We call this country the “Land of the Free”…
What a sad and pathetic joke. Stasi and the NKVD never had anything on the Queen of the FBI and the thugs in the Police Department Red Squads.
I grew up in the days of the Red Scare and Joe McCarthy, the Amerikkkan Legion, Koncerned Kitizens Kouncils and racist Republican assholes who should be compelled to have a swastika tattooed on their foreheads.
I watched organizations destroyed, people murdered, causes slandered by these fucks.
The earliest case of a lesbian organization trashing a WBT was probably a secret police operation, “bad jacketing” her.. Bad jacketing some one was lying and smearing someone, generally some one who was one of the hardest workers in an organization. It served several purposes: It drove a hard worker from the organization. Deprived them of that worker who would in turn talk bad about the organization. It split the organization into factions. It caused other people to hesitate before committing to putting the effort in.
“B.E.” wasn’t the only one in women’s movements to experience this even if she was the earliest WBT to experience it.
The lowest forms of life were the spies.
I have always assumed that Hoover knew more than will ever come out about many crimes. Probably knew before they happened because of his secret police.
Nothing surprises me…
From Memphis The Commercial Appeal:
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2010/sep/12/photographer-ernest-withers-fbi-informant/#comments
Photographer Ernest Withers doubled as FBI informant to spy on civil rights movement
He provided agency with insider’s view of volatile period
- By Marc Perrusquia
- Memphis Commercial Appeal
- Posted September 12, 2010 at midnight
At the top of the stairs he saw the blood, a large pool of it, splashed across the balcony like a grisly, abstract painting. Instinctively, Ernest Withers raised his camera. This wasn’t just a murder. This was history.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood here a few hours earlier chatting with aides when a sniper squeezed off a shot from a hunting rifle.
Now, as night set over Memphis, Withers was on the story.
Slipping past a police barricade, the enterprising Beale Street newsman made his way to room 306 at the Lorraine Motel — King’s room — and walked in. Ralph Abernathy and the others hardly blinked. After all, this was Ernest C. Withers. He’d marched with King, and sat in on some of the movement’s sensitive strategy meetings.
<snip>
The grief-stricken aides photographed by Withers on April 4, 1968, had no clue, but the man they invited in that night was an FBI informant — evidence of how far the agency went to spy on private citizens in Memphis during one of the nation’s most volatile periods.
Withers shadowed King the day before his murder, snapping photos and telling agents about a meeting the civil rights leader had with suspected black militants.
He later divulged details gleaned at King’s funeral in Atlanta, reporting that two Southern Christian Leadership Conference staffers blamed for an earlier Beale Street riot planned to return to Memphis “to resume … support of sanitation strike” — to stir up more trouble, as the FBI saw it.
The April 10, 1968, report, which identifies Withers only by his confidential informant number — ME 338-R — is among numerous reports reviewed by The Commercial Appeal that reveal a covert, previously unknown side of the beloved photographer who died in 2007 at age 85.
Those reports portray Withers as a prolific informant who, from at least 1968 until 1970, passed on tips and photographs detailing an insider’s view of politics, business and everyday life in Memphis’ black community.
As a foot soldier in J. Edgar Hoover’s domestic intelligence program, Withers helped the FBI gain a front-row seat to the civil rights and anti-war movements in Memphis.
Continue reading at: http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2010/sep/12/photographer-ernest-withers-fbi-informant/#comments
Tell me again about how free this country is and how the right wing Hooverites and McCartyites protected our rights.
The blood is on their hands.
If there is a hell may it be full of sniches and spies, the finks who name names even if they have to make them up.