WATERGATE "HERO" MARK FELT (AKA "DEEP THROAT")
IS AS BIG OF A SCUMBAG AS PRESIDENT NIXON WAS

And I'm not talking about the ire of Nixon loyalists such as G. Gordon Liddy, Pat Buchanan, or Alexander Haig, all of whom have recently been on Fox News attacking Felt for his lack of loyalty to the President. No, Felt was a scumbag for much more rational reasons. As the number two man at the FBI during the political turbulence of the 60s and 70s, Felt was right in the thick of things, breaking pretty much the same laws that were broken during the Watergate break-in.

From the Houston Chronicle opinion section:

Felonious former FBI man far from 'greatest secret hero'

Felt and fellow FBI man Edward S. Miller were convicted in 1980 of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens by authorizing illegal break-ins and wiretaps of people connected to suspected domestic bombers. In an ironic twist worthy of Hollywood (and the administration of President George W. Bush), Felt justified his actions as a protection of national security.

The jury disagreed, sending Felt and Miller the same message communicated so dramatically by Deep Throat's leaks to the Washington Post: No man is above the law.

Perhaps it is Hollywood that is to blame for the disillusionment that set in on Tuesday as word of Deep Throat's identity circulated. Human nature and the movies abhor ambiguity.

We like our heroes pure in spirit. We want Hal Holbrook, the actor who portrayed Deep Throat in the film All the President's Men. His only celluloid vice was a flair for the melodramatic and an unhealthy dependence on nicotine.

We want Deep Throat to be a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Instead, he could be a functionary in the U.S. Justice Department of John Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzales.

Click here for the rest.

So, Felt broke the same laws for which Nixon went down. But it's actually much worse than that. Felt actively used the FBI to suppress and harass anti-war and civil rights activists.

From Another Day in the Empire, courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

Deep Throat: COINTELPRO Spook and All-American Hero

In fact, Mark Felt subverted the Constitution, not by outing Nixon—who was outed because he displeased the plutocracy, the real folks who run the United States—but because he was a COINTELPRO spook. “In 1981, Ronald Reagan granted a presidential pardon to Mark Felt for illegal actions against antiwar activists, including break-ins,” writes Eric Garris. “Those who study history know that the Cointelpro activities supervised by Mark Felt were not limited to surveillance and burglary. During that period, the FBI actively interfered with the internal politics of dissident groups, including starting and inflaming factional struggles. There were many local groups that were under the total control of FBI infiltrators.”

Click here for the rest.

So under COINTELPRO (short for "Counter Intelligence Program"), the FBI became more than a Federal law enforcement agency: they became a kind of secret police, straight out of Orwell or the old Soviet Union, seeking not to enforce the law, but to destroy political groups for political reasons. "Hero" Mark Felt presided over this.

But wait. It gets worse. I mentioned in my previous post that I'm revisiting Noam Chomsky's book Understanding Power. In a nice little bit of synchronicity, I came across this little passage earlier today:

...the COINTELPRO exposures were a thousand times more significant than Watergate. Remember what Watergate was, after all: Watergate was a matter of a bunch of guys from the Republican National Committee breaking into a Democratic Party office for essentially unknown reasons and doing no damage. Okay, that's petty burglary, it's not a big deal. Well, at the exact same time that Watergate was discovered, there were exposures in the courts and through the Freedom of Information Act of massive FBI operations to undermine political freedom in the United States, running through every administration back to Roosevelt, but really picking up under Kennedy...It included the straight Gestapo-style assassination of a Black Panther leader; it included organizing race riots in an effort to destroy the black movements; it included attacks on the American Indian Movement, on the women's movement, you name it. It included fifteen years of FBI disruption of the Socialist Workers Party--that meant regular FBI burglaries, stealing membership lists and using them to threaten people, going to businesses and getting members fired from their jobs, and so on. Well, that fact alone--the fact that for fifteen years the FBI had been burglarizing and trying to undermine a legal political party--is already vastly more important than the fact that a bunch of Keystone Kops broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters one time...In comparison to this, Watergate is a tea party.

By the way, if you're curious, the name of the Black Panther leader murdered by Felt's FBI is Fred Hampton; check out the link--it's a pretty outrageous story, but it also makes clear what kind of man "hero" Mark Felt is. That is, he's a scumbag.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Chomsky passage above is that it observes that COINTELPRO was exposed right around the same time that Watergate was exposed. I'm not sure about the exact timing, but it strikes me that the great patriot "Deep Throat" was motivated not by love of country or respect for the law; rather, like the Bush administration now does all the time, he was creating a bigger news story that would drown out the COINTELPRO story. In other words, he was playing Bob Woodward like a fiddle in order to save his own butt. I mean, we all know about the infamous Watergate scandal all these years later. But how many people today know anything at all about the savagery of Mark Felt's FBI?

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