[Marxism] Behind the relative FBI circumspection at Guantanamo

[Brian Shannon <Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The 1967 caper movie, The President's Analyst, starring James Coburn
and Godfrey Cambridge, presented CIA spooks as a colorful panorama of
hipsters, as adaptable as chameleons. FBI agents were dressed in white
shirts and black suits, under the direction of the stylish J. Edgar
Hoover.

The FBI informants, however, were something else. These stories should
disabuse anyone inclined to make a hero of Mark Felt (number 2 man in
the FBI and COINTELPRO convict) or who believes that George W. Bush,
who personally closed off his father's government papers, is telling
the truth when he says:  "When there's accusations made about certain
actions by our people, they're fully investigated in a transparent
way."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/politics/31TEXT-BUSH.html [PAGE 9]

An interesting aspect of government behavior at the Guantanamo station
in the American Gulag are reports from the FBI about the way prisoners
were being treated. FBI agents were afraid of being tainted with the
brutality and torture in process there and wrote numerous e-mails
expressing disagreement with the investigative process--perhaps to
establish a paper record for themselves. The stories below may shed
some light on why the FBI wants to protect itself today.

The second one reviews a new book about the death of Viola Liuzzo, who
was murdered with the complicity of FBI informant Gary Rowe.

From Brian Shannon
_______________________

Flemmi ties Connolly to 2 slayings
Gangster admits to 10 murders in a plea deal

By Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff, 10/15/2003

The jury got it wrong when it acquitted former FBI agent John J.
Connolly Jr. of leaking information that prompted his longtime
informants, James "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi, to
kill two men, according to court documents unsealed yesterday.

Flemmi, who pleaded guilty yesterday in federal court to 10 murders,
has alleged that Connolly instigated two of those slayings by warning
Bulger that one of the victims, Richard Castucci, was an FBI informant,
and that the other, John Callahan, was being sought by the FBI as a
potential witness against Bulger and Flemmi, according to a detailed
account of the crimes signed by Flemmi and filed with the court.

It was unclear, though, whether Connolly could be charged again in
either slaying.

In May, a federal jury found that prosecutors failed to prove Connolly
leaked information that prompted Bulger and Flemmi to kill Castucci and
Callahan. Jurors convicted Connolly, 63, of racketeering and
obstruction of justice, and he is serving 10 years in prison.

While the plea agreement and documents unsealed yesterday provided a
glimpse of what Flemmi can offer, prosecutors have yet to disclose the
full extent of what the gangster has told them. Flemmi, however, has
implicated some of his other associates in murders.

Flemmi pleaded guilty to murder, drug trafficking, racketeering, and
extortion and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. In exchange, the
government recommended a life prison term.

Flemmi also will plead guilty to murders in Florida and Oklahoma, where
prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty.

http://www.truthinjustice.org/connolly.htm

     *     *     *     *     *

FBI's mole in Klan was as horrifyingly brutal as the rest

The Informant: The FBI, The Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo

By Gary May. Yale University Press. 432 pages. $35.
. . .
The last of these incidents, and the climactic event in Gary May's
suspenseful and vigorously reported The Informant, occurred on a
stretch of Alabama highway on March 25, 1965, in the wake of the
otherwise triumphant Voting March to Montgomery. On that night,
Klansmen raced down a car driven by Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from
Detroit who had participated in the march, and shot her to death.

In the Oldsmobile from which the fatal bullets were fired was none
other than the FBI's prized informant, Gary Rowe.

When he had first come to the FBI's attention five years earlier, Rowe
was a barroom brawler in Birmingham with a police record, a man
unburdened by either principle or self-control and virtually
indistinguishable in character or outlook from those already in the
KKK. Except Rowe had a fantasy about himself as Eliot Ness, which
encouraged the FBI to take its own flight from reality, drafting Rowe
as their mole in the Alabama Klan.

It did not seem to have occurred to anyone that a volatile,
self-aggrandizing, undisciplined character might not be ideally suited
for the murky role of agent-provocateur, particularly not in one of the
most combustible racial flashpoints in the country. ("There's no hate
like the hate down there," one official was later warned.) As May, a
University of Delaware historian, recounts, the results of the FBI's
miscalculation were as predictable as they were appalling.

http://makeashorterlink.com/?I5D12643B
[free registration required]

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