CIA's Family Jewels

[mswas]

http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-06-26-voa65.cfm

The Central Intelligence Agency released hundreds of pages of documents Tuesday about past agency abuses that sparked outrage and investigations in the 1970s. The documents contain no startling new revelations. But, as VOA correspondent Gary Thomas reports, they paint a more detailed portrait of an agency under siege for some of its activities at home and abroad.

What do people think about the CIA’s abuses in light of the current national security culture and the fights over who gets to say what and how the information should flow and be handled?

[Zoe]

mswas, I am not willing to take Gary Thomas’s word for it that in the hundreds of pages of documents there are no surprises. I have already heard some of the surprising things that have been leaked.

For example: The CIA planned to assassinate someone in France by use of a poison pin. President Kennedy ordered at stop to it but it took place anyway – November 22, 1963.

Another example: Twenty volumes of information regarding the Kennedy assassination have disappeared from the CIA.

The CIA is largely responsible for driving Allende to suicide.

The reports claim that Robert F. Kennedy was in on one assassination attempt on Castro. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. emphatically denies it and uses John Seigenthaler Sr. as a reference. (Remember the gentleman founder of the First Amendment Center so terribly wrongly accused of crimes in a Wikipedia article?)

If these documents have been released yet, a link to the documents themselves would be helpful.

Thanks, mswas.

[elucidator]

Don’t click on that link unless you are using a borrowed laptop in some anonymous coffee shop with wireless internet, and leave within ten minutes. Because what we already know is pretty bad, and if there are any “surprises”…

[askeptic]

I just tried to download the full report…my computer crashed.

when I viewed it before the crash Item 1 is obscured. I only got to page 13 before crashing. Seems we actually did put out a contract on Castro with the Mob. Why aren’t we prosecuting these SOB’s? Some of them must still be alive.

[elucidator]

Stuff redacted:

LBJ had Kennedy killed, because Bobby had Marilyn killed.
They’ve got Hitlers brain.
Castro is Jewish.
It wasn’t J. Edgar Hoover who was gay, it was Reagan, Hoover was a decoy.
It was Barzini, all along.

[askeptic]

@elucidator

Stuff redacted:

LBJ had Kennedy killed, because Bobby had Marilyn killed.
They’ve got Hitlers brain.
Castro is Jewish.
It wasn’t J. Edgar Hoover who was gay, it was Reagan, Hoover was a decoy.
It was Barzini, all along.

I understand your attitude. But I wish you would weigh in on this. I for one, respect/enjoy your observations on these issues.

[elucidator]

Well, first and foremost, it hasn’t been digested yet, its a document dump, and it will take a lot of poring over by conspiracy wonks. I don’t have the attention span of a conspiracy wonk, but they always report.

Secondly, as a long time lefty I don’t expect anything is going to surprise me all that much, a lot of the CIA’s ugly episodes have already been reported in, say, Mother Jones, the nations number one purveyor of depressing truths. Probably just the usual, murdered nuns, murdered archbishops, US complicity with some of the most ghastly regimes evah! Which, for the most part, we already know. And, for sure, a lot of indigenous people got dead, but, hey! your illiterate, impoverished Marxist revolutionary is the worst kind!

If anybody is really and truly shocked, its only because they weren’t paying attention. Mostly, just another opportunity for dirty fucking hippies to say “Told you so!”. Which pales after about the ten thousandth repetition.

It was all a long time ago, it was the Cold War and hey! the KGB was a lot worse!

[askeptic]

Yeah, I knew about the nuns and the archbishop, Hasenfus too. But I am not able to communicate as well as you. If people like you take the attitude that “this is old news” then it really will be brushed under the rug and ignored. If I had your ability I would be screaming “I told you so” at the top of my…fingers.

[dropzone]

@elucidator

If anybody is really and truly shocked, its only because they weren’t paying attention.

Especially since most of it was released or leaked in 1974, a generation and a half ago. This shit’s ancient history to anybody who has been paying attention or reading newspapers and its release is a publicity stunt that buys the CIA good will from the masses without its needing to say anything new or about recent employees or operations. However, askeptic is right: this is new and potentially shocking to most people so I TOLD YOU SO! I F*CKIN’ TOLD YOU SO BUT YOU PEOPLE TREATED ME LIKE SOME RAVING PARANOID! SO SCREW YOU FOR KEEPING YOUR HEADS GLUED TO AMERICAN IDOL WHEN THERE WERE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS GOING ON AROUND YOU!

Ah, that felt good!

[tomndebb]

@mswas

What do people think about the CIA’s abuses in light of the current national security culture and the fights over who gets to say what and how the information should flow and be handled?

In the current situations, the CIA keeps coming out as the good guy (in relative terms).

Kidnappings and “renderings” are pretty low and will come back to haunt the U.S. and the CIA, but, for example, it was the CIA who appears to have kept trying to give good intelligence prior to the Iraq fiasco, only to be “overruled” by the hand-picked publicity office of DoD’s OSP group. (Note that the OP’s question specifically talks about intelligence, not other criminal activities.) Unfortunately, there is no way to prevent True Believers from doing whatever they wish to give themselves plausible deniability (even if only to themselves and other True Believers). Much of the OSP team has already been reassembled to “review” intelligence regarding Iran. No law insisting that the president rely on confirmed CIA intelligence is going to make it through Congress or be enforceable if it passed.

As to the revelations in the recent data dump: so far, I have not (yet) heard a single new claim that was unknown prior to 1975 except in some small details.

[BrainGlutton]

Anyways, you can read the full report via links from this page (George Washington University’s The National Security Archive).

[BrainGlutton]

@dropzone

Especially since most of it was released or leaked in 1974, a generation and a half ago. This shit’s ancient history to anybody who has been paying attention or reading newspapers and its release is a publicity stunt that buys the CIA good will from the masses without its needing to say anything new or about recent employees or operations. However, askeptic is right: this is new and potentially shocking to most people so I TOLD YOU SO! I F*CKIN’ TOLD YOU SO BUT YOU PEOPLE TREATED ME LIKE SOME RAVING PARANOID! SO SCREW YOU FOR KEEPING YOUR HEADS GLUED TO AMERICAN IDOL WHEN THERE WERE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS GOING ON AROUND YOU!

Ah, that felt good!

Excellent, ladies and gentlemen. We have evoked the desired reaction in the subject. Proceed to Phase II.

[BrainGlutton]

@Zoe

The CIA is largely responsible for driving Allende to suicide.

:dubious: Suicide?

[dropzone]

@BrainGlutton

Excellent, ladies and gentlemen. We have evoked the desired reaction in the subject. Proceed to Phase II.

The desired reaction is me feeling good? Then, by all means, on to Phase II!

[elucidator]

Shot himself in the head with an automatic rifle. Six times. Very sincere suicide.

[ralph124c]

i was interested about the plots to kill Castro. apparently, the CIA conspired with known criminals (like John Roselli and Santos Trafficante) to solicit a third party to poison Castro. So we have a conspiracy at the highest level of the US government, to murder a foreign head of state.
So the knnedy assasination theories don’t sound so weird, now.

[BrainGlutton]

As The Nation points out, there are still some interesting omissions:

The first document in the packet is a 1973 memo from Howard Osborn, then the CIA’s director of security, to the CIA top management, and it summarizes the “jewels” compiled by his office. It lists eight problems–including the recruitment of mobster Johnny Roselli for the Castro hit. But blacked out from this document is the first item on Osborn’s list. And a two-and-a-half page description of this operation is also redacted from the “Family Jewels” file.

In a recent speech, General Michael Hayden, the CIA’s director, hailed the declassification of the “Family Jewels.” He remarked, “The documents provide a glimpse of a very different time and very different Agency.” Yet the very first secret in these papers has been deleted.

“The No. 1 jewel of the CIA’s Office of Security is probably a pretty good one–especially since the second jewel in this list is the Roselli/Castro assassination program,” says Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a public interest outfit that filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the “Family Jewels” fifteen years ago. There are many other deletions in the “Family Jewels” file, and in most instances there’s no telling exactly what has been excised. But much of the censored material seems to be related to how the CIA has created cover and fake documents. “This is probably justifiable,” says Blanton, because such operational secrets may still be relevant today. But the missing jewel? Assassination? Domestic spying? Something unimaginable? “We just don’t know,” says Blanton.

[dropzone]

@ralph124c

So the knnedy assasination theories don’t sound so weird, now.

HAH! Welcome to the Dark Side, ralph. (Where’s the tinfoil hat icon when I need it?)

[Merijeek]

@elucidator

Shot himself in the head with an automatic rifle. Six times. Very sincere suicide.

There were times, when men were real men, that a man knew how to finish the job, as it were.

-Joe

[Richard_Parker]

@Merijeek

There were times, when men were real men, that a man knew how to finish the job, as it were.

-Joe

Haahahaahhaahahahaaaha.

Well done, sir.