Today’s release of the “Family Jewels”–a record of CIA misdeeds in the fifties, sixties, and seventies–provided a further reminder that most of the media, especially the electronic variety, are woefully ignorant. Breathless newcasters announced the release of the documents as if the Ark of the Covenant stashed by Indiana Jones had been discovered in a warehouse. Look folks, the CIA did some bad things back then that were first uncovered and reported as a result of an internal investigation. Congress subsequently was briefed and the CIA’s dirty laundry was aired before the public by Senator Frank Church.
The report highlighted the following major crimes and misdeeds:
1. The use of the mafia in a failed attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro.
2. The illegal wiretapping of American newsmen.
3. Analysis of domestic groups and political protestors.
4. Unauthorized opening of mail of U.S. Citizens.
5. Drug and behavior-alteration testing that probably resulted in the suicide of at least one U.S. citizen.
6. Imprisonment of a Soviet defector without due process for more than two years.
The records are historically important but there is no significant “news” in these documents in the sense of reporting something we did not previously know. These events were fully reported thirty years ago and the CIA’s shame exposed. I make no apologies nor excuses for the past CIA abuses. The records do help explode some myths, e.g. that the CIA successfully assassinated foreign leaders. They were authorized to do so and tried in several cases but never succeeded. Castro, in case you have been living in a cave, is still alive and giving the United States the finger.
The real news that the media is ignoring is the new “Family Jewels”. I am certain the CIA has a report somewhere detailing who was involved with extraordinary renditions and torture. I would not be surprised if we find CIA officers like Michael Scheuer, Cofer Black, Hank Crumpton, John McLaughlin, and George Tenet facing war crimes charges in the International Court at the Hague within the next four years. I am making no claims about the guilt of these individuals, but their role in extraordinary renditions almost certainly will be investigated by foreign governments (Italy, for example, is currently prosecuting other CIA officers and contractors for their role in kidnapping a muslim cleric) and charges could very well be filed. At a minimum these gents probably will not be traveling outside the United States for the foreseeable future.
But torture in the war on terror shares a pedigree with the misdeeds of the past. The CIA was not a rogue elephant acting on its own. It was an obedient dog carrying out the order of political masters. As the Washington Post has detailed in a series of excellent reports this week, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were leading the charge in authorizing the use of torture proscribed under international law. It is the responsibility of intelligence officers to maintain their integrity when ordered to do illegal and immoral acts. The lessons of the Nuremburg trials of the Nazis is that the claim of, “I was only following orders”, is not a valid nor acceptable defense. Government officials, regardless of their place in a government bureaucracy, are expected to follow the law and do the right thing.
See what’s missing: CIA operations in Iran and Guatemala to topple their popular governments and install tyrants.
Its important to remember what the “Family Jewels” are NOT. They are NOT a collection of all the CIA’s misdeeds – only the ones that were outside of the law at the time such as domestic intelligence activities (which by law AT THE TIME were the purview of the FBI)
The Jewels do NOT include the LEGAL misdeeds of the CIA – like the operations in Iran and Guatemala. By law they were supposed to declassify the Iran docs by now but have failed to do so.
They aren’t nearly “all” the illegal activities going on at the time, either. They were only the ones agency employees reported to Schlesinger. You can bet the ones never reported were far more interesting.
Even so – there’s some very interesting data in the Jewels. I’m also amazed at how brazenly misreported one item in particular is, and hope to write about that this weekend.
http://www.thestar.com/article/222996
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PBS joins the propaganda war against Palestinians ◊ by shergald
Sun Jun 24th, 2007 at 05:06:22 AM PST
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
WASHINGTON DC (St. Louis Post Dispatch/AP) – The CIA released 693 pages of documents about spying on Americans, opening citizens’ mail and plotting to kill foreign leaders, but vast sections were blocked out by agency censors.
As a result, they were far less revealing than the reports issued in the mid-1970s by the three investigations that were given unedited versions of these documents at that time — President Gerald Ford’s Rockefeller Commission, the Senate’s Church committee and the House’s Pike committee.
The panels spent years investigating and amplifying these documents. Their public reports in the mid-1970s filled tens of thousands of pages.
In early 1975, CIA Director William Colby told the Justice Department that these documents detailed assassination plots against foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro, the testing of behavior-altering drugs on unwitting citizens, wiretapping of U.S. journalists, spying on civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protesters, opening of mail between the United States and the Soviet Union and China and break-ins at the homes of ex-CIA employees and others.
But as censored by the CIA, many of the most sensational events were mentioned in little more than one sketchy paragraph apiece.
The new documents devoted two paragraphs to the programs that opened mail between U.S. citizens and the Soviet Union and China.
One paragraph said “Project Westpointer,” from fall 1969 through October 1971, was based in the San Francisco area and the “target was mail to the United States from Mainland China.”
The other paragraph said a program, begun in 1953 but dormant by 1973, intercepted incoming and outgoing Russian mail, and occasionally other types of mail, at New York’s Kennedy Airport.
By contrast, the Senate committee headed by Frank Church, D-Idaho, which spent two years investigating these documents, produced a book-length study of 12 CIA and FBI mail opening programs from 1940 to 1973. It found that the CIA alone had opened and photographed almost 250,000 first-class letters in the United States and produced a computerized CIA index of nearly 1.5 million names.
The agency’s new documents contained an unsigned three-page memo that described the CIA’s program, code-named Operation Chaos , as a worldwide effort to collect information “on foreign efforts to manipulate U.S. extremism.” It said some American extremists had been recruited by the CIA as contract agents.
Another 1973 memo to Colby from the CIA inspector general expressed concern over Chaos “because of the high degree of resentment we found among many agency employees at their being expected to participate in it.”
But the Church committee reported in 1976 that Chaos compiled a computerized index of 300,000 individuals, including 7,200 Americans and more than 100 domestic groups, between 1967-1973 as it examined civil-rights demonstrators and anti-Vietnam war protesters.
In a message to CIA employees Tuesday, Director Michael Hayden said: “It’s important to remember that the CIA itself launched this process of recollection and self-examination. And it was the Agency itself that shared the resulting documents in full with Congress.”
● The Family Jewels ◊ by BooMan
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."What’s most interesting, to me, is how many lies there are in the Jewels report, lies that were exposed in the investigations that followed. It’s sort of like re-releasing the Warren Report (essentially what Bugliosi’s book does), even though all this other data has come to light to put the lie to that. A new generation never knew any of this before, so they’re starting back at the lie. I hope they keep reading to find the truth, again, as we had to do living through it in the seventies.
That which is potentially seriously damaging to the Permanent Government is not publicized by its propaganda media.
Once things are considered old news…”Why, SURE, Podna!!! Jest LOOK at how open an’ acommodating us good ol’ boys kin be!!! We’ll ‘fess up to our mistakes. EVER’BODY’S human!!! Y’all kin TRUST us!!!”
And the beat goes on.
AG
The records do help explode some myths, e.g. that the CIA successfully assassinated foreign leaders. They were authorized to do so and tried in several cases but never succeeded.
Instigated coup d’états with assassinations, torture and mass murder in a few examples: Iran Mossadeq – Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem – Indonesia Sukarno – Greece Papandreous – Chili Allende – Central America/El Salvador Bishop Romero – and the unsolved murders of JFK-RFK-MLK
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."THANK YOU.
Patrice Lumumba in Congo…