25 and 50 years ago
October 10, 1975
WASHINGTON--Buried somewhere at FBI headquarters is a division where agents study "locks and picks," or more popularly, "black-bag jobs"--the government's term for burglaries.
The vast extent of the FBI's illegal break-ins was revealed September 25 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee announced that by the agency's own figures the FBI carried out 238 burglaries from 1942 to 1968 against "domestic security targets."
Fourteen organizations--none of them identified by the Senate committee--were the victims of these illegal entries. Another three U.S. dissident groups were also burglarized "numerous" times from 1952 to 1966, over and above the 238 figure.
This is the first time the FBI has publicly admitted that the methods that became famous with the Watergate break-in have been used on a massive scale for decades against opponents of government policy.
The revelations came as the Senate committee heard testimony from Charles Brennan, former head of the FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division.
Brennan was the final witness in three days of testimony on the 1970 Huston spy plan, the government program to intensify illegal surveillance against antiwar, Black, and student groups.
October 9, 1950
The Korean people reeled from staggering blows last week in their struggle for independence. The world's mightiest military power, equipped with every fiendish instrument of destruction, poured sufficient troops against the North Korean forces to break through to the 38th parallel; and the United Nations placed its rubber-stamp approval on invasion of the peninsula by MacArthur up to the border of Manchuria.
At the same time, the swift advance of MacArthur's armies toward the armed forces of the USSR and China visibly heightened world tension.
Thus Truman's "police action," undertaken with the solemn promise it would halt when the North Koreans were pushed out of South Korea, has once again confirmed the charge that this is a war of brazen colonial conquest. The new promise is that American troops will be kept in Korea only as long as "necessary."
The aim clearly is to convert Korea into a beach head from which in time an invasion can be mounted into the Asiatic continent in accordance with Wall Street's grandiose schemes of world conquest. This was the route followed by imperial Japan when it set out to conquer an empire.
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