Departments

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FBI

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    11/14/2022

    Beverly Gage on J. Edgar Hoover—Enemy of Democracy

    Beverly Gage's book explains the FBI director's longevity not to dark arts of blackmail and secret-keeping, but to a more straightforward and disturbing explanation: many Americans shared Hoover's reactionary views and liked how he cracked down on dissenters. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    11/9/2022

    Ernie Lazar, Who Amassed Archive of FBI Documents, Dies at 77

    "Through sheer perseverance and patience, Mr. Lazar became a kind of Zen master of the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, a provision enacted in 1967 that allowed the public a centralized way to request unclassified government material."

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    8/18/2022

    Trump is Attacking the Most Conservative Agency of the Government

    by Garrett M. Graff

    The embedded conservatism of the FBI is so severe that Democratic presidents have never felt politically entitled to name a fellow Democrat to lead the Bureau. Trump's attacks on the FBI as part of a liberal "deep state" are ludicrous.

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    1/30/2022

    The Islamophobia of Domestic Security and the Capitol Insurrection

    by Juan Cole

    Perhaps if the FBI hadn't been spending the last 20 years spying on American Muslims the organizing of white Christian nationalists leading to to the January 6 assault on the Capitol would't have been an apparent surprise to the authorities. 

  • SOURCE: New York Review of Books
    2/21/2021

    What the FBI Had on Grandpa

    by Molly Jong-Fast

    "I never considered my grandfather to be a danger to the republic, but J. Edgar Hoover disagreed." The FBI surveilled writer Howard Fast extensively, though, as he wrote in his autobiography, "the eleven hundred pages detailed every—or almost every—decent act I had performed in my life."

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    2/13/2021

    The Unsettling Message of "Judas and the Black Messiah"

    by Elizabeth Hinton

    The film "brings the disparities engendered by a surveillance state into focus, leaving audiences to wonder what this country would look like if the war on white supremacy were fought with the same implacable intensity as the one against the Black Panther Party some 50 years ago."

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    2/10/2021

    "Judas and the Black Messiah" Is an American Tragedy

    The performances of the lead actors in "Judas and the Black Messiah" elevate the story of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton's assassination by the police and FBI to a complex story of the Black freedom movement. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    2/9/2021

    What ‘Defund the Police’ Really Means

    by Simon Balto

    The debate about "defunding police" must return to the community-driven vision of activists like assassinated Black Panther Fred Hampton, who envisioned a program of community empowerment that could divert the vast resources spent on policing toward other social ends.