Getting rid of the FBI would be a giant boon for the freedom of the American people. As President Harry S. Truman put it, “We want no Gestapo or secret police. The FBI is tending in that direction.”
For its entire existence the FBI has served as the strong arm of the federal government. Beginning in 1909 as the Bureau of Investigation, no one’s life, liberty, or property has been safe since. Ostensibly created to investigate anarchists, bootleggers, kidnappers, bank robbers, crimes on federal property, and later, the KKK, the FBI would soon find its true calling: political repression, personal destruction, and terror.
Communists, real and imagined, were the first to find themselves under the FBI’s ominous glare. World War II provided an opportunity for the FBI to serve a legitimate role, by investigating acts of espionage, but that would take a backseat to mass arrests of innocent Japanese Americans and warrant-less searches of their property.
J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director and its longest serving, then began compiling a list of “sexual deviants” in April 1950 so that homosexuals could be purged from the federal workforce.
Hoover disliked civil rights leaders as well, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO – for “counter intelligence program” – targeted Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
The FBI was also linked to political assassinations in the 1960s, including that of Illinois Black
Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in Chicago, and the wiretapping of congressional offices.
To protect its Mafia informants, the FBI allowed four innocent men to be imprisoned for life in 1965 (two would die there); forty years later a congressional committee called it “one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement.”
The Bureau’s record of failure would only continue, and grow more tragic.
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