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Watergate "Deep Throat" Mark Felt Dead At 95
Hugh Pickens writes "W. Mark Felt Sr., 95, associate director of the FBI during the Watergate scandal, better known as 'Deep Throat,' the most famous anonymous source in American history, died at his home in Santa Rosa, California. Felt secretly guided Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to pursue the story of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate office buildings, and later of the Nixon administration's campaign of spying and sabotage against its perceived political enemies. 'It's impossible to exaggerate how high the stakes were in Watergate,' wrote Felt in his 2006 book A G-Man's Life. 'We faced no simple burglary, but an assault on government institutions, an attack on the FBI's integrity, and unrelenting pressure to unravel one of the greatest political scandals in our nation's history.' No one knows exactly what prompted Felt to leak the information from the Watergate probe to the press. He was passed over for the post of FBI director after Hoover's death in 1972, a crushing career disappointment. 'People will debate for a long time whether I did the right thing by helping Woodward. The bottom line is that we did get the whole truth out, and isn't that what the FBI is supposed to do?'"
For whatever reason he chose, he did the right thing. If more folks did that maybe Presidents wouldn't run the Whitehouse as their supermarket for all their cronies.
if you had known any good amount of recent world history, you would shove that sarcastic code of yours in your butt, and cry over the shit that has been perpetrated around the world because of the republican administrations of last 50 years.
hell, even al kaeda and rising islamism is their gift to the world, in which they screwed everything in 80s, perpetrating islamism against soviets and arming and funding islamist groups all around the world.
the stuff which YOU are paying for today.
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Yes, Jefferson chose free speech over a regulated media, and we reap the benefits of that in spite of the pain it can cause. Still, it seems the media falls into two camps:
- Illuminate, Educate, and Illustrate
- Titillate, Castigate, and Prevaricate
One pays better than the other, but one is much better for society in the long run.
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
It's worth bearing in mind that Nixon's predecessor was objectively far worse than him, namely LBJ.
Starting and then fighting the Vietnam war badly, deliberately falsifying the Gulf of Tonkin incident (whatever about Bush, I think he genuinely believed his pretext, that Iraqi WMDs existed), ordering the USS Liberty to not be defended when it was under attack and then falsifying details of the attack later (probably the most spineless act in US military history).
Aside from that, there's the personal - forcing aides to talk to him while he was talking a dump, laughing at the dead body of JFK, etc..
A truly odious and terrible president.
Sure, those are terrible things.
Breaking the oath of office and using the power of the Presidency illegally in order to retain power is far more cancerous and treasonous. That was Nixon's big crime.
To portray Felt as some heroic whistle-blower is nonsense. For one, Felt hid in the shadows for 30 years, until he was senile and his daughter pulled him into the daylight to capitalize on his fame. Heroes put themselves at personal risk for a higher cause. Felt hid to protect his reputation among his FBI cronies (think cigarette-smoking man types).
More importantly, he was J. Edgar Hoover's #2 at a time when the FBI was wiretapping MLK and John Lennon - and presidents. Yes, there is a reason that Hoover stayed as FBI director, a huge plum appointment for any president, for 48 friggin years. Hoover blackmailed presidents, and everyone else he could wiretap and burglarize. You think his #2 wasn't in on that?
When Hoover died, Nixon did the right thing, what any of the 44 presidents would have done, cleaned house and got the Hoover cronies the hell out of there. And what did Felt do once he didn't get the director job? He did exactly what every president for 48 years was afraid of about Hoover - Felt released dirt on Nixon.
Say what you want about Nixon, but Hoover was the antithesis of a democracy, an unelected guy who abused his power and blackmailed presidents to stay in office for half a century. Appointing Felt to replace him would have been, in retrospect, politically expedient. Felt thought he was entitled to the job and brought Nixon down for it. To suggest that Felt, the ultimate black-bag guy, was appalled at Nixon's shenanigans, when Hoover freaking invented it, is like saying Linsday Lohan is offended by Paris Hilton's public tramp behavior. Ludicrous!
It is interesting that most news reports do not talk about Felt's illegal wiretapping of the Weather Underground (not that I have sympathy for that domestic terror group, but I am not running around claiming to be some civil liberties hero), or they mention it at the very end of the story like AP did.
God knows all of the shit Hoover pulled. Maybe someday it will all come to light. It would make a great movie, but would probably have to be a mini-series or TV show on HBO, as it would likely be impossible to chronicle in 2 hours.
And they named the FBI building after the sumbitch.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Only if we are going back to a Roman Citizen type culture where freedom and democracy is important for people who are in, but absolutely forbidden for people that are 'out' (in this case, the Vietnamese).
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
This may be okay if you have a media that's actually motivated by some kind of ethics. In my area (and I suspect many others), the economy isn't really large enough to support much more than a commercially sponsored media primarily interested in turning news into entertainment, and presenting whatever news in whatever form and bias it takes to get as many viewers/readers as possible to sell advertising.
The local media around here tends to be full of people who seem more interested in having themselves seen than in accurately portraying something. It makes sense, too, because in the entertainment industry one of the most important things for future employment is to be seen.
Yeah, maybe the 60,000 Americans who died pointlessly because of LBJ would disagree.
I'd wager the 1.5 million Vietnamese who did likewise would, also.
And maybe congress would think that being deliberately misled about a false enemy attack in order to start said war would constitute the president "breaking the seal of office".
Azural - instrumentals
Mark Felt, another fascist hypocrite, is dead.
Too bad more hypocrites won't be dropping dead soon.
While Felt thought it was perfectly legitimate to violate the civil rights of the families of the members of the Weather Underground with his own "black bag buglaries", he was incensed by Nixons' band of thugs doing the EXACT same thing to the Democrat National Committee at the Watergate.
The only reason Felt went after Nixon was because Felt threw a tantrum when Tricky Dicky wouldn't let him run the FBI so Felt could violate the civil rights of millions more of American citizens in the pursuit of his own fascist agenda.
Felt was J. Edgar Hoovers' docile lapdog and would likely have worn a flowery sun-dress to match Jeds', had Jed asked him to. Perhaps Jed knew from firsthand experience exactly why Felt earned the moniker of "Deep Throat".
Felt was convicted of his crimes but like his fellow travelers in fascism he never served any jail time. He was pardoned by Ronald Reagan, a former movie actor whose two most memorable roles were as a supporting actor in Bedtime for Bonzo and a ventriloquist dummy for the Illuminazi Agents of the New World Order.
The only real travesty of justice is that the heads of neither Nixon nor Felt were not put on pikes in front of the White House and FBI headquarters as a future warning to anyone who might attempt to repeat their fascist misdeeds.
Those who would lull themselves in the false belief that the Democrats are any less fascist than the Republicans need only recall the Massacre at Waco. Felt admired Janet Reno. Timothy McVeigh did exactly what Janet Reno taught him to do, murdering innocent people. Neither should be forgiven.
I do not doubt that Felt still admired Reno even after her massacre of both citizens and the Posse Comitatus Act, but it does make you wonder how many hypocritical circular illogical loops Felts' mind must have revolved around when he heard the news about what McVeigh did.
Being a master of disinformation and trickery himself, I seriously doubt Felt was incapable of seeing that the Massacre at Oklahoma City was a direct and logical conclusion of the heinous and murderous official oppression at Waco but perhaps his own self-righteousness would have continued to cloud his logic and judgement.
Those who would violate the civil rights of others should not be allowed any 8th Amendment protections.
The government serves at the whim of the people, not vice versa. Ask any deposed dictators.
Don't tase me, bro!
I can't stand Bush and think his presidency has been among the most dangerous in modern history, but there's no credible evidence he "let" 9/11" happen. There's evidence he treated the threat too lightly, but no real reason to believe he had specific knowledge of what would happen and chose to look the other way. What not-so-credible evidence has been presented by conspiracy theorists has been debunked to high heaven.
Hate him on the indisputable merits. It's easier.
Yes, because Islam's history before the '80s was one of peace and love.
Slaughtered. So LBJ didn't save them. He started US involvement, and then fought the war badly enough to irreparably erode a huge amount of belief in it from the US public and to galvanize a lot of South Vietnamese opinion against their corrupt rulers, wasted vast amounts of tax dollars and large numbers of US lives (along with Koreans and Australians), and ultimately it didn't turn out exactly well, did it?
I don't follow your logic.
Azural - instrumentals
I believe the 9/11 attack would have happened with any president. The way it would be dealt with would have been completely different. Others would not have raped peoples rights so much.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Approved political party? Since when do parties require authorization, and from whom? The ruling parties?
I don't think we do, quite honestly, judging by the multiple scandals that have gone seemingly unpunished during the Bush administration.
That's no different from the multiple scandals that plagued the Clinton administration, the difference between that the media actively covered it up back then.
Unless I misunderstand you, I think it is quite different. During the Clinton era, we had attack dogs in congress spending millions of dollars investigating petty bullshit like Christmas Card lists and the firing of a travel agent.
Just to name one of the uninvestigated crimes of the Bush administration, we had the attorney firings scandal, where the administration fired dozens of federal prosecutors, who wouldn't play ball and pursue crimeless political cases. Or how about Bush's multiple meetings with Jeff Gannon, the gay male hooker who was posing as a member of the press, whose exit and entries logs in the whitehouse were deleted by the secret service? Or the outing of Valerie Plame! Argh, don't get me started!
The media was "covering it up"? All *I* remember from that time was something about Clinton being up to neck in scandals that didn't really seem all that scandalous. I remember Clinton firing missiles into Syria and Sudan to destroy Osama Bin Laden's suspected chemical weapons labs, and the next day the Republicans shouting "Wag the dog" and starting up the Lewinski bullshit. And it was minor, petty bullshit compared to what Bush has gotten away with.
While writing this post, I tried to look up references to Clinton's missle attacks on OBL. The wikipedia page doesn't mention it *at all* -- the wikipedia article on his presidency is mostly a list of scandals. What story has won the day?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso