United States v. Stanley

We'll hear argument next in number 86393, United States against James B.

Stanley.

Hey everyone, this is Leon from Prologue Projects.

On this episode of 5-4, the hosts are talking about United States v.

Stanley, a case about whether the government can be held liable for running experiments on people in the military without telling them.

The Supreme Court said that to allow you to sue would interfere with the right of the military to issue orders.

How do you feel about that?

I still think it was totally wrong.

Being a soldier, training, fighting for your country is okay.

But when they use you

below an animal level, then someone should have to answer.

The ruling in the case, which came down in 1987, found that being dosed with LSD against your will is just part of being a soldier and that it's not the Supreme Court's place to tell the military otherwise.

This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.

Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have whittled away at our nation, like sports betting apps whittling away at men's bank accounts.

I'm Peter.

I'm here with Rhiannon.

Hey.

Yeah, y'all's brains are really frying on this thing.

It's not good for us.

You can't put it right on the phone.

Back in the day when you had to know a local criminal to place bets, yeah.

In order to place a sports bet, that was, I think, the safest that we ever were as men.

Now, Michael, of course, not here with us, not related to sports betting.

This is not about Michael.

He just had family stuff, so couldn't make it.

But don't worry.

Michael, still solvent.

In the black.

As far as I know, not wasting his family's money on sports betting.

But again, Elena, maybe watch out.

You know, I don't know.

Check in.

Check in is all we're saying.

With every straight man, there is a risk.

Today's case, United States v.

Stanley.

We had said we were going to do SEC v.

Jarkassy from this past term, but we're going to wait till Michael's back because he's good at that kind of stuff.

Yeah,

we need his brain on that kind of case.

We do.

We couldn't do it ourselves.

It's not just a favor to to him, but also to us.

Right.

Now, this one, United States v.

Stanley, this is a case from 1987 about the illicit activities of the CIA.

In the beginning of the Cold War, the CIA ran a secretive program called MKUltra, where they tested various mind-altering substances on subjects both knowingly and unknowingly, with the purported goal of unlocking the secrets of mind control.

And yeah, just to clarify, there's multiple intelligence agencies in the U.S.

government running similar programs to MKUltra at this time.

That includes the CIA, of course.

That also includes Army Intelligence, the intelligence agency in the military that ran the tests on James Stanley that are relevant in this case.

This all became public in the mid-1970s when the famous Church Committee, a congressional committee that investigated the excesses of certain U.S.

intelligence agencies, reported on it.

In the wake of these reports, many of the victims of the programs sued the federal government.

James Stanley, a serviceman in the Army, was one of those people.

He had volunteered to test the effectiveness of certain protective equipment against chemical warfare.

But what actually happened to him was that he was secretly administered LSD,

which he alleges caused him to suffer from long-term bouts of hallucinations, incoherence, and memory loss, including incidents where he became violent toward his family, ultimately destroying his marriage.

In 1975, he was informed well after the fact that he had been dosed with LSD, and he brought suit against the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, alleging that he was owed damages for the government's negligence in running the program.

But the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, said no dice, because the government is not liable for anything that happens to servicemen that are quote incident to their service.

Yeah, just part of being in the army, James.

Suck it up.

That's what you signed up for, James.

Yeah.

You signed up to get dosed with LSD without your knowledge.

It's called being a soldier.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah, let's jump into what happened to James Stanley.

He was a master sergeant stationed at Fort Knox in 1958 when he saw a daily bulletin at the base that asked for volunteers to test equipment that was designed to protect soldiers from chemical warfare.

Things like gas masks, things like chemical-resistant clothing,

protective outer garments, you know, things like that.

He was told that those experiments would take place at a chemical testing laboratory at Edgewood Arsenal, which was on the base.

So when he got there on the first day of this volunteer program that he had volunteered to do.

Stanley went through a series of kind of like psychological and memory tests.

And then he was offered a glass of what he thought was water.

And then they administered the same tests again.

He

recalls that

After drinking the glass of water, he couldn't get past the first few questions of the readministered test.

And the doctor offered him a place to lay down and rest.

At which point, Stanley recalls experiencing hallucinations.

He was fixated, he said, with like this thumbtack on the wall.

He experienced uncontrollable laughter.

Yeah, man was tripping balls.

Yeah, tripping absolute balls.

Now, afterwards, in interviews.

Which I should say, I learned a lot about what happened to James Stanley because of an oral interview.

There's a recording that Linda Hunt did with James Stanley.

We'll leave the link in the show notes, maybe.

It's archived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

And so I listened to that interview.

You know, in that interview, he talks about like, it didn't occur to him that like there was something in the glass of water.

You know, at this time, he talks about being like a man who like he never drank.

He just smoked cigarettes.

He's in the military.

It's the mid-1950s.

Like, there's no reason to think that.

other military members are like experimenting on you or like giving you a substance.

There's also no frame of reference for like LSD, right?

That's not something that was in the popular consciousness in the same way it is now.

Absolutely not.

He's not even considering the possibility that like he ingested a substance that made him have these experiences.

So that was the first time that Stanley went.

He went back weekly for a total of four times.

On the third time, he recalls that he might have been given LSD in coffee, again, unknowingly.

But on the third time, suspects that he was given a very high dose.

He had the worst time physically.

He was also given in the third session an injection, like a needle, injection of another drug, which triggered a really scary series of hallucinations where he describes like feeling like he was falling through space and time.

He went back once more.

and completely has no recollection at all of what happened on that fourth and final time.

He didn't remember what happened immediately the next day and years later still never knew what happened during that that final session.

Stanley, this is so crazy.

For

the couple dozen maybe volunteers, servicemen who volunteered for this experiment, although Stanley never saw anybody else participating, after it was over, the army on the base had a ceremony where they were given a certificate of achievement for participation in the chemical warfare volunteer program.

Again, Again, being told that it was chemical warfare, like protective equipment that

they tried out.

So like Peter said, Stanley had a lot of sort of mental health problems in the few years after.

He would wake up with flashbacks, flashbacks of the trips, of the drug trips and hallucinations that he had had.

He would lose sense of where he was, like in a position way, like his body.

Like he talks about how he would like walk to the back back of a car instead of being at the front of a car, right?

And not understand how he got there and not understand how to maneuver to get to the right location or position himself correctly.

He talked about like violent outbursts with his family, including like being on a very short circuit with his children.

They would, you know, just say something normal or, you know, just speak.

And in response to the sound, his reaction would be violent.

He would hit them.

He talked about assaulting his wife without either remembering it later or understanding why he reacted like that to his family members.

He had uncontrollable bouts of crying.

He disconnected from loved ones because he didn't trust that he could, you know, sort of like behave well around them, that he was like a safe person for them to be around.

And through it all, he continued his military service, but was afraid to go to like the army doctor because he says like the army doctor would just like discharge you for like inefficient service, inefficiency in your duties.

And then like, where am I going to get a job?

He would say.

He's eventually demoted in the army and discharged.

So let's back up.

Like, what the fuck was happening, right?

Like, what is the military doing?

What is the government doing?

Protecting us.

Yeah.

Spreading democracy across the globe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

By

treating people like lab rats.

So like Peter said, in the 1950s, at the start of the Cold War, military intelligence agencies and the CIA began to secretly test chemical and biological materials on subjects who had not consented.

Sometimes they had consented, but for many, many of these experiments, over the course of years, the subjects did not consent, did not volunteer to be exposed to these materials.

They had no idea they were being given or exposed to these substances.

In many instances, they didn't even know they were part of any experiment at all.

James Stanley volunteered to test out certain equipment.

In a lot of instances, they didn't volunteer for shit.

And they didn't know that they were being surveilled or monitored.

Backing up even a little bit more, this kind of started when the U.S.

government in the mid, say, 1940s began experiments to try to develop a quote-unquote truth drug.

They were looking for a truth serum to use on people who were being interrogated, to use use on POWs.

So, during World War II and the Korean War, and of course the Cold War, there were allegations that foreign adversaries were like using mind control techniques on American POWs.

So, the CIA wanted to develop its own mind control techniques to interrogate Soviet spies.

And they also wanted to be able to drug and manipulate foreign leaders like Fidel Castro.

Many, many attempts at drugging Fidel Castro.

Project Artichoke was started by the CIA in 1951.

And the objective of that project was determining when a person

could be made possibly to attempt an assassination involuntarily.

Like, can we administer a drug to somebody that would make them vulnerable to our coercion that they would then try to assassinate a foreign leader that we want gone?

Right.

And then they wouldn't remember it afterwards.

To give even a little more color.

So the Nazis were working on

a truth serum in the 30s and 40s.

What ends up happening in the very early Cold War, late 40s, is that the American government becomes convinced that the Soviets have essentially mastered this or something like it, some sort of mind control

serum or device or technique.

They become convinced, especially when there's like this

Hungarian anti-communist dissident who's a cardinal, Joseph Minzenti, I think is how you pronounce it.

He basically gets accused of

all sorts of stuff that he almost certainly didn't do, collaboration with the Nazis.

And there's a sham trial where he admits to all of this.

He appears to be sort of a broken man.

And

American observers are are like, oh no, the Soviets have done it.

They have figured this out.

That's a big catalyst for MKUltra and all of these similar projects is the American government's genuine belief that the Soviets have actually already figured out mind control.

And so

we just need, we need to cash up.

Exactly.

Yeah.

These experiments were administered at dozens of institutions across the U.S.

That's institutions outside the military.

That's universities, prisons, pharmaceutical labs, hospitals.

And the CIA would be operating MKUltra through like front organizations.

So, you know, a prison wouldn't necessarily know that the CIA was behind, was behind the kind of experiments that they were doing on prisoners.

Just to give kind of like

the smallest taste of everywhere that MKUltra touched in American society, the famous Boston mafioso, Whitey Bolger, when he was in prison, was the subject of MKUltra experimentation.

At safe houses set up in San Francisco by the CIA.

Sex workers were paid to seduce men, men off the street into situations where the sex worker would drug them.

And then the men, while they were tripping, while they were experiencing the effects of these mind-altering drugs, would be observed through one-way mirrors.

Psychiatric patients, people addicted to drugs, sex workers themselves, they were all experimented on as part of MKUltra, as well as CIA employees themselves, military personnel, obviously in the case of James Stanley, doctors, and of course, many, many members of the general public.

Now, turning back to this case with James Stanley, Army intelligence covertly administered LSD, it is said, to about 1,000 soldiers between 1955 and 1958.

James Stanley is obviously one of them.

We'll talk a little bit more later about how all of this was even revealed by the church commission.

But in Stanley's case, he, again, had no idea he was given LSD until the mid-1970s when he got a letter from the army that said, like, you were a part of experiments in which you were administered LSD.

We'd like to check in on you and see how you're doing.

Like, that's the first, it's 20 years later.

And that's how James Stanley finds out.

And so he sued.

He sued the federal government, and it made its way all the way to the Supreme Court so that

Justice Anton and Scalia could be like,

no, thanks.

Oh, no.

Doesn't matter.

So he sues under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which allows for lawsuits for damages against the federal government.

But back in the 50s, the Supreme Court had held that the government is not liable under the law, quote, for injuries to servicemen, where the injuries arise out of or are in the course of activity incident to service.

There are a lot of technical and procedural matters at play in this case.

And in fact, it reads like a very procedural decision.

There's a lot of chatter about which standards apply where and why.

But the bottom line is that the court

is basically

allowing for this exemption from liability for the military, including the civilian officials in charge of the military.

Scalia writes the majority.

It's 1987, so he's pretty fresh on the court.

What he says is essentially that the military needs to be unfettered to operate properly, meaning that courts should not be able to interfere with military affairs, right?

Who are we, the civilian judges, to sort of understand what's going on in the military context and intervene appropriately?

Yeah.

This is a pretty classic conservative position on the military.

You see it with law enforcement too, right?

The idea that accountability interferes with their ability to do their job, right?

The, you need me on that wall, sort of.

You need me on that wall.

Yeah.

They have this concept.

in their mind that like the military and law enforcement are what stand between us and chaos.

And so if you restrain them too much, the chaos will break through.

So we must accept the excesses and the crimes of the military and law enforcement because it's a small price to pay for keeping the chaos away.

Yeah, there's this framing of like,

this is a national security issue, right?

Like who, who are we to, who are we to?

We're trying to figure out mind control, guys.

Yeah, and also we should note that as much as Antonin Scalia is making this a national security issue, we need to emphasize again that this case is at the Supreme Court in the late 1980s.

This is fully 30 years after James Stanley was experimented on.

It's about a decade after James Stanley found out he was experimented on with LSD.

And so...

There's no way to say that actually in this case, at this time period that the Supreme Court is looking at it, that this is a national security issue.

The experimentation on people with these drugs has already been identified as a massive fiasco and a bust.

It was not a successful experimentation period.

So Scalia is also doing this thing where he's like looking forward, like saying, well, we don't know the national security issues that might come up in the future.

Yeah, there might be a time in the future where we need to experiment on American citizens.

Yes.

And I don't want to get in the way of that.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And so there's also this misidentification of the issue in this case as something that military discipline should handle.

This is a disciplinary issue.

Same exact thing that they do with law enforcement as well.

Like internally.

Internally.

Although.

It's less coherent here because the lawsuit that he's bringing is about oversight by the government of the program.

So it's not like some of the old cases that Scalia relies on are really about like following your superior's orders.

Can a superior get in trouble for giving you orders negligently?

And the court said no.

This is different because this is like

the civilian officials who have oversight over these programs who allowed them to sort of spin out of control.

Yeah.

Now, those people aren't necessarily subject subject to military discipline.

So, Scalia is sort of saying, well, I don't know, but

you can't fucking sue them.

And this is an idea that you see in a lot of conservative jurisprudence about immunity for police and military officials.

It's just sort of brought to a point of absurdity here because the argument is sort of like, yeah.

The government drugged its own people in an effort to learn about mind control.

But if you try to hold them accountable for that, it's a slippery slope.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you agree?

We're trying to figure out

a seven-year-old's idea of how the brain works.

So if you could please just let us experiment willy-nilly on American citizens for several decades straight,

showing absolutely no progress, but just ruining many lives in the process, that would be great.

And if you try to stop us, that's actually you making the military worse.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

That's actually you making Americans less safe.

And you wouldn't want that.

Yeah, there's this crutch that Scalia and the majority are leaning on really heavily here by identifying without explaining very well at all, without a lot of support at all, identifying this conduct and like what happened to James Stanley as incident to his military service.

Because that's the prior case that Scalia is relying on that says basically like you can't sue for damages for something that happened to you that's incident to your military service.

And so, yeah, that's what they're relying on here without, again, like taking half a step back to be like, wait a second.

Yeah, he signed up to be in the military, but he didn't sign up to be experimented on involuntarily.

Right.

There's sort of a natural extension of Scalia's logic where, like, I don't know, what if the military just decided, I want to see what happens when you dump sulfuric acid on this guy, right?

Could they just do that and not be liable under the FTCA?

It seems like that's what Scaly is saying.

James Stanley was like career military.

Like this was his job.

And so like it's like signing up for any job.

Like, yeah, you take on the duties of that job.

You sign up willingly for that.

But like your employer.

Even if that employer is the U.S.

military, the U.S.

government, they can't abuse you.

They can't harm you, right?

Especially without you knowing what harm you're risking will like befall on you.

I mean, look, I'm not wanting to praise a member of the military, but like this dude signed up to test chemical weapons protective equipment, right?

Like this dude is like crazy brave, like

willing to sacrifice for the cause.

And they're just like, you know, let's just fucking slip him some drugs and see what happens.

Just like, you know, it should go without saying that this is an amoral program and that like the extended program, you know, MK Ultra and its sort of like progeny and its sort of affiliate programs like this one were amoral programs.

But like, it's really hard to emphasize and you should really like read up about it if you want to learn just how completely depraved these fucking people were.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

No, it's pretty crazy.

And

there are two dissents in this case.

Sandra Day O'Connor writes one.

We've talked about Sandra Day O'Connor before, but this is a conservative justice.

And Sandra Day O'Connor is identifying outright that this is crazy.

This is depraved.

She's talking about like human decency.

And she is saying like, yeah, okay, I agree actually that you can't sue for damages for harm that you experienced that was incident to military service, but there is no way that experimenting on unknowing subjects is incident to military service.

Right.

She says, quote, conduct of the type alleged in this case is so far beyond the bounds of human decency that as a matter of law, it simply cannot be considered a part of the military mission.

There's no way that this kind of general bar on damages suits for, you know, injuries incurred incident to military service insulates these defendants from liability when they carried out what Sandra Day O'Connor says are: quote, deliberate and calculated exposures of otherwise healthy military personnel to medical experimentation without their consent, outside of any combat, combat training, or military exigency, and for no other reason than to gather information on the effect of LSD on human beings.

Pretty plain, right?

Like, you just have to be a human being.

This is crazy.

This is not part of somebody's military service.

He should be able to sue, period.

Yeah.

I just want to note one thing about Sandra Day O'Connor's dissent, which is that, again, she is a conservative.

We don't have a lot of praise for Sandra Day O'Connor on this podcast, but a conservative talking about human decency.

It was a different time.

That is not what you get from conservatives on the Supreme Court today, right?

They have

carved the decency out and replaced it with more lawyer brain.

Yeah, yeah.

There's no decency to be found in any of

the opinions that conservatives are writing today.

Surgically removed it from the frontal cortex

during 3L.

There's another dissent, this one by Justice Brennan.

Very good.

I think impactful.

Something really interesting that I certainly wasn't thinking about in 2024, reading this case that actually came down in 1987.

Brennan grounds his whole dissent in the Nuremberg trials, which were, of course, like the legal proceedings in the mid-1940s after World War II, in which Nazi Germany leaders, you know, they stood trial for crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes.

Some of those war crimes that the Nazis had committed were medical and chemical and biological and other experimentation on Jews and other targeted minorities during the Holocaust, also against POWs, right?

And those were victims who had no idea they were being experimented on, or

they knew they were being experimented on, but they didn't have a choice but to be subjects of these kinds of experiments, right?

And so Brennan,

writing this dissent, says, you know, those trials, the Nuremberg trials, quote, deeply impressed upon the world that experimentation with unknowing human subjects is morally and legally unacceptable.

And he says, you know what?

In fact, the U.S.

military tribunal that established the Nuremberg Code, right, which was like the standard by which to adjudicate, to judge these German scientists, they codified as the first principle of that code that, quote, the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

Like Brennan is saying, like, it's a decade later.

after these Nuremberg trials in the mid-1950s that this is happening, the U.S.

military and the U.S.

government are completely defying this principle.

Like, this is

so wrong on its face, legally, morally, right?

And the majority here is like saying, you know, no liability.

You can't sue him.

Turning to the remedy, like, does James Stanley get damages?

Can he sue for money damages?

Brennan's saying, like, without damages, there is no remedy.

Like, yeah, you can, a court can issue an injunction to stop activities like this, but that doesn't help like after the harm is already incurred.

You have to have the ability to sue for damages, like for this violation of your constitutional rights by a U.S.

government official.

So what are we doing here?

And

to the point that Scalia makes about like, oh, this is a military discipline issue and we can't wade into that.

Brennan doesn't agree.

He's like, no, this isn't a military discipline issue, whatever.

But even if it were, even if military discipline is somehow implicated, if you were to award damages for these kinds of cases, Brennan says, like, nonetheless, decision-making of federal officials who are deliberately choosing to violate the constitutional rights of soldiers, that should be impaired legally.

We should be creating obstacles to that kind of decision-making, right?

You know, and Brennan refers to this principle, no official is above the law.

No violation of right should be without a remedy.

He's saying, like, that has to be something that the law upholds in these very obvious situations.

Yeah.

Another way to put it would be like, what's the least you could do?

You know, maybe throw this guy some cash.

Yes.

And I will add one thing to make this slightly less depressing.

After this case, Congress eventually passed a law basically specifically for this dude that ultimately allowed him to recover some money for damages.

So he did, despite the best efforts of the Supreme Court, get a little bit paid.

Yeah.

And that's because this case was so fucking bonkers, right?

And the program was so bonkers, and the controversy was so crazy when all of this stuff was revealed and all of this stuff was declassified decades later that Congress was like,

this guy should get something, actually.

Right.

Right.

Brennan wraps up his dissent with a point referring back to that idea that, oh, this is part of like military service.

And he's referring to like, okay, well, a soldier's duty is to defend the Constitution, right?

In some sense.

And he says, quote, soldiers ought not to be asked to defend a constitution indifferent to their human dignity.

So, you know, Brennan's saying, like, you, you're ignoring the Constitution.

Like, there's no way that the Constitution stands for this idea, that you can't sue federal officials for this kind of behavior.

Right.

I want to add some big picture political context to what was happening here.

This program that affects James Stanley is

run by Army intelligence.

As far as I know, we don't know whether or the extent of the overlap between what they were doing and the CIA, although it's sort of safe to assume some coordination.

But I also haven't read the full church committee report.

So maybe

there's a clear link or maybe there's none.

But I do want to talk about what the intelligence agencies across the country and across the globe were doing after World War II.

The CIA is created right after World War II.

They had both a very vague mandate and very limited oversight.

MKUltra and similar projects are happening in those early years from the 40s into the early 60s or so.

And this is also when the CIA is dabbling in regime change.

They successfully overthrow Mossadegh in Iran,

Arbenz in Guatemala.

There's a failed attempt in Indonesia in 58.

There's a successful one in Congo in, I think, 60.

All of this is happening outside of the public eye and for the most part, away from the scrutiny of political branches.

But then you have a series of public fuck-ups.

First one, Bay of Pigs in 1961, which raises questions about what the CIA is doing and how competent they actually are.

And then in 1970, at the height of the anti-war movement, you had revelations that the CIA had been running covert ops murder programs in South Vietnam well before the

U.S.

officially intervened.

And many of the people killed were likely innocent.

That same year, it's revealed that Army intelligence is spying on domestic anti-war activists.

You then get Watergate, and it's revealed that several former CIA operatives played key roles.

And then finally,

in 1974, Cy Hirsch, the legendary reporter, publishes a big expose about CIA activities, including their assassination program and efforts to spy on Americans.

And that leads to the creation of the church committee to investigate all of this.

which in turn reveals MKUltra.

It reveals COINTELPRO, the FBI's program to disrupt domestic radical organizations.

It reveals Operation Shamrock, where major telecom providers were sharing their data with the NSA for many years.

It reveals extensive operations by the CIA and FBI to read citizens' mail.

In a lot of ways, this was a watershed moment for our understanding of our intelligence agencies, because

any pretense that we are like the world's good guys or whatever

was functionally lost, right?

But some conservatives were upset, not about the revelations, but by the committee, which they thought undermined the ability of our intelligence agencies to operate freely.

President Ford cautioned against releasing all of this information.

He didn't want it to be done.

The result of the church committee is congressional oversight committees over intelligence operations, as well as FISA courts, which oversee warrants for intelligence operations.

After 9-11, you saw another outcry from the right about the church committee, which they said had inhibited the agencies and allowed 9-11 to happen, even though, of course, there's no like direct tie.

Former Reagan Secretary of State James Baker, a true demon, blamed the committee for disarming the CIA, in his words.

Republican senators echoed the sentiment.

The Wall Street Journal blamed the committee for moving our country to what they called an anti-intelligence footing.

Novelist Tom Clancy said that liberals had gutted the CIA.

Write me a book, Tom, you dumb bitch.

Yeah, shut the fuck up, loser.

Write another stupid-ass book.

The point being that for the right, This was all not really a dark moment in American history.

It's an aspirational one almost, right?

When Scalia is writing about the ability of the military to freely conduct itself, he's not doing constitutional analysis.

He's making these normative arguments about like what our military and our intelligence operations should look like, how free they should be to operate, what they should be allowed to do to their employees, the citizens of this country, etc.

There's no constitutional amendment saying like, and by the way,

Army intelligence is allowed to do whatever it wants to servicemen, right?

Yeah.

It's really a judgment call that also shows conservatives' preference for authoritarianism.

The conservatives are okay with all of this power, all of this decision-making power about the lives of thousands of people in ways that those thousands of people never consented to.

It shows that conservatives are okay with that.

They like that consolidation of power in a way that really maintains this deference to hierarchical stratifications, right?

People at the top, people at the top of the military, people at the top of the CIA, CIA, people at the top of the government make decisions.

And who are we to mess with that at all?

And where does that leave us?

That leaves us in a place where there are no mechanisms for the population, for regular people to protect themselves against like these government actors.

You know, Peter, you mentioned COINTELPRO.

So, so many examples.

We know that the FBI was surveilling groups, people in the U.S., dissidents, people who were protesting the Vietnam War, people who were organizing for black power and black liberation,

you know, just across the board, not just surveillance, but tampering with those organizations and those groups operations, infiltrating those groups and literal assassinations.

Literally, the FBI broke into Fred Hampton's home and killed him.

Everybody knows that, you know?

And well, it might have been Chicago PD on their own.

I don't want to nitpick.

You're making an accurate point.

Supported by the FBI, right?

And cases like this,

way down the line of like these grave harms happening and these intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies

trampling over everybody's rights, trampling over what we think the Constitution stands for.

It's so frustrating to be so technical and ticky-tack.

And they're saying, like, well, this is incident to military service.

And, well, what about military discipline issues?

Like, it's not contending with the massive harm of MKUltra, the massive incompetency and violence that these agencies carried out.

It's a real, it's a real fucking letdown from

these institutions, man.

You know, my sense is that even now we are largely at at the mercy of what these intelligence agencies are willing to share with the rest of the government.

And I think there's this very legitimate fear that can often be framed as conspiratorial and can often just sort of like

become conspiracy

theory style thinking that the agencies are withholding important information from the rest of the government.

And there's some precedent for that, right?

And I think

what happens on the right, what happens with conservatives, is that they don't really care about overstep by these intelligence agencies because it wasn't right-wing activists who were getting their doors kicked in by the FBI, right?

It wasn't right-wing activists who were having their movements undermined by the feds during the civil rights era.

Not that there was no friction, of course, between the federal government and the right-wing.

You have that in the 90s with like the ATF, for example.

But that's why the right hates the ATF and loves the FBI, right?

Or at least used to until they

started to believe that the FBI was undermining Donald Trump.

But that's a rabbit hole we don't have to go down.

But you can see where this reasoning on the right might develop, where they sort of justify the actions of a lot of these organizations, because these organizations have largely protected their interests, right?

They were overthrowing left-wing governments.

They were undermining left-wing movements domestically.

So

I think you have this real imbalance in what they were doing.

And so I think what the result is, is that there has really been a lack of political will to really wrangle these agencies and get them under control.

Because the highest institution that could instill any accountability, at least legally, the Supreme Court of the United States, won't do it.

So

there's nothing holding them back.

I mean, you know, it's interesting because we were like in a moment.

We were in a political moment in the 70s and then into the 80s where perhaps we could have established an equilibrium of sorts.

You know, this is sort of a tug of war that went back and forth for a bit.

And the people who were in favor of accountability, especially after 9-11, just got dragged into the mud.

And

that was the end of it.

The great irony is that the right wing talks about the deep state and what they're talking about is like the fucking Department of Education or something, and not the guys that are allowed to poison you.

Exactly.

Like, just to like dabble in a little bit of like conservative psychoanalysis, it's like, so the conspiracies that they come up with are about a liberal deep state order.

That it's like school boards that like want your kids to read about gay couples or whatever.

You know what I mean?

That like drag performers are part of like, part of like this you know liberal uh Illuminati kind of like brainwashing of children.

Right.

That's what they're grasping at because the real monsters in the government never target them.

Right.

And so they don't have to be suspicious about the CIA and the FBI.

And,

you know, they have to come up with like these secret cabals when really like, no, it's it's our own fucking government.

Right.

Yeah, they

they believe that deep in the government are like cabals of people working against Donald Trump.

Come on.

Yeah.

No, dude, there's boots on the ground in Tehran.

There are boots on the ground in Gaza.

Like, that's what they're fucking doing.

Yeah.

Next week, SEC v.

Jarkassy,

we're bringing Michael back and we're talking about administrative proceedings, baby.

It's where he flourishes.

It really is.

White-collar criminals.

Michael's friends with a lot of them, and so he knows he knows what they're up to.

Yeah, not me being like, okay, so Jarkasy, we're doing Jarkassy, and just me texting Michael immediately.

Michael, what is the SEC?

Let's start there.

Yeah.

That's my research for this upcoming episode, everybody.

That always makes it harder when you have to learn what the SEC is before you can dive into the case.

Yeah.

But that's the life you lead.

You're brave.

Yeah.

I'm doing it so that the listeners don't have to.

You're welcome.

We can say it while Michael's not here.

It's braver to be dumb.

It's

the way that we operate

week to week is

braver than Michael could ever.

Michael's out there.

Right now he's probably reading a book.

You know what I mean?

Not me.

Not me.

I'll do my reading when there's a case about it.

Yeah, I valiantly, courageously get on this mic every week.

Illiterate, close to illiterate, you know?

Everything I just said about the CIA, I learned from a friend on a phone call 25 minutes ago.

I was like, tell me everything you know.

All right, folks, follow us on social media at 54pod.

Subscribe to our Patreon, patreon.com/slash five4pod, all spelled out for access to special events, our Slack, premium, ad-free episodes, all sorts of shit.

We'll see you next week.

Bye.

5-4 is presented by Prolog Projects.

Our producer this week is Benjamin Frisch.

Leon Nafok and Andrew Parsons provide editorial support, and our researcher is Jonathan DeBruin.

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