The problem with the CIA is not that we don't know what it is doing but it is a moral failure by the rest of us in not stopping our own murder, torture, and terror incorporated. The problem isn't as much with the CIA, as it is with us.
Something about the tone of this Post article set me off. How many times do we have to "detail" CIA assassinations (not just attempts) before people realize that we have detailed and re-detailed the same portrait over and over again, and that these murderers should be stopped? Rhetorical question. I don't expect answers.
On 6/22/07, Eubulides <paraconsistent at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/21/AR2007062102434.html
>
>
> CIA to Air Decades of Its Dirty Laundry
> Assassination Attempts Among Abuses Detailed
>
> By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus
> Washington Post Staff Writers
> Friday, June 22, 2007; A01
>
>
>
> The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing
> some
> of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family
> jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts,
> domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the
> 1950s to
> the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.
>
> The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of
> break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from
> China and
> the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series
> of
> "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.
>
> "Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA's history," Hayden said in a
> speech
> to a conference of foreign policy historians. The documents have been
> sought for
> decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been
> the
> subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests.
>
> In anticipation of the CIA's release, the National Security Archive at
> George
> Washington University yesterday published a separate set of documents from
> January 1975 detailing internal government deliberations of the abuses.
> Those
> documents portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of
> President
> Gerald R. Ford that what then-CIA Director William E. Colby called
> "skeletons"
> in the CIA's closet had begun to be revealed in news accounts.
>
> An article about the CIA's infiltration of antiwar groups, published by
> New York
> Times reporter Seymour Hersh in December 1974, was "just the tip of the
> iceberg," then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned Ford,
> according to a
> Jan. 3 memorandum of their conversation.
>
> Kissinger warned that if other operations were divulged, "blood will flow.
> For
> example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the
> assassination of
> [Cuban President Fidel] Castro." Kennedy was the attorney general from
> 1961 to
> 1964.
>
> Worried that the disclosures could lead to criminal prosecutions,
> Kissinger
> added that "when the FBI has a hunting license into the CIA, this could
> end up
> worse for the country than Watergate," the scandal that led to the fall of
> the
> Nixon administration the previous year.
>
> In a meeting at which Colby detailed the worst abuses -- after telling the
> president "we have a 25-year old institution which has done some things it
> shouldn't have" -- Ford said he would appoint a presidential commission to
> look
> into the matter. "We don't want to destroy but to preserve the CIA. But we
> want
> to make sure that illegal operations and those outside the [CIA] charter
> don't
> happen," Ford said.
>
> Most of the major incidents and operations in the reports to be released
> next
> week were revealed in varying detail during congressional investigations
> that
> led to widespread intelligence reforms and increased oversight. But the
> treasure-trove of CIA documents, generated as the Vietnam War wound down
> and
> agency involvement in Nixon's "dirty tricks" political campaign began to
> be
> revealed, is expected to provide far more comprehensive accounts, written
> by the
> agency itself.
>
> The reports, known collectively by historians and CIA officials as the
> "family
> jewels," were initially produced in response to a 1973 request by then-CIA
> Director James R. Schlesinger. Alarmed by press accounts of CIA
> involvement in
> Watergate under his predecessor, Schlesinger asked the agency's employees
> to
> inform him of all operations that were "outside" the agency's legal
> charter.
>
> This process was unprecedented at the agency, where only a few officials
> had
> previously been privy to the scope of its illegal activities. Schlesinger
> collected the reports, some of which dated to the 1950s, in a folder that
> was
> inherited by his successor, Colby, in September of that year.
>
> But it was not until Hersh's article that Colby took the file to the White
> House. The National Security Archive release included a six-page summary
> of a
> conversation on Jan. 3, 1975, in which Colby briefed the Justice
> Department for
> the first time on the extent of the "skeletons."
>
> Operations listed in the report began in 1953, when the CIA's
> counterintelligence staff started a 20-year program to screen and in some
> cases
> open mail between the United States and the Soviet Union passing through a
> New
> York airport. A similar program in San Francisco intercepted mail to and
> from
> China from 1969 to 1972. Under its charter, the CIA is prohibited from
> domestic
> operations.
>
> Colby told Ford that the program had collected four letters to actress and
> antiwar activist Jane Fonda and said the entire effort was "illegal, and
> we
> stopped it in 1973."
>
> Among several new details, the summary document reveals a 1969 program
> about CIA
> efforts against "the international activities of radicals and black
> militants."
> Undercover CIA agents were placed inside U.S. peace groups and sent abroad
> as
> credentialed members to identify any foreign contacts. This came at a time
> when
> the Soviet Union was suspected of financing and influencing U.S. domestic
> organizations.
>
> The program included "information on the domestic activities" of the
> organizations and led to the accumulation of 10,000 American names, which
> Colby
> told Silberman were retained "as a result of the tendency of bureaucrats
> to
> retain paper whether they needed it or acted on it or not," according to
> the
> summary memo.
>
> CIA surveillance of Michael Getler, then The Washington Post's national
> security
> reporter, was conducted between October 1971 and April 1972 under direct
> authorization by then-Director Richard Helms, the memo said. Getler had
> written
> a story published on Oct. 18, 1971, sparked by what Colby called "an
> obvious
> intelligence leak," headlined "Soviet Subs Are Reported Cuba-Bound."
>
> Getler, who is now the ombudsman for the Public Broadcasting Service, said
> yesterday that he learned of the surveillance in 1975, when The Post
> published
> an article based on a secret report by congressional investigators. The
> story
> said that the CIA used physical surveillance against "five Americans" and
> listed
> Getler, the late columnist Jack Anderson and Victor Marchetti, then a
> former CIA
> employee who had just written a book critical of the agency.
>
> "I never knew about it at the time, although it was a full 24 hours a day
> with
> teams of people following me, looking for my sources," Getler said. He
> said he
> went to see Colby afterward, with Washington lawyer Joseph Califano.
> Getler
> recalled, "Colby said it happened under Helms and apologized and said it
> wouldn't happen again."
>
> Personal surveillance was conducted on Anderson and three of his staff
> members,
> including Britt Hume, now with Fox News, for two months in 1972 after
> Anderson
> wrote of the administration's "tilt toward Pakistan." The 1972
> surveillance of
> Marchetti was carried out "to determine contacts with CIA employees," the
> summary said.
>
> CIA monitoring and infiltration of antiwar dissident groups took place
> between
> 1967 and 1971 at a time when the public was turning against the Vietnam
> War.
> Agency officials "covertly monitored" groups in the Washington area "who
> were
> considered to pose a threat to CIA installations." Some of the information
> "might have been distributed to the FBI," the summary said. Other
> "skeletons"
> listed in the summary included:
>
>
> · The confinement by the CIA of a Russian defector, suspected by the CIA
> as a
> possible "fake," in Maryland and Virginia safe houses for two years,
> beginning
> in 1964. Colby speculated that this might be "a violation of the
> kidnapping
> laws."
>
>
> · The "very productive" 1963 wiretapping of two columnists -- Robert Allen
> and
> Paul Scott -- whose conversations included talks with 12 senators and six
> congressmen.
>
>
> · Break-ins by the CIA's office of security at the homes of one current
> and one
> former CIA official suspected of retaining classified documents.
>
>
> · CIA-funded testing of American citizens, "including reactions to certain
> drugs."
>
> The CIA documents scheduled for release next week, Hayden said yesterday,
> "provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency."
>
> Barred by secrecy restrictions from correcting "misinformation," he said,
> the
> CIA is at the mercy of the press. "Unfortunately, there seems to be an
> instinct
> among some in the media today to take a few pieces of information, which
> may or
> may not be accurate, and run with them to the darkest corner of the room,"
> Hayden said.
>
> Hayden's speech and some questions that followed evoked more recent
> criticism of
> the intelligence community, which has been accused illegal wiretapping,
> infiltration of antiwar groups, and kidnapping and torturing terrorism
> suspects.
>
> "It's surely part of [Hayden's] program now to draw a bright line with the
> past," said National Security Archive Director Thomas S. Blanton. "But
> it's
> uncanny how the government keeps dipping into the black bag." Newly
> revealed
> details of ancient CIA operations, Blanton said, "are pretty resonant
> today."
>
>
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>
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