We think that our current administration is unique in its assault on civil liberties? Those of us from the "silent generation" know better. Those of us who protested against the Vietnam war and for Civil rights in the 60's know better. Here are a couple of examples of how these folk "protected" our freedoms:
FBI campaign against Einstein revealed
FBI planned mass arrests in 1950
I remember being a coplaintiff with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in a lawsuit against them in the 60's to stop them from harrassing demonstrators by sticking a camera in their face to intimidate them. Then there were the wire taps. My phone sure acted funny during those days. More below the fold.
These are from the BBC news:
Former FBI director J Edgar Hoover had a plan to arrest 12,000 Americans he deemed a possible threat to national security, declassified papers reveal.
The FBI chief sent his proposal to US President Harry Truman just after the start of the Korean War in 1950, The New York Times newspaper reports.
He asked the president to declare the mass arrest necessary to counter "treason, espionage and sabotage".
There is no evidence any part of the plan was ever approved.
Mr Hoover wanted the president to suspend the centuries-old legal right of habeas corpus, which protects individuals against unlawful arrest.
The FBI director planned to detain the suspects - whose list of names he had been compiling for years - in US military and federal prisons.
"The index now contains approximately 12,000 individuals, of which approximately 97% are citizens of the United States," wrote Mr Hoover, in the now declassified document.
This also brings back memories of the McCarran act (Hubert Humphrey was a cosponsor) which provided for concentration camps for such folk if a "national security emergency" was ever called. It was passed and had a whole host of other noxious provisions every one of which was declared unconstitutional by the courts. The concentration camp part, thankfully, was never tested. I wonder if it still is on the books? Some of the camps were the very ones used for thr Japanese American citizens during WWII. Then there were the loyalty oaths. I lost a job as chairman of a new Biophysics Department I was creating at the University of Oklahoma Medical School because I refused to sign a loyalty oath that was sent to me three weeks before I was to start the job. Fortunately I was offered a post at Harvard Medical School so things did not turn out too badly for me.
Here's a great one:
A new book reveals the 22-year effort by FBI director J Edgar Hoover to get Albert Einstein arrested as a political subversive or even a Soviet spy.
Uncovered FBI files are revealed in a book by Fred Jerome who says it was a clash of cultures - Einstein's challenge and change with Hoover's order and obedience.
From the time Einstein arrived in the US in 1933 to the time of his death, in 1955, the FBI files reveal that his phone was tapped, his mail was opened and even his trash searched.
Einstein became world famous in 1906 for his Special Theory of Relativity that deals with light.
His General Theory of Relativity, published in 1919, deals with gravity and has been called mankind's greatest intellectual accomplishment.
Derogatory information
The Einstein File begins with a request by J Edgar Hoover in 1950: "Please furnish a report as to the nature of any derogatory information contained in any file your bureau may have on the following person."
That person was Albert Einstein, and the request intensified a secret campaign to discredit him.
Hoover was worried about Einstein's liberal intellectualism and his dabbling in politics, something that has been forgotten today. It has been overtaken by Einstein's absent-minded professor image.
But Einstein was outspoken against social injustice and violations of civil rights.
The fledgling state of Israel once offered Einstein its presidency. Einstein declined.
The broad outline of this story has been known since 1983, when Richard Alan Schwartz, a professor of English at Florida International University in Miami, obtained a censored version of Einstein's 1,427-page FBI file.
But Jerome uncovers new material.
He sued the US Government with the help of the Public Citizen Litigation Group to obtain all the documents in the Einstein file.
Stalin comparison
The new material shows how the bureau spied on Einstein.
"It is like the agents got up in the morning, brushed their teeth, opened other people's mail and tapped some phones," he told the BBC.
After he left Germany, appalled by the barbarism of the Nazis, Einstein lent his name to a variety of organisations dedicated to peace and disarmament.
Because of this, the Woman Patriot Corp wrote a 16-page letter to the State Department, the first item in Einstein's file, in 1932, arguing that Einstein should not be allowed into the United States.
"Not even Stalin himself" was affiliated with so many anarchic-communist groups, the letter said.
Fred Jerome reveals that the 1,800-page document prepared about Einstein by the FBI shows that the agency even bugged his secretary's nephew's house.
The files reveal that for five years J Edgar Hoover tried, and failed, to link Einstein to a Soviet espionage ring.
The Einstein File by Fred Jerome, St Martin's Press, New York, 272 pages.
Thing just seem to go on don't they?