Nicole~’s Reviews > The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI > Status Update

“Blind faith and trust in the integrity of the agency,” said Keller, “tended to reinforce general ignorance of internal security operations.”

"J. EDGAR HOOVER became director of the FBI the same way he continued being director of the bureau for forty-eight years—by not being asked questions.
Questions were not asked before he was appointed despite the fact that danger signs already were present. There was evidence then that he was willing to use government power to trample rights and damage people."

“The overall impression in directives written by Hoover, other headquarters officials, and local FBI officials was that the FBI thought of black Americans as falling into two categories—black people who should be spied on by the FBI and black people who should spy on other black people for the FBI.”

“It had never occurred to the director that some people cared so much about the Constitution and the right to dissent it guaranteed that they would be willing to risk their freedom in order to get access to his secret files to determine if he and the FBI were destroying that right”

“It was advice to FBI agents, the outcome of a meeting at FBI headquarters a few months earlier of agents who specialized in investigating activists. Agents were advised, in a newsletter prepared for such agents, to “enhance the paranoia … and … get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”

- or "email" box.

“If it turned out that the U.S. government was suppressing Americans’ right to express dissent—including and especially dissent about the most crucial issues: the war, the use of apocalyptic weapons in the war, and racial equality—then much was at stake. Without the freedom to dissent without being spied on, Davidon thought, dissent was empty, erased, useless.”

“In November 1969, the world was horrified to learn that American soldiers had massacred 504 unarmed Vietnamese children, women, and elderly people in March 1968 in My Lai....old men were bayoneted, women and children were shot in the backs of their heads, some young girls were raped and then killed...President Nixon accused the press of inflating the case in order to “chip away” at support for the war.”

“When madness is the acceptable public state of mind, we’re all in danger, all in danger; for madness is an infection in the air. And I submit that we all breathe the infection and that the movement has at times been sickened by it too."

“The Media files revealed that there were two FBIs—the public FBI Americans revered as their protector from crime, arbiter of values, and defender of citizens’ liberties, and the secret FBI.”- Ya don't say!