Ali in 1966.
As the world remembers the life and legacy of the great boxer Muhammad Ali, who passed away at the age of 74 last week, we here at The Progressive remember him especially for his leadership in the struggle for justice and equality. Ali once said: "Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth." President Obama, in an official Whitehouse statement, declared: “Muhammad Ali was The Greatest. Period.”
But Ali was not always held in such high regard in Washington, D.C., as Earl Ofari Hutchinson pointed out in a 2002 column for the Progressive Media Project.
Muhammad Ali was convicted of refusing induction into the military on June 20, 1967 in Federal Court in Houston. His famous quote: “I got nothing against no Viet Cong. No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger,” reverberated across the country. The conviction was eventually overturned on appeal by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971.
It was during his trial that evidence first emerged of the FBI’s massive wire-tapping of activists, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. (A recent article in The Guardian newspaper based on documents declassified in 2013 shows that the NSA was listening in as well.)
The Progressive decried this wiretapping in an August 1969 article “Dirty Business”:
What matters even more is that the case of Dr. King, brought to light almost accidentally in the course of the litigation involving boxer Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay), is obviously merely one example of a system of government snooping that is as pervasive as it is pernicious.
Nearly one half century later, our magazine still stands for free speech, justice and equality. We remember the late, great world champion Muhammad Ali for his principled stands on these issues as well. Here is the 1969 piece:
Dirty Business
There was something utterly incongruous about the great controversy that erupted a month or so ago over the question of who had authorized Federal agents to listen in on the telephone conversations of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It made little difference, in our view, whether the wiretaps had been instigated by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, as columnist Carl Rowan and former Attorneys General Ramsey Clark and Nicholas Katzenbach contended, or whether they had been instituted at the request of the late Attorney General Robert
F. Kennedy, as President Nixon and Mr. Hoover's other partisans insisted.
What mattered was that the Government of the United States, by its own admission, had ordered its agents (and, therefore, ours) to mount a systematic campaign against the privacy of a citizen whose sole "crime" was that he dedicated his labors and, ultimately, his life to the advancement of democracy.
What matters even more is that the case of Dr. King, brought to light almost accidentally in the course of the litigation involving boxer Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay), is obviously merely one example of a system of government snooping that is as pervasive as it is pernicious.
What matters most of all is that the Nixon Administration has mapped plans to expand still further its system of electronic surveillance against private citizens. In a statement that has, quite justifiably, alarmed civil libertarians and legal scholars, Attorney General John N. Mitchell has asserted a claim to unlimited power "to gather intelligence information deemed necessary to protect the nation from attempts of domestic organizations to use unlawful means to attack and subvert the existing structure of the Government."
Electronic eavesdropping has been a legal quagmire for more than four decades. The courts including the Supreme Court have handed down ambiguous and contradictory rulings on the status of wiretaps and bugs under the Fourth Amendment's protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures." State and Federal statutes have also presented a confused picture but whatever their requirements, the inexorable trend has been toward more official snooping, with or without the cover of law.
Regardless of the legal niceties of taps and bugs, the moral implications seem clear: Government eavesdropping is a practice appropriate to a police state and totally repulsive in a democracy. Much of the support for what Justice Holmes called "dirty business" comes from those who pervert the concept of "clear and present danger" as their rationalization for incursions against liberty through the employment of totalitarian techniques.
Nor is our repugnance against Government snooping confined to such a flagrant abuse as was instanced by the case of Dr. King. Should the privacy of student radicals be invaded in the interest of "national security"? We believe not. Should FBI agents tap the telephone lines of a Manhattan saloon owned by a football player suspected of associating with gamblers? We believe not. Should the sexual exertions of a New Jersey Mafioso be spread on the public record as the result of years of covert investigatory eavesdropping? We believe not. Should law-abiding citizens condone such practices since they "have nothing to hide"? We believe they do so only at the risk of imperiling their freedom.
At best, the fruits of official snooping are used to contravene the constitutional precepts barring illegal searches and self-incrimination in criminal prosecution. At times, they are used as in the case of Dr. King to provide grist for the mills of officially circulated rumors attacking an individual who has incurred the Government's suspicion or hostility. At worst they may be used to suppress dissent or intimidate dissenters.
With respect to Attorney General Mitchell's thesis that unrestrained snooping is in order against "subversives," thirteen prominent professors at major law schools declared that "to grant such a claim would gravely threaten some of our most fundamental liberties as well as the true law itself." They have condemned "this attempt to obtain such absolute power against our own people in domestic affairs."
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a suit against Mitchell's policy in behalf of nine antiwar and Black Power organizations and eight individuals who were indicted in connection with the violence at the Democratic National Convention last August.
"By announcing a policy of unfettered searches and seizures," the ACLU complaint states, "the defendants [Attorney General Mitchell and FBI Director Hoover] have created a chill and a pall on all those who would desire to associate with those persons and groups caught within the dragnet of the announced policy in violation of the associational rights protected by the First Amendment."
The ACLU suit could prove to be one of the most important civil liberties test cases of our time but it is directed only at the most recent and most blatant extension of eavesdropping. It is time to get back to fundamentals and put a total stop to government-by-espionage in the United States.
From the August 1969 issue of The Progressive
Norman Stockwell is incoming publisher of The Progressive.