COINTELPRO (spook speak for Counter Intelligence Program) was a decades-long operation by the FBI to infiltrate and undermine organizations it saw as subversive to the corporate feudal state. During the 40-plus-year operation, the FBI targeted civil rights groups, women's groups, labor organizations, anti-war groups, environmental groups, congressmen, judges, journalists, celebrities and anyone else it deemed dangerous to its skewed concept of liberty.
The program was exposed when a group of leftist radicals burglarized an FBI field office in Pennsylvania and gave classified documents to the press. The program faced further scrutiny during the Church Committee hearings a few years later. The FBI supposedly ended the program in the wake of these revelations, but as recent activities indicate, it appears COINTELPRO is alive and well.
COINTELPRO or some similar program was probably responsible for the bombing of Earth First! activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. And the FBI continued its surveillance of journalist David Halberstam long after the program had supposedly ended, contributing to speculation that the program continues to this day.
And the recent raids on anti-war activists in Minneapolis and Chicago are clearly part of the same kind of operation, especially considering the efforts of Daniela Cardenas and Karen Sullivan.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Good News! COINTELPRO Is Back!
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Limited Release
Well, after reading the synopsis, I decided to see if it was playing nearby. The Stephanopoulos interview indicated it was "out Friday," but there were no showtimes listed locally. I returned to the HuffPo item to see if "out Friday" meant next Friday, but no, it means today. Then I noticed seventeen people rated it on Yahoo Movies for a cumulative rating of B+, so it must be playing somewhere. I returned to the movie listings page of the Tribune to see if maybe I had missed it or misspelled the title in my search or something, but after a thorough search, I still couldn't find a showtime. So then I went to IMDB to find out if it was out yet, and they list today as the release date, but with the word "limited" after the date. Well, Chicago is a big movie town, what with Siskel & Ebert and all, and most "limited" releases include Chicago. So I went to the Chicago Reader because they have a tradition of listing artsy fartsy and controversial releases, but they barely even mention the movie. Then I went to Ebert's page at the Sun-Times. He has had the gloves off as of late, due mainly I guess to his declining health and increasing legacy, but there was mention neither the movie nor of any surrounding controversy.
So I went back around to the various stops in this quest to revisit the synopsis. In the movie and novel, Adam Lang, the Tony Blair character, has been charged in The Hague with war crimes relating to his decision to send several British citizens to the notorious prison in Guantanamo, Cuba, where they are tortured. This transpires as the ghostwriter (McGregor) begins work on the memoir. The McGregor character is apolitical, which is partly why he was chosen to ghostwrite the memoir. But revelations of Prime Minister Lang’s alleged war crimes pique his interest, and he delves more thoroughly into Lang’s past. In doing so, he discovers that there had been a previous ghostwriter assigned to the task who had died mysteriously part-way through the project. This piques his interest even further, and he uncovers the same secrets the previous ghostwriter had uncovered, namely Lang’s involvement with CIA black operations, not to mention clues indicating that the previous ghostwriter had been murdered.
As I mentioned earlier, Harris’s previous novels have met with high praise for their drama and historical accuracy. The Daily Mail called Harris’s Pompeii “a blazing blockbuster.” Esquire calls Harris’s Fatherland (which has been made into an HBO movie), “ingenious…fast-paced and beautifully written.” The Times referred to his novel Enigma as “top-class stuff.” But strangely, The Ghost was universally panned, with critics calling it formulaic and far-fetched. The New York Observer went so far as to call it “The Blair Snitch Project,” while simultaneously admitting, “if it were [true] it would certainly explain pretty much everything about the recent history of Great Britain.”
Well, since I evidently can’t see the movie, I decided to walk down to my neighborhood Borders for the novel. But it wasn’t there. All of Harris’s other books are there, including his non-fiction. Not even the movie tie-in version with Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor on the cover was available.
Hmmm….could this historically-accurate-but-fictionalized portrayal of Tony Blair be the real reason Polanski’s rape case has suddenly taken a front seat? And why else would a popular novelist’s most recent work, and an A-list laden film adaptation, be so hard to come by?
I’ve always admired Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby, two of Polanski’s early works. I never saw Tess or The Pianist. I saw Bitter Moon when it came out and I thought it was garbage. Like his work, Polanski’s life is marked by remarkable highs and incredible lows. He just barely escaped the Nazis by changing his name and pretending to be Catholic as a child. His mother died in Auschwitz; his father survived his Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp experience. Later, of course, he became a successful and highly regarded filmmaker and enjoyed the Good Life until his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was killed by the Manson gang. The rape ocurred a few years later. A probation officer recommended probation and psychiatric counseling, but the judge in the case wanted Polanski to serve a prison sentence so Polanski fled to France. In 1993, Polanski settled a civil suit with his rape victim by paying her $500,000. She has since filed a formal request with the court to drop the charges. In 2003, she wrote an op-ed piece saying that Polanski should be allowed to return to the States to collect his Best Director Oscar for the Pianist, and that she “got over [the rape] a long time ago.”
But a crime is a crime, and rape is a serious crime, so it’s hard for me to disagree with those who think he should face justice. However, I have to admit my opinion of Polanski has gone up a bit. In this age of retraction and my-comments-were-taken-out-of-context spinelessness, it’s nice to see someone with the cajones to make a film like The Ghost Writer in the face of obvious peril. I only wish I could see it.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Friday, April 20, 2007
The Parallax View
The American Heritage Dictionary defines parallax as “An apparent change in the direction of an object, caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight.” In The Parallax View, Warren Beatty plays a reporter who investigates the assassination of a Bobby Kennedy-type political candidate after witnesses to the shooting-including Beatty's girlfriend-start turning up dead. Beatty infiltrates a corporate-run assassination team and finds evidence of a far-reaching conspiracy. Meanwhile, of course, the hit has been pinned on a deranged patsy for easy public consumption. Well, needless to say, things don’t turn out too well for Warren.
Our species’ proclivity for unsolved assassinations and dirty tricks has instilled in me the habit of taking second and third looks at various newsworthy events, such as Monday’s massacre at Virginia Tech. In other words, I try to find the parallax view. Sometimes there is no parallax view, meaning, sometimes things are just as they appear and events are being reported correctly by the M$M. Or, as Freud put it, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” But other times, taking the parallax view produces inconvenient questions.
There are various arcs of consciousness, which, except for the occasional intersection, coexist unnoticed by one another. The average person’s arc of consciousness consists of friends, family, roommates, jobs, etc. It progresses gradually over a lifetime more or less unhindered. Occasionally, however, this arc of consciousness is pierced by another in the form of some earth-shattering event, like an assassination or act of terror. After a while, things settle down and the average person’s arc of consciousness returns to normal. The important thing to remember, though, is that after things settle down, the arc of consciousness that produced the earth-shattering event continues at its own gradual pace. Looked at properly, things like the Kennedy and King assassinations, Watergate, Iran Contra, the September 11th Attacks, are all part of the same arc of consciousness, not the isolated incidents that the public perceives them as.
Well, when you get in the habit of looking for the parallax view—that is, when you accept the fact of multiple arcs of consciousness—two things can happen. One is that you start second- and third-guessing everything, even your own perception of reality, and you inch closer and closer to insanity. The other is that you find tiny tidbits of affirmation from seemingly rational individuals who have come to the same conclusions that you have. In this case, you experience a revelation about how truly fucked up the world is and you…inch closer and closer to insanity.
Well, as Hawkeye put it, going crazy is a sane reaction to an insane world.
Friday, June 16, 2006
How You Gonna Come?
When they kick at your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun
When the law break in
How you gonna go?
Shot down on the pavement
Or waiting on death row…
—The Clash, Guns of Brixton
Top court upholds no-knock police search
By GINA HOLLAND, Associated Press WriterThu Jun 15, 7:05 PM ET
The Supreme Court made it easier Thursday for police to barge into homes and seize evidence without knocking or waiting, a sign of the court's new conservatism with Samuel Alito on board.
The court, on a 5-4 vote, said judges cannot throw out evidence collected by police who have search warrants but do not properly announce their arrival.
It was a significant rollback of earlier rulings protective of homeowners, even unsympathetic homeowners like Booker Hudson, who had a loaded gun next to him and cocaine rocks in his pocket when Detroit police entered his unlocked home in 1998 without knocking.
The court's five-member conservative majority, anchored by new Chief Justice John Roberts and Alito, said that police blunders should not result in "a get-out-of-jail-free card" for defendants.
Dissenting justices predicted that police will now feel free to ignore previous court rulings requiring officers with search warrants to knock and announce themselves to avoid running afoul of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches.
"The knock-and-announce rule is dead in the United States," said David Moran, a Wayne State University professor who represented Hudson. "There are going to be a lot more doors knocked down. There are going to be a lot more people terrified and humiliated."
Supporters said the ruling will help police do their jobs.
"People who are caught red-handed with evidence of guilt have one less weapon to get off," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.
The case provides the clearest sign yet of the court without Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Hudson had lost his case in a Michigan appeals court. Justices agreed to hear his appeal last June, four days before O'Connor's surprise announcement that she was retiring.
O'Connor was still on the bench in January when his case was first argued, and she seemed ready to vote with Hudson. "Is there no policy of protecting the home owner a little bit and the sanctity of the home from this immediate entry?" she asked.
She retired before the case was decided, and a new argument was held this spring so that Alito could participate, apparently to break a 4-4 tie.
Four justices, including Alito and Roberts, would have given prosecutors a more sweeping victory but did not have the vote of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a moderate conservative.
Ronald Allen, a Northwestern University Law professor, said the ruling "suggests those four would be happy to consider overturning" a 1961 Supreme Court opinion that said evidence collected in violation of the Fourth Amendment cannot be used in trials. "It would be a significant change," he said.
Kennedy joined in most of the ruling but wrote to explain that he did not support ending the knock requirement. "It bears repeating that it is a serious matter if law enforcement officers violate the sanctity of the home by ignoring the requisites of lawful entry," he said.
Kennedy said that legislatures can intervene if police officers do not "act competently and lawfully." He also said that people whose homes are wrongly searched can file a civil rights lawsuit.
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, said that there are public-interest law firms and attorneys who specialize in civil rights grievances.
Detroit police acknowledge violating the knock-and-announce rule when they called out their presence at Hudson's door, failed to knock, then went inside three seconds to five seconds later. The court has endorsed longer waits, of 15 seconds to 20 seconds. Hudson was convicted of drug possession.
"Whether that preliminary misstep had occurred or not, the police would have executed the warrant they had obtained, and would have discovered the gun and drugs inside the house," Scalia wrote.
Four justices complained in the dissent that the decision erases more than 90 years of Supreme Court precedent.
"It weakens, perhaps destroys, much of the practical value of the Constitution's knock-and-announce protection," Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for himself and Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Breyer said that while police departments can be sued, there is no evidence of anyone collecting much money in such cases.
The case is Hudson v. Michigan, 04-1360.
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On the Net:
Supreme Court decisions: http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/05slipopinion.html
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