Mark Felt: Hero or Villain?

[wtmusic]

--CNN Headline

Yes, Mark Felt is a villain for risking his life to help uncover the criminal acts of one of the most dishonest, vile presidents in American history, and seal his fate.

Then: cut to lying, stinking, filthy media whore Judy Woodruff and an interview with Ken Mehlman about "The Bush Agenda".:puke:

The WH must be doling out bonuses trying to make up for ground lost last week...

[seemslikeadream]

1. What is Watergate?

Watergate's Company men: McCord, Sturgis and Hunt



"It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Watergate was a CIA setup." - Frank Sturgis

Yesterday there was an answer - and it may not even be the answer - to the question Who is Deep Throat? But that's a sideshow, and not even a particularly interesting one, when there's still no satisfactory answer to What is Watergate?

It's become part of history, as it was meant to, that Watergate was all about a botched White House intelligence operation at Democratic headquarters and its bungled cover-up. It's not hard to see why. Nixon's paranoia was more than sufficient to account for its implausibility. And though the Democrats needed no help imploding in 1972, they were neatly nudged along by Republican dirty tricks. After all, Karl Rove cut his teeth on the campaign. (Rove's mentor Donald Segretti served six months in prison for forging letters on the stationary of early frontrunner Edmund Muskie.) As Lisa Pease suggests, even the shooting of candidate George Wallace may have been an example of the oldest dirty trick in the book.

So bugging the DNC made a perfect cover story. But it's not the story.

In Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA, Jim Houghan establishes, using FBI documents and sources ignored by those hypnotized by the misdirection, that the DNC telephones were never actually bugged, and that false evidence - crude, defunct bugging devices - were planted in the headquarters months after the Watergate arrests to support the cover story. He also found that E Howard Hunt and James McCord, both CIA men, were using the White House only as a cover for domestic espionage, including spying on the administration. Most significantly, Houghan determined that clients of prostitutes in the Columbia Plaza Apartments, adjoining the Watergate complex, were the real targets of the operation.

Houghan's conclusions may have appeared incredible in 1984. In 2005, they should be predictable:

"Watergate," then, was not so much a partisan political scandal as it was, secretly, a sex scandal, the unpredictable outcome of a CIA operation that, in the simplest of terms, tripped on its own shoelaces. There is more, much more, but the point is made: our recent history is a forgery, the by-product of secret agents acting on secret agendas of their own.

By 1969, McCord had become director of the technical and physical security sections of the CIA's Office of Security. The broad responsibility of the OS was to protect CIA assets, operations and personnel. which entailed maintaining more than 1.7 million files on "persons of interest." The OS, therefore, had an admitted domestic reach, reported directly to the Director of Central Intelligence. Houghan writes that, "in effect, the OS is an extension of the director's office in a way that other CIA components are not; and because of this...it has served as a vehicle for some of the agency's most questionable operations." These include conducting the CIA's first mind control programs, Bluebird and Artichoke; the Mafia-assisted assassination attempts upon Fidel Castro; infiltrating anti-war and black power organizations in the sixties; "Operation Chaos" and sexual sting operations.

more
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/

[wtmusic]

5. This reads like a really, really bad movie

"This set up competing agendas between the Nixon men and the Company men within the White House. The CIA prostitution operation was so sensitive that McCord, aided by Russell, set out to sabotage the June Watergate break-in so the intelligence gathered through the wiretaps would remain the CIA's proprety. Houghan writes that 'in effect the snake had swallowed its tail: CIA agents working under cover of Nixon's re-election committee came to be targeted against their own operation.... All that the agents could do was to stand tall and, when all else failed, blow their own cover.'"

:tinfoilhat:

When something seems too complicated, it probably is. Not buying it.

[stpalm]

6. but it's on the prestiegious INTERNET!

On a blog, no less! How can you not believe it?!!

[wtmusic]

7. Good point

They wouldn't put up lies or half-baked conjecture on a website, would they? For everyone to see??

[seemslikeadream]

9. So sorry I won't let it happen again

please pardon the post

[thebigidea]

16. considering that the "call girl ring" hoohaa is what Liddy pushes...

... I think I'll pass.

[ClintonTyree]

2. Oh boy, Mehlman and Woodruffruff.............

what a lovely twosome. I'm sure they're being very fair and balanced. :sarcasm:
The bush agenda in one word; greed.

On edit; Felt is a hero, despite what all of Nixon's former asslickers (Buchanan, Liddy, Colson etc.) say. They're still pissed that they were A. caught, convicted and jailed or B. lost their cushy jobs polishing Nixon's ego.

[maveric]

3. Or a Fake? Maybe Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee got the memo?

An old man, on his way out, takes the rap and heat off the real "Deep Throat"? <cough> poppy <cough>

[Coastie for Truth]

4. Mark Felt is a hero

in the sense that Claus von Stauffenberg and Colonel-General Ludwig Beck were heroes.

[leftofthedial]

8. Hero, big time

a great American

[orleans]

11. i agree--he was a hero

[saltpoint]

10. Like your post here, wtmusic.

I didn't catch Judy's babble on Felt, but feel that he is a patriot.

Nixon was, by all counts, a fucking mess toward the end of his presidency.

It's not Felt's fault that Nixon behaved like a paranoid monster.

[hfojvt]

13. toward the end?

Nixon resigned in August of 1974, his second term began in January of 1973 following his re-election in November 1972.
ABC news blew the lid off the "Felt is not a hero" arguments. John Dean said that Felt should have gone to the grand jury, but the grand jury had not yet convened when he was talking to Woodward. They also showed that he could not go through channels because those channels were implicated in the cover-up.
Another hat tip to ABC news, certainly better in this case than CNN. I wonder how CBS did it?

[saltpoint]

14. Point well taken. My family was split violently between JFK & Nixon in

1960 and just as split in 68 when Humphrey almost beat him again.

The McGovern race was my first vote and of course my side lost and lost big. I felt MUCH more hopeless then in the wake of that Nixon win than in 2004 when Bush-Cheney either did or did not cheat to beat Kerry-Edwards. History will play its cards and we'll all find out later on.

The tapes gradually being released about Nixon do reveal him to be off his damned rocker much earlier than the second term. Agreed.

And wow, what a dark soul those tapes reveal.

[moondust]

12. Hero.

If he had not done what he did the way he did it there's a fair chance it would have disappeared down the memory hole. With something like this you don't just go up to one of Nixon's loyalists and show your cards hoping they'll turn themselves in!

[Lexingtonian]

15. whistleblowers are imperfect people

Because real crooks only let people they themselves trust into positions of any knowledge or power.

And for people who are/feel morally compromised, it's harder stuff for them to come forward than for the clean sorts. Sinners can do things saints cannot.

It really is heroism for the likes of Felt to have gone as far as he did. He seems to have regretted it for a lot of the past thirty years- and I think his family decided to prove to him that his loyalties to those crooks was deeply misplaced, to put him at peace with himself before he died.