I was reading this column in the New Yorker written by Margaret Talbot - Opened Files when it struck me how similar the J. Edgar Hoover FBI with its COINTELPRO operation are the pronouncements of the Harper government with regard to environmental activists.
In 1971 a group of anti-war activists broke into an FBI office as they believed that there were FBI infiltrators in their ranks. Among other disturbing pieces of information was this:
Since 1956, Hoover had been running a highly secret program under that name which not only spied on civil-rights leaders, suspected Communists, public critics of the F.B.I., student activists, and many others but also sought to intimidate, smear, and blackmail them, to break up marriages, get people fired, demoralize them. These were the auspices under which the F.B.I. spread a false rumor that the actress Jean Seberg, who had recently given a donation to the Black Panther Party, was pregnant by a Panther leader. (Seberg was pregnant, and, shortly after the story appeared in a gossip column, she miscarried.) It was under COINTELPRO that Hoover waged his assault on Martin Luther King, Jr., wiretapping his hotel rooms and recording his sexual encounters, and, at one point, trying to coerce him to commit suicide.
This operation was only uncovered because a group of people broke the law, and it resulted in the
Church Committee which curtailed many of these illegal activities on the part of the FBI.
At this point Canadians do not have any idea what measures the Harper government is taking to go after environmental activists in defense of his overweening priority – oil; however this government’s secrecy and lack of scruples as demonstrated in the Senate expense scandal, the silencing of government scientists and robo-call electionsmalfeasance indicate a government which has convinced itself that the ends justify the means.
The preponderance of thuggish ministers in the government as well as the information recently released by Edward Snowden regarding The Communications Security Establishment of Canada (CSEC) collaborating with the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) to spy at the G8 and G20 summits makes me feel sure this is something more than smoke.
Who will be the burglars that will bring the sordid details to light?