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FBI Wiretapped Hemingway
Hugh Pickens writes "On the fiftieth anniversary of the death by suicide of author Ernest Hemingway, his friend and biographer A. E. Hotchner writes in the NY Times that the man who 'had stood his ground against charging water buffaloes, who had flown missions over Germany, who had refused to accept the prevailing style of writing but, enduring rejection and poverty, had insisted on writing in his own unique way, this man, my deepest friend, was afraid — afraid that the FBI was after him, that his body was disintegrating, that his friends had turned on him, that living was no longer an option.' In the midst of depression and under treatment at St. Mary's Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, Hemingway was convinced that his room was bugged, his phone was tapped, and suspected that one of the interns was a fed. Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the FBI released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Hemingway under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest's activities in Cuba. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary's Hospital, making it likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all. 'In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest's fear of the FBI, which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the FBI file,' writes Hotchner, author of Papa Hemingway and Hemingway and His World. 'I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.'"
The immunity to telecoms that accepted requests to wiretap without warrants, the revenge taken on Qwest for not doing so, the new rules that pretty much allow warrantless wiretapping at will...those powers would never be abused by today's FBI. They are all staunch and true. There's no chance of this happening now. No way are they going to snoop on friends-of-relatives-of suspected possible terrorists. Zero chance that people who impress a girlfriend by going to a march to support that Gaza blockade ship (which helps Gaza, which helps Hamas, who are terrorists, who no-doubt support other terrorists that might attack us some day) will find themselves on a list.
Don't be paranoid. We don't need a government of laws when we have a government of such good men who only want to protect us.
From terrorists.
And communists.
I'll refrain from calling you names, as you've characterized LutzSed, but just point out the fact that it the FBI that's the problem. They've been violating the rights of Americans, and spying on us all, for their own reasons, not because they were trying to protect us, since they were formed. There's no hope of curtailing their activities, especially now that we have the big Radical Muslem scare, and a congress full of right wing reactionaries and cowards.
LutzSec isn't bringing on anything, it's already here.
Not to worry. The hope and change we voted for will be here any moment to take us to Candy Mountain.
Worth pointing out is that there is a competing school of thought, which regards his suicide as likely having been an accident.
you're not paranoid if they're really out to get you.
but, when the conspiracy is shown to be real, i have nothing but venom and hate for the power abusing assholes who think they can get away with it
hoover was a cross-dressing pinhead (not that there's anything wrong with cross-dressing, but there's plenty wrong with hypocrisy). the fbi under him was an extension of mccarthy era hysteria and witch hunts. so fuck you hoover, thanks for contributing to the destruction of the composure of a great man and a great writer
those who seek to protect us, in the name of hypocritical assumptions about what we need protection from, are the real enemies of the usa
down with them all
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
He was bipolar, with paranoid delusions most amplified during mixed episodes (happy and not happy psychosis in the same package -- a bad trip).
And you're right, that he was a manic depressive with persecutory delusions and that he was indeed being spied upon by law enforcement doesn't mean he wasn't nuts -- obviously the case in Hemingway's case. Maybe it was self-fulfilling.
Calling out bogus battery capacity claims.
With just a touch of exaggeration, I'll say that any public intellectual in that era who didn't have an FBI file probably was lacking a conscience. Einstein had a 1500-page FBI file, having aroused Hoover's suspicion with his involvement in "communist front" organizations like the American Crusade Against Lynching. America had been through the worst era of unrestrained robber-baron capitalism, followed by the Great Depression. It was the height of Jim Crow. If you were engaged in the intellectual life of the country, it was very likely that you were either going to become a socialist or some other kind of radical. Just to pick two more random examples: Margaret Sanger and Helen Keller were both leftists, and both had FBI files. American leftists were the only ones who spoke up against Fascism in Spain and tried to do anything about it -- at a time when right-wingers were often huge fans of Mussolini. For a lot of folks on the left, the big disillusionment came in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Find free books.
...doesn't mean there isn't one. I am quite sure a large percentage of the paranoid notions out there are not true, but then there are the facts that surface much later that prove to have been true.
it's exactly this kinda crap that keeps the seeds of doubt sewn in my mind each and every time the government tells the people something.
Put it this way: every single time some government official, from the President of the United States on down says, "we need new power 'x' in order to make you safe from 'y'", We the People need to reply with a resounding "Prove it!" Make these bastards fight for every new power they try to assume. Sometimes they're right ... but I want to hear more than fear-mongering and manufactured statistics.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
They have been given authority by several Congressional Laws throughout several decades. Stop thinking this is June 21, 1788 and we just ratified the US Constitution. Protections have been slowly disintegrating shortly after the last remnant of the Founding Fathers were in power and had pull to protect them. Stop voting in Evangelical Fundamentalists and you'll see how much push back Congress will actually do to keep a checks n' balance with the FBI. Stop sitting around ignoring all the Militia nut jobs around and take them more seriously because the FBI certainly does and must to keep even your ass from being threatened. The blade cuts both ways.
This is the kind of mindset that fear mongers capitalize on. Hoover had the Red Scare to keep in power. This terrorist stuff is a fear mongers wet dream. Interesting how we have so many ways to keep people "informed", aka in fear. This kind of reptile brained actions are too global in reach. We haven't evolved out of it and we don't look like we will until we destroy ourselves or nature does it for us. Serioiusly, we are wasting time and resources we should be spending on space. Let's try to be ready to avoid a planet destroying event instead of fighting each other? How many asteroids need to wiz by our planet before we realize we need to tend to them?
Take the Red Pill.
To compare LulzSec with rapists or thugs is rediculous; comparing the CEOs to victims is so outrageous it's almost funny. There are plenty of serious "cyber" criminals who are hacking into people's systems for real money and causing real damage to people like you and me; the consumers who have their data being stored by these corporates. What makes LulzSec different is that, instead of just putting some charges on your credit card and never telling anyone where they got the data they published what they did. That's just bringing to the surface an issue which was already happening before LulzSec got involved.
LulzSec caused public nuisiance and annoyance but that makes them more stupid teenage vandals than thugs. The main bad thing they have done is embarassing the powerful and pointing out publicly what data was already available to the real black hats. It's not just that the corporates should have had better security, it's that:
For now I think there's quite a bit more value in pursuing the CEOs than the
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
But Hemingway also was, by most accounts, not a particularly happy individual. I am not meaning to absolve the FBI from blame for its misbehavior; but his dad commited suicide, his mom mailed him the gun his father used for that, he couldn't stay in a relationship, and he had a drinking problem - he already had 2.9 strikes against him. His semi-autobiographical Nick Adams stories all seemed to show a poor sense of self worth too.
It seems odd that the FBI would worry about his activities in Cuba, though, given how his writing sure seemed (to me) to be pretty pro-Batista.
#DeleteChrome
Don't blame LulzSec, blame the people who will be putting such laws in place. That is like blaming flaming homosexuals for making gay marriage illegal, or blaming rape victims for the high number of rapists in prison. This kind of douchebaggery attitude is what will lead to improved tolerance of such government policies. Fight the government policies.
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
So mr. anarchist, you don't think large companies and corporations are capable of significantly worse effects of oppression on our lives? I know it is an assumption, but judging by what you said I assume you are totally against all government regulations of the corporate world. Using barriers to entry, monopolistic and monopsonistic actions, most US companies have managed to drive prices through the roof while driving wages through the floor, despite the fact that in the past 40 years GDP went from .5 T to 17T, a 34 fold increase. If that isn't oppression, nothing short of China's internet censorship, Soviet Russia, or Hitlers Germany qualifies. When you let corporations exploit people to an unlimited extent, they will. Regulations ARE necessary, if they weren't, we wouldn't be in this shithole situation right now, it would be a lot better as the deregulation of the past 10 years goes into effect, instead of even worsening quality of life. But don't let the facts affect your anarchism.
Governments are the only thing in the world that is by, for, and of the people. Corporations are for profit, by profit, and of profit. Profit isn't a moral imperative, people are. Governments can become too powerful, too strong, and too evil, but they do not have to be inherently, and can and have been controlled by the people for periods of time. This is not true of large businesses, who have amassed so much power that voting with your dollars is either ineffectual or impossible.
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
the damage done to the usa by communist infiltrators was less than that by the hystertical overreacting nitwits
This statement is not true. Joseph McCarthy was actually correct. The Venona decrypts, declassified in 1999-2002, identified a lot of the Communist Party CPUSA members and revealed them to be Soviet agents. And the Mitrokhin Archive, an internal KGB record of their own history, smuggled out of Russia in 1992 by their former senior archivist Vasily Mitrokhin, shows quite clearly the depths of penetration of the Soviet agents, as well as their strategies of spreading disinformation. These documents are readily available, go check them out at your local bookstore or library.
Now McCarthy was indeed a zealot, and used improper means of "persuasion" instead of following legal channels, but his claims were fairly accurate. Much of Hollywood was infiltrated, as well as the U.S. State Department, and even Congress. But McCarthy was unable to publicly back his claims with the data because the Venona project itself and all its data was classified top secret, and was not to be revealed in case they gave away the secret that we were reading Soviet "one-time pads". (Hint: they used their pads two times, which broke their security.) This was an operational mistake that happened from 1946-1948, and so they could have safely used the data then as the Soviets had corrected the mistake before he went public, but the FBI had no way of knowing that. Among other interesting tidbits, the Venona decrypts proved conclusively that the Rosenbergs were indeed the traitors that gave the secret of the bomb to the Soviets. The campaign to cloud their guilt with doubt was just one of the many Soviet disinformation campaigns. (These campaigns included such crap as "AIDS was created by the U.S. Army as a bioweapon", which even the Russians now regret having spread.)
the damage done to the usa by terorrism today is less than that by the hystertical overreacting nitwits
I agree with you and believe this statement is true. Many of our rights have been stripped by the misnamed USA PATRIOT act, and our government has gone apeshit crazy, all even better than the results UBL hoped for when he attacked. I'd much rather have the occasional terrorist attempt than the current form of the DHS. At least an idiot on a plane today is going to be jumped by a hundred very pissed off travelers. Nobody's ever going to fly another plane into a building on our soil again, not while there are solid cockpit doors and a few real Americans on board.
However, there is quite a bit of difference between the two. McCarthy acted alone, from secret knowledge. The DHS is acting as the face of the U.S. government. The politicians are bringing war to all kinds of new places in the name of terrorism. They've completely soiled this country and her reputation, and they should be stopped.
John
Franco kept Spain stable for decades, dealt with old-school Communists in the most effective way, and was a reasonably good steward of his country, which he kept out of WWII.
By which you mean he supported the Nazis and offered them assistance whilst not fighting in WWII himself, summarily executed his political opponents and sent hundreds of thousands more to forced labour camps, totally rolled back women's rights and religious freedoms, and was a least as bad as the Communist states - but that's OK because he wasn't red.
There's a reason the US isn't very popular.