Charlie Rose

SharkswithfrikingLazers  04/12/2012 01:46 AM Report

So then President George W. Bush instituted a program of electronic eavesdropping.

Bush's program would track and trap and trace e-mails and telephone calls from all over the world in the United States. So you send an e-mail from Karachi, Pakistan to Beijing, China chances are that that e-mail is going to be routed through a server in the United States for a fraction of a second.

The United States government was trapping this material and trapping the e-mails and phone calls of Americans without judicial warrants and this went on for more than two years.

So the Justice Department finally wakes up and several of the top dogs create their letters of resignation to present to Bush and Bush backs off or risks his re-election.

Does the Bush infamous legacy have no end? Is an oath to something Grover Norquist is selling even stronger than an oath to uphold our Constitution?

"And it’s clear, with all due respect to the former president, that he lied to the FBI. That is a felony."

George W.--please turn yourself in now.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  04/12/2012 01:31 AM Report

Here is the calculus: on the one hand, national security; on the other hand civil liberties.

Hoover failed. He did not balance both.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  04/12/2012 01:28 AM Report

A guy was in power at the FBI for 48 years. Does this make any sense to anybody?

Look at some of the other Directors: William Webster was nine years; John Otto William Sessions for seven years; Floyd Clarke, interim,; Lewis Freeh, seven and three-quarters years; Thomas Pickard, three months; and then Robert Mueller, 10 and a half years.

How long do you think it took to get J. Edgar Hoover’s intelligence files? About 27 years from a lawyer in Washington who had represented another reporter from the New York Times in a Freedom of Information Act suit that he, the reporter, had filed in 1981, 26, almost 27 years earlier. FINALLY after decades of struggle they had the files and the lawyer said this reporter is not interested anymore, he’s moved on to other things.

So the guy is in power 48 years and it takes another 27 years to get his files. Sounds like a KGB story doesn't it?

By the way, Tim Weiner was quite fortunate the reporter who started it all had moved on to other things.

Gelles  04/11/2012 07:49 AM Report

..... Love and respect make the world go around. We all need more not less of them.

M and N are adjacent on QWERTY keyboards. So are F G H and J K L . These adjacent-cies are there to foul our fingers up. Charlie and I play tennis every day just to stay alive. He should skip a day and borrow from his friend Jeff Bezos the edit-ware we're missing.

Gelles  04/11/2012 07:38 AM Report

Repuplican / Republican -- what's the difference? As I read what your fingers punched, I never saw the error.

..... That ability of most of us to read smoothly through missing words and messed up key strokes is what this website counts on when it refuses to allow post-send editing.

They are so wrong on this matter! Amazon's bulletin boards, nearly infinite in number, matching every author, book and product sold, allow edit anytime at all.

For this reason, customers whose eyeballs they own, love them all the more. Customers can say anything -- and they can re-say it as they feel the need. The rest of the audience could care less.

Sure the original vent was never etched in stone. But whoever read it, and failed to see a subsequent change, was not cheated on account of a corrected error.

Topaz Girl, you and I are simpatico. We may be ready to join two heads as one. At 86 years and 7 months, I, nevertheless have memories.

..... Our thoughts may be joined in cyberspace no matter that our keyboards remain miles apart.

..... Love and respect make the world go around. We all need more not less of then.

I will do what I rarely ever do -- read what Ive typed before "submitting". We will see if that step washes away a multitude of errors -- to justify this sites chintzy habit of ignoring so many of our desires.

..... It does, to it's credit, cover all the arts and sciences -- and it would do more if it had less bias in favor of its own poor vision of missing monetary reform.

Thanks, TL, for being there to enliven a site in need of more heart, as well as Amazonian edit-ware.

topazgirl  04/11/2012 03:03 AM Report

...Oops! Didn't use Spell Check! ... I meant Republican!

topazgirl  04/11/2012 03:00 AM Report

Gelles:... PS: Anyone who can quote the Preamble to the United States Constitution is TOTALLY sexy, and has my undivided attention... (Lord, I sound like a Conservative Repupublican!)... ;^D

topazgirl  04/11/2012 02:40 AM Report

Gelles: ...God, I just luv ya to pieces.. You lighten my day!

Gelles  04/11/2012 02:27 AM Report

Without my Google task bar to work independently of my composition, I would be lost. I will enter "domestic demand driven economy", and copy from the task bar's smaller screen something relevant.

What I copied:

..... "Eichengreen suggested that a move towards a more balanced, higher-value domestic-demand driven-economy could benefit other nations in the region, notably low-cost manufacturers such as Bangladesh and Vietnam, which could attract industrial capacity away from China."

So I agree with Topaz Girl. Many of my recent posts copied from the task bar window to my post on this archive of comments.

topazgirl  04/10/2012 03:47 PM Report

Gelles: I am lost without my Google tool bar (with its spell check, translation, and what-not...) Just like I can't talk without my hands, I can't write without my tool bar! (...here is where I click it on, before posting this to you...) <3

Gelles  04/10/2012 06:59 AM Report

Not directly related to the FBI, but because it is in "books", and is the latest program date archived, let me demand:

..... Philip Coggan and his book, "Paper Promises, Debt, Money and the New World Order",

be invited to Charlie's famous table. The book has rave reviews. Its content is our top recovery priority.

Along with Coggan, invite Peter Diamandis, billionaire mover and shaker. His book "Abundance" is required reading, too.

Gelles  04/10/2012 06:37 AM Report

There are more than half a dozen typographical errors in the posting below which a post-send edit window of one hour (or one day) would prevent.

Gelles  04/10/2012 06:30 AM Report

"Chasing Radicals (and Breaking the Rule of Law)", the title of BRYAN BURROUGH's NYT book of Weiners book "Enemies", says a lot.

It seems to me to be a plain fact that Hoover's FBI chased radicals and broke the law for nearly half a century from the post WW I era (1924) until 1972.

During that period organized crime in America was not attacked and destroyed to the degree necessary by Hoover and his FBI.

Right and left wing criminal conspiracies were given much attention. In my opinion they were not beaten as badly as they have been by our side of the law -- the FBI.

President's who used Hoover should, in my view have fired him for his insolence to their office. Burrough says Hoover did not cross them -- that he broke the Klan. That is to the credit of Hoover and hid presidents.

..... But since his departure, no FBI director has come close to his reputed insolence -- and none ever will -- not because of his reputed insolence, but because Hoover was possibly a cross dresser.

I am glad the NYT review is so favorable to the content of the book. Burrough says it's not the full story of the FBI -- because it does not cover organized crime. But Burrough gives it credit for what it covers -- radicals and exceeding the law to defend its attacks on political action I may have supported.

On balance, I have thought the FBI was centrist-friendly. I may be wrong on that score. But Burroughs and Weiner seem to agree that is at least now the fact.

I look forward to the time a super high-tech FBI and local police forces can prevent crime and subversion before they happen. The niceties of privacy laws and protection of the rights of our worst enemies (including Americans) are not in my view to be allowed to foster crime and subversion in the coming age of baby nuclear bombs.

Prevention of barbarous acts should always trump legal technicalities and niceties. Prevention of police and FBI barbarism would come high on the list of things to prevent.

When young we were told the FBI hired lawyers and accountants as its ordinary agents. They always hired scientists as needed. I believe they always paid good and fair salaries to their employees. I do not know of or believe there was a lot of money-stealing by these people.

In today's world of high-tech secrecy, cryptography, explosives, and criminology, war and cyber-war, etc., they should hire genius is safety, security, psychology, education, political science, history and the arts, etc.

..... Their task has become critical to the success of democracy -- especially economic democracy (something we do not yet have but urgently need.)

Gelles  04/10/2012 05:45 AM Report

The following copyrighted text is presented at the teachable moment free to a large audience for educational non-commercial purposes. It is by far the best review of the Weiner book under discussion that I found. The text is offered to the same public for free by the copyright owner -- and this presentation adds to its value and is in accordance with copyright law. My own commentary on the FBI and Weiner's view appears adjacent to this text as a separate posting.

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW -- March 14, 2012

Chasing Radicals (and Breaking the Rule of Law)

By BRYAN BURROUGH

ENEMIES: A History of the F.B.I.

By Tim Weiner

Illustrated. 537 pages. Random House. $30.

.

First things first: Tim Weiner’s new book, “Enemies: A History of the F.B.I.,” is an outstanding piece of work, even-handed, exhaustively researched, smoothly written and thematically timely.

What it is not is a history of the F.B.I. Here’s the thing: For 104 years now the Federal Bureau of Investigation has essentially worn two hats — its traditional law enforcement “arrest a bad guy” hat and its more controversial intelligence hat. The latter is the part of the F.B.I. that from World War I on investigated all manner of political radicals and Communists, compiled lists of Americans to be detained in the event of national emergency and engaged in at least half a century of illegal wiretapping, mail opening and burglaries.

It’s this side of the shop — and exclusively this side — that interests Mr. Weiner, a former reporter for The New York Times. This shouldn’t be too surprising, given that Mr. Weiner previously wrote an admired history of the C.I.A., “Legacy of Ashes.” So, in a 500-page book on the F.B.I., this means not a word on Louis Buchalter — no Mafia at all in fact. There are only glancing references to Waco and Ruby Ridge, and barely a single sentence on the bureau’s Depression-era scramble to hunt down the likes of John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd. This is like writing a history of the New York Yankees but ignoring Whitey Ford and the other pitchers.

That said, what Mr. Weiner does, he does very, very well. This is certainly the most complete book we are likely to see about the F.B.I.’s intelligence-gathering operations, from Emma Goldman to Osama bin Laden. The problem with some F.B.I. histories is that they come off as a list of unrelated cases — case after case after very old case. Where Mr. Weiner excels is in connecting the dots. He identifies his themes, almost all involving the conflicting demands of civil liberties and civil order — “the saga of our struggle to be both safe and free,” as he puts it — and rigorously pursues them. As far back as 1941, for example, he finds echoes of the contemporary debate over military tribunals in the F.B.I. case against a group of Nazi saboteurs who, after a peremptory trial before a secret court approved by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, were executed within weeks of their arrests.

Illegal wiretaps and burglaries were the F.B.I.’s key weapons almost from the beginning. Time and again, going back to the 1930s, this or that court would rule such procedures illegal. Time and again, J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau’s director from 1924 until his death in 1972, simply ignored the law. A string of presidents, from Roosevelt to Richard M. Nixon, knew exactly what the bureau was doing and refused to stop it.

“Despite (their illegality),” the assistant director William C. Sullivan wrote in a memo to Hoover in the early 1960s, “black bag jobs have been used because they represent an invaluable technique in combating subversive activities of a clandestine nature aimed at undermining and destroying our nation.”

Illegal activities were so ingrained that Hoover himself, after an embarrassing court disclosure in 1966, ordered them stopped and was ignored. Even after his death, after still more court orders against wiretapping and black bag jobs, Hoover’s successors continued to defy the courts, in acts that eventually got one F.B.I. director, L. Patrick Gray, indicted, and the bureau’s No. 2 and 3 men convicted. In time the bureau’s top men simply didn’t know how to run an investigation without breaking the law.

Another weakness of some F.B.I. books is their portrayal of Hoover as either a Machiavellian villain or, worse, a figure of unassailable power. He was neither. Mr. Weiner does a superb job, maybe the best I’ve seen, at charting the ebbs and flows of Hoover’s power, chronicling in detail his relationship with presidents over 40 years.

For each, Hoover wooed the new president by opening his dossier of gossipy secrets, and almost to a man, the president was immediately hooked. Only Harry S. Truman, and to a lesser extent John F. Kennedy, consistently resisted Hoover’s charms; just about every time Truman mentioned the F.B.I., he managed to use the word “Gestapo.” And only Nixon made any serious effort to replace Hoover, after the director, near the end of his life, wouldn’t go along with committing crimes far worse than his own.

In “Enemies” one can vividly trace the rise of Hoover’s power. Running down those Depression gangsters made him a household name, but it was World War II, Mr. Weiner shows, that fueled the F.B.I.’s growth; between 1939 and 1945, as the bureau tried in vain to capture Nazi spies across Latin America, the number of its agents more than tripled, as did its budget.

The postwar rise of anti-Communism, bringing to power Hoover diehards like Nixon and Joseph R. McCarthy, did the rest. Hunting Commies, after all, even more than compiling political gossip, was Hoover’s true life’s work — the one thing, other than his reflexive bureaucratic defensiveness, that obsessed him from his first radical raids in 1919 into the 1960s. When the Communist menace finally faded, so did Hoover. He had lost his raison d’être.

Hoover as a man never really comes alive in “Enemies”:’ Mr. Weiner is far more concerned with policy than with private life. He briefly addresses the idea of Hoover’s closeted homosexuality, even the hoary old story that he was a cross-dresser, dismissing both notions out of hand, saying there is “not a shred of evidence” that Hoover was in fact gay or ever had sex with anyone.

The last third of “Enemies” is well-worn territory. Mr. Weiner adeptly traces the F.B.I.’s slow recovery after the scandals of the 1970s and especially its dismal record tracking Al Qaeda and Middle Eastern terrorists. His choices are consistent with his aims, focusing exclusively on intelligence matters. But this leads to a decidedly uneven narrative; just as there is almost nothing in the book about the 1930s, the 1980s are left aside except for a single long interview with an assistant director, Oliver B. Revell.

In the end, though, you don’t really mind. Mr. Weiner tells you upfront what interests him, and he does an excellent job bringing home the goods, showing how the F.B.I. in the last two decades has slowly returned to working within the rule of law. “These principles once might have seemed self-evident,” he concludes, “but the F.B.I. had violated them time and again in the past.”

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Bryan Burrough, a special correspondent at Vanity Fair, is the author of “Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the F.B.I., 1933-34” and “The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes.”

REMant  04/09/2012 11:30 AM Report

Most people, of course, feel national security is waaaaaay out of control, what with the new electronic center in Utah and new installations popping up all over the DC area, along with arrogation of more and more executive power.

If not a cross-dresser, Hoover doesn't seem to have been much of a masculine specimen, so this idea may be a slur on Machiavelli, who was a lot more than a hatchet man. I'd say Hoover was more of a Dzerzhinsky, Beria or even like the rather monastic Stalin, himself. I don't know if the latter liked bean salad as much, but being around Hoover must have been just as disagreeable. Despite all the bluster, I think he must have been inordinately incompetent, as well as, unscrupulous. Other nations have never thought a lot of our security services, and there's no shortage of evidence to support their opinion. We are probably strongest on the technical side, and God knows we've spent enough on it.

There's probably an FBI file on me for having told a reporter in Vietnam I thought there were more important things to do at home, as well as, telling a student convocation a couple years before that if they were really concerned about power, they'd be better off to stop whining about representation, and start learning. (Have to look into that, kinda proud of it.)

But as I said last week, for all its virulence, anti-Communism was a scarecrow, a blind for self-interest, a tendency in American politics I think far more dangerous than any spying or sabotage. Our government, as much as our financial institutions, simply lie to the people and get away with it.