It’s highly unlikely that releasing the files our intelligence agencies have on Nelson Mandela would hurt our national security or our foreign relations, but it would probably make our intelligence agencies look like racists. Considering that the time frame we’re talking about here is the early 1960’s, prior to the passage of our historic civil rights bills, when we were technically no better than the South African apartheid regime, I don’t think anyone would be surprised that our intelligence agencies were racist. Half the country was operating within a Jim Crow framework and J. Edgar Hoover was trying to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into committing suicide.
So, what in the hell?
Prolific FOIA requester and MIT researcher Ryan Shapiro has been seeking information about the U.S. intelligence community’s role in the 1962 arrest and placement on the U.S. terror watchlist of Nelson Mandela. Following government agencies’ refusal to comply with his FOIA requests, Shapiro filed suit against the NSA, the FBI and and the Defense Intelligence Agency Tuesday, adding to an ongoing suit of the same nature against the CIA.
I hope Prof. Shapiro wins in court.
That letter to Dr. King is disgusting. What a reprehensible piece of shit the writer of that letter is.
It isn’t because our “enemies” (very broadly defined) might somehow glean knowledge of our super-secret espionage tactics that nobody anywhere ever thought of before, whooo-weee aren’t we foxy! No, the real rationale for hiding intelligence operations behind secret classifications is to avoid embarrassment for those operations.
I’m reading Seth Rosenfeld’s “Subversives” about campus unrest in Berkeley in the 1960s and the rise of Ronald Reagan. Rosenfeld has been plodding through the courts for years to dislodge FBI files from those days, and finally succeeded in 2011. This book is the result of his reading through all this stuff, and Rosenfeld isn’t shy about pointing out the discrepancies in how seriously the FBI treated some things but not others.
For example, an anonymous tip that someone was a communist was grounds for snooping through every inch of that person’s life, background, employment, friends, family, and associates. But others didn’t have to worry about such things. Reagan’s son Michael, for example, was palling around with the son of mobster Joseph “Joey Bananas” Bonanno. When this came to the attention of Hoover, instead of setting a trap to spring on the rebellious young man, a couple of agents went around first to inform Daddy Ronald, and then to tell Michael that he ought to be a little more judicious in his choice of friends.
Some incidents received the FBI’s full attention, such as when a bunch of Berkeley students went to protest the session of the House Unamerican Activities Committee in San Francisco. A few years later, when the Berkeley house that hosted the Vietnam Day Committee was bombed, the FBI monitored the Berkeley Police investigation, but they otherwise didn’t lift a finger except to spread unsubstantiated rumors that the VDC had set the bomb itself to garner public sympathy.
Any of this sound familiar to things going on today? Nah, I don’t think so, either.
Just exactly WHO doesn’t think that the CIA was all involved in helping the Afrikaaners catch Mandela?
Come on,now.
Nah.
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