Category: Religion

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Separation of Church and State: American Sharia

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, a supporter of the invasion of Iraq, had dinner last week with Sayyid Iyad Jamaleddine, who is a “liberal” Iraqi Shiite cleric. Jamelddine brought along a guest– Sayyid Hussein Khomeini, the grandson of the famous Ayatollah who led the overthrow of the American-supported government of Iran.

Jamaleddine is in favour of separation of church and state. He wants a secular constitution that takes power away from the clerics and gives it only to elected officials.

George Bush, on the other hand, wants to bring the church back into the government. He wants a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. He wants to make abortion illegal. He wants faith-based organizations to receive government funding. He wants the 10 Commandments posted at the front of every classroom. He wants to appoint justices to the Supreme Court based on whether they hold the religious belief that the instant sperm meets egg, a human soul is created.

Jamaleddine observes, about Islam, that “The state dominated religion, not the other way around. It used religion for its own ends.” That sounds almost like getting elected with the devoted support of the Christian right so you can pass a huge tax break for the rich, ratchet up the war machinery, and gut environmental regulations. It’s almost like you could count on people to vote for you because you represent “family values” while simultaneously enacting economic policies that undermine the integrity of the family.

It looks to me like this. George Bush supports freedom and liberty as long as it’s his religion that is free and liberated.

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The Blunt Instrument of Zero Tolerance

Zero Tolerance is a concept grounded in atheism.

Yes it is. I don’t care if you disagree.

It’s a catchy idea, isn’t it? This is what happens. A scandal. Outrage. Denial by the culprits. Conviction. Confession. Apologies. Then, just to prove that we really are moral and upright, “zero tolerance”.

There is a power structure in every organization. The power structure is always responsible, in a real way, for what takes place in the organization. An organization that is shown to be rife with sexual harassment and discrimination against women must repair the public damage. Since the people in charge never fire themselves and never subject themselves to onerous rules and regulations and never find themselves at fault, and are perfectly able to cut a deal with their lawyers present when needed, they have to name a few scapegoats in middle management, fire them, and pronounce themselves purified. The company then passes “zero tolerance” rules.

Churches do it too now. Which is really odd, because “zero tolerance” is an insanely atheistic concept.

They can believe in zero tolerance because the essence of zero tolerance is not really zero tolerance. The essence of zero tolerance is that we will no longer make judgments or rational decisions or peruse evidence or measure credibility. There’s no question of not tolerating real sin. What we don’t tolerate is the appearance of sin. We think that if we eliminate the appearance of sin, we eliminate the sin itself.

We will not longer consider either the possibility that a person was wrongly accused, or that they might change, repent, or learn from their mistakes, with a reasonable, proportionate response to the infraction.

Waterloo Christian Reformed Church has “zero tolerance”. If any allegation of any kind of improper behavior is made, the culprit is immediately suspended from position or function in the church, before any investigation is made.

Sounds godly, doesn’t it? We are so holy that we punish people without determining if they have really sinned or not.

It’s the product of atheism. Here’s why.

The essence of Christianity is Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. I can’t and won’t go into a long, detailed theological discourse here, but I think most Christians feel they understand that this sacrifice was to make possible the forgiveness of sins, and bring about the redemption of sinful humans by a just God.

We are not worthy of redemption on our own. We don’t deserve it. We didn’t earn it. It is only through the sacrifice of Christ that we are entitled to it.

Zero tolerance makes sense if you don’t believe in redemption, or grace, or forgiveness. Zero tolerance leaves no room for redemption, no room for forgiveness, or repentance. You are done, toast, finished.

I guarantee you that most Christians in churches that have adopted zero tolerance will tell you that, oh yes, we do forgive the sinner, of course we do, amen, alleluia. And they will tell you, yes, we are all sinners. And they will tell you that if the allegations are proven false, the sinner will be fully reinstated. And the damage to his reputation will magically disappear.

But they don’t mean it. As I have argued before, when Christ demanded that his followers forgive those who wish them evil, he didn’t mean “forgive them, and then punish them anyway. If a man steals your cloak, take it back, and then tell him you forgive him. If a man strikes you on the cheek, hit him on the cheek, and say you forgive him”.

But of course, zero tolerance doesn’t mean that we have zero tolerance for sin at all. We don’t have zero tolerance for greed or materialism or arrogance or self-righteousness, or lust, or hatred, or hard-heartedness, or bigotry. We have zeroed in on one particular area of human behavior– sexuality–and because we’re all rather hysterical about sex and ashamed of our own bodily desires and feelings, we make it the scapegoat. Our church or organization is pure, because we punish people who are inappropriate.

I have learned something else through all this.  Once the leaders in a church become enamored of a certain idea that they want, they will stare at you blankly and nod and give you a few minutes to make your argument but they will not hear a single word.

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Rome’s Peculiar Position on Zero Tolerance

As everybody knows, the Roman Catholic Church has a sexual abuse problem. It is besieged by lawsuits from former alter boys and others. It appears that many of the abusers, instead of being punished, were moved to other dioceses. Sometimes, they were ordered to seek psychiatric treatment or counseling, and sometimes not. In many cases, their crimes were covered up and hidden by the church hierarchy. In some cases, the church hierarchy simply denied that anything untoward had happened. In too many cases, priests went on to abuse other children after they had been caught once, twice, or several times.

There might or might not be a distinction to be made between consensual affairs between priests and teenaged boys, and younger boys who clearly could not or did not give consent. The church tried to make that distinction in many cases.

The American Bishops, prodded into action by wide publicity and a public outcry, have proposed a new set of guidelines and rules that is based on the principle of “zero tolerance”. Rome, astonishingly, has rejected it.

I say “astonishingly” because the mass herds of mindless conformists that comprise middle management in most companies and institutions flock to “zero tolerance” like lawyers to litigation. It’s how they earn their bread and butter. It’s the consensus. It’s the gist of popular opinion. It’s the bureaucrat’s hot-tub- a steaming, comfortable wash of feminist theory, righteous conservative paranoia, and muddled legalisms. It means that we are virtuous and pure and strong and moral. It really means, we have no ability to make a rational, reasonable judgment based on facts. If you deny being a witch, then you must be a witch.

Rome worries about two things: that the Bishop’s proposal doesn’t distinguish between types or degrees of abuse, or between real abuse and stupidity, and that it doesn’t leave any room for a rather fundamental component of the Christian faith: grace. In other words, forgiveness. Zero tolerance means that the slightest allegation against a priest, substantiated or not, will result in suspension or worse, and there can be no forgiveness, even for an offender who recognizes his sin and asks for grace.

And it must be said– some of the advocates of “zero tolerance” (like the fundamentalists who wanted Bill Clinton impeached) will argue that they “forgive” the sinner, but not the sin. That is a lie. That is not the Christian idea of forgiveness. Read your bible: when Christ demands that his followers forgive their enemies, he leaves no room for revenge or “justice” or retribution. Someone strikes you on the cheek? You turn the other cheek. You forgive the sinner and you do forgive the sin.

If you forgave someone who had assaulted or robbed you, in Israel in 33 AD, that person was freed: the sentence was over, because you forgave the offender.  Look it up: it’s true.

Rome also has expressed concern about the fact that the zero tolerance policy is adopted, rather wholesale, from public and private institutions in America. The church is not the government or IBM. It takes the word of God as it’s constitution, and the living presence of Christ as it’s inspiration. The American Bishop’s abuse policy sounds much like something that could have come out of McDonald’s Corporation or the YMCA.  If Rome accepted this policy, it would be to admit that the very wellspring of church leadership and authority is incapable of producing a authentic Christian response to the crisis in the church.

Some people would say, well, yes. It can’t. Rome, of course, could never accept that, the same way lawyers could never accept that laws could be simple and understandable.

But I’m not unsympathetic. In fact, I think Rome is right. Zero tolerance is one of the stupidest ideas of our society. It’s a code word, really. It’s bulldozer logic. It gives all of the power to accusers and strips the accused of all recourse. It treats offenses that really are minor the same way it treats serious offenses.

Thus, a kindergarten student is suspended from school and charged with “sexual harassment” for kissing a classmate.  Yes, this really happened.

It is a response to a real problem. There really are people out there who abuse positions of trust for sexual purposes. Too often, those people, when caught, have received trifling punishments, or no punishment at all. Sometimes, the person alleging the abuse received the punishment– losing his or her job, or being accused of lying.

The real solution is to do the hard work of sorting out the trivial from the serious, the truth from exaggeration, the substantial from the trite.

What zero tolerance means is that we now believe that accusers never lie and that is obviously not true, was never true, and never will be true.

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Billy Graham’s Recovered Memory

The Rev. Billy Graham apologized Friday for a 1972
conversation with former President Nixon in which he
said the Jewish “stranglehold” of the media was ruining
the country and must be broken.

Billy Graham, who must occasionally take a little pride in the fact that while Swaggert and Baker and others have fallen, he remains pure and unsullied by scandal, says:

Although I have no memory of the occasion, I deeply regret comments I apparently made in an Oval Office
conversation with President Nixon … some 30 years ago.

This statement was released by Mr. Graham’s Texas public relations firm.

It’s disgraceful. He has no memory? He has no memory of a conversation he had with President Nixon, in the Oval Office? He has no memory of the fact that he was an anti-Semite?

The thing is, the comments didn’t materialize out of thin air. They don’t sound like a man making conversation while waiting for a bus. They sound like a man deep in serious discussion with another powerful man for whom the issues being discussed are not academic or abstract. Mr. Graham, presumably, said what he believed. Why would it be something he didn’t believe? It’s not enough for him to say now that he doesn’t remember saying it, and doesn’t believe what he said. It is not enough.

You have to think of other things. You have to think about the civil rights movements and the antiwar movements and the media reporting on it all and the perception widely held among redneck Americans at the time of some kind of global Jewish conspiracy to undermine core American values. Mr. Graham was condemning the media for holding liberal values which he thought were alien to Mr. Nixon’s constituency, the so-called silent majority.

“This stranglehold has got to be broken or this country’s
going down the drain,” Graham said.

“You believe that?” Nixon says in response.

“Yes, sir,” says Graham.

“Oh boy. So do I,” Nixon agrees, then says: “I can’t ever
say that but I believe it.”

“No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might
be able to do something,”

Now, what I am disturbed about is this: Billy Graham has a public relations firm?

Added March 2007:

President Nixon wasn’t able to break the “stranglehold” of the liberal, Jewish Media. So was God’s man in America, Billy Graham, being prophetic when he said America would go “down the drain”.

Are we down the drain yet?

I know some people think we are They think the pervasiveness of sex, sexual references, sexual topics, sexy bodies, sexy jokes, and sexy clothes are proof of that. The sex itself is not what leads us down the drain: it is the drain. We are here.

But by any objective standard, we actually live in a kind of neo-Victorianism where in Stewy’s little animated butt on “Family Guy” is now censored. I am not making this up.

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Jesus is Back

Suppose that Jesus returned tomorrow. He appeared somewhere and announced the end of time, judgment day, the rapture, whatever.

Where would he appear? If he appeared at Bob Jones University, a lot of us would have to rethink some of our value judgments. Maybe that’s where he would appear. He would arrive in a limo surrounded by Secret Service agents, wearing a nice suit, with a cell phone. He would shake hands with Pat Robertson and say, “blessed is he who preserves traditional family values, promotes deregulation, and cuts taxes for the rich.” Then he’d go golfing with Pat and Jerry at Augusta.

But what if he had a kind of funky sense of occasion and appeared in New York? He might drive his own Volvo, or a Prius. He might be dressed in black t-shirt and jeans, and preach in Central Park. He might hang out with beggars, welfare mothers, drug addicts and prostitutes. Mayor Bloomberg might elbow his way into one of these gatherings and try to give him the key to the city. He might say, “there is more love and beauty and truth among these panhandlers and homosexuals and prostitutes, than among your councils and your senators and your police.”

Some people would suggest Jerusalem. I have a hard time believing that Jerusalem has any special claim, especially lately. Does Jesus share our fuzzy conceptions about spiritual significance? I doubt it. Jerry Falwell thinks the anti-Christ is already in Israel. But that’s Jerry Falwell. Maybe Jerry Falwell is the antichrist. So what if Christ appeared in Jerusalem and stood in front of an Israeli tank, like that heroic student in Tiananmen Square, and said, “the endless cycle of violence and retribution can only be broken with an act of grace and love”. Do you think the tank would stop?

Our best guide to where Jesus will reappear is the bible, of course. In the bible, Jesus was born in a very small, insignificant little town. He carried on a lively ministry in several small towns in various areas of Palestine, and even ventured into Samaria. Then he went to Jerusalem where, of course, he was finally arrested and sentenced to death by the civil authorities, after a trial held by the Jewish authorities, the Sanhedrin.

Do I have this all right? I’ll check later. I’m going from memory.

Why would he reappear in Jerusalem? A lot of people believe that there is still a special tie between Jesus and the Jews. The Jews don’t believe that– a lot of born-again Christians do, especially those who buy into a lot of the silly “end-times” tripe being trotted out by guys like Tim Le Haye lately.

The biggest problem here is that some evangelical Christians think that they will do a lot better than the Jews in 0 A.D. They think they will know who Jesus is. They won’t call him a blasphemer and send him to the Romans to be executed. They will see this person who looks like any other man. They will hear him speak like any other man speaks, except for the content of his speech.

They think they will take one look and say, “it’s the Messiah! He has returned!”

Think about that. How will they know it’s really the Messiah? How do they know what Jesus will look like, or what he will say? Do they honestly think he will say “God bless America”? Will he carry a little American flag? Will he say, “you people in your suburban churches with the rock bands and the lighting effects, and the annual trip to Vegas, and the hummer, and clever tax dodges– yes, that is exactly what I meant.”

Or might he say something like, “Cursed be those who make weapons of death and destruction and sell them to tyrants and dictators. And cursed be those who pollute the earth, and rape her forests, and destroy all that lives beneath the sea. And cursed be those who cry ‘war, war’, while the hungry lament in silence. And cursed be those who seek status and wealth; and cursed be those who elect politicians and judges who allow the execution of people whose minds are so shattered they have no concept of right and wrong…”

And cursed be the tobacco companies, Enron, and the companies that make little plastic land mines.

Maybe he’ll tell a parable like the one Nathan told David about the rich man who stole the sheep from the poor shepherd, even though he had thousands of sheep of his own, and maybe he’ll mention the words “Citibank” and “Third World Debt”.

What if he said, “this nuclear bomb is a great evil. Men will make war, and men will die, and evil will be heaped upon evil, but let no man be received among you who has deliberately targeted civilians.”

And what if he said, “my father gave you a beautiful planet that lavishly provided everything you needed to prosper– how well have you taken care of it?” He might take one look at our abandoned open-pit mines, and our slums, and polluted rivers, and plastic islands, and say, “oh my God!”

We wouldn’t like that message. You know what we would do? We would say, “you’re not the real messiah. ”

The real messiah will look more like a gay Caucasian shepherd with a bunch of tiny lambs at his feet, carrying a spool of cotton candy. “That’s more like it, we’d say. Will there be ice cream in heaven?” Of course there will be. It’s melting right now.

And because you people all went to church almost every week and Christmas and Easter and because you gave money that one time to pay for Amy’s surgery after her gymnastics injury because it wasn’t covered by her parents’ health insurance, and because you once almost joined a protest march against abortion, and because you didn’t see any actual nudity in that stripper movie you went to see last year, and because you got married just as soon as you found out you were pregnant, you get to have some.

 

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Jesus Christ Superstar (Film)

Looks, let’s get this straight about Jesus Christ Superstar. It is not what most people think it is. I don’t think it is even what Norman Jewison, the director, thinks it is. Least of all is it what Andrew Llloyd Webber thinks it is, though he wrote the music– nothing he did elsewhere in his career substantiated the promising intrigues of this modest little opera and film.

In short, some interpretations I’ve heard, which I think are wrong:

1. the movie is very “spiritual” and has led a lot of people to Christ. Look, it may be true that the movie has led some people to Jesus, but it’s not a very spiritual film at all. It’s very much about politics and power and organized religion as a social force. But God makes no appearance in this movie– he is conspicuously absent. The cheesy image of the sheep at the end (I’ll bet Jewison wishes he could take that one back.) is misleading. Jesus dies on the cross and, in this version of events, he stays there, leaving his followers and antagonists to wonder just who he really was.

Did you know there is even a web site devoted to very pious paintings of Ted Neely as Jesus? These are paintings of an actor playing Jesus, as if he really were Christ. Strange.

There are dozens and dozens of productions of this very expensive show– many of them by churches or religious groups. Even stranger. I mean, it’s agreeable– and certainly an improvement on the usual drivel many churches’ mistake for art, but it’s still somewhat surprising.

2. the movie is about a bad man, Judas, and how he grew jealous of Jesus’ popularity and betrayed him, only to be disappointed when he becomes a “superstar”. Oh please! Judas hangs himself because he realizes that he has caused the horrible death of an innocent man because he misunderstood the motivations of the Scribes and Pharisees. He thought Jesus was getting carried away with his mission and posed a threat to the foolish, innocents who surrounded him. When he realizes that the Pharisees and Scribes mean to kill Jesus, he understands that a) he has been just as foolish as Jesus, b) he has become the tool by which manifest evil will be committed, c) he is going to remembered as the man who betrayed the holiest man on earth.

3. the movie is about the different paths by which people come to find God. As I said, there is no God in this film. There are some stories about dark clouds blocking the sun during the crucifixion scenes, and about Norman Jewison running around modern day Israel pointing at archeological digs and shouting, “God is here”, but Jewison didn’t understand the opera, and tried to put a bit of a new age spin on things. Didn’t wash.

Significant Changes From Rice’s Original Script:

Original Caiaphas: “What you have done will be the saving of Israel,”
Movie Caiaphas: “What you have done will be the saving of everyone,”

Original Jesus to Pilate: “There may be a kingdom for me somewhere if I only knew!”
Movie Jesus to Pilate: “There may be a kingdom for me somewhere, if you only knew.”

Original Jesus, as he is mobbed by the poor and the lepers: “Heal yourselves!”
Movie Jesus: this angry, frustrated outburst is omitted.

Original: nothing
Movie: awful, schmaltzy song led by Peter and Mary on how they miss the guy: “Could We Start Again”. I believe the song was written for the original and then wisely omitted. The movie, needing an extra few minutes of scenery, resuscitated it, to ill effect.  The action, Jesus and Peter and Mary strolling in the hills, is cringy.

What does it mean? That Jewison tried to put a “correct” spin on the movie? Rice’s lyrics clearly imply that Jesus is deluded, and has begun to question his own mission. His irritated outburst at the mob of lepers and poor betrays a deep frustration with the demands put on him by an endlessly needy and desperate populace, and raises doubts about Jesus’ confidence in his ability to meet those demands. Then Jewison tries to make it sound like Jesus is one up on Pilate. And he tries to make it sound like Caiaphas is paying Judas an ironic compliment, when Rice meant to suggest that the betrayal is significant only to Israel.

What is the movie about? It’s about an extraordinary, complex man whose gifts and ideas generated intense responses in the people around him. The story constantly shifts focus from one constituency to another, from his disciples who hardly grasp what he means and hope to be famous some day, to Herod who finds him a curiosity, a joke, to Pilate who discerns the worth of the man, but sees him as a danger to himself, to Mary Magdalene doesn’t know how to love him, to the priests who see him undermining their legalistic authority. The utter clarity of the schematic should be apparent to everyone: all of the parties are self-interested, except for Jesus. Jesus is a shock to “Israel in 4 BC” as he would be today. He was the very definition of the word “provocative”. And you don’t have to believe that he was the literal son of God to understand this.

Without developing a theological treatise here, you could do worse than encapsulate the nature of his message thusly: blessed are the weak. This particular phrase has become a modern cliché, but it’s fundamental subversiveness should never be underestimated. All around us, we proclaim “blessed” are the strong, the successful, the rich, the able, the triumphant, the popular, the creative, and so on. To understand the subversiveness of Christ’s message, try to picture Pat Robertson standing in front of his earnest Republican cohorts, or Madeline Albright in front of the U.N., or Eminem at the Grammys, or Colin Powell in Jerusalem: blessed are the losers. Aint gonna happen.

On the other hand, picture former President Carter hammering a shingle on a house for Habitat for Humanity. Every president of the U.S. claims to be a God-fearing Christian, but Carter is the only one I know of who actually might be one.

The tragedy of the movie is that when Christ resists the temptation to play to the self-interests of those around him, they do him in. And so it will always be. I doubt if the reaction to Christ today would be any different. Those Christians who rave about how they can’t wait for his return have one serious problem: they won’t know him. If Christ returned today, he would not say, “blessed are the cheerleaders…”

And that’s what is being done to the original rock opera itself.

The movie was reasonably faithful to the opera (which was recorded before the show was produced anywhere) at least partly because it had to be: it was an opera. The terms were relatively fixed.

But do a quick search on the internet and you’ll find that it is being appropriated by people who don’t seem to understand or care what it means.

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Roger Latimer’s Sentence

This is such a tough one. On the one hand, you have a vulnerable child suffering from serious and painful disabilities. On the other hand, you have a down-to-earth farmer who, by all accounts, was a loving and sensible father, who simply decided one day that he couldn’t bear his daughter’s continued suffering and went ahead and put an end to it. You have protection of the weak, the disabled, the voiceless. You have a justice system that ends up sentencing this father to a longer sentence than Karla Holmolka, who merely helped her husband rape, torture, and murder several young women.

I don’t disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision to force Latimer to serve his sentence. I don’t see how they could have ruled otherwise. The question is not, in any case, whether Latimer’s decision made sense in any shape or form given his extraordinary circumstances. The question is whether or not the courts can look the other way or make exceptions to the law based merely upon their sentiments about he case.

What if Latimer, instead of fighting the courts all the way, had immediately agreed to plead guilty? What if he had said that he was willing to serve the sentence because that is how deeply he cared about his daughter Tracey and the suffering she was going through? What if he had understood that the law cannot make exceptions even under exceptional circumstances, when an issue like protection of the disabled is at stake?

I have a feeling that public sentiment would have been more uniformly on the side of compassion and clemency.

I don’t see Latimer as a bad man. I think he was simply wrong, and profoundly unfortunate.

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Left Way Behind

I just read that the movie “Left Behind” will now be released on video before it is released to theatres. The announcement makes it sound like this is some ingenious new marketing strategy.

Could be. Could also be that market research showed that the movie is a total dog and a disaster and couldn’t possibly survive a humiliating week of empty theatres across the nation.

Could be that the makers of the movie realized that a large contingent of Christians will buy the movie to support the cause, generating the cash they desperately need to somehow recover the impressive cost of making this ambitious but doomed concept a reality.

If you do see it, let me know if it’s any good.

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What Wouldn’t Jesus Do?

What wouldn’t Jesus do?

Well, he probably wouldn’t steal other people’s copyrighted material and then market it like some kind of consumer trinket.

Janie Tinklenberg lead a youth group in Holland Michigan. many years ago. She used some source material by Charles Sheldon, a pastor from Topeka, Kansas. One of Sheldon’s ideas was to frequently ask yourself, what would Jesus do?

Tinklenberg came up with the idea of putting the initials, WWJD, on bracelets, so her students could be reminded constantly of the question. I personally think it’s kind of a dumb idea myself, but that’s not the point here. The point is that she came up with the idea of putting the initials “WWJD” on jewelry.

Tinklenberg’s idea has been stolen by every Christian publisher and trinket manufacturer in the U.S. Not a single one of these companies has offered Tinklenberg a single red cent for her idea. (You can’t copyright an actual idea, but you can copyright the expression of an idea, which is exactly what WWJD is.)

Now, you could argue that the idea of putting “WWJD” on a bracelet is neither original or elaborate enough to justify a copyright at all. You could make a good case for that. The trouble is that these publishers are themselves notorious for demanding draconian enforcement of copyright of their own mediocre ideas and expressions, including all those dumb posters and bookmarks that trivialize spirituality and reduce the precepts of Jesus to cute little mindless mantras and mottos.

Do any of these companies ask themselves the very question they are selling? Do the people wearing this bracelet realize that they have been sold a bill of goods? That they sport an emblem of all that is shallow and trivial and superficial and utterly meaningless about the kind of kitsch that passes for Christian “culture” these days?

Actually, “Christians” in the U.S. don’t seem to mind the merging of commerce and religion, and it’s not because their commerce has a spiritual aspect to it.

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Nixon and the FBI

One of the great mysteries of recent political history– by “recent”, I mean the last 30 years– is the relationship between Richard Nixon and the intelligence community and the FBI. Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s right-hand man, is quoted on a Watergate tape as saying something like “we don’t control” the FBI, in response a question Nixon had asked about the investigation of the Watergate break in. Nixon famously suggested Haldeman get the CIA to tell the FBI to back off– because they would compromise a secret intelligence operation. Neither one mentioned that the CIA, at the time, was expressly prohibited from any intelligence activities within the borders of the U.S.A.

This was a serious compliment to the FBI… in a back-handed way. That is, if you could imagine that because the FBI was not controlled by Nixon, it was therefore accountable and lawful and diligent. In fact, the FBI had long been corrupted by J. Edgar Hoover’s weird personal control, and was famous for claiming that there was no organized crime in America, before Bobby Kennedy went after the mob.

[2008-11-01]

The FBI also later helped discredit the Satanic Ritual Abuse hysteria– they assigned an agent to look into allegations that thousands of children were being abducted and ritually sacrificed by Satan’s pawns. The FBI agent concluded that the claims were nonsense. [Added November 2008]