Tag
#1971
2 articles
The Pentagon Papers
In October 1969, a Defense Department analyst at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica began making photocopies of a 7,000-page classified history of the Vietnam War. He worked nights, with a single accomplice. He took the documents home in stages. He photocopied them on a commercial Xerox machine that his daughter, age 13, helped him operate. Twenty-one months later, the New York Times began publishing them. The Nixon White House obtained the first prior-restraint injunction against an American newspaper in 154 years. The Supreme Court overturned it within fifteen days. The same White House unit set up to stop Daniel Ellsberg from leaking anything else became, eight months later, the unit that broke into the Democratic National Committee at Watergate.
COINTELPRO
Between 1956 and 1971, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ran a counter-intelligence program against Americans. Not foreign agents — Americans. The targets were Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, the Students for a Democratic Society, the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and dozens of others. The methods included blackmail, forged letters, planted informants, and — in at least one documented case — collaboration in a killing. The program stayed secret until eight people walked into an FBI office in Pennsylvania on the night of a heavyweight title fight.
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