BF2S Forums COINTELPRO and the Assassination of MLK

Considering President Johnson was one of MLK's greatest allies the answer is clearly no and you're a twit if you think otherwise.

Lotta_Drool wrote:

The US government only kills blacks by giving them Aids.

What about all the ones they execute?

Turquoise wrote:

[...] COINTELPRO [...]

I sense a conspiracy.

Runs faster on...

Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2008-04-11 16:55:14)

Turquoise wrote:

DoctaStrangelove wrote:

Considering President Johnson was one of MLK's greatest allies the answer is clearly no and you're a twit if you think otherwise.

Considering J. Edgar Hoover was running the FBI at the time, it's not that much of a stretch....

"Martin Luther King, Jr. was a frequent target of investigation. The FBI found no evidence of any crime, but attempted to use tapes of King involved in sexual activity for blackmail. In his 1991 memoirs, Washington Post journalist Carl Rowan asserted that the FBI had sent at least one anonymous letter to King encouraging him to commit suicide."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Bu … on#History

Yes but then Johnson would have known of it and had Hoover dealt with, such a major action by the FBI does not get missed by the president.

Turquoise wrote:

Are you sure about that, Docta?  9/11 largely happened because of miscommunication between the FBI and the CIA.  Our current president definitely missed a lot of red flags leading up to 9/11.

While LBJ was a considerably better president than Bush, I wouldn't exactly assume he was incapable of missing the machinations of the FBI.  I just find the official story on MLK's death to be rather suspect.

Ok, are we going to start the 9/11 stuff again?  I will agree that several warning signs were missed, but hindsight makes it easy for us to say "you should have known," without seeing all the detrius it was buried in at the time.  I think the greatest culprit was the lack of communication between the federal agencies.  Of course, the communications lack was a deliberate stragegy of the previous administration.

Ok, before you all start yelling replies, I am sure the Clinton administration had a valid reason for putting it there, and 9/11 was an unintended concequence.  And that the Bush II administration had several months to reverse the policy, but that I doubt they had seen the need to until 9/11.  That hindsight thing works both ways, and we need to cut slack both ways.

imortal wrote:

Turquoise wrote:

Are you sure about that, Docta?  9/11 largely happened because of miscommunication between the FBI and the CIA.  Our current president definitely missed a lot of red flags leading up to 9/11.

While LBJ was a considerably better president than Bush, I wouldn't exactly assume he was incapable of missing the machinations of the FBI.  I just find the official story on MLK's death to be rather suspect.

Ok, are we going to start the 9/11 stuff again?  I will agree that several warning signs were missed, but hindsight makes it easy for us to say "you should have known," without seeing all the detrius it was buried in at the time.  I think the greatest culprit was the lack of communication between the federal agencies.  Of course, the communications lack was a deliberate stragegy of the previous administration.

Ok, before you all start yelling replies, I am sure the Clinton administration had a valid reason for putting it there, and 9/11 was an unintended concequence.  And that the Bush II administration had several months to reverse the policy, but that I doubt they had seen the need to until 9/11.  That hindsight thing works both ways, and we need to cut slack both ways.

Sure, that sounds reasonable, but it still doesn't detract from my initial point.  A president doesn't necessarily know everything the FBI is doing.  One of the more recent presidents who would have been exceptionally aware of the FBI's actions was the first Bush, because of his personal connections to the intelligence community (and his former status as director of the CIA).

I just doubt LBJ was that focused on the FBI and COINTELPRO mostly because of how Vietnam overshadowed everything else at the time.