We spend a lot of time on the NutJobs and folks who think they are patriots and know something about the Constitution. I think we need a thread to remember some of the heroes who fought the government in order to preserve our civil rights under the Constitution. Some of them are not so well known. I think this July Fourth is a good day to start a memorial for them.
One such hero was Frank Wilkinson. He was one of the victims of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and went to jail for nine months after he refused to answer questions for the Committee about his associations. His case went all the way to the Supreme Court and he lost. There is strong evidence that J. Edgar Hoover had some shadowy dealings with the court. The FBI shardowed and hounded him for decades as he dedicated himself to getting rid of HUAC and exposing the FBI tactics used against him and others like him. He filed a case against the FBI and finally got them to release over
130,000 pages from their files on him. Somebody should make a movie about this courageous American hero.
From an L.A.Times article:
Quote:
It wasn't until four years later that NCARL officials began noticing similarities between their own robbery and a series of White House-directed political break-ins during the same period--in particular, the 1971 burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office only a few miles away by a band of Cubans hired by Watergate conspirators G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt.
NCARL's executive director, Frank Wilkinson, wrote Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and demanded to know if there was a connection. There wasn't, Cox wrote back, but Cox said he was nonetheless intrigued enough about the robbery to turn over Wilkinson's letter to the FBI.
Thus began more than 10 years of inquiries and litigation that eventually convinced Wilkinson that the FBI, charged with investigating the robbery, had perhaps committed it.
A wave of documents that began flowing in from FBI offices all over the country revealed that Wilkinson had been a target of FBI surveillance for nearly 30 years.
Much,much more here:
http://articles.latimes.com/1987-10-18/ ... -wilkinsonhttp://articles.latimes.com/1989-02-24/ ... -libertiesAnd sometimes the good live a long, productive life:
http://articles.latimes.com/2006/jan/05 ... wilkinson5
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Mark TwainQuote:
Research shows that 87.666 per cent of all statistics are made up.