No Gangs Allowed

 

Art credit: Chandler (Arizona) Police Gang Enforcement Unit

No doubt you are as relieved as I am that Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer seems to have been “protected” by the Michigan State Police and the FBI. The "Wolverine Watchmen" militia* murder/kidnapping plot of the Governor and an attack on a Michigan State Police facility was recently  foiled.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer saved countless Michigan lives because she stood up to Tea Party Republicans in the Michigan State Legislature and Mr. Trump during the COVID plague. She has proven to be a strong, intelligent stateswoman. A leader some people can't seem to appreciate. 

It certainly hasn't taken a whole lot of brain power to predict that something like this attempted plot was going to happen at the hands of crazed Trump zealots who have been repeatedly called to violence by Mr. Trump.

Additionally, it is good to note that the FBI for once used their “undercover” agents for the “good”. 

You may recall that the FBI has a terrible track record of doing the opposite, as do several other federal agencies. There are a multitude of instances, from the 60s, 70, 80s, 90s and even up to today, when FBI leadership used their undercover people for unlawful, evil purposes against protesters, e.g. Kent State, civil rights activists, BUS, etc., through COINTELPRO - the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program.

Each day, as Mr. Trump becomes more unhinged, his toy brown shirts, i.e. Proud Boys and other white supremacists’ groups, become more empowered.

Bad times seem to be ahead because win or lose Mr. Trump's “boys” will be out looking for Democrats and people of color to beat and murder. We truly are on the edge of disaster.

By the way, don't allow these white supremacists’ groups credibility by referring to them as, "militia*". They are lawless gangs akin to the street gangs infesting our cities and neighborhoods. Instead of white hoods and sheets, they wear camo outfits, preen about, leeching off the real thing - the sworn, Constitution-honoring military, both officers and enlisted.

* Militia - a military force that is raised from the civil population to supplement a regular army in an emergency; or a military force that engages in rebel or terrorist activities in opposition to a regular army; or all able-bodied civilians eligible by law for military service.

Generally unable to hold ground against regular forces, militias commonly support regular troops by skirmishing, holding fortifications, or conducting irregular warfare, instead of undertaking offensive campaigns by themselves. Local civilian laws often limit militias to serve only in their home region, and to serve only for a limited time; this further reduces their use in long military campaigns.

Let's talk about Michigan, lost causes, and a sense of purpose....

Beau of the Fifth Column - 9 Oct 2020 

Karma Really Is a Bitch

I’m old enough to remember a multitude of “incidents” that occurred over the past 60 years that claimed the lives of many people and changed the lives of millions of Americans. In all cases they began as nonviolent protests but ended in bloodshed. They were protests against war, against the draft and centering around civil rights, voting rights, education, jobs, fair housing, equal opportunity and equal pay.

Today, in large part due to the Freedom of Information Act, we know that the FBI and / or other "security services" played a “provocative role” in nearly every incident, with undercover agents and / or paid informants inciting violence and, in some cases, even supplying weapons, ammunition and explosives.

Here are just a few of the targets and the locations:

Who
Anti-Vietnam war protesters; civil rights movement nonviolent workers; Kent State University students; Youth International Party; Jackson State students; Black Panthers; Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Students for a Democratic Society; draft protesters; Veterans Against the War; Branch Davidians; MOVE.

Where
Ruby Ridge; Waco; Watts; Hough; Detroit; Chicago; West Philadelphia; Kent; Jackson; and every town in the U.S.A. that drafted her children and sent them to "war".

In a way, I find it interesting that I’ve lived long enough to see a payback of sorts. As we used to say, “the worm has turned” and the conservatives, the supposed “law and order people” are eating their own.

Here’s the whole story:

The FBI Targeted the Left with Devious Tactics for Years—Now Trump Is Giving the Agency the Same Treatment, Jefferson Morley, AlterNet, 6 Feb 2018.

“The conservative Bureau is stunned to face its own anti-democratic tactics.”

"The release of a Republican memo trashing the senior Justice Department has given the FBI a taste of its own medicine: a mendacious and misleading attack designed to impugn dissent and confuse democratic discourse, all dressed up in the righteous rhetoric about the American way."

"From 1958 to 1974, the FBI routinely engaged in this sort of activity against its perceived enemies. The notorious Cointelpro—Counterintelligence Program—targeted civil rights, antiwar and other leftist groups for infiltration, disruption and destruction. Now that the president and his allies are giving the FBI the Cointelpro treatment, the Bureau and its leaders are indignant, understandably so."

"The Association of FBI Agents protested the release of the memo, written by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), as unfair to its members."...

more... here.

Please download background info, Lies Too Big To Fail (PDF)

Creedence Clearwater Revival: Fortunate Son - 1969

Willie Words of Wisdom

Here's a random thought this day before the big election:

To those NYC FBI guys who tried to make their will be the winning vote tomorrow... we all know that you'll keep tryin'... 'cause you can, right? I mean, after all, you guys know better than the rest of us what's best for the USA.

Still, this one time, a few "Willie Words of Wisdom" about countin' chickens and arrangin' ducks might be worth considerin'...

Ain't Necessarily So, by Willie Nelson

More to the Story, Part 2

Yes, always. There is more to the story:

"Beltway insiders swooned over Comey's "nonpartisan" reputation—but his career tells a very different story."

"But then this isn’t the first time for Comey to break with DOJ guidelines in the case. His press conference in July announcing that no charges would be brought, while excoriating Clinton for her handling of classified emails, was completely out of bounds. If the government doesn’t have the goods, it certainly doesn’t have the right to smear the subject of its investigation, which is essentially what Comey did with his statement and repeated inappropriate testimony before a partisan congressional committee."

"And now there’s this."

"Some of us are anything but surprised. Liberals who lived through the ’90s and the endless Whitewater probe that went nowhere met President Barack Obama’s appointment of James Comey as director of the FBI with a primal scream of “Are you kidding me?” It was inconceivable that, just as former president Bill Clinton had foolishly appointed a Republican FBI director, Louis Freeh, who saw it as his primary duty to investigate a president he did not respect, a Democratic president was appointing a GOP lawyer to the same job 20 years later in an even more toxic political environment."

"At the time, everyone in Washington seemed to be very pleased with the choice, seeing Comey as a “straight shooter” without a political agenda. That was largely based on his dramatic congressional testimony about the night in 2004 that he and then-FBI director Robert Mueller raced to former attorney general John Ashcroft’s sick bed to stop the White House counsel Alberto Gonzales from coercing the ailing AG into signing an illegal domestic spying order."

"A lot of civil libertarians understood that to signify that the heroic Comey had been arguing the constitutional point, but he wasn’t. His concerns had been over a technical problem with the program’s legal basis. They fixed a few little details and Comey signed the order that month to keep the secret domestic surveillance program going for many years. A civil liberties hero he is not."

Please go here for the full article:
So Much for the 'Upstanding' James Comey: The FBI Director's Long Career as Preening Partisan Hack, Heather Digby Parton, Salon, (Alternet) 31 Oct 2016.

Hoover's Ghost

J. Edgar Hoover passed in 1972 but his ghost may recently have paid us a visit and somehow taken control of current FBI Director James Comey.

This past Friday, Comey announced that he had reopened the FBI investigation of Sec. Clinton use of a private email server, even though the FBI had not reviewed nor obtained a warrant to investigate emails obtained from the personal laptop computer of the estranged husband of one of Sec. Clinton’s assistants. He is under investigation in an entirely unrelated case.

Oddly, neither the FBI nor the Clinton assistant know how the emails ended up on that computer let alone the information included within them.

Director Comey, previously a registered R, said the FBI might get around to reviewing the mysterious emails sometime in the future. He wouldn’t say when. Additionally, news sources revealed that Comey made his email announcement despite direction not to do so from his boss, the Attorney General of the United States, and in violation of Justice Department policy.

So, a few days prior to the election, voters are left with many “unknowns” and Mr. T, the R candidate, has been handed a miraculous “leg -up” for his bid to become Leader of the Free World. Unsurprisingly, Mr. T wasted no time putting his miraculous gift to work.

As I reflected on this mystical turn of events, a few spotlights began to brighten the dark for me. I remembered how the FBI and other “secret” organizations had “planted” information in the past in order to discredit or otherwise cast aspersions upon a patsy or fall person.

Lee Harvey Oswald is an example. Freedom of Information Act disclosures have shown that he was an informant and paid by both the FBI and the CIA prior to the murder of the President of the United States. You may recall that within hours of JFK’s assassination, Hoover himself declared Oswald the sole assassin. Later, Hoover also said that Oswald had absolutely no connection with the FBI.
.
During his 48-year reign as Director of the FBI, Hoover was known to maintain in his office "personal and confidential" files on every important person he deemed significant. When it served his purpose he would threaten to publicly disclose information from his files to embarrass, threaten, bully or otherwise “compromise” the person into doing whatever he wanted them to do.

Hoover was an expert at this form of blackmail and no one, no matter his/her position, was exempt from his abusive reach.

It was Hoover who created the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) through which he marshaled the resources of the USA via his FBI agents and conducted a series of covert, illegal investigations designed to discredit and disrupt a plethora of civic movements, political organizations and otherwise “legal” organizations. Hoover conducted his own personal vendettas against many people, including Dr. Martin Luther King, for instance, using COINTELPRO as his cover.

As FBI Director, he ordered around-the-clock surveillance of Dr. King, looking for evidence of Communist influence or sexual deviance. “Using illegal wiretaps and warrantless searches, Hoover gathered a large file of what he considered damning evidence against King.”

“J. Edgar Hoover shaped the F.B.I in his own image of discipline and patriotism. He also directed the bureau into secret and illegal domestic surveillance spurred on by his conservative patriotism and paranoia. His nefarious tactics had been suspected for decades by government officials, but presidents from Truman to Nixon seemed unable to fire him due to his popularity and the potentially high political cost. In 1975, the Church Committee (named after its chairman, Senator Frank Church [D-Idaho]) conducted a full investigation of COINTELPRO’s operations and concluded that many of the agency’s tactics were illegal and, in many, cases unconstitutional.” *

You know… it’s Halloween… Do you think it’s possible that Mr. Hoover’s ghost has taken over Mr. Comey? Just askin’.

Oh, by the way, lest we have forgotten, there was a time when at least some FBI agents did conduct honest investigations... at least on TV. Check how FBI Inspector, Lewis Erskine, (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.) handled an investigation: The F B I, Season 1, Episode 14 Pound of Flesh, 1965. Sorry, the episode is no longer available for free on YouTube. You may be able to view it through Netflix or Amazon. Here is a link to download the episode.

*J. Edgar Hoover Biography, Biography.com
http://www.biography.com/people/j-edgar-hoover-9343398#fbi