Tag: FBI

Emmett Exhumed.

“Twas down in Mississippi no so long ago,
When a young boy from Chicago town stepped through a Southern door.” FBI agents begin an exhumation of the murdered Emmett Till. “‘One purpose of this is to positively identify the remains and dispel any rumors as to whether it is truly Emmett Till or not,’ [FBI Spokesman] Bochte said. A second reason, he said, is to ‘see if any further evidence can be looked at to help Mississippi officials bring additional charges if warranted.’”

Throat Cleared.

As suspected by several journalists and at the ripe young age of 91, Deep Throat reveals himself to Vanity Fair as W. Mark Felt, the FBI’s #2 man during Watergate. “‘I don’t think (being Deep Throat) was anything to be proud of,’ Felt indicated to his son, Mark Jr., at one point, according to the article. ‘You (should) not leak information to anyone.’” Update: With great hullabaloo, the Post confirms. Update 2: Nixon weighs in, as do Slate‘s Tim Noah (multiple times) and David Greenberg.

Oh, you mean that Koran.

While the toilet incident that got Newsweek in trouble was emphatically denied, the Pentagon announces — after the release of FBI interviews obtained by the ACLU — that there have in fact been incidents of Koran mistreatment at Gitmo. (Surprise, surprise.) While “the interviews underscore that U.S. government officials were made aware of allegations of prisoner abuse and Koran mistreatment within months of the opening of Guantanamo Bay in early 2002“, just last week “Pentagon spokesman Lawrence T. Di Rita said the Defense Department had received no credible claims of such abuse.”

We’re all in it together.

After a long and tortuous road, including some last-minute GOP balking, Dubya signed the intelligence bill into law today. “The new law, which grew out of last summer’s report of the national commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, brings together the 15 separate intelligence agencies into a single command structure, legislates creation of a National Counter Terrorism Center, increases border security and establishes a civil liberties board to serve as a check on excesses in the war on terrorism.” Sounds good…now let’s get that bastard Buttle.

Fox in the Henhouse?

Ashcroft gets the inside word on the FBI’s Plamegate investigation. Well, on one hand he is the Attorney General. But, c’mon now – the smart thing to do would be to recuse himself from this case, particularly given his close ties to Rove. As I’ve said before in other contexts, if we were talking about Janet Reno here, Dan Burton would already have fired up the investigation train.

Same tricks, different decade.

Used in section this week: J. Edgar Hoover hones his later anti-civil-rights strategy as the FBI goes after Marcus Garvey. (In fact, the first black FBI agent was hired by Hoover to infiltrate Garvey‘s UNIA…what a victory for progress.) Speaking of which, if you haven’t been reading Caught in Between lately, CiB’s been collecting superlative black history links all month long, including items on Reconstruction, the Middle Passage, Juneteenth, Lynching, Harlem, and the Dred Scott Decision, among others. All worth a look, in February as in any other month.