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Hijinks or Undercover Ops?
If four politically-motivated young men with left-wing (or Muslim), rather than right-wing ties, broke into the office of a senior Senate Homeland Security Committee member and gained access to her computer files — do you think we’d be hearing less about hijinks and more about Guantanamo?
The story of the break-in at Senator Landrieu’s office gets weirder and weirder by the day.
For those who were distracted by the State of the Union, last week, federal officials arrested four young men and charged them with plotting to tamper with the telephone system, after they were caught impersonating telephone repairmen in the New Orleans office of Senator Mary Landrieu.
The mainstream media account of the story has it that the four were neo-Conservative pranksters gone overboard in an attempt to uncover possibly damaging information related to the Democratic senator and a voter registration drive or the health-care bill, or both. One of the men was a conservative activist who gained fame – or infamy – last year by posing as a pimp and secretly recording members of the community group ACORN giving him advice on how to set up a brothel.
Read the alternative media and the story points away from pranks and towards undercover operations. The group of arrestees, it seems, not only had ties to conservative campus think tanks, but may also be linked to the US intelligence community.
Lindsay Beyerstein is alleging that one of those arrested, Stan Dai, is an Assistant Director at the Intelligence Community Center for Academic Excellence at Trinity University in DC.
Curious about the ICCAE ? David Price over at Counterpunch happens to be reporting in depth on the group. According to Price, the ICCAE (aptly pronounced “ICKY”) is just one of a handful of programs started on US campuses after 9-11 to “sneak unidentified students with undisclosed links to intelligence agencies into university classrooms.” The Trinity program, according to its website, “received a $250,000 renewable grant from the US intelligence Community” upon launching in 2004.
“Hijinks to Handcuffs for Landrieu Provocateurs,” so ran the New York Times story by Jim Rutenberg and Campbell Roberston January 31. “Silent Coup” is the headline of David Price’s piece in Counterpunch. Connecting the two is Raw Story’s “Landrieu Phone Plot: Men Arrested have Links to Intelligence Community.”
Whatever the truth, and however this story pans out, thank heavens for independent media. Left in establishment journalists’ hands, this story might not have gone anywhere. Thanks to inquisitive independent media, the dots are out there, just crying to be linked up.
19 Comments so far
Show AllCOINTELPRO. Chicago's '60s era Red Squad. Planted informants in groups setting up to protest at national conventions. Cops infiltrating environmental groups. This newest iteration just continues the legacy of beating them by joining them, then turning them in. Laura Flanders is right - if the infiltrators struck a right-wing group, things would turn out differently - and not for the better. Joe McCarthy must be giggling in his grave.
Good point by Laura--if these guys had been "liberals" and done this, they would be called terrists.
The US media is a disgrace for not covering.
Not to pick knits, but there was no “break-in”, there was an illegal entry.
Secondly, proving links between these four nutcases and America’s intelligence community proves exactly what? If America’s intelligence community wants to know every word spoken on Landreu’s telephone system all the “Intelligence Conmmunity” needs to do is to send a request to the NSA for the data since it’s common knowledge that since the earliest days of the administration of George W. Bush virtually all of the telephone companies have been providing the NSA with all of their data streams.
Finnaly is would be much more telling to disclose the FINANCIAL RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN JAMES O’KEEFE AND ULTRA-RIGHT-WING BILLIONAIRES LIKE RICHARD MELLON SCAIFE that have been using their wealth to reshape the United States more to their likeing for over a generation.
Technically, opening the door and walking in without permission is the definition of breaking and entering. There doesn't have to be ANY damage done to the lock or the building for "breaking" to be part of it. In fact, you never hear of one without the other, they are considered parts of the same crime.
Having said that, I also want to say in general that I doubt that a W appointed judge will be letting anything happen to the right's little darling. I suspect that there will be some technicality that lets this little bastard get off Scott free. And Flanders is 100% correct, if this had been one of "ours" doing this to one of "theirs", there would be a call for no trial, just kill them. Funny thing, I thought we were ALL supposed to be AMERICANS. Seems to be a bit more than some people can handle, being in a country with those they disagree with. But what do you expect to happen when you have those who are supposed to be our leaders playing divide and conquer on us for over 3 decades?
Time for justice to mean the SAME thing to both sides, again. When was the turning point that made it possible to have a two tiered justice system that puts JUST US in jail, and leaves them free to not only walk the streets, but to continue to do such horrendous damage to us and clearly to the next generation? What is it in the righty mentality that thinks that it's a good thing to destroy your own country for your own gain?
It would be nice to think that this little miscreant will get the time he so clearly needs to think about the BS he has pulled, but I just don't think it will happen. Some W appointee will see to it. But smoke a joint and YOU will see time. God, this country is OVER. Lock up when you leave.
Our current media is geared to churning out right-wing terrorists with a pro-rich agenda. Virtually all superheroes are constantly going after non-whilte "bad guys" who are trying to steal diamonds or nuclear secrets from the rich "good guys."
I sometimes think that semi-commercial media like GritTV just legitimizes all media.
More BushCo. Wurlitzing w/DEMs dat brung ya (back from the dead, AGAIN)!
The mainstream media did "cover the story" of the attempted bugging of Senator Landrieu's office by right wing wannabe clandestine dirty tricksters. In typical fashion, the focus was upon personalities, and the link back to the ACORN set up publicity stunt.
As the slogan went during the Watergate saga, follow the money. Good work, Laura Flanders and the indie media. If it turns out that one or more of these clowns does have ties to funding from the US intelligence community, how is this caper all that different from the Watergate break-in scandal?
Oops! I forgot. We're on Obama's watch now.
Chase after that lead diligently enough, and next thing you know the long knives will be out inside the DC beltway to take down CIA Director Leon Panetta for failure to properly supervise his own black ops boys. Stranger things have happened. You never know where the spin may spiral.
Bill from Saginaw
The first thing I thought of while reading this article was an article that Greenwald wrote January 15th.
-Obama Confidant's Spine-Chilling Proposal-
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/15-13
Not exactly what Cass was talking about but a nice little group of infiltrators none-the-less.
If watergate were to happen today exactly as it did 40 years ago...how would Woodward/Bernstein be received by MSM?? My sense is there never would have been a watergate scandel. Woodward/Bernstein would be castigated as "alternative media kooks".
Exactly! But to clarify your remark for younger readers, they were mot only well received, they were the prize reporters of the MSM - The Wash. Post.
Today, you can be near-certain that they would have been told to drop the story, take up something else. If they insisted, the WP would have quietly fired them. Off to pecking their lives away in the obscure blogosphere with them!
Sioux Rose
RADAR: Quite true, and indicative of how far the pendulum has moved to the right. Of course several decades of all sorts of deregulation and lax tax policies upon the wealthy have led to an inversion of the ownership society: the top 5% own it all and we, as Chris Hedges recently alluded, are all fast becoming serfs. Money buys lots of access to the airwaves that in turn manufacture consent and marginalize dissent.
Important voices from the left are seldom IF EVER seen on the MSM shows, and the right wing practically has the entire radio dial tied up.
When I was a child and watched my father eat exotic cheeses I used to turn up my nose. He said, "You have to develop a taste for it." The same is true with respect to the type of diet the American TV viewer is fed. The fellow I date pointed out quite aptly that action movies keep upping the ante on crash scenes, blow-up events, and all sorts of violence. In a sense, the typical viewer is being habituated to a TASTE for violence. And it's EVERYWHERE in our heavily armed (inclusive of all those uniformed guards) society! On the other side of the coin, with so few voices advocating FOR peace, or single payer health care, or conservation efforts to ward off the ravages of climate change, those voices that DO take these positions are seen as the weirdos. How can they be right, the naive viewer wonders, when so many experts all over media do not share their views? The power of consensus applied to many persons' need for acceptance catalyzes a conformity where it otherwise would not likely exist. Especially IF truth mattered!
Hoo boy.
If, say, Coal River Mountain Watch** was caught doing this in, say Gov. Manchin's, or Jay Rockefeller's office in Charleston, we wouldn't hear the end of it in the national media! Like when the ACORN guys were being flippant with the faux-pimp, it would be the Crime of the Century!
But when right wing extremists do it. It is treated, if it is treated at all, as a light humorous story to wrap up the evening news with.
**Not that CRMW or the OVEC would ever do this of course, they are entirely too "nice", and that is why we are being utterly defeated.
I have long wondered why only the good guys get assassinated.
Because the folk most willing to assassinate someone are bad guys and bad guys are not so eager to kill their own.
Ask Jesus.
Alan Moore, in his seminal work 'V For Vendetta', called these kind of off-the-books government thugs 'fingermen'.
In Orwell's '1984', they would have worked for the Ministry of Truth.
To the followers of the cyberpunk sci-fi genre called cyberpunk, these would be 'solos'.
In Adolph Hitler's rising NSDAP(Nazi Party), they would have been 'brownshirts'.
But lets call a spade a spade: these creatures are the disposable bagmen of the Corporate Elite. No one will come to their rescue, and they will go down without naming who hired them.
In all likelihood, because of the notoriety this news 'non-event' is getting, the perps will probably suffer a series of fatal accidents in the near future.
True that, O'Keefe should probably avoid flights on small airplanes, drinks in seedy bars and hunting trips with Dick Cheney or Sarah Palin.
Ask author J.H Hatfield about how life has been since he did the unauthorized biography of George W. Bush titled 'Fortunate Son'.
Oh that's right...
He's not talking to anyone on account of his being dead due to a 'drug overdose/suicide' in a hotel room shortly after the book was published.
Hatfield suffered the same fate so many of the talkative Kennedy witnesses did. He knew too much and wouldn't keep his mouth shut.
The 'ACORN pimp' definitely qualifies a soon-to-happen 'accidental death'.