The Great Blue Wall of Lawlessness

[zengrifter]

Give Me Liberty
Blue Wall of Lawlessness
The NYPD has a long-standing reputation
for its "excessive" surveillance.
Now more than ever.

by Nat Hentoff
May 1st, 2007 3:50 PM


Democratic Senator Frank Church:
Constitutional enemy of FBI, CIA and NSA.

During the 1970s, an American hero, the late Democratic senator Frank Church of Idaho, exposed the secret illegal operations of the FBI, the CIA, and the National Security Agency.

As head of a Senate committee to study government intelligence activities, Church, with special indignation, condemned the FBI's COINTELPRO surveillance and infiltration of lawful dissenting organizations, thereby becoming my hero because, at the time, I was reporting on the FBI—as it was reporting to J. Edgar Hoover on me.

With so few civics classes in schools around the country during the last quarter-century, I doubt if many Americans know who Frank Church was, let alone are aware of his 1975 pledge to the American people after his hearings on epidemic government lawlessness: "The American people need to be assured that never again will an agency of the government be permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it considers a threat to the established order."

...more - http://www.villagevoice.com/news/071...f,76516,2.html