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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
In November 1939, after the outbreak of war in Europe, Hoover also began to compile a list of individuals to be closely monitored and/or detained in the event of a national emergency or war. In June 1940 he sought and gained the approval of Attorney General Robert Jackson for this list, known as the Custodial Detention list. (Late in life, Jackson appears to have regretted the powers that Hoover accumulated.)
123 Athan G. Theoharis, The FBI & American Democracy: A Brief Critical History (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 20-21; Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Report, Book III - Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans (henceforth Church Committee, Book III), 411-17.
124 Church Committee, Book III, 417.
125 Church Committee, Book III, 420-21; quoting from Attorney-General Biddle's directive to the FBI, 1943.
126 Weiner, Enemies, 122: “[The Security Index] included - in addition to ‘both aliens and citizens of the United States [of] German, Italian, and Communist sympathies’ - radical labor leaders, journalists critical of the administration, writers critical of the FBI, and certain members of Congress.” In 1955 about half the names on the Security Index were transferred to a less punitive Communist Index (later renamed the Reserve Index), including “Professors, teachers, and educators: labor union organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers newsmen and others in the mass media field; lawyers, doctors, and scientists; other potentially influential persons on a local or national level; individuals who could potentially furnish financial or material aid” (Church Committee, Book II, 55. Among those included were Norman Mailer and Martin Luther King (Theoharis, The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide, 123).
127 FBI, FBI Privacy Act Systems (63 FR 8659, 8671 / 02-20-98) link: “The following indices are no longer being used by the FBI and are being maintained at FBIHQ pending receipt of authority to destroy: Black Panther Party Photo Index; Black United Front Index; Security Index; and Wounded Knee Album.)
1 Administrative Index (ADEX). Consists of cards with descriptive data on individuals who were subject to investigation in a national emergency because they were believed to constitute a potential or active threat to the internal security of the United States. When ADEX was started in 1971, it was made up of people who were formerly on the Security Index, Reserve Index, and Agitator Index. This index is maintained in two separate locations in FBI Headquarters. ADEX was discontinued in January 1978. This list is inactive at FBI Headquarters and 29 Field Offices.”
128 Weiner, Enemies, 161. Theoharis asserts however that Truman had already secretly approved the detention plan in 1948 (Theoharis, The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide, 151).
129 Weiner, Enemies, 160-61. The primary targets for detention were Communist Party members and their supporters. Each detained person would eventually get a hearing, which under Hoover's plan would “not be bound by the rules of evidence.” The plan was declassified in 2007; see “Hoover plan for mass arrests,” Public record media, February 2011, link. The FBI at this time became what Victor Navasky called “the vanguard of an extraordinary internal-security bureaucracy,” including the Subversive Activities Control Board established, over Truman's veto, by the McCarran Act of 1950 (Victor Navasky, Naming Names, 22). That security bureaucracy has morphed today into a second, shadow government.
130 Weiner, Enemies, 144-45.
131 Theoharis, The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide, 151, 158; cf. Church Committee, Book II.
132 Presidential Proclamation 2914 of December 16, 1950; reproduced in Brian Tuohy, Disaster Government: National Emergencies, Continuity of Government, & You (San Bernardino, CA: Mofo Press, 2013), 44-45.
133 For NSA 68/4 of December 14, 1950, see FRUS, 1950, 1: 467-74; Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 322, etc.
*i Dennis Wainstock, Truman, MacArthur, and the Korean War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 99.
134 Matthew L. Conaty, “The Atomic Midwife: The Eisenhower Administration's
Continuity-of-Government Plans and the Legacy of ‘Constitutional Dictatorship,’“
Rutgers Law Review, Vol. 62, No. 3, Spring 2010, 7.
135 Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA], FEMA MANUAL 5400.2 111 (effective Feb. 29, 2000), link1 link2; quoted in Thronson, “Toward Comprehensive Reform of America's Emergency Law Regime,” 762.
136 FBI memo of June 19, 1958, to L.F. Boardman from A.H. Belmont (FBI HQ file 66-19016-6), reproduced in Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Defense Plans -Presidential Emergency Action Documents, 1958 - 1979, link.
137 Conaty, “The Atomic Midwife,” 7-8.
138 Conaty, “The Atomic Midwife,” 14.
139 Hope Yen, “Eisenhower letters reveal doomsday plan: Citizens tapped to take over in case of attack,” AP, Deseret News, March 21, 2004, link. Other emergency responses to the launching of the Soviet sputnik included acceleration of the military programs to launch an American satellite, and the creation of the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now DARPA), which developed the Internet.
140 “Emergency Preparedness for Telecommunications,” attachment to memo of November 5, 1969, to Clay Whitehead [director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy under Nixon], from Charlie Joyce; reproduced at http://www.docstoc.com/docs/128597200/NSA-USCSB_1940-1980.
141 Tim Shorrock, Spies for hire: the secret world of intelligence outsourcing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008),72-75; Peter Dale Scott, “Continuity of Government: Is the State of Emergency Superseding our Constitution?” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, November 29, 2010, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3448.
142 Peter Dale Scott, “The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, November 21, 2011, link. For peripheral links between this network and the JFK assassination, see this article; also Larry Haapanen and Alan Rogers, “A Phone Call from Out of the Blue,” Kennedy Assassination Chronicles, Vol, 8:2, link.
143 Scott, “The Doomsday Project and Deep Events;” quoting Peter Dale Scott, “North, Iran- Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Original Congressional Cover Up of Continuity- of-Government Planning,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 21, 2011.
144 Ben Bradlee, Jr., Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North (New York: D.I. Fine, 1988), 132
145 Scott, “The Doomsday Project and Deep Events;” citing Woodward and Bernstein, All the President's Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 23; Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (New York: Random House, 1984), 16. For more on WISP, see David Wise, The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power (New York: Random House, 1973), 134-37.
146 Cf. e.g. Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD), “Promulgation and Administration of OSD Crisis Action Packages (CAPs),” December 13, 1990, link: “The Director. Crisis Coordination Center shall:[|…. d. Develop and maintain an automated data base interfacing CAPs [Crisis Action Packages] with related presidential emergency action documents (PEADs), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) major emergency actions (MEAs), and Joint Staff fact sheets.” These programs were under the purview of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, who in 1990 was the neocon Paul Wolfowitz. Crisis Action Planning is today intensively developed inside and outside government: e.g. James L. Jacobs, Micheal C. Dorneich, and Patricia M. Jones, “Activity Representation and Management for Crisis Action Planning,” 1998 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, San Diego CA, October 11-14, 1998. (Invited).
147 Brian Glick, War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It (Boston: South End Press, 1999), 34 (coordinated); Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 71 (business). Cf. Weiner, Enemies, 15-16.
148 Athan G, Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (New York: Bantam, 1990), 224-29; Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 413; Mike Forrest Keen, Stalking Sociologists: J. Edgar Hoover's FBI Surveillance of American Sociology (New Brunswick : Transaction Publishers, 2004), 51 (Legion); Charles R. Geisst, Undue Influence: How the Wall Street Elite Puts the Financial System at Risk (Hoboken, N.J. : John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 139 (business).
149 Alfred M. Lilienthal, “The Changing Role of B’nai B’rith's Anti-Defamation League,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 1993, link.
150 Robert Friedman, “The ADL: The Jewish Thought Police,’“ Village Voice, May 11, 1993; citing Henry Schwarzschild, SF Weekly, April 28, 1993.
151 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 329 (Allen); 432 (Murchison, Kennedy, Rosenstiel); 470n (Kennedy).
152 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 329. Burton Hersh, claims that Hoover dined at Clint Murchison's club in La Jolla, the del Charro, with John Roselli. Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 107. Cf. Sanford J. Ungar, FBI (Boston: Little Brown, 1976), 393: “[S]ome of the director's own wealthy friends were involved in dealings with the underworld.”
153 Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 49; cf. 198.
154 Theoharis, The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide, 189. Hoover's refusal to investigate American organized crime was ended by the embarrassing news stories about the 1957 Apalachin, NY crime summit. After Robert Kennedy, then working for a Senate Subcommittee, approached the FBI for information, it developed that the FBI had no information at all on about forty of them. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), in contrast, “had something on every one of them” (Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 454n). In all, 58 mobsters were apprehended at Apalachin, while about fifty more escaped through the woods and fields. Cf. Gil Reavill, Mafia Summit: J. Edgar Hoover, the Kennedy Brothers, and the Meeting That Unmasked the Mob (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2012).
155 Summers, Official and Confidential, 228.
156 Stephen H. Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth Century America (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 178.
157 Scott, Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (Berkeley: Westworks, 1977), 40; citing San Francisco Chronicle, September 26, 1974;
January 11, 1975.
158 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 218-21; Albert Fried, The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 213.
159 Weiner, Enemies, 487. In like manner, when Carmine Galante of the Bonanno family avoided conviction for the murder of the left-wing journalist Carlo Tresca in 1943, a sycophantic admirer of Hoover and Winchell, Guenther Reinhardt, blamed the murder on the Communists (Nunzio Pernicone, Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2010), 296; cf. Thomas A. Reppetto, Battleground New York City: Countering Spies, Saboteurs, and Terrorists since 1861 (Washington: Potomac Books, 2012), 190-94.
160 Howie Carr, Hitman: The Untold Story of Johnny Martorano: Whitey Bulger's Enforcer and the Most Feared Gangster in the Underworld (New York: Forge Books, 2011), 170ss.
161 Boston Globe, September 6, 2006, link.
162 John Kroger, Convictions: A Prosecutor's Battles Against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 146-52, etc.
163 Lance, Triple Cross, 221-38, etc.
164 Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock, The Awful Grace of God (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012), 34.
165 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), 341-50; Henry T. Gallagher, James Meredith and the Ole Miss Riot: A Soldier's Story (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. 2012), ZZ (twenty thousand).
166 Richard D. Mahoney, Sons & brothers : the days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (New York: Arcade Pub., 1999), 186, 188.
167 Summeres, Not in Your Lifetime, 162.
168 Scott, Deep Politics, 49-50.
169 A few days before the JFK assassination, the source, Joseph Milteer, also told Miami police informant Willie Somersett that the president would be shot “from an office building with a high-powered rifle.” FBI HQ received this information on November 10, 1963; but did not transmit it to the Warren Commission (in a rewritten form making it less credible) until August 7, 1964, when the Commission had already written its report and was winding up its work. Meanwhile FBI HQ had ordered its Miami office to “amend the reliability statement to show that some of the information …could not be verified or corroborated.” See Scott, Deep Politics, 49-51. Thus in August 1968 the FBI ignored a credible report from Somersett connecting a Klan murderer, Tommy Tarrants (of whom more shortly) to the murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis four months before (Wexler and Hancock, The Awful Grace of God, 95-97).
170 Although the Klan were generally people with little status in society, Tommy Tarrants told Patsy Sims that one of the people responsible for planning the White Klan violence in which he participated was “a high- ranking military officer” (Patsy Sims, The Klan (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 240).
171 Maryanne Vollers, Ghosts of Mississippi: the murder of Medgar Evers, the trials of Byron de la Beckwith, and the haunting of the new South (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 229-30; quoted in Michael Newton, The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi: A History (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2010), 125.
172 Theoharis, The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide, 33; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York:
Ballantine Books, 1979), 313.
173 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 314.
174 Weiner, Enemies, 247.
175 Glenn Peter Hastedt, ed., Spies, Wiretaps, and Secret Operations: An Encyclopedia of American Espionage (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC- CLIO, 2011), 180. One of the agents later commented, “There would be a Klan meeting with ten people there, and six of them would be reporting back the next day” (Weiner, Enemies, 247).
176 Hastedt, ed., Spies, Wiretaps, and Secret Operations, 180. By way of comparison, the FBI COINTELPRO against the Socialist Workers’ Party, over a much longer period, involved only 208 operations.
177 Steven E Atkins, Encyclopedia of Right-Wing Extremism In Modern American History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 24.
178 Weiner, Enemies, 244.
179 Theoharis, ed., The FBI: A Comprehensive Guide, 70; Anthony Villano, Brick Agent: Inside the Mafia for the FBI (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Books, 1977); M. Susan Orr Klopfer, Fred Klopfer, Barry Klopfer, Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited ([Fort Madison, Iowa?]: M.S. Orr, 2006), 399.
180 Sandra Harmon, Mafia Son: The Scarpa Mob Family, the FBI, and a Story of Betrayal (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2010), 57-64; Peter Lance, Cover Up
What the Government Is Still Hiding About the War on Terror, link; Richard H. Stratton, Altered States of America: Icons And Outlaws, Hitmakers And Hitmen (New York: Nation Books, 2005), 226-27.
181 Fredric L. Dannen “The G-Man and the Hit Man,” New Yorker, December 16, 1996, link. The involvement of Scarpa in the two earlier investigations has been challenged (Jerry Mitchell, “A mobster takes on the KKK,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger,
February 17, 2010); but on the basis of evidence introduced into the trial of Scarpa's FBI handler Lindley DeVecchio, the interpretation of which has itself been challenged (Brad Hamilton, New York Post, May 27, 2012, link; Lance, Triple Cross, 421-25; Jack Cashill, “The Trials of Angela Clemente: Why the Department of Justice is Destroying America's Best PI,” WorldNetDaily.com, May 31, 2007, link).
182 Wexler and Hancock, The Awful Grace of God, 25: “The FBI would connect the White Knights with more than three hundred acts of racial violence.”
183 Wexler and Hancock, The Awful Grace of God, 20: “Sam Bowers had himself targeted King for murder and … was part of a network that had incited and planned attacks on King over a period of years.”
184 Wexler and Hancock, The Awful Grace of God, 275. In contrast Hoover should be severely faulted for his obstruction of the investigation of the Martin Luther King assassination. FBI files contained evidence which, if “collated and cross-referenced.could have developed a powerful circumstantial case for a conspiracy to murder King [against Bowers and followers of an allied racist, Wesley Swift].” But after the FBI had developed evidence pointing to James Earl Ray as the assassin, “Hoover issued a directive to several field offices…to ‘hold all leads in abeyance concerning whereabouts and activities of various individuals, including Dr. Wesley Swift, in view of the present information regarding Galt [i.e. Ray]’“ (Wexler and Hancock, The Awful Grace of God, 253, 256).
185 Jack Nelson, Scoop: The Evolution of a Southern Reporter (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 147-48.
186 Nelson, Scoop, 146-52. Cf. David Mark Chalmers, Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 83-86.
187 Nelson, Scoop, 150, 152. Cf. Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 362-63. Tarrants, who became a repentant born-again Christian while in prison, later discounted the entrapment issue: “My feelings are,that I was a willing participant” (Patsy Sims, The Klan, 243; cf. Wade, The Fiery Cross, 363).
188 One person forgiving the FBI was the repentant Tarrants: “if I were an FBI agent faced with the situation there in Mississippi in that particular time, I would not hesitate to use the same methods they used to get me” (Sims, The Klan, 243).
189 Nelson, Scoop, 152.
190 Nelson, Scoop, 150.
191 George Michael, Confronting Right Wing Extremism and Terrorism in the USA (London: Routledge, 2003), 128. Cf. Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock, The Awful Grace of God (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012), 91-95.
192 Jim Douglass, Gandhi and the Unspeakable (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2012), 83.
193 Hoover gave increasing signs of being out of touch, even senile (Ronald Kessler, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI [New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002], 172). Meanwhile leadership in the once nonviolent SDS passed to people like Bernardine Dohrn, who said in a 1970 address to an SDS convention, “Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson” (Vincent Bugliosi, with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter: the True Story of the Manson Murders [New York: W.W. Norton, c1994], 297).
194 Cf. Ray Wannall's not wholly unfriendly assessment of his former colleague Sullivan: “With respect to some of Sullivan's FBI associates referring to him as ‘Crazy Bill,’ there surely were signs of certain irrationalities on his part beginning about a year before he retired from the FBI [in 1971]… Those of us who came to know him well felt that he may have suffered a mental collapse the last year or so he was in the Bureau, perhaps brought on by his obsession to become FBI Director” (Wannall. The Real J. Edgar Hoover, 146).
195 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 621; Scott, Deep Politics, 308-09.
196 Frank J. Donner, The age of surveillance: the aims and methods of America's political intelligence system (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 223; quoted in Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 621-22n: “more specifically it [the FBI] engaged in a conspiracy to deprive individuals of their constitutionally protected rights.”
197 “The Hunt for Red Menace: - 4, Information Collection & Sharing,” Political Research Associates, link.
198 “By 1970 Sullivan was, largely unbeknownst to Hoover, almost obsessively pursuing factions of the New Left, pushing field offices to open files on every known individual affiliated with SDS or living on a commune. Such excesses were halted only when hey were discovered by another assistant director, Inspection Division head W. Mark Felt” (David Cunningham, There's something happening here: the New Left, the Klan, and FBI [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004], 253).
199 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 687-88. Cf. Ray Wannall. The Real J. Edgar Hoover: For the Record (Paducah, KY: Turner Pub., 2000), 145-46. The Angleton-Sullivan alliance may have developed after their collaboration in 1964 to establish a common FBI-CIA version of how John F. Kennedy was killed. Cf. Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 646; Scott, Deep Politics II, 20. However Mark Riebling writes that the Angleton-Sullivan mostly developed (unknown to Hoover) after Hoover terminated formal liaison with the CIA in 1970 (Mark Riebling, Wedge: the secret war between the FBI and CIA [New York: Knopf, 1994], 276).
200 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 670); Nelson, Scoop, 157 (‘ferret”).”
201 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 670-72. Cf. B. Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 500.
202 Loch K. Johnson, America's secret power: the CIA in a democratic society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 145; Joan Hoff, Nixon reconsidered (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 243.
203 “Huston's legacy lived on in a way he could not have anticipated…. Nixon had formally approved this extension of buggings and break- ins…. The president wanted this development; some of the official organs of the state were frustrating his wishes…. When in the following year the next peril presented itself, the urge for the White House to take over and run some police functions itself was irresistible” (Fred Emery, Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon (New York: Random House/ Times Books, 1994), 28; emphasis in original). Cf. Hoff, Nixon reconsidered, 243-44.
204 Dennis Hevesi, “William Anderson, Navy Hero, Dies at 85,’ New York Times, March 6, 2007, link.
205 Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 666.
206 Church Committee, Report, Book III - Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, especially pp. 10-11. 33-61.
207 The two men (Edward Miller and Mark Felt) were pardoned by Reagan in 1981, while their cases were still on appeal.
208 Samuel P. Huntington, The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies (Trilateral Commission Report; New York: New York University Press, 1976),
209 John Prados, Safe for Democracy: the secret wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 435-36: “The [Ford] White House saw the [congressional] inquiries as a major threat.”
*ii John Prados, Safe for Democracy: the secret wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 435-36: “The [Ford] White House saw the [congressional] inquiries as a major threat.”
*iii Scott, Road to 9/11, 98.
210 Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency (New York: Random House, 2006), 36. For an extended analysis of the Ford- Rumsfeld-Cheney-inspired “counterattack” on the various congressional investigations of the FBI and CIA, and its overall success, see Kathryn Olmstead, Challenging the Secret Government: the post-Watergate investigations of the CIA and FBI (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 147-89.
211 “Veto Battle 30 Years Ago Set Freedom of Information Norms:
Scalia, Rumsfeld, Cheney Opposed Open Government Bill.” National Security Archive, November 23, 2004, link.
212 Scott, Road to 9/11, especially pp. 50-113; Olmstead, Challenging the Secret Government, 177-78.
213 Cf. Olmstead, Challenging the Secret Government, 180-81.
214 Scott, Road to 9/11, 132: “Wilson even put an extra $200 million into the CIA's Afghan pipeline in 1991, after the Russians had withdrawn from Afghanistan.”
215 Newsweek, November 30, 1964. Hoover added, off the record, “He is one of the lowest characters in the country” (Church Committee, Book III, 157). For the illegalities in Hoover's obsessive campaign to destroy King, see Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 571-75; Church Committee, Book III, 158-61.
216 This same homeostatic impulse explains his use of the FBI to reinforce public myths about the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations. According to Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock, FBI files contained evidence which, if “collated and cross-referenced…could have developed a powerful circumstantial case for a conspiracy to murder King [against Bowers, Tarrants, and others].” But after the FBI had developed evidence pointing to James Earl Ray as the assassin, “Hoover issued a directive to several field offices…to ‘hold all leads in abeyance concerning whereabouts and activities of various individuals, including Dr. Wesley Swift, in view of the present information regarding Galt [i.e. Ray]’“ (Wexler and Hancock, The Awful Grace of God, 253, 256).
217 Wexler and Hancock, The Awful Grace of God, 275, etc.
218 Having surprised myself by coming to this relatively benign assessment of Hoover, I was pleased and again surprised to find it corroborated by Burton Hersh (Bobby and J. Edgar, 514-15).
219 Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America's Defenses: strategy, forces and resources for a new century (Washington, DC: Project for the New American Century, [2000]), 51.
Contrary to what some have suggested, the focus of this transformation was clearly on forcing the Department of Defense, for the sake of “military preeminence,” “to exploit the emerging revolution in military affairs.” But to fulfill the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz PNAC agenda of future preemptive wars, it was also vital to shift America to the more robust techniques we have since seen for silencing antiwar opposition.
220 Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little Brown, 2011), 52.
221 Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 277. No fiscal cliff threatens CACI's growth. In April 2013 its website advertised 1,014 job openings for people with security clearances, along with another 46 job openings with no clearance required.
222 Katrina vanden Heuvel, “The Corporate ‘Predator State.’“ Washington Post, March 26, 2013.
223 Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 275; quoting CIA general counsel John Rizzo.
224 Judge Richard D. Bennett of the Federal District Court, commenting on the case of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, whose felony charges were dropped in exchange for a guilty plea to a misdemeanor. Judge Bennett said that it was “unconscionable” to charge a defendant with a list of serious crimes that could have resulted in 35 years in prison, only to drop all of the major charges on the eve of trial. For more on the Drake case, see Jane Mayer, “The Secret Sharer: Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?” New Yorker, May 23, 2011, link.
Obama's behavior is reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's, who was elected after promising to reduce the defense budget, but presided instead over a huge increase. I suspect that neither president was duplicitous; rather, they are just less powerful than the covert processes over which they preside.
225 Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 132.
226 Some might wish to add to this list General MacArthur in 1952 and General Westmoreland in 1968.
227 Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, “Dr. King's ‘Two Americas’ Truer Now than Ever,” Moyers @ Company, April 10, 2013, http://billmoyers.com/2013/04/10/dr-king%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Ctwo-americas%E2%80%9D-truer-now-than-ever/: “Walmart's one of those companies laying people off, but according to the website Business Insider, the mega-chain's CEO Michael Duke gets paid 1,034 times more than his average worker.” As a matter of fact, “In the past 30 years, compensation for chief executives in America has increased 127 times faster than the average worker's salary.”
228 Young India, December 15, 1921; in Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: His Life, Work, and Ideas: an Anthology (New York: Vintage, 1963), 150.
229 Mahatma Gandhi, “Towards Realization,” in Works (Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, [1958]-1994), Vol. 88, 185.
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