CIA Releases Key 1970s Files, Including Spying on Journos
WASHINGTON — The CIA released hundreds of pages of internal reports Tuesday on agency misconduct that triggered a scandal in the mid-1970s over domestic spying.
The documents detail assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, the testing of mind- and behavior-altering drugs like LSD on unwitting citizens, wiretapping of U.S. journalists, spying on civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protesters, opening mail between the United States and the Soviet Union and China, break-ins at the homes of ex-CIA employees and others.
The 693 pages, mostly drawn from the memories of active CIA officers in 1973, were turned over at that time to three different investigative panels - President Ford’s Rockefeller Commission, the Senate’s Church committee and the House’s Pike committee.
The panels spent years investigating and amplifying on these documents. And their public reports in the mid-1970s filled tens of thousands of pages. The scandal sullied the reputation of the intelligence community and led to new rules for the CIA, FBI and other spy agencies and new permanent committees in Congress to oversee them.
These documents also were one of the products of the Watergate scandal. Then-CIA Director James Schlesinger was angered to read in the newspapers that the CIA had provided support to ex-CIA agents E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, who were convicted in the Watergate break-in. Hunt had worked for a secret “plumbers unit” in Richard Nixon’s White House. The unit originally was tasked to investigate and end leaks of classified information but ultimately engaged in a wide range of misconduct.
In May 1973, Schlesinger ordered “all senior operating officials of this agency to report to me immediately on any activities now going on, or that have gone on the past, which might be construed to be outside the legislative charter of this agency.” The law establishing the CIA barred it from conducting spying inside the United States.
The result was 693 pages of memos that arrived after Schlesinger had moved to the Pentagon and been replaced as CIA chief by William Colby. Colby ultimately reported the contents to the Justice Department.
“These are the top CIA officers all going into the confessional and saying, `Forgive me father, for I have sinned,’ ” said Thomas Blanton, director of the private National Security Archive, which had requested release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act.
Inside the CIA, Colby referred to the documents as the “skeletons.” But another name quickly caught on and stuck: “family jewels.”
They first spilled into public view on Dec. 22, 1974, with a story by Seymour Hersh in The New York Times on the CIA’s spying against antiwar and other dissidents inside this country. The agency assembled files on some 10,000 people.
Copyright 2007 Associated Press
Why stop at the ’70’s, they didn’t.
This is probably worse than the KGB because they did not have to hid the fact that they were spying on their own citizens.
Many civil rights leaders were killed in this country and we still can’t tell how the CIA or FBI was involved even though it was discovered that they had case files on the victims.
The problem with using language like Hitler and fascist is that it allows those in power an easy and convenient way to dismiss your message without even considering it. Tone down the rhetoric, and use logic and very small words.
Look, I’m not saying you’re wrong. God knows I agree with you, Richard Posner. But HOW you say something definitely influences how it is received…..
Jaded Prole is right–We need to resurrect the proposals made by JFK before he was assassinated to force the CIA out of “regime change” or other military style operations.
Then we need to defund them and all the intel agencies being used to spy on Americans without proper court oversight and documentation as to who, why, since when, for how long, etc.
The CIA has shown itself a rogue agency in need of serious reform and oversight.clearly, it cannot be trusted to do its work without greater restraints on its operations.
People wonder why they are revealing their crimes now. Well, I guess they figured that we are living in a time where no one is going to do anything about it. After all the mounting evidence of corruption and criminal end-runs around ethical questions, legal loopholes, secrecy, blatant disregard for the rule of law commonplace during the
Bush years especially, who will hold them accountable? No wonder Cheney never breaks into a sweat. Just another news cycle.
Here’s one of the last people who went against this machine.
Mike Ruppert
GREAT ARTICLES btw
http://www.copvcia.com/
and the same site
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/
and if you can’t find a copy of crossing the rubicon on the torrent networks then ya aint looking
And how bout a shout out to IMPEACH CHENEY
What a load of bull. They’re calling it the “family jewels”. That’s a tactic criminals use. They confess to lesser crimes, hoping that will get them off the hook.
JFK was talking about cancelling the CIA & the Vietnam war, so they canceled him.
It’s very likely that they were also involved in the assassination of Robert Kennedy & MLK.
To say nothing of assassinations of foreign heads of states, economic terrorism, & fixed elections.
The idea of cancelling the cia sounds good to me!
=======================
“Without sharing there can be no justice;
without justice there can be no peace;
without peace there can be no future…
Man must change or die.
There is no other course.”
Maitreya, the World Teacher
http://www.share-international.org
=====================
Peacealluia!
The Church of Stop Shopping
http://www.revbilly.com/
The CIA is admitting to much that is by now ancient history. Brian Glick’s “The War At Home” came out in 1989, for heaven’s sake. Not much new in this spate of “coming clean”.
The subtext of this admission is “See, we’re telling you everything”. Well, no they’re not. Not much about the years long, world class cocaine operation, the millions of which have been applied to CIA “black ops”, and the social impacts of which are still being felt in minority neighborhoods.
whew! i’m glad we got that out of our system. now that so much has changed, now that we don’t torture, etc.
the whole idea that there are areas (mostly related to foreign policy, btw) that citizens cannot know about, aka classified information, is unconstitutional, and undemocratic, and just what the national security state needs, in any form.
we need to open all the files, up to this very day, immediately.
Poet & Jaded Prole -
The release of this 30+ year old information at this particular moment in US history underscores how much more additional, current overseas and domestic adventurism by the national security establishment there is yet to uncover. When this stuff originally leaked into the margins of the mainstream media, the leakers were labeled conspiracy nuts. It took over 20 years for the Pentagon to concede that the whole Gulf of Tonkin “attack” on the Maddox and Turner Joy (that stampeded Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf resolution authorizing the Vietnam War) was the result of sonar glitches being misread by naval analysts.
One of the few redeeming side effects of the mountains of lies told by the Bush White House to launch the invasion of Iraq is that middle America has had a glimpse of just how rabidly militaristic and absolutely shameless the neo cons can be when left to their own devices, with no meaningful checks & balances to restrain their ideological fervor. A Howard Zinn view of the People’s History is moving into the mainstream, and the beltway big shots in both major parties’ brain trusts are oblivious to that evolving grassroots development.
Can healthy skepticism about such fundamental issues as whether we wuz flat out lied into an unwinnable colonial war be focused into activism before it morphs into cynicism? I think a good place to start is to focus on just when it was in US history that civilians in the White House first thought they had a legal right to consider assassinating foreign political figures in the first place.
Can you imagine Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and the other Constitutional framers sitting around a table somewhere, divvying out the Congress the power to tax, coin money, and declare war, and to the Executive branch the power to grant pardons, negotiate treaties, and appoint ambassadors.
Suddenly Tom turns to Ben and James.
“Whoa! What about the power to murder foreigners? Whaddaya think? Should that be a power of the Congress subject to majority vote after public debate, or should our new Constitution delegate the contract killing hit list prerogative solely to the President? Which do you guys figure is the best way to go?”
As Gore Vidal and numerous CIA historians tell the tale, Uncle Sam got into the business of covert, sometimes homicidal dirty tricks abroad only in the aftermath of WWII with passage of the National Security Act. The Pike and Church committees’ work led to a legislative effort to curb the CIA’s covert activities that was successfully headed off by the Reagan administration by means of an executive Order. Murder by our black ops boys became OK if and only if the killing was first preceded by a written Presidential finding of necessity, followed up by timely Congressional oversight.
Now of course we live in the age of Predator drones and Hellfire missles, amazing hi tech assassination devices for targeting individuals or small groups of evil doers everywhere on the face of the globe. But the underlying question remains: outside the context of a declared war (think trying to whack Hitler or kill Admiral Yamamoto), just where does the Constitution say that anybody, in any branch of the United States government, has the legal or moral authority to act like Tony Soprano?
Bill from Saginaw
Any chance we could get the info from say the past 5-7 years???
“Any chance we could get the info from say the past 5-7 years???”
Yeah, just elect Kucinich or Nader…
I rather think the Bush Gang of petrocriminals has classified everything for 50 years or more.
This just a ploy to make it seem like the CIA’s days of being involved in illegal, nefarious activities around the world are behind it.
Actually, in the last few years under GWBush, it has been involved in the assassination of world leaders (like Hariri) as well as the abduction and torture of several innocent civillians.
Unfortunately, we aren’t surprised at all by these disclosures in the wake of the continual tsunami of lies, corruption, propaganda, and lack of respect for the rule of law during these Bush years.
Back in the day, there were a LOT of people really skeptical about the disclosures by Anderson and Hersh. No problem with that today. Now it’s a matter of too FEW journalists willing to write the real story.
###
Maybe the answer lies not so much in trying to figure out how to stop our continuing slide into fascism, but rather to figure out a way to push it over the edge?
I’m just playing Devil’s Advocate here….
Claudius, you’ve asked a wonderful question. You likely already know the answer.
A silver lining to this endless stream of negative news is reading the comments of others who sound as alienated as I feel.
I agree with Bill from Saginaw that our national security state got its start, or certainly a quantum leap forward with the Cold War. Now that the Cold War’s ended, it’s time to demand that this secret government be dismantled. (And call for an end to the holy “war on terror”, a meaningless phrase the Bush crew cooked up to panic the US population.)
The scary thing is that half the CIA budget and half its manpower are devoted not to gathering intelligence but to ‘black ops’, and these operations are initiated simply by the president calling the CIA chief into the oval office and telling him to __________ or kill _____________ or whatever he might think of. It’s been going on for a long time.
“I am not a crook” said little Richard Nixon after he told mommy all about stealing cookies from the cookie jar, and vowed he’d never do it again.
She was so impressed by his open confession that she believed him and knew he would grow up to be an honest man.
Later, George Bush I heard the story, and was so impressed that he decided too to follow Nixon’s moral example and declare a “Kinder, Gentler Nation”, and helped his son to seize the Presidency in order to carry out that promise.
Then, the CIA central command bared it soul and confessed its sins, vowing to forever respect the rights of American citizens and promote freedom and democracy.
Just give these Bad Boys a chance, and every time they prove their true intentions.
To all: Please remember that the CIA, until its “absorption” into the so-called entity called, euphemisitically, “homeland security,” was by its very charter and origins “a political arm of the presidency.” That last quote is taken from its 1940s charter, when it was transformed from the OSS. It was directly under the President of the United States, and answered only thereunto. It was a misguided, paranoid schizophrenic entity which never quite understood exactly what it was supposed to accomplish. Because of its chameleon-like nature, it became subject to the insanities of James Jesus Angleton, and many, many others. What is it today? Has anyone checked its full charter? I haven’t, but I should!
Richard Posner is correct - - as far as he goes. The problem is, though, that the practices of the CIA that have been revealed
are still happening up to the present time and we as a nation are getting an ever-darkening record to say nothing of betraying the legacy left to us by the founding fathers. If there are any doubts, get it from one who has been there: John Perkins in his books, “Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man,” and “The Secret History Of American Empire.” The problem is that it is not enough to reveal these things and the policies that create them, but the fact of the matter is that the whole coterie inside the “Beltway,” Republican and Democrat alike are in it up to their necks because they are being manipulated and run by what Perkins calls “The Corporatocracy.” Basically, the corporatocracy is the same “Military-Industrial complex about which Pres. Eisenhower warned us (even though he was being compromised by them before the end of his second term - - which is why he didn’t speak up until he was at the end of his 8 years).
We need to deport all the current and living past CIA personnel; deport them to one or more uninhabited islands in the Pacific, and then implode the CIA Bldg in Langley, VA., - -just like the current Administraton did to World trade Center buildings 1, 2, 7, plus the Pentegon on 9/11/01. If you need to explore that and the possible complicity of the Cheney/Bush neo-con bunch, get in touch with the 911 Truth Movement - - there are many questions that need to b answered with a more thorough investigation than what we’ve had to date - -
one that deals in empirical facts, scientific
findings and most of all: subpoena power!
Releasing this information is a joke. Besides it being ancient history, it only documents illegal activities by the CIA. From what I know, anything and everything is fair game for them once they are outside the country, including assassinations, overthrow of countries, coverup of massacres by our favorite henchmen, etc.
The CIA is advertising. They are way behind the NSA and the pentagon in torture and war crimes. In true American can do spirit they are trying to use past glory to catapult themselves back into the number 1 position of antidemocratic agencies. When you think of torture think CIA.
I presume that the Richard Posner commentor from NM is not the Richard Posner of CHicago Law Reagan appointee to seventh circuit Court of APpeals fame.
The ‘real’ Richard Posner might sue for defamation!
evanj: Obviously R. Posner can answer your question directly, but I have a comment regarding the appropriateness of your public post as follows:
Instead of presuming, why don’t you send R. Posner an e-mail and ask him directly. He left an address in his message above. In my humble opinion, when asking personel questions, it is proper to talk to each other directly, if possible, instead of through a message board. Don’t you think?
Otherwise, what are you trying to accomplish with your public posting?
Furthermore, if there is a “real” Richard Posner (did it not occur to you that more than one person can have the same name — take “Tom Smith” for example) from where you mention, you are now the one who has called out this individual’s name for no apparent purpose. Additionaly, you have provided details on this individuals residence and profession.
Hm. Makes a person wonder about intent.
Peace,
Ken Hausle
* I support HRes333 - Impeach the VP
***** time is of the essence *****
Why release information about the past? Is it being done in order to turn our focus to the past instead of the present where it belongs?
As long as they are releasing information, what about our support of the bin Laden and the Afghans when they were fighting the Soviet Union? How about some data on our support of dictatorships? What about Robert Gates and the Iran-Contra affair?
Why talk about Nixon and Castro?
As John Dean said, the present is “Worse than Watergate”. Forget the past and look at today.
Marcos,
You pretty clearly have schizophrenia. Surely you’ve heard of it? Or do you think there is no such thing and such people are really just being afflicted by the US goverment? If so, try looking into it’s history which goes far beyond the US gov and far back surely before this amazing hidden technology could have existed.
(Marcos writes in his page he linked…)
“Thought monitoring as described in the section entitled GULAG OMNIUS exists and someday the world will find out about it. I need to report here that this sadistic totalitarian methodology has been applied to me around-the-clock, twenty-four hours a day, day and night for over 20 years now. It is being applied to me now while I am writing. I am never free from it and I believe that I will never be free from it until I am dead. I believe that even if the public finds out about it before I am dead that I will still have it applied to me by the U.S. secret police until I am finally dead. This program of thought-monitoring has been torturing me for more than two decades now.
I can’t say what I feel like saying to my God because of this program.”
Deja Vu?
Shakker & Ruth K -
I suspect the overriding, “big picture” reason for CIA Director Hayden’s decision to release all this pre-1973 documentary evidence about successful and unsuccessful black-ops efforts by the agency in the early Cold War years is to set up the mindset frame that since Truman did it, Ike did it, JFK did it, Lyndon did it, and Nixon did it, then it certainly must be part and parcel of the basic job description for Little George & Deadeye Dick Cheney to carry right on doing it.
While wise folks like Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Thomas Powers, and Ray McGovern of VIPS (and others) periodically pull the CIA’s blood stained skeletons out of the closet into the light of day in hope that the public may wake up and demand a reassertion of elected officials’ accountability over the greedy, homicidal spooks running amok within the military/industrial/national security complex, Karl Rove’s purpose is the exact opposite: let’s publicize this ancient history of CIA skullduggery and derring do today, in order to depict black-ops as an inevitable, essential feature of the 21st Century international GWOT landscape.
As George Lakoff might put it, this is all about framing. If 2008 voters accept the underlying premise that for the forseeable future we’re condemned to a world of perpetual low intensity urban warfare and lethal spy vs spy sheenanigans against an amorphous horde of terrorist evil doers, then which candidate, and which political party, is led by the bravest warrior and the toughest spymaster?
Okay, now let the campaign begin…..
Bill from Saginaw
The secrets now hidden by Cheney and Bush’s stonewalling are going to be ten times worse when they come to light as they are covering a takeover, a coup, though it will be too late for us. The CIA was a rogue country - read Joseph Trento’s book on Edmund Wilson, PRELUDE TO TERROR. We have more than one agency whose tricks are making preparations to take control of the whole thing. Impeach Chaney at least, before the elections. They are not going to even take place - we’ll have martial law called or a “false flag” terroristattack or the premise that we are at “war”" or elections will be, once again,a manipulated farce. I’m telling you this is a takeover.They are not going to walk away from all they have accomplished knowing it will all be changed.
One other thing, I don’t think the CIA can be stopped. Cutting funding won’t touch the core work, they fund themselves with legal real estate deals, start their own banks (this started with funds from the Marshall Plan early on) and deal in illegal arms sales and drug trafficing/protection. In Vietnam, they smuggled drugs in the body bags and body cavities of our dead soldiers. They know no limit. Read Trento and as much as you can get your hands on. A pack of mad wolves is making rogue foreign policy.
The CIA is releasing files? yeah right. But how many files have been deleted or thrown in the waste bin? And how many are being left out or changed. Let’s see what their current files say about present activities related to the Bush Administration’s illegal spying or secret detentions or even experiments affecting the general population.
I used to think that CIA’s legislative charter allowed it to screw only other countries (coups, assassinations, etc), but not the law-abiding, sheepish, careless, no-nothing creatures in the United States. OK, now that people know, is any agency going to investigate and punish the perpetrators, or they out the information only after it has passed the statue of limitations? Good question.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA%20Hits/CIA_GreatestHits.html
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zepezauer_Mark/Boomerang.html
The CIA makes the Nazis look like saints. The LEAST we can do is call them fascists, to hell with toning it down for the benefit of the fragile ..!
http://coanews.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=1744
http://coanews.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=1269
http://coanews.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=1323
Auberon June 26th, 2007 2:15 pm
The problem with using language like Hitler and fascist is that it allows those in power an easy and convenient way to dismiss your message without even considering it. Tone down the rhetoric, and use logic and very small words.
WHO NEEDS A CENSORING DICTATORSHIP WHEN YOU’VE GOT PEOPLE LIKE “Auberon” TONING DOWN THE OPPOSITION FOR THE BENEFIT OF WHITE SUBURBIA?
http://www.amnesty.org/resources/flash/torture/renditions/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/venezuela/story/0,,2005069,00.html
Chávez makes a monkey of Bush
Duncan Campbell
Saturday February 3, 2007
The Guardian
In the lexicon of political insults it will take some beating. Already known for his somewhat colourful use of language Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has probably written himself into the history books for a new sidewipe at his US counterpart George Bush. In the latest salvo in the war of words between the two countries Mr Chávez described Mr Bush as “evil,” a “criminal” but then added that he was “more dangerous than a monkey with a razor blade”.
… thank the Lord PRESIDENT Chavez doesn’t give a three-legged rat’s ass how he’s received by spoiled, fragile white sububanites …
Dr. Peter Phillips is a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University and the director of Project Censored. Well, right after the election he stated that “over 80 million eligible voters” refused to participate.
Now juxtapose the aforementioned information with what was reported in the Nov. 4 Toronto Star: “The overall turnout, steadily going down for decades, shot up to 60 percent.”
All this tells me that Dubya only has a little more than 30 percent of “the will of the people,” since Kerry carried about half of the electorate. That ain’t a mandate - not if more than 100 million voters either voted against Dubya or simply didn’t vote.
According to the Socialist Worker, “For the conservatives who run the Democratic Leadership Council - of which Kerry is a member - their defeat will be taken as evidence that the party is too far to the left, and that Bush won because of his appeal to ‘moral values.’ Typical was New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who declared that ‘the Democratic Party’s first priority should be to reconnect with the American heartland.’”
The biggest complaint against South Africa was that a white minority once ran it. So how is it much different when Democrats and Republicans in America bend over backwards to appeal to a declining demographic?
… a little more than 30 percent of the voting population, and yet we’re supposed to CENSOR ourselves to satiate their spoiled asses–and they didn’t even have to fire a single shot to force us into doing so. My God, how we’ve elevated whites ..!
Ken Hausle. Re ‘Richard Posner’.
No malintent; rather a comic aside.
The ‘other’ Richard Posner is an Establishment flunkey par excellence.
evanj,
Heh, thanks for the response. I’m glad to hear there is no malintent….cause there are way way more important things to focus upon……
Peace,
Ken Hausle
* I support HRes-333 : Impeach the VP
****** time is of the essence ******