The FBI has enjoyed, for much of it's existance, a splendid public image. This is no accident. J. Edgar Hoover spent as much time polishing the image of the FBI as he did solving crimes, and the unofficial motto of the FBI remains, "Never embarrass the bureau".
Hoover was obsessed with Hollywood, going back to his battles with Charlie Chaplin. Hoover personally supervised the filming of the Jimmy Stewert movie, "The FBI Story", and FBI documents show that the FBI not only kept watch on celebrities, but kept an eye on movies that might be considering showing the FBI in a poor light. So concerned with the FBI's public image was Hoover that he even used bureau assets to track rumors of his gay lifestyle.
But that's just the FBI's public image. The reality is quite something else.
It is inevitable that when a government lies to the people, sooner or later the liars need to have in place a mechanism to suppress anyone who might wish to expose the lies, the first amendment be damned.
Fullfilling that role is the FBI and it's COINTELPRO program, the harsh reality behind the polished public image.
Originally started back in the 60s to sabotage opposition to the war in Vietnam, the FBI's COINTELPRO operation was exposed in the 70s and led to Congressional Hearings. In those hearings, it became obvious that rather than fighting crime, the FBI had been engaged in criminal actions of its own and for no other purpose than to silence anyone who spoke out against the government's policies, and especially those who challenged the official view of events.
One of the tools most used by the FBI was to sabotage public support for dissident views by planting false information, either through informants, the complicit media, or undercover informants which operated on every college campus (and still do to this day).
One of the most infamous smear jobs involved the "Black Panther Coloring Book". The Black Panthers were originally formed to address two issues. They wanted to make sure that kids in the ghettos were getting breakfasts, and they were concerned with the curriculum in the public schools and wanted local control of education (an issue that many today can easily identify with). And, of course, they wanted the government to respect their Constitutional rights.
Needless to say, the Federal government did not like either the idea of giving up control of the public school curriculum, nor of having to respect anyone's Constitutional rights.
The FBI then printed up the coloring book shown at the above link and distributed it far and wide. That it was mailed primarily to white households should have been the tip-off, but again, people didn't believe that the government of the United States engaged in such despicable behaviors, and that belief kept the people blind. The mainstream media then proceeded to tell the public that the coloring books were being given out to black children at those free breakfasts, and forever after, the Black Panthers were portrayed by the media as dangerous fanatics intending to kill white people. Needless to say, all support for local control of the curriculum vanished.
Yet another infamous FBI trick was the smearing of actress Jean Seberg, who at a time when the Black Panthers were under attack by the media and the FBI, openly supported them on the issues of civil rights. Because of her fame as a film star, Jean Seberg drew a lot of public attention to the real issues the Black Panthers were working for, so the FBI set out to destroy her.
The SAIC Los Angeles wrote a memo to FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. Page one of the memo requested permission to plant a false story to destroy Jean Seberg's public image. Page two of the memo contained assurances that the smearing would never be traced back to the FBI, clear evidence that the Los Angeles office knew it was acting in an unethical manner.
Permission was granted by Washington D.C. with the suggestion that the smear be delayed until Jean's pregnancy was much more obvious. The phony letters were sent, and the story broken by Los Angles Times gossip columnist Joyce Haber. NEWSWEEK picked up the story, and it was soon world wide. All this at a time when inter-racial sex, let alone an inter-racial adulterous affair, was a career-wrecking scandal. The emotional shock of the smear drove Jean Seberg into miscarriage. The funeral for the baby was held with an open coffin, so the lie stood revealed in it's most tragic and pathetic form. Soon after, Jean Seberg committed suicide. Because Jean Seberg's husband was a French Diplomat, the scandal became an international incident that ended only when the FBI was forced to make a public apology for it's action (one of very few times it has done so).
This is the harsh reality behind the glitzy and quite phony façade of the FBI. As whistleblower Frank Whitehurst has pointed out, and as the lawsuit against the FBI for witness harassment and evidence tampering in the Vincent Foster case underscores, the FBI is not always interested in what is true, but only in what is expedient.
The FBI is in the business of planting false information for the express purpose of deceiving the public.
The evidence that TWA 800 was victim to something other than a mysterious fuel tank explosion could fill a website (several, actually) but for our purposes, we will focus on one issue only, that of the strange red residue found on three rows of seats in the reconstructed wreckage.
In the NTSB's report, specifically the Fire & Explosions report written by Merritt Birky, the NTSB claims that the red residue, thought by many to be the combustion products of a solid fuel rocket motor, was the 3M contact cement used in the manufacture of the seats. The NTSB went further, claiming that lab tests conducted by NASA scientist Dr. Charles Bassett had linked the red residue to the seat glue.
But that is not what Dr. Bassett found. In a sworn declaration entered as evidence in a court case Dr. Bassett makes it clear that his tests did not and could not link the red residue to seat glue. More telling, deliberate attempts by him to coerce the normally pale green contact cement into assuming the reddish color of the residue all failed.
The NTSB lied to the public when they claimed Dr. Bassett's lab tests linked the red residue to seat glue. R. Bassett's tests did nothing of the kind.
The NTSB lied.
What the red residue actually is, is a subject for another monograph. The key point to be made here is that the National Transportation Safety Board willfully and knowingly lied to the public about an air crash.
The NTSB lied.
Keep that in mind.
