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TechnoratiOK, I admit it. I was excited when I first heard the CIA was going to show us the "family jewels." You could say I have an intelligence fetish; an affinity for analysis.
But now that I've seen the "jewels" it all seems rather anti-climatic, about as satisfying as Geraldo's exploration of Al Capone's vault.
A few lowlights from the file:
The CIA planned to poison the late Republic of Congo premier Patrice Lumumba (page 464) and offered $150,000 for a mob hit on Castro.
The "jewels" confirm that the government had their own LSD hippies on the payroll, conducting "drug experiments" on unwitting victims (page 213).
The Agency kidnapped and illegally detained Russian defector Yuriy Nosenko (page 522).
The one interesting tidbit buried in the Nosenko notes is that the CIA actually worried about the illegal detention of one person.
Today, we've got the CIA running secret prisons where more than one "enemy combatant" is being held and tortu - I mean, interrogated.
A few other family gems: domestic eavesdropping has been around since G Dub was in diapers and - oh my god! - the CIA had a particular interest in the private lives of Americans identified with the Left - real evil people, like John Lennon (page 552) who clearly posed a clear and present danger to "the national interest."
Not only have these sordid tales been open secrets for a long time, the Fourth Estate was reporting on most of this stuff 30 years ago. Seymour Hersh first broke the story on the CIA's domestic spying on the front page of the New York Times in December 1974.
And, anyone familiar with the Church and Pike investigations Congress did back in the mid-1970s will see the "family jewels" for what they are: a response to a 15-year-old Freedom of Information Act request that provides more corroboration than revelation.
You gotta hand it to the PR department on the Backward Bush Train, though. Release documents that corroborate or embellish the "dirty secrets" we already know, while scoring propaganda points demonstrating the health of an "open society." The declassification of open secrets. Brilliant!
I wonder what the national archives will reveal 30 years from now about Bush's "war on terror" - if we make it that far.
What we already know - cooked intelligence, torture, indefinite detentions in secret prisons, unprecedented domestic snooping powers - makes the Cold War-era seem quaint.
Of course, looking at the "jewels" in today's light, it's clear we're not only repeating 1960s history, we're heading even further backward.
Next stop: 1954, as Bush's Supreme Court appointees have essentially overturned the landmark desegregation Brown v. Board of Education case.
As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissenting opinion, the majority opinion "reverses course and reaches the wrong conclusion. In doing so, it distorts precedent, it misapplies the relevant constitutional principles, it announces legal rules that will obstruct efforts by state and local governments to deal effectively with the growing resegregation of public schools, it threatens to substitute for present calm a disruptive round of race-related litigation."
Next stop: the Robber Baron era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If you look to you're Right you'll see the Supremes decided to give manufacturers greater leeway to set minimum prices, which flip antitrust laws on their head, hurting both consumers and small merchants.
As a black man I'm starting to get real nervous. I mean, at the rate we're going, we'll be back to the Civil War days in no time. And then maybe we'll start hearing "conservatives" once again extolling the virtues of chattel slavery.
Can any of my fellow-travelers tell me where I can catch the train heading back to the future?
Sean Gonsalves is an assistant news editor for the Cape Cod Times and a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at sgonsalves@capecodonline.com
13 Comments so far
Show All"...As a black man I’m starting to get real nervous."
'
Anyone who's been paying attention, regardless of race, is right with you, Sean.
simonhhh, that's the Thugs best move. Distract-O-Rama, the Karl Rove Special.
Yo Cruxpuppy! You don’t think so?
“As a black man I’m starting to get real nervous. I mean, at the rate we’re going, we’ll be back to the Civil War days in no time. And then maybe we’ll start hearing “conservatives†once again extolling the virtues of chattel slaveryâ€.
You need to look just a few more years into our collective future. Our collective ‘train of state’ if you will, has been going over the cliff for the last 6yrs based on a class war against us for the last 35. It’s a big train, a long one. We push the poorest of the poor off the cliff first. Then comes the next car and then next and suddenly the train car you’re in goes vertical and accelerates to terminal velocity and you’re really shocked. Big rocks at the bottom. I call it, The Great Shattering.
Cruxpuppy, we’re reaching critical mass. In the face of massive cascading consequences, a bankrupt Federal Government, and a frozen leadership, the States will become autonomous without firing a shot. They will quietly appropriate the Federal Arsenals because the Feds can’t pay the bills or the troops. Oh yes, Grover Norquist gets his wish, except that like my first marriage, it isn’t going to work out quite the way he thinks. There are a lot of military bases, military hardware, nuclear weapons, and various and sundry WMDs in the former Confederacy. Not a mistake. It will take them about 20 minutes to restore chattel slavery. Five minutes after that, debt bondage for whites with full transfer of debt to debtor’s children upon debtor’s death (you can inherit wealth right?). Three minutes after that, women will have all property rights stripped from them. Forget birth control or abortion, think Gender Slavery. It has always been our "way of life".
In the North and the West, they’ll do everything but the chattel slavery bit. Not part of their “way of life†but they will make money from the trade and sell the products of slave labor, just like they do now, while you toil in debt bondage.
All of which will last about 20 minutes because ecological collapse combined with the loss of gasoline and electricity will pretty much shatter any bits of social organization that remain. Think warlords. We’ve go lots of weapons and we didn’t forget the bullets. Life gets very simple at that point. Like I said, The Great Shattering. Think Jenin. Think Hebron. Think Beirut during their Civil War – Now think Denver, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Seattle, Atlanta, and no food.
Some will call it Justice. Bubye.
Peace.
In other words, long after their predecessors succeeded in destroying so many lives of so many who warned what the criminals were up to, the new criminals say that they can be trusted because they now admit that the people they destroyed were right.
Do we need to know anything more about the way that minds steeped in this secret culture work?
ballsy June 30th, 2007 7:36 pm
"much of this stuff is known. why release it now?"
In one word DISTRACTION!!!!
I want to know exactly what the Administration is up to NOW....
this "family jewels" thing is a psyop, a contrived psychological operation under the direction of maestro Michael Hayden, former head of NSA, now enjoying his new role as DCI.
the spy chief throws a little meat to the press, laced with barbiturates, which makes them less inclined to sound any alarms.
Sean Gonsalves needn't worry about chattel slavery for his racial group in particular. After all we've got Condi, Colin, and Clarence, among others, helping drive this train.
Sean should be more concerned about a generalized condition of chattel slavery which is called fascism. You can't really say that this is going backwards because we've never been there before.
dcbeltway, I think your immigration stance is weird, are you Iraqi or something? That aside I think you have said it well here. This may be just one of the little digs the administration is able to deliver to the CIA to put the thumbs screws to any further rebellions.
I'm also wondering if the timing of the release was to somehow discredit and sideline the CIA (although much of the public already knew about the CIA's actions years ago). The CIA and Valerie Plame took the fall for Iraq. The CIA was the only part of gov't standing up to the administration at one point. Maybe the administration fears the CIA will also produce evidence that Iran is no where near able to produce a nuclear weapon..just like Iraq wasn't.
much of this stuff is known. why release it now?
The only people on the face of the planet that still believe the old bromide that, "if we threaten to use military force and then don't follow through, it only emboldens our enemies" are Americans. How many decades now have we been interfeering in the affairs of other nations either openly or clandestinely? When an American leader threatens to use military force against someone, those in the line of fire immediately begin preparing bomb shelters and stockpiling rations.
I think Sean's analysis is correct. Revealing this stuff now is anticlimactic as it had already been leaked or guessed long ago. At least it takes it out of the realm of conspiracy theorists. Much is indeed hidden, but it is only the particulars, for what they do is plainly out in the open, expressed fully in their ideology and their oficial pronouncements.
Black man, Yellow man, Red man, White man. We all need to catch that train. When Bush, the appointee was still picking his cabinet in 2001, I wrote the following on 5 January, for which I was castigated most severely by my friends, to the effect that "This is America! Things like that can't happen here."
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Well, it seems the President-appointee has selected his cabinet to guide us through the next four years. As expected, he has filled most of the posts with the most reactionary right wingers he could find. The Secretary of labor is anti-labor and anti-Social Security, the Attorney General probably thinks Hitler was a liberal. We have retreads from the Reagan/Bush administrations, corporate CEO’s, in short, a cadre of people dedicated to ensuring that the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the middle class supports it all until it is taxed into poverty, too. The environment will be raped and despoiled for every last dollar that can be squeezed out of it. The International Cartels and the WTO will have yet more of the poor and the displaced to exploit, at home and abroad. Protests of this wanton destruction will fall on the ears of a bought Supreme Court which has already proved that it is acutely conscious of who put them in their lifetime situations.
Our Constitution will be more narrowly interpreted by this court and the civil rights gained at so much pain, suffering and sacrifice will gradually be eroded or disallowed. We will become a nation of dispossessed, poverty stricken, hungry and illiterate people standing in lines for jobs or food, fighting for crusts and watching the limousines drive by.
If he can accomplish this, the President-appointee will no doubt get a pat on the head from his daddy for accomplishing what daddy only made a start at.
As it was under Nixon, Reagan and Bush the First, our children will once again have their role models in high places to teach them that greed, venality, vengeance and the bottom line are the only things worthwhile and that caring, compassion, love and conservation of resources are just weaknesses to be exploited if there is power or profit to be gained.
What is needed today are statesmen, but who would risk assassination or being dragged through the muck of character assassination by what passes for leaders today. Mussolini’s Black Shirts made thinkers, intellectuals, idealists, teachers and opposition politicians drink a quart of Castor oil and stand in the street until they soiled themselves, to the amusement of the fascists. It is rarely remembered that this humiliation was also the administration of an often fatal dose of a slow acting poison.
Will we and our cherished Constitution manage to survive this increasingly blatant takeover? Can we live through another “Corporate State?â€
And then, of course, there is war and all the corporate profits that accrue to that, not to mention the curtailment of personal liberties in the name of “National Security†that goes with it.
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Sadly enough it has all come true and a whole lot more. I didn't take it far enough, but I wish more people had listened back then. We might not be in the same spot we're in, now.
Sean: We can set up a "back to the future" research fund, and when the train makes it to the station, get on and bypass the next 20 years. I wish. Good point jp; but I think there were dossiers on LOW profile people, too. Remember there were photos of CLINTON as a college kid overseas. He was a NOBODY then... people don't think backwards. They say "Well he's the president" (when this info surfaced); but he was NOT someone who "should" have been under scrutiny in his 20's. Yet the data emerged. My only hope in this "spy on everybody" age is that shit does happen, machines go down, and the sheer volume of info may make it all the less possible (needle in haystack style) to make anything meaningful of the material. A great film that presciently mocks these trends was Terry Gilliam's, BRAZIL.
We're all in the Bush country jail, at the moment; but the train back out is "fight for our rights" on time. The time is NOW!
interesting theory that the timing of these "great revelations" was designed to make Americans believe that we still live in an "open society" where secrets are ultimately brought to light. My take on it is that Bushco is attempting to show that the illegal practices his administration so blatantly indulges in are nothing new, that they have taken place under Republican and Democratic presidencies, and that we must do these things in order to protect our "freedoms." In fact, what distinguishes the present administration is that it feels it can engage in illegal activities openly and blatantly, whereas under previous administrations, they were done in secret!