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They would not answer it. That question has been hanging in the air since it was raised in 2006. Attorney
General Alberto Gonzales simply declined to answer the question. Actually, his refusal to answer is pretty
much an answer. And we know that in the past, the FBI and other government organizations were indeed
opening our mail—hundreds of thousands of letters. I would also say that Gonzales’s refusal to answer
the question says a lot about what is going on now, although we don’t hear much about it in the papers,
and we don’t have proof of it yet.
Now, why do we have the knowledge that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was conducting illegal,
warrantless surveillance? In Pennsylvania, some ways away from here in the suburb of Philadelphia
called Media, something happened in March of 1971. A burglary took place. A book has just come out
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which I recommend to all of you, by Betty Medsger, called The Burglary. It’s about the burglary of the
suburban FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in March of 1971—shortly before June when the Pentagon
Papers came out. Eight antiwar, nonviolent peace activists, many of whom had been involved in draft
board raids earlier, decided that it was time to go further and try to pin down documents to discover
whether there were informants in the peace movement. There were a lot of rumors about this, but no proof
of it. Eight of them, several of whom had young children at home, broke into the FBI office. This was not
something that was done lightly, as each of them understood that burglarizing a FBI office in search of
specific files had a good chance of putting them in prison for life. None of them actually was arrested or
identified until this last month in The Burglary, when some of them did choose to be interviewed by Betty
Medsger and were identified. One of them died just recently: Bill Davidon, a physics professor. Two
others, Bonnie Raines and John Raines, who had the small children, have also been identified.
These very ordinary Americans put their lives on the line in order to see what the FBI was hiding.
When they went through the files, they found that the FBI was conducting illegal warrantless surveillance
of all antiwar movements and black movements of any kind. J. Edgar Hoover was obsessed with the idea
that a “black messiah” might rise to organize blacks into some kind of movement of dissent. It later came
out that Hoover had Martin Luther King Jr. wiretapped in every place that he went: hotel rooms, home,
office, everything. And in fact, he had made recordings of sexual adventures that Martin Luther King Jr.
had been involved in, which they sent to him and his wife with a note trying to blackmail him. There were
strong implications that he should commit suicide before going to get a Nobel Peace Prize. In other cases,
black units were set against each other with false rumors that they had been attacking each other or were
informants for the FBI, leading to some deaths. Fred Hampton, who was perhaps the most idealistic and
charismatic member of the Black Panther Party, was shot in his bed by the police while he was sleeping.
His bed location was identified by his bodyguard, who was an FBI informant. All of this information was
found in the files, which were sent in a brown paper envelope to Betty Medsger when she worked at the
Washington Post. She published what was sent to her.
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