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To be fair, some of the groups that COINTELPRO targeted were subversive. For example, the weather underground: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground

• cyrus_ 13y ago
  many of them were "subversive", but very few were violently so.
• jlgreco 13y ago
  "To be fair, some of the people Stalin executed really were out to get him." What the fuck kind of justification is "some were accurately targeted"?
• scarmig 13y ago
  To be fair, you've stepped into a giant pile of irony. Indeed, the Weathermen were a violent terrorist group that needed to be shut down. But very key point in the story: its members originally were an extremely radical but small faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Until its fracturing, the Weathermen had committed no crimes, and SDS was undoubtedly a legitimate organization to exist in a democratic society. And the irony? Well, the FBI played no small part in the fracturing of SDS. COINTELPRO planted agents who acted as infiltrators, agitators, disruptors, and agents provocateur, with the explicit goal of destroying SDS. So those bombs put more than a smidgeon of blood on the FBI's hands as well, and the FBI were every bit as much a malign anti-American, subversive influence as the Weathermen.