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Many have made the claim that Lee Harvey Oswald was sent to Russia by the CIA, when it could be as simple as a group of private citizens or a local agency like the LAPD behind it. The LAPD was extremely anti-Communist in those days. It had secret divisions investigating subversives which kept huge files on private citizens. If Oswald was recruited by the LAPD it would show him to be a right wing operative, not the communist many claim him to be.
compared2what? wrote:Then I emerged from the stream of my consciousness into reality. I hate when that happens.
Los Angeles is a young city, young even by California standards. But in that short time, the city’s earned a reputation for its rightwing and racist cops, and for its sophisticated and zealous political surveillance apparatus.
Frank Donner, a labor attorney and pioneering researcher into modern police political surveillance, considered Los Angeles to be America’s premier police state city. From his great 1991 book “Protectors of Privilege”:
“In Los Angeles…more than in any other city in the country, the role of the police department and its red squad as clients of business interests in combating dissent and unionism was from the start openly proclaimed and was implemented over the years with only minimal concessions to changes in political climate, accountability requirements, reform movements, recurring corruption scandals, and adverse court decisions. Finally, the political intelligence component of the LAPD is unique because of its unabashed right-wing commitment. To be sure, all of the red squads were guided by highly conservative political values, but in Los Angeles right-wing zealotry reigned supreme. This extremist bias accounts for the unit’s operational aggression, persistent racism, failure to deal with right-wing bombings in the sixties, operational collaboration with legislative witch-hunts…"
...
Harry Chandler, L.A.’s O.G. oligarch and owner of the Los Angeles Times, owned most of the land here, which he pimped out to white Midwesterners as the “white spot of America." L.A. was advertised as a place untroubled by “labor difficulties, inefficient workers and a constantly rising labor costs,” in contrast to the cities back East. And the L.A. police department — and its army of undercover officers — were the custodians of this purity, tasked with keeping L.A.’s white spot clean and sparkling, and union free.
The city’s founding fathers wielded unchecked political and economic power, and destroyed anyone who sought to curb or challenge their dominance. The LAPD’s covert division blackmailed political and business opponents and waged constant war on socialists, labor activists and assorted leftists. They responded to even the tiniest whiff of pro-labor sentiment with extreme violence.
So close was the relationship between business and covert police work that for a long time LAPD’s Intelligence Bureau (the official name of LA’s “Red Squad”) was housed inside the Chamber of Commerce — which had been founded by Harry Chandler’s father-in-law and fellow owner of the Los Angeles Times Harrison Gray Otis. Best of all, the Intel Bureau was headed by William Hynes, who got the job after a distinguished career in the private sector as a labor-provocateur-for-hire.
With leadership like that, the LAPD performed marvelously. Intel Bureau agents planted bombs to implicate union activists, attacked labor symps, broke up strikes, blackmailed reformist politicians and received additional pay and bonuses from the Chamber of Commerce and affiliated companies for strike-breaking services rendered. And the Intel Bureau did not restrict its activities to Los Angeles. They rode up to other counties to break up farm worker strikes on behalf of oligarch farmers, who were frequently based in Los Angeles and Pasadena.
The Intel Division began amassing files on individuals and political groups, sharing them with other law enforcement agencies across the nation.
Undercover detectives colluded with Mexico’s dictatorship to harass Mexican political activists hiding out in the U.S. Cops were on Mexico’s payroll, which was known and condoned by LAPD’s top brass. The practice of working for foreign nations would continue well into the present — as the ADL spying scandal showed. But more on that later…
The fact is that police corruption and covert political repression went hand in hand. Cops were given a free hand to plunder and run their own criminal rackets, as long as they tended to the business interests of their masters first.
In 1938, an investigator working for a local police reform group was targeted by a car bomb. He survived, but was badly injured. Subsequent investigation revealed that a crooked cop named Earl Kynette had planted the bomb. Kynette was part of a special “secret service” unit within the LAPD that was tasked with spying on and blackmailing rivals of then-mayor Frank Shaw. Kynette was recruited to lead the LAPD’s secret service after a prostitute extortion racket he had been running was exposed in public.
This was just part of the scummy daily grind for L.A.’s covert ops cops. The hardboiled crime pulp fiction that came out of that era wasn’t fantasy — it was, as they say, inspired by real events.
The Intel Bureau’s activities were slightly curbed in the early 1940s, following a series of scandals and shocking revelations of the La Follette Committee, a blockbuster Senate investigation into big business’s war on labor unions. But the lull didn’t last for long. WWII was just around the corner, and the Intel Bureau’s anti-labor activities were brought back with a vengeance under the guise of Cold War subversive activity.
By that point, covert policing had become deeply ingrained in LAPD’s culture. And many of the department’s most powerful figures rose up through the ranks of the undercover/intel division.
William Parker, LAPD’s longest-serving and most influential chief, had come up from the Red Squad, where he worked to infiltrate and subvert “radical” groups. If his experience had taught him anything, it was that police intel apparatus provided raw political power… In that sense he was like J. Edgar Hoover…obsessed with keeping tabs on everyone and everything...
And that brings us to today.
L.A.’s current chief Charlie Beck also hails from LAPD’s covert police culture. He was part of the elite anti-gang CRASH Unit—Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, which triggered the Ramparts scandal, in which detectives essentially operated as a police criminal gang: confiscating drugs and selling them, framing and murdering innocent people as a matter of routine.
Charlie Beck never got caught up in the scandal and does not like to talk about his time there, other than to say that those were the “dark days.” But he was eventually brought in to “reform” the Ramparts Division, and surely knew about what was going on. According to sworn testimony from Rafael Perez, the Ramparts detective who stole a bunch of coke and was caught trying to frame an innocent person for a shooting, just about everyone in the elite CRASH Unit knew what was going on.
Here’s what he said in 2000:
Perez: I’m going to make a very broad statement. And you’re not going to like it. It’s not good. There’s a thing called being “in the loop,” being involved. I was not in the loop or involved in anything, as far as police-wise ’til maybe ’95, when I joined CRASH. When I got into CRASH– before then, I had no concept of what certain officers do. I can tell you this. And you can put me on a polygraph. Oh, well, I know I’m going to be on a polygraph… . I would say that ninety percent of the officers that work CRASH, and not just Rampart CRASH, falsify a lot of information. They put cases on people. And I know that’s not a good thing to hear. I know that’s very broad. But the first time I saw certain things, I didn’t realize that, like I said until ’95, when I joined CRASH I didn’t see a lot of these things. I just didn’t. I was a patrol guy. I worked Narcotics. Just did my normal job. And I’m not, number one, proud of this. You know, it hurts me to say it. But there’s a lot of crooked stuff going in with LAPD, especially LAPD specialized units. ... What I’m saying is, specialized units need to be looked at, because there is – and believe me when I tell you – if there was 15 officers in CRASH, 13 of them were putting cases on people.
Rosenthal: When you say “putting cases on people” do you mean manufacturing probable cause, or do you mean actually, in essence, framing somebody who did not do something for a crime?
Perez: Both. Both.
And, as an understudy to Police Chief William Bratton, who’s backed by the CIA’s Manhattan Institute thinktank, Charlie Beck is a huge proponent of using covert police operations to fight terrorism. You can read Bratton, in his own words, describing his technique of turning cops into pre-terror fighters through “intelligence-led counterterrorist policing” techniques. Which of course will mean going after immigrants and Muslims — after all, only foreigners would want to destroy the United States.
sunny » Mon Jan 28, 2008 4:02 pm wrote:I don't think the possible involvement of LAPD rules out CIA in the least. CIA used Mafia, Dallas Police, Bethesda Naval Hospital personnel, and various and sundry other organizations to get the job done.
@TimothyS: Every city? "His last position was Director of Central Intelligence Representative in Los Angeles from 1999 to 2003." http://prn.to/17XNZ0m
PhaseOne Names Ren Stelloh Chief Operating Officer
LOS ANGELES, July 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Reynold F. "Ren" Stelloh III,
executive vice president of PhaseOne Communications, Inc. has been appointed
to the additional office of chief operating officer, according to Joanne L.
"Jody" Moxham, president and chief executive officer of the research-based
consultancy.
Stelloh joined PhaseOne in June, 2003, following a distinguished 25 year
career with the Central Intelligence Agency. His last position was Director
of Central Intelligence Representative in Los Angeles from 1999 to 2003.
PhaseOne scientifically analyzes all forms of communication, and forecasts
performance in the marketplace. For more than 20 years clients have employed
PhaseOne to determine which strategic direction is best suited to specific
marketplace challenges, to understand strengths and vulnerabilities in their
and their competitors' communications and to maximize the impact of their
communications, before spending time and money to produce them.
Stelloh is a member of the Virginia State Bar, and received his law degree
from the College of William and Mary. He lives in Redondo Beach, California.
PhaseOne is headquartered in the Howard Hughes Center, just north of Los
Angeles International Airport.
SOURCE PhaseOne Communications, Inc.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases ... 24932.html
streeb » Mon Jan 28, 2008 2:31 pm wrote:Interesting... isn't there, historically, a strong working relationship between the CIA and the LAPD? Doesn't Ruppert talk about that in Crossing the Rubicon?
Los Angeles Times @latimes
How LAPD's law-and-order chief revolutionized the way cops treated illegal immigration http://lat.ms/2kfn3Z7
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