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29 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M discuss the FBI's COINTELPRO operation, which seems oddly salient to what is happening here and how...
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Support for Black Lives Matter
00:00:00
Speaker
This week, we just want to say one thing. Black lives matter. Yes, not all lives matter. Black lives matter. For when people say black lives matter, no one is denying that all lives have value, or that we should treat everyone with equal respect or dignity.
00:00:18
Speaker
Now, when people say black lives matter, they're pointing out that systematically, black lives seem to matter less than other lives. In health. In policing. In jobs. And so much more. So, black lives matter. Black lives matter.
Introduction and Casual Conversation
00:00:44
Speaker
The Podcastor's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denteth. Hello and welcome to The Podcastor's Guide to the Conspiracy. In Auckland and Hamilton, respectively, it is Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denteth. Indeed it is. It's getting into winter here down in the southern hemisphere.
00:01:09
Speaker
So it was one degree when I got up yesterday morning. I don't know whether it was that cold up in Auckland, but here in Kiri Kiri Loa, one degree, I spent 38 minutes in bed willing myself to get out. Apparently there's this big super high that those dastardly Australians are sending our way and it's going to be negative 15 degrees somewhere. Not Auckland, I assume.
00:01:35
Speaker
It's usually the South Island that keeps that cool. But at any rate, keep that whisky handy. You might need it. Or possibly just a large Saint Bernard with a little barrel of whisky on its collar. A large Saint Bernard filled with whisky.
00:01:52
Speaker
But we're not here to talk about the weather, although we could. And indeed, we just have. Well, yes, yes. No, so it's kind of funny how it worked out. This
Main Topic: COINTELPRO Introduction
00:02:02
Speaker
week, we're going to be talking about COINTELPRO. And we are probably going to be debating how to pronounce that throughout the entire course of the episode. Is it COINTELPRO? COINTELPRO? COINTELPRO? Probably not that last time. COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO.
00:02:23
Speaker
Now, this is something I can't even remember why. A few weeks ago, it came up and it was one of those, oh, hey, we've mentioned that. We've never actually done a full episode devoted to it. So it seemed like a good thing to
COINTELPRO's Target and Tactics
00:02:34
Speaker
do. But then in light of the recent weeks events, I think it takes on quite a more appropriate tone, especially when you look into the major targets of the COINTELPRO Gram.
00:02:48
Speaker
So I don't think we do. We don't have anything to say off the top to issue. We dive straight in. I think so. Let's get into surveillance by the state. Hmm.
00:03:01
Speaker
actually another thing because of course COINTELPRO is short for Counter Intelligence Program. Of course it is. So should it be COINTELPRO if it's getting its first syllable from counter? I mean we've had this discussion in the past on the podcast about the way in which people try to come up with
00:03:25
Speaker
wacky sounding abbreviations or abbreviations for programs based upon basically manipulating words or initializations and in that respect yes you probably want to respect the words it's meant to refer to so yeah
00:03:42
Speaker
I showed up, I mean counter, I guess so this is Cal Intel Pro. Cal Intel Pro. There we go. We now have a defector pronunciation of the program and it's the Cal Intel Pro. I mean what program? Actually programs in the name anyway. So it's just Cal Intel Pro. Cal Intel Pro. You heard it here.
00:04:04
Speaker
Why not? What was wrong with CIP? Why not just call it the CIP? I don't know. Anyway, of all the things the FBI has done in relation to COINTELPRO or how we want to call it, the coming up with of that abbreviation is probably at the lower end of offensiveness. Yes, I think that is correct.
00:04:28
Speaker
COINTELPRO is, of course, a series of counterintelligence projects conducted by the FBI under J. Gahueva ran from 1956 to 1971 and only stopped in 1971 because they got found out, as we will see.
00:04:44
Speaker
And it was a program, it was the FBI, so it was internal to America, aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting political organizations in America. In particular, not exclusively, but almost exclusively, left-leaning organizations. Now, Josh, are you aware that there was a sequel
00:05:05
Speaker
No, it does not surprise me in the slightest. Because there was Operation Chaos, which was a very similar program run by the CIA after Cal Intel Pro, which we should probably do in another episode. Because as we will see with this story, technically, Cal Intel Pro ended with its revelation.
00:05:27
Speaker
Although people are suspicious of that official story for good reason, as we'll get into when we talk about the sorry end of the Cal Intel Pro program.
Impact on Civil Rights Movements
00:05:40
Speaker
I wish I'd stop saying pro program. It just sounds ridiculous.
00:05:43
Speaker
Yes, so Hoover was in charge of the FBI at this time, but William C. Sullivan was the agent in charge of the program, who was directly under Hoover. RFK, good old RFK, who we've devoted in episode two, was Attorney General for at least some of it, and he personally authorized some of the things that they got up to.
00:06:07
Speaker
So it started in 56, targeting the Commies. I mean, we all know about Hoover and his reds under the bed and his general paranoia of communism. But I think it's fair to say Hoover had enough paranoia to go around, wouldn't you say? Yes, Hoover was the kind of person who'd be suspicious of people being suspicious of Hoover. And that turned out to be almost anyone who was, even to the moderate left of Hoover,
00:06:34
Speaker
on Hoover being quite right. It's a lot of space. It is interesting when we carve out the conceptual space of who was actually surveilled, assassinated and the like by the Cal Intel Pro program. I'm just going to commit to it now.
00:06:52
Speaker
It does turn out you had to actually be quite left of over to really get into his bad book. So even though he was paranoid, he was particularly paranoid about people on the left. And as we're seeing with President Trump in the US at the moment, with the notion of this amorphous enemy Antifa,
00:07:14
Speaker
It turns out the left may have started with the explicit communists who you were concerned were actually being controlled by Mother Russia and ended up being anyone who identified with the left at all
00:07:30
Speaker
which meant things like the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King. Yes, so apparently the very first targets of COINTELPRO, I'm going to go COINTELPRO just to mix it up, just a bit of variety for the listeners there. You have betrayed me, Joshua, for the last time.
00:07:45
Speaker
Yep. So the first targets are apparently the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party. But yes, very, very quickly, its range was broadened. And in particular, the Civil Rights Movement came under the microscope. And in 1963, which was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the Civil Rights Movement march
00:08:06
Speaker
which is when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous speech, the I Have a Dream speech. At that point, apparently, Hoover then singled out King himself as a major target for COINTELPRO.
00:08:21
Speaker
So this went 56 to 71, that's what, 25, 15 years? 15 years, yes, I can do basic mathematics. Covered numerous presidencies, everyone from FDR all the way up to Nixon signed off on various surveillance methods that came under COINTELPRO. But yes, eventually, now we have, I have a list I've got off of Wikipedia.
00:08:47
Speaker
which you might as well just go through a list of groups that were known to be targets of COINTELPRO operations. So we have communist and socialist organizations, organizations and individuals associated with the civil rights movement, which we'll get into a bit later, black nationalist groups,
00:09:05
Speaker
the Young Lords, the American Indian Movement, the National States' Rights Party, a broad range of organizations labeled, quote, New Left, including Students for a Democratic Society and the Weathermen. Almost all groups protesting the Vietnam War, as well as individual student demonstrators with no group affiliation. The National
Covert Operations and Internal Conflicts
00:09:22
Speaker
Lawyers Guild. Is that a Jewish thing? I don't even...
00:09:26
Speaker
No, why you'd be paranoid of lawyers? Sorry, when I say a Jewish thing, is that an anti-Semitic thing? Yes, I do wonder whether this is one of these situations where maybe they were concerned that anyone who unionizes is going to be on the left. So it's fine to be a lawyer, but definitely don't belong to a girl. I mean, there's certainly a civil rights lawyers.
00:09:48
Speaker
Yeah. But it goes on, organizations and individuals associated with the women's rights movement, nationalist groups such as those seeking independence for Puerto Rico, United Ireland and Cuban exile movements, including Orlando Bosch's Cuban power into the Cuban nationalist movement. And also some white supremacist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, though only because
00:10:10
Speaker
Lyndon Johnson actually insisted you need to surveil these guys as well. This was not a group that Hoover wanted to surveil. This was a group that the president went, no, actually you kind of do need to check on these people to go around burning people, hanging people and burning down buildings. We should probably keep an eye on them as well.
00:10:34
Speaker
And yes, so as well as these organizations, they were keeping tabs on specific individuals, including obviously the likes of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Hampton, member of the Chicago Black Panthers, who was notoriously murdered, Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panthers, murdered in 1989, so long after Coontail Pro had officially ended, but nevertheless,
00:10:57
Speaker
allegedly. Muhammad Ali, I mean obviously Nation of Islam and also very vocally against the Vietnam War, Ernest Hemingway. Well I mean after all those books he wrote with those interminable beginnings, I'm not surprised. Jessica Mitford of
Campaign Against the Black Panthers
00:11:13
Speaker
the Mitford Sisters,
00:11:14
Speaker
I don't know a lot about the Mitford sisters. There are about half a dozen of them and they managed to all do interesting things right across the political spectrum. I know one of them was buddies with Hitler, but it wasn't Jessica. Jessica was the other end. She was the lefty one.
00:11:30
Speaker
I like the idea that the the Mitford sisters are a kind of spectrum going from extreme right on one side of the photo to extreme left as far as I can tell they pretty much this idea of a photo of the Mitford sisters, we've got one Mitford sister, you know, arms around Adolf Hitler. And then on the other extreme end, you've got arms around Martin Luther King.
00:11:55
Speaker
I mean, yeah, photo may exist. I don't even know. And readers, if you have a copy, please do send it in. We would love to see it. So I think maybe we'll come back to civil rights figures in a moment, but perhaps it'd be good to just talk about when we talk about these operations, counterintelligence is a fairly nebulous term. So what exactly did people get up to under the umbrella of COINTELPRO?
00:12:23
Speaker
Well, it wasn't just about the spying and the wiretapping. So they did do your basic standard surveillance to a very large extent. Now, Kalventor Pro was about infiltrating and undermining organization. So the idea was they simply weren't keeping tabs
00:12:45
Speaker
on organizations they had designated as being problematic, unpatriotic, or against the American way of life. No, they wanted to expose, disrupt, misdirect, and otherwise neutralize the groups that FBI officials believe were subversive.
00:13:03
Speaker
And they did this in a variety of rather interesting and also disturbing ways. So one thing they were particularly good at was creating a negative public image for the groups they were targeting by basically surveilling the groups and then releasing negative personal information to the public about those groups, or portraying those groups as being bad and public enemy number one.
00:13:33
Speaker
And possibly their most successful tactic of this particular kind was the way they treated the Black Panthers, because for a very long period of time, if you mention the Black Panthers, they were treated as a criminal gang of some description. In the same way that when you talk about the mongrel mob in this country, we think about them as being a gang associated with criminality and drug,
00:14:01
Speaker
use and distribution as opposed to the other things they do because people tend to forget that Panthers were a civil rights organization.
00:14:11
Speaker
that basically existed to provide a framework and infrastructure for African Americans at a time where there was no easy access to social welfare. And as I said that I went actually there is no easy access to social welfare in America at this particular point in time.
Connections to High-Profile Assassinations
00:14:28
Speaker
But actually it turned out it was a lot worse back in the 60s, particularly if you were not a white person in the US.
00:14:36
Speaker
So the Panthers existed as an organization to provide that kind of infrastructure and to ensure that people had access to the things they actually needed. Now, this kind of ground level activism, which was basically promoting racial equality and trying to counter systemic oppression and racism, was the kind of thing the FBI thought was leftist propaganda and the kind of thing that only scums got up to.
00:15:06
Speaker
So they basically ran a PR campaign to make the Panthers look like they were criminals and only criminals in order to ensure that people would oppose their coming into neighborhoods black or white.
00:15:24
Speaker
and also using that to try and discourage people from learning more about the Panthers and what they were actually doing. So basically, COINTELPRO was part of making sure that people thought the wrong things about the right kind of people. Now, of course, it did other things apart from engaging in PR campaigns, they would actually bring people into organizations
00:15:51
Speaker
in order to create conflict in those organizations by basically getting people to say, exacerbate racial tensions, or sending anonymous letters that seem to be in the nose or try to create conflict. They liked their anonymous letters from what I'm reading.
00:16:09
Speaker
of anonymous lesions, including anonymous death threats, which doesn't seem like the kind of thing that an intelligence agency should be sending towards members of the public. But we'll get on to that soon enough. They would, of course,
00:16:24
Speaker
spread rumours to make sure that groups were antagonistic towards each other by say spreading the idea that one group was taking money or creaming money off the top of a particular movement or taking money that didn't belong to them on the idea that this would then make it harder for groups to work together.
00:16:44
Speaker
They would pressure nonprofit organizations to cut off funding or material supports to organizations that the FBI didn't consider to be right or proper. They would engage in restricting the ability to organize protest. Now, Joshua, that seems a bit topical. Sounds a little familiar, yes, yes. Marshalling government controlled forces to restrict people's right to assemble and protest.
00:17:15
Speaker
So yes, like I said at the start, reading through this sort of stuff, it's like, hang on, we didn't, it's kind of coincidence that we came to this now, but it's definitely appropriate.
00:17:30
Speaker
Now, of course, they do other things. They would basically engage in character assassination and possibly actual assassination, false arrest, so they would make it look as if people had been arrested to cause dissension or dismay in an organization. They, of course, engaged in this standard typical surveillance, but also
00:17:52
Speaker
And to my mind, this is one of the most disturbing things they did. They also finance armed and largely controlled a right wing militia group. So they basically took former members of the Minutemen and transformed them into a group called the Secret Army Organization that then went around terrorizing groups, activists and leaders involved in the anti-war movement back in the 1960s.
00:18:22
Speaker
And I mean, so this was FBI agents, from what I gather, they would also sort of draft local police to get in on some of this stuff as well. And we can sort of see how certainly in the case of the Civil Rights Movement, all of these things were in play. Interestingly, one stat I read was that supposedly there were
00:18:44
Speaker
known to be 295 co-intel operations launched against black nationalist groups of those 233 targeted the Black Panthers specifically. Yes, Fred Hampton
00:18:59
Speaker
was killed in 1969 when the building he was in was raided, but the details of the raid sound an awful lot more like an assassination. From what I can gather, he was in bed, officers who had been tipped off of the building's layout by someone within his group.
00:19:20
Speaker
essentially opened fire I think from outside of his room but pointing at what they the position that they knew to be his bed inside the room fired something like 90 rounds or something and then according to eyewitness reports when it was found he was still alive someone went in and shot him twice in the head.
00:19:37
Speaker
So that was right in the midst of COINTELPRO. Also in the middle of it, the murder of Malcolm X, murdered in 1965 by someone, supposedly by someone with ties to the Nation of Islam. Now Malcolm X had belonged to the Nation of Islam, but it had something of a falling out with them.
00:19:56
Speaker
And there was always talk amongst people of how much of that falling out had been orchestrated by the FBI. Because as we just said, you know, that was one of the things they did for me, discord, try to create divisions both within and between various groups. So even so, you know, there are a variety of conspiracies around this along the sort of mihop lehop lines, you know, you don't have to believe that it was actual FBI assassin who shot him, you could believe that the FBI basically set things up so that there were people who were
00:20:26
Speaker
willing to shoot him on their own steam.
Exposure and Public Outrage
00:20:29
Speaker
And then, of course, we come to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. murdered in 1968. And again, we could probably devote a whole episode to him. And in fact, maybe we should. Maybe we should. But in brief, I mean,
00:20:47
Speaker
Hoover was paranoid and obsessive, but he was apparently particularly obsessed with Dr. King, in particular, because I believe King had been fairly critical of the FBI as well, and Hoover wasn't taking that. So there was all sorts of stuff. Now, it was
00:21:08
Speaker
I think it was RFK. He did set on surveilling Dr. King, and RFK said, okay, fine, I'll let you do it, but only because I think this will prove that he's not a communist. And apparently, yes, the surveillance and the wiretapping and what have you showed that, no, he wasn't a commie, so they couldn't get him for that. But they had apparently
00:21:32
Speaker
followed and surveilled him enough to find out the various extramarital affairs he had had. And then the story, which I've heard numerous times, supposedly then one of their famous anonymous letters found their way on Dr. King's doorstep, where they basically said, hey, we know about all your affairs, and essentially hinted that maybe he should think about suicide, perhaps, as an alternative to all of this coming to light.
00:21:56
Speaker
Yeah, one of the ways to make sure these affairs don't come to light is just cease existing, Dr. King, and everything will be fine. So after he was assassinated, shot with a, I don't know if it's technically a sniper rifle, but shot from far away with someone with a rifle, which sounds sniperish to me. James Earl Ray was convicted of his murder, but conspiracy theories have always abounded there.
00:22:24
Speaker
And in 1999, King's family brought a civil case against a man called Lee Jowers, who claimed himself to have been paid by the mafia to help organise an assassination. So the case was against Lee Jowers and other unknown co-conspirators.
00:22:42
Speaker
Although I would like to point out for people listening at home, Josh has managed to write that out as co-conspiractors. Conspiractors? They're really, really nice to... That's even better, yeah. We need more conspiractors, I think. I mean, it's as good as the fact that every time I try to write conspiracy, and I write it a lot in my academic work, I can't help but write conspiracy.
00:23:04
Speaker
Yes, exactly. So my typos aside, so this was a civil case, not a criminal case, and apparently King's family asked that if judgment was found their way, they wanted it to be a fine of $100, purely as a symbolic amount. But the jury, who apparently was consisted entirely of white men, nevertheless took an hour to conclude that a conspiracy was behind
00:23:31
Speaker
King's death and that James Oray had been set up to take the blame. So while the FBI, I don't think it was officially found that the FBI specifically orchestrated his death, there's a lot of fishiness about around it. And we certainly know that Coen Telpro was very, very, very strongly involved in messing with his life.
00:23:56
Speaker
Yes, which is why there are a number of conspiracy theories about who actually killed Martin Luther King and also whether the person who was convicted of his death was in fact framed.
00:24:11
Speaker
Now, as we said, this went 1956 to 1971. And it stopped in 1971. Is that because they finally had an attack of conscience and realized this was a silly thing to be doing and just decided to pack it all in on their own state? Well, yes, but they had an attack of conscience because they were found out as opposed to decided that actually this was a wrongdoing and maybe they should have never started it in the first place.
Media's Role in Unveiling COINTELPRO
00:24:38
Speaker
This is where things get really interesting.
00:24:41
Speaker
So activists are concerned about what the FBI is up to, because activists are particularly aware that people on the left seem to be targeted by the FBI in a way that people on the right are not. And this leads to certain leftist activists, including the Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI,
00:25:04
Speaker
getting interested in what the FBI are up to. Now this particular part of the story I'm not sure about, I've seen this reported several times online but I actually can't find a citation to show it's actually true. Apparently
00:25:20
Speaker
the Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI realized that because the FBI were heavily invested in surveilling Muhammad Ali, the fight of the century which occurred in 1971 between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier was the perfect time to make an attack on the FBI because the FBI would be so focused on what Ali was doing
00:25:46
Speaker
they would be looking in the wrong direction. So the Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI instigate a burglary of an FBI field office in Pennsylvania, and they take 1000 classified documents and then hand them over to the media.
00:26:07
Speaker
Now, initially, the media does not want to report. No, they do not. They are very resistant to even looking at the documents.
00:26:17
Speaker
But as these things tend to pan out, a few journalists are willing to write some initial stories about the trove, which then means that other journalists feel they need to report upon it as well. And what was initially a trickle turns into an avalanche in one of my famous mixed metaphors.
00:26:40
Speaker
Yes, this was, there's a movie called 1971, which came out five or six years ago, which apparently, which dramatizes these events. I haven't seen it myself. I have not either. No, so they just basically grabbed whatever they could from the sounds of things. And so a lot of it was, was fairly benign, just, you know, stuff the FBI looks into because they're the FBI, various crimes and so on that happened.
00:27:05
Speaker
I have heard the claim that one document out of this entire trove was found to use the term COINTELPRO, which is how they sort of got onto it, although I read about that in a description of the plot of the movie 1971. So that's possible, that's artistic license, I'm not sure.
00:27:22
Speaker
People don't refer to operations in actual documents because they know it's just going to be under the aegis of that document classification system anyway. I mean, this actually does get you down to the problem that some conspiracy theorists have about the Holocaust. But there's so few documents that refer to the final solution.
00:27:49
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, but that's to be expected. I mean, when you're engaging in a mass extermination campaign, that you know that everyone else knows about, and is engaging as well, you don't need to state it in your document, you just need to state numbers and times, because people know what that refers to.
00:28:09
Speaker
it's a it's just a standard operating procedure that when you're writing this kind of documentation or writing reports you know who's going to read it so you don't repeat information that they they don't need to know or that they already know yeah yeah i mean it's my i mean the example i use when i'm
Church Committee Investigation
00:28:26
Speaker
teaching is the the classic thing you got to see in mummy films now josh and i we've we've watched a fair number of mummy films in our time for better or worse
00:28:36
Speaker
And almost all of them will feature two Egyptologists about to break into a term. And one of them will say, well, of course, I know you know the history of this place, but let me explain to you exactly who's buried here in a way that professional archaeologists never engage in because you don't end up going, now, I know Joshua, you know, awful loss about this particular term, but there's a camera over there. So I really need to explain this for the audience watching at home.
00:29:06
Speaker
Yes, no, it's more like the Neil Stevenson book Cryptonomicon, which has one of the most Neil Stevenson exchanges I've ever seen, where two characters are talking about how they're going to name their company EpiFight Corp. And one of the characters says to the other, you know what an EpiFight is, don't you? And the other character says, yes, I do. And the book carries on like that, the subtext being, oh,
00:29:31
Speaker
Oh, you don't know what an epiphyte is, reader. Gosh, how embarrassing for you, because as I like to say, the moral of every single Neil Stephenson book is that Neil Stephenson is more intelligent and well-read than you, the reader, which is one of the many reasons why I don't read books.
00:29:46
Speaker
Anyway, so this, yeah, it sort of started off slowly and kind of snowballed from the sounds of things. From what I gather, some kind of smaller, smaller media outlets were the first ones to publish this sort of stuff. And then as it gained steam, people started looking into it more and the bigger the network started taking, staking note of it. So it could no longer be ignored. And so it's within the year, Hoover had said, right work, co-intel pro is no more.
00:30:15
Speaker
It didn't mean they're not going to be doing counterintelligence ops, just that there will no longer be this broad umbrella project where anything goes. They'd be looking at them more on a case-by-case basis. It's not like anything actually stopped happening. They were just supposedly committing to be a little bit less slapdash about it.
00:30:36
Speaker
Yes, they're going to be less systematic and more selective. All those people will point out that's a great way to make the problem disappear because A, by saying you're more selective, then you don't have a program needs to be referred to. It makes it a lot easier to do things effectively off the box. And arguably, we've got a lot of evidence even to this day, that security services around the world
00:31:04
Speaker
are kind of curiously fixated on particular groups and not other groups. I mean, this was one of the big issues we had here after the mosque shootings in March of last year was the realization that it turns out our security services, like those in the UK and the US, seems to be of the opinion that left-wing groups are dangerous and right-wing groups are not.
00:31:32
Speaker
Yes, yes, which led, we all know where that led. So the FBI did get raped over the coals for this to some degree. So in 1975, the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate was formed. This is most commonly referred to as the Church Committee. Apparently it was chaired by Senator Frank Church.
00:31:59
Speaker
So it started in 1975 and it looked at dodgy dealings that the FBI, the NSA and the CIA had been getting up to, some of it prompted by Seymour Hersh's reporting into some of the dodgy things the CIA had been getting up to abroad. Which is the Operation Chaos stuff.
00:32:17
Speaker
But within America, COINTELPRO was what really got the FBI in trouble, and so they raked them over the coals. Their summary was highly critical of the FBI, went into lengths about how illegal a lot of the stuff they had been was, how it had violated the constitutional rights of many of the people that the operations had been focused on, talked about how the fact that
00:32:44
Speaker
Many of the agents involved knew that what they were doing was illegal and chose to do it anyway under the grounds of national security and it had to be done to protect the nation. And yet also one of the things that they criticized it about most strongly was how broad its scope was, how it ended up just being an umbrella term for just
Criticism of FBI's Political Bias
00:33:11
Speaker
Anything kind of lefty, agitator-y, it supposedly was aimed at violent groups, groups that were a threat to security.
00:33:23
Speaker
the lives of other Americans and somebody ended up looking at completely nonviolent groups just because they came under the same umbrella. That's because the FBI stated motivation was that they were protecting national security, preventing violence, and I think this is the crucial part, maintaining the existing social and political order.
00:33:47
Speaker
They can kind of go protecting national security. Yes, that's what a security agency is meant to do. Preventing violence seems like something you ought to do, as long as that doesn't stop systemic oppression from occurring. But when you're maintaining the existing social and political order, that's very ideological.
00:34:10
Speaker
because maintaining the existing social and political order is basically maintaining the situation which allows you to be in power or to have the kind of security apparatus that surrounds you.
00:34:25
Speaker
Many of the leftist groups, as we're seeing with the Black Lives Matter protests, are going, no, we should be defunding organizations like this, which makes organizations like this go, oh, oh, no, no, you need to. No, I don't want to do that. Because that doesn't maintain the political social order that has rewarded us by putting us into the position of power we have at this particular point in time.
00:34:50
Speaker
And of course, that is essentially a political position from what, on paper at least, should be in a political organization. This is something that comes up all the time, forever, always. You get, you know, people agitating for change, and then people say, why do you have to bring your politics into this?
00:35:11
Speaker
Choosing to conveniently ignore the fact that the idea we should keep everything just as it is, is a political position. That's basically what conservative means. So yeah, it's not really what you want. I mean, we all know that law enforcement
00:35:34
Speaker
Organizations the world over do tend to have a bit of a political bent, but they're not supposed to be open about it, at least. Although, actually, maybe if they were open about it, it would make it a lot easier to them disagree with what they're doing and argue against it. Part of the problem has been by hiding the political nature of these organizations and treating them
00:35:58
Speaker
as being purely neutral. They've got away with pursuing ideological ends for a long time. If people are actually honest about the no, no, no, we're here to make sure that nothing changes. And we realize that that rewards only a select few, then it becomes a lot easier to then go yeah, and that's kind of why we don't like you because
00:36:23
Speaker
it's actually not very just what you're doing and the kind of society that you are defending isn't the kind of society that many of us can actually afford to live in.
Internal Dissent Within the FBI
00:36:36
Speaker
Now speaking of small groups of people, after all this came out and after the FBI had been soundly spanked on the bottom by the church committee,
00:36:48
Speaker
Various members of the FBI started coming out and saying, oh, yes, this is terrible. This is against the character of the FBI. It's not what I signed up for and so on. So Oliver Revelle, who was at one point the FBI associate deputy director, said that most FBI agents didn't know about COINTELPRO. And once these revelations came out, they disagreed strongly with it. His words were,
00:37:13
Speaker
Probably less than 200 people in the FBI ever knew of or were involved in COINTELPRO, and the other 8,000 agents were, like I was, investigating organized crime in all types of bank robberies and violent crimes, and it just seemed to be so out of character with the FBI that I had joined, and that I believed was essential to protect the rights of American citizens.
00:37:32
Speaker
Now, maybe that's true that only a few select people knew about this. Maybe it isn't. For one thing, it kind of doesn't matter because the small group of people who knew about it were the ones at the top. This started with Hoover and worked its way down. But it is an interesting, I guess, illustration of the sort of things we've talked about in the past, how you can have a big conspiracy, but not everyone needs to be in on it. See, say, the Volkswagen stuff.
00:38:00
Speaker
Yeah, so it only requires a few people at the top to know the full extent of what they're doing. And then you can have dupes and patsies who are just telling to do routine procedures or routine activities.
00:38:15
Speaker
who are actually enacting the conspiracy, who may not be aware exactly what they're up to. Although that being said, it is kind of weird to think that these other 7,800 people who were being asked to predominantly surveil people in the left community and engage in discovering dirt about them,
00:38:42
Speaker
weren't weirded out by what they were being asked to do. So it seems a little bit weird for an associate deputy director to go, I don't know, only 200 people, not including me, ever knew what was going on.
Surveillance of Leftist vs. Right-Wing Groups
00:38:59
Speaker
Surely people in the organisation were working that out, which I think once again speaks to
00:39:07
Speaker
where the FBI was drawing its agents from at the time were the kind of people who were not particularly perplexed or annoyed by who they were surveilling and also by extension who they weren't looking at.
00:39:24
Speaker
Certainly, as we said before, they would draft local police in to do various dodgy things like raiding buildings and shooting people 90 times or pulling people in on trumped up charges or false arrests and all that sort of stuff. Again, in those cases, you probably had members of the police force who were entirely happy to be sticking it to these various organizations.
00:39:51
Speaker
It's feasible. It's plausible that you had a small number of people at the top just sort of drafting in people within and without the FBI who then you would have been sympathetic to it. But still, it does seem to be a big enough thing that it's
00:40:08
Speaker
It's hard to credit the vast majority of people throwing their hands in the air and saying, goodness gracious me, is this what the organization I work for was up to all this time? It does seem to stretch credibility just a little. And if you'll let me get political for just a moment, Joshua, because of course you have to get political at all during the course of this podcast. No, no, obviously not.
00:40:29
Speaker
One of the things which is interesting about Coentor Pro, and indeed the security app browsers who find worldwide, is the fact that, as mentioned previously, a lot of people were surveilled because they were left to wing rather than right wing, which is led to questions so, you know,
00:40:47
Speaker
Why is it that the left gets surveilled and the right doesn't? And one answer, and this is only a partial answer, is that historically, despite the fact that the extreme right have been very problematic with, you know, killing people, engaging in lynch mobs and the like, the one thing they did have was respect for the state and for the apparatus of the state.
00:41:11
Speaker
So one reason why the right were not surveilled and the left were, is that the left were calling for organizations at the FBI and the CIA to be defunded, whilst the right were broadly in support of extending those powers to make them more authoritarian.
00:41:29
Speaker
to end up ignoring the problems on the right because, you know, they might engage in a bit of murder, a bit of burning down of churches where African-Americans go. I mean, maybe they engage in the old lynch mob, but, you know, they'll be there defending us when things get bad. Well, you can't trust those people of color. They're the one to think we're out to get them.
00:41:52
Speaker
How paranoid are they? Indeed. Yes, no. Did you see the guy in the States on the police where people noticed the very large SS tattoo on his own? Yeah, yeah. Which they tried to say, oh no, that's just, it was memorized. There's a guy whose initials were SS or something that we wanted to commemorate.
00:42:15
Speaker
And yes, we know it looks a bit like an SES logo, and by a bit, I mean exactly like it. It's the same dollar. How many fonts are there in the world? And you're trying to tell us that you decided to get an SES written on your arm and happened to pick the exact symbol used by the actual SES. I don't know.
00:42:34
Speaker
Look, to quote the Simpsons, this is not die, Bart, die, it's the Bart. The Bart,
TV Show Dinosaurs and Societal Parallels
00:42:42
Speaker
the. And indeed Bart is German for beard. So anyway, oh, now, OK, I think we've I think I think we've now got into the rambling about pop culture section of this podcast. Have you seen the clip from Dinosaurs that's been going around?
00:42:57
Speaker
the old dinosaurs. But I mean, I do remember dinosaurs quite a bit. I mean, the most recent clip of that I saw was the end of the final episode, which might be the bleakest thing ever committed to celluloid. Look, if you're not our age, you might not remember that there was, who was behind it? It was someone big. It was the gym, it was a gym handsome. Yeah, it was a gym handsome one. There was a live action puppet show. Which is a weird sentence, but that is completely true.
00:43:27
Speaker
About about this family of dinosaurs and there was a fair bit of sort of it was bad I should say at the start it was not it was not a funny sitcom and you don't ran for four years it went a long time and it had a lot of sort of social satire in it and that a lot of sort of you had these dinosaurs with head of civilization that are just like people you know it was it was a family sitcom only they all happen to be rubber puppets rather than human actors and
00:43:50
Speaker
with a really annoying baby. With a really annoying baby. And there was a lot of episodes along the lines of, gosh, look how stupid these idiot dinosaurs are doing all these things, which actually people do in the real world as well. And yes, as you say, the final of the entire show ended, I guess, appropriately with the dinosaurs going extinct. And this was in the, what, 90s? Early 90s? Yeah.
00:44:15
Speaker
due to climate change. They messed up the world's climate and they all froze to death, which was, yes, an interesting choice for ending a beloved family sitcom. But no, the point is, just today, people have been sitting around a clip. There was an episode apparently where
00:44:33
Speaker
I don't know the details, but they had this cop show called Triceracops, which obviously is a clever name. And then for some reason, I don't know why the dad got involved in it, and then they ended up retooling it. And so someone put up, there was a clip of the first sort of Triceracops show, which is these two sort of hard boiled cops.
00:44:52
Speaker
confronting a criminal and shooting him a dozen times, and that was kind of it. And then they show the retooled version, which is two cops confronting a thief and putting their guns away and saying, ah, you're just a misunderstood member of society who's being driven to this by poor socioeconomic conditions. And the guy's, the criminal's like, no, well, but I'm actually, I'm a thief. I stole a car. But isn't all property theft?
00:45:19
Speaker
and pulls out a blackboard and starts detailing Marxist theory to the sky in the middle of the sitcom about dinosaur puppets. It was quite interesting to see. Yeah, I do if you wonder whether Dinosaurs is better than we gave it credit for. I think maybe it's clever than we gave it credit for, but it was not good. I don't see any way in which it could be called a good show, but maybe a clever show, maybe too clever for its own good.
00:45:46
Speaker
Yes, maybe it was both before and after its time. Anyway, we're rambling about popcorn now, which means the episode has effectively come to an end. But for our patrons, there's more coming up. I would say after the break, but actually... I mean, there is a break for us technically, but you guys won't listen to it. I don't know. Because your mum, you can stay out if you want.
00:46:10
Speaker
We will be talking about the end of the Olof Palmer investigation. It's finally over. 34 years and it's done. We'll also be talking about what Trump's been tweeting about, which is never good news. A claim that Covid-19 was made in a lab, which feels like it should be another claim. A repeat of a previous one, but this is this is new, apparently.
00:46:34
Speaker
And then we've got some local spy related news about spying both by the internal spy agency of the over people in this country and external spy agencies trying to infiltrate the country. It's all very exciting. Espionage both foreign and domestic. Just the way I like it. Yep.
00:46:56
Speaker
So, if you're a patron, stick around. I'll thank you for being a patron, for starters. Stick around and you can listen to that one. If you're not a patron but you'd like to be, you could go to patreon.com and look for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. And I think, I think,
00:47:13
Speaker
But we never do the, hey, if you're listening to this on whatever thing, you should like and subscribe and give us a good rating, because apparently that makes us better to, I can't remember, there's a whole spiel you always hear about, rate us on iTunes, because it makes us easier to find or something. But anyway, if you're in a position to rate us, do it, and do it highly. Or not, I suppose. Yes, but I mean, there's no, I mean,
00:47:37
Speaker
If you want to give your honest opinion about the podcast, I mean, that's fine, but it's actually not very useful to us if you give your honest opinion. We'd rather you gave your dishonest opinion and give us five stars and say we're the best podcast ever made, much better than say, Chappo Trap House, maybe even better than The Dollop. I mean, frankly, it is conceivable that we could be. One day, one day.
00:48:04
Speaker
As you know, I actually think we peaked a long time ago. It's probably true. And our best days are well behind us. And we're just trundling along now. In the podcast as in life. Yes. Yes, this is true. Sad, but true. So I'm depressed, which means I think it's time for us to call this episode to an end, which we will do in our traditional fashion by me saying goodbye. And my saying, murder, she wrote.
00:48:34
Speaker
makes sense in context.
00:48:45
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:49:46
Speaker
And remember, remember, oh December was a night.