... We already KNOW the crimes the CIA has committed - names, dates, histories ... but that's all "classified" and NOT OFFICIAL REALITY until the files are made public. SO OPEN UP THOSE FILES, APPLE-PIE-FACED CIA, THEN GO TO PRISON, WHERE "JACKALS" BELONG ... and kindly rot there, you fascist pricks. - AC
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Independent.ie
CIA admits abuses 'to escape past'
Agency hopes latest revelations will banish rumours of even worse dirty tricks
By Tom Baldwin
Saturday June 23 2007
The secret documents, long known in intelligence circles as the 'family jewels', covering the period between the 1950s and the 1970s - an era of Cold War 'dirty tricks' and ructions in the US over Vietnam.
CIA director Michael Hayden said the 700 pages of records would "provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency". He added: "Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA's history."
He hopes the declassification will correct some long-standing rumours about even worse CIA abuses, saying: "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."
On Thursday the National Security Archive published a shorter document showing internal discussions of the abuses. These include a memo of a conversation between President Gerald Ford and then secretary of state Henry Kissinger in January 1975. Dr Kissinger warns that if secret operations are divulged "blood will flow" and "this could end up worse for the country than Watergate".
He cites as an example that Robert Kennedy - the attorney-general in the Administration of his brother, President John F Kennedy - had "personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro".
In a later memo, Dr Kissinger expresses exasperation about the illegality of domestic surveillance on American citizens, saying: "The British can't understand us. [Jim] Callaghan [then British Prime Minister] says insiders are routinely tapped." Dr Kissinger also voices concern that possible prosecutions would stymie CIA operations. "The result could be the drying up of imaginations . . . on which we depend," he said.
Among the 18 activities listed in a 1975 summary memo that "presented legal questions" and caused such panic in Washington were the "two-year physical confinement" in the mid-1960s of a Soviet defector, assassination plots of foreign leaders, CIA wiretapping of journalists and burglaries of homes or offices.
The disclosures will shed further light on CIA-funded experiments on US citizens showing 'reactions to certain drugs', and interception of mail from the Soviet Union and China - including letters to anti-Vietnam War activist Jane Fonda.
Mr Hayden clearly believes the publication will draw a line under the past.
The presence at the White House yesterday of the Vietnamese President, Nguyen Minh Triet, the first such visit since the end of the war, underlined how America had moved on. Mr Nguyen said talk of the war was outdated: "Vietnam is peace. Vietnam is friendship. Vietnam is developing dynamically and creatively."
In the past week, however, memories were rekindled when Vice-President Dick Cheney was accused of seeking to circumvent the system for overseeing classified documents - and then trying to abolish the National Archives office that challenged his actions. (© The Times, London)
- Tom Baldwin
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