Reply #6: COINTELPRO: FBI tried to drive Martin Luther King, Jr. to suicide.

[Octafish]

The FBI's Vendetta
Against Martin Luther King, Jr.

excerpted from the book
The Lawless State
The crimes of the U.S. Inteligence Agencies

by Morton Halperin, Jerry Berman, Robert Borosage, Christine Marwick
Penguin Books, 1976

p63
For the FBI, an organization seeking to register blacks in the South was clearly suspicious. Until 1962, the bureau would monitor King and SCLC under the "racial matters" category, which required agents to collect "all pertinent information" about the "proposed or actual activities of individuals and organizations in the racial field." According to the Senate Select Committee, the FBI information on King was "extensive."

The unfolding story of the civil rights protest movement and the leadership role of Martin Luther King, Jr., is a most ignoble chapter in the history of FBI spying and manipulation. As the civil rights movement grew and expanded, the FBI pinpointed every group and emergent leader for intensive investigation and most for harassment and disruption, the FBl's domestic version of CIA covert action abroad. The NAACP was the subject of a COMINFIL investigation. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were listed by the FBI as "Black-Hate" type organizations and selected for covert disruption of their political activities. But the most vicious FBI attack was reserved for King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. All of the arbitrary power and lawless tactics that had accumulated in the bureau over the years were marshaled to destroy King's reputation and the movement he led. The FBI relied on its vague authority to investigate "subversives" to spy on King and SCLC; its vague authority to conduct warrantless wiretapping and microphonic surveillance to tap and bug him; its secrecy to conduct covert operations against him. The campaign began with his rise to leadership and grew more vicious as he reached the height of his power; it continued even after his assassination in 1968.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/NSA/Vendetta_MLK_LS.h...