding. He is fundamentally against the New Deal wizards, and he will probably make an earnest effort to turn them out of power, but I have some doubt that he will succeed. They have dug in deeply and they may be expected to fight to the bitter end, for once they are out they will be nothing and they know it. The case of La Eleanor is not without its humors. Only yesterday she was the most influential female ever recorded in American history, but tomorrow she will begin to fade, and by this time next year she may be wholly out of the picture. I wonder how many newspapers will go on printing her “My Day.” Probably not many.

It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history — maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln. It will be to the interest of all his heirs and assigns to whoop him up, and they will probably succeed in swamping his critics. If the war drags on it is possible, of course, that there may be a reaction against him, and there may be another and worse after war is over at last, but the chances, I think, run the other way. He had every quality that morons esteem in their heroes. Thus a demigod seems to be in the making, and in a little while we may see a grandiose memorial under way in Washington, comparable to those to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. In it, I suppose, Eleanor will have a niche, but probably not a conspicuous one. The majority of Americans, I believe, distrust and dislike her, and all her glories have been only reflections from Franklin.

The Baltimore Hearst paper, the News-Post, handled the great news with typical cynicism. Hearst is one of the most violent enemies of Roosevelt, and all his papers have been reviling the New Deal, and even propagating doubts about the war. But the whole first page of the News-Post is given over this afternoon to a large portrait of Roosevelt flanked by two flags in color and headed “Nation Mourns.” The editorial page is filled with an editorial saying, among other things, “The work and name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt will live on, not only today or tomorrow, but in all the annals of recorded time.” This, as I have noted, is probably a fact, but it is certainly not a fact that tickles Hearst. He is, however, an expert in mob psychology, and does not expect much. The Sun is in a far less rational position. It certifies to Roosevelt’s greatness in all seriousness.

April 15

All the saloons and major restaurants of Baltimore were closed last night as a mark of respect to the dead Roosevelt, whose body passed through the city at midnight. It was silly, but it gave a lot of Dogberries a chance to annoy their betters, and so it was ordained. As a result, the Saturday Night Club missed its usual post-music beer-party for the first time in forty years. All during Prohibition the club found accommodations in the homes of its members, but last night no member was prepared, so the usual programme had to be abandoned. August and I came home, had a couple of high-balls, and then went to bed.

Roosevelt, if he had lived, would probably have been unbeatable, despite the inevitable reaction against the war. He was so expert a demagogue that it would have been easy for him to divert the popular discontent to some other object. He could have been beaten only by a demagogue even worse than he was himself, and his opponents showed no sign of being able to flush out such a marvel. The best they could produce was such timorous compromisers as Willkie and Dewey, who were as impotent before Roosevelt as sheep before Behemoth. When the call was for a headlong attack they backed and filled. It thus became impossible, at the close of their campaigns, to distinguish them from mild New Dealers — in other words, inferior Roosevelts. He was always a mile ahead of them, finding new victims to loot and new followers to reward, flouting common sense and boldly denying its existence, demonstrating by his anti-logic that two and two made five, promising larger and larger slices of the moon. His career will greatly engage historians, if any good ones ever appear in America, but it will be of even more interest to psychologists. He was the first American to penetrate to the real depths of vulgar stupidity. He never made the mistake of overestimating the intelligence of the American mob. He was its unparallelled professor.

WITH ALL DUE respect to Elouise Cobell, lead plaintiff in a recently settled lawsuit over American Indian trust funds (“U.S. to pay Indians $3.4B,” Dec. 9), I think the United States is continuing a policy of “Indians are not humans.”

During the course of this long-running, class-action litigation, it has been documented that the United States owes Indian people more than $137 billion for mismanagement of trust accounts. That was established just by the documents that were presented.

The original federal judge on this case was Royce Lamberth, who held at least three secretaries of the Interior in contempt for not producing thousands of additional documents. Also, during the course of this case, hundreds of relevant documents were found in the trash by Interior Department employees, who reported this to the court and to Interior Department officials.

To add insult to injury, the government is clearing its conscience by paying back 2.48 percent of the so-far known value of what the United States stole in the first place. Paying $3.4 billion on a known debt of $137 billion is a national disgrace; this needs to be known by all Americans. Cobell should have at least held out until all the documents were presented or a final calculation of the debt was determined.

In the words of a great Oglala Lakota statesman Chief Red Cloud: “The United States made us many promises, but they kept only one. They promised to take our land, and they took it.”

Bill Means is a board member of the International Indian Treaty Council.

Read the entire settlement offer here

American Indian movement article

Editorial by Paul Craig Roberts

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. — George Orwell

THERE WAS a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.

Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.

Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-Semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”

Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.

Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.

Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.

Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.

Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”

And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted “studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the “studies.”

The Council of Europe is investigating big pharma’s role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.

The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms.

And there is the global warming scandal, in which climate scientists, financed by Wall Street and corporations anxious to get their mitts on “cap and trade” and by a U.N. agency anxious to redistribute income from rich to poor countries, concocted a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution.

Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.

Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job.

I remember when, following CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders.  In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.

When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion alone of being a “threat,” he wasn’t impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don’t carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government.

As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO “performance bonuses,” have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession.

Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these “performance awards” by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about “the Muslim threat,” Wall Street, U.S. corporations and “free market” shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans.

Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.

Americans have bought into the government’s claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect “terrorists,” and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.

Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different.

I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week‘s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.”

For the last six years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.

For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.

The American media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.

America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.

These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington’s deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar’s value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called “entitlements” as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.

With over 21 percent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington’s greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the “war on terror,” the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.

The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.

_________

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term.  He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal.  He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. His latest book, How The Economy Was Lost, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press.