The FBI's Campaign Against Some Rightwing Groups Looks Exactly Like J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO Scandal
(AP Photo/Harvey Georges) The use of government agents and informants to instigate criminal acts to create the pretense for a crackdown is hardly new, and it is not exclusively the province of overtly totalitarian regimes. On the night of March 21, 1965, 40-year-old Freedom Rider Viola Liuzzo and a 19-year-old Black volunteer with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (LeRoy Moton) were driving back to Selma, AL, from assisting some 3,000 civil rights marchers under the leadership of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., on their trek from Selma to Montgomery, AL, for a scheduled rally...