The 70's revisted

A few weeks ago Maureen Dowd wrote a column about about how Cheney wanted to return our presidency to the 70's before the crackdown on wiretapping etc. I had never really studied the 70's, considering it a bleak and boring part of history, but I'm quickly catching up.

I'm sure all know this one quote by Cheney

“Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both during the 70’s served, I think, to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area,” Cheney said as Air Force Two took him on an inspection tour of the Middle East.

At the time I didn't fully know what he meant. However, here's a something from The Village Voice that highlights what the FBI and CIA did before their powers were reined in.

Between 1960 and 1974, the FBI conducted half a million investigations of so-called subversives, without a single conviction, and maintained files on well over a million Americans. The FBI tapped phones, opened mail, planted bugs, and burglarized homes and offices. At least 26,000 individuals were at one point catalogued on an FBI list of persons to be rounded up in the event of a “national emergency.” Hoover was particularly obsessed with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, which he thought was influenced by communists. The FBI proceeded to undermine the civil rights movement, planting agents among the Freedom Riders (and also the Ku Klux Klan). Hoover put spies into the ranks of labor activists and of Democratic Party insurgents during the 1964 presidential campaign.

Meanwhile, the CIA began spying domestically. The Agency planted informants of its own within the United States, especially on college campuses. Between 1953 and 1973, they opened and photographed nearly a quarter of a million first-class letters, producing an index of nearly 1.5 million names. Under something called Operation CHAOS, separate files were created on approximately 7,200 Americans and over 100 domestic groups. In 1964, the CIA even created a secret arm called the Domestic Operations Division, the very name of which flew in the face of its legal charter. Back then, there were no “communications problems” between the two agencies.

Is this the road we want to go back down?