Posted on 06/22/2007 6:47:12 AM PDT by 3AngelaD
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 discussions 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...
A New York Times article by reporter Seymour Hersh about the CIA's infiltration of antiwar groups, published 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," saying, "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...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The Hate-America liberals will founder on this. Stupid, stupid, stupid idea.
Maybe we’ll find out about what really happened to Vince Foster and Ron Brown.
It might be some kind of vaccine to America now that we know other Western Secret Services may be involved in horrendous crimes.
The Age of Innocence is gone.
It isnt going to look good from President Bush’s dad either, he was head of cia for some time.
Plus, many people seem to believe that the CIA is a conservative-leaning organization, when it actually tends to be quite liberal.
This is just a rehash of the WaPo’s “greatest hits”. I don’t see anything that hasn’t been leaked or reported before.
Are these "crimes" a reference to renditions?
I don’t know about that, but it does release the stuff about Bobby Kennedy directing the plot to kill Castro. Too bad he was incompetent.
Oh.....now.....those are exceptions to the rule...
It may be a spectacularly GOOD idea, just for that reason.
For the agency to divulge anything of consequence(this has happened before) signals a conscious effort to sanitize itself, “come clean” , PRECISELY to head off and pre-empt
anticipated pressure to do just that from its internal enemies.
THAT, plus, perhaps a signal of a new shift within the Agency itself into a less “reckless”, more State Department type of worldview. If that’s what it is, that’s what you should be worrying about, not giving fodder to “America-haters”.
Links to the docs on this thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1854271/posts
CIA Announces Declassification of 1970s ‘Skeletons’ File...(Drudge Title)
The uber-leftist Walter Pincus is rubbing his hands in anticipation. So must his friends in the great journalist cabal of American-haters.
No, simply the old highly useful political assassination.
Are the Dems absolutely sure that they want the government to run the health care system, not to mention the schools?
No kidding. I’m sure Chomsky is gleeful.
After seeing the film Breach and reading about Robert Hanssen, who knows just how “accurate” these reports are.
My thoughts exactly.
From dosing the unwitting with LSD, using those in public housing to study the effects of lead based paint, to exposing terminally ill children to lethal levels of radiation to learn how long exposed bomber pilots could remain functional; having the government in charge of health care is the stuff Steven King novels are made of.
It always struck me as a huge red flag when Bill Clinton pushed for centralizing all medical files in DC to protect us from those nasty insurance companies.
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