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CIA Declassifies the "Family Jewels"
An anonymous reader informs us that the CIA has recently declassified for your reading pleasure some records relating to illegal spying, assassination attempts, and other goodies. These are available from the CIA's FOIA portal. From the BBC article: " Last week, CIA chief Michael Hayden announced the decision to declassify the records, saying the documents were 'unflattering but part of CIA history.' The documents detail assassination plots, domestic spying, wiretapping, and kidnapping... Among the documents is a request in 1972 for someone 'who was accomplished at picking locks' who might be retiring or resigning from the agency."
Baically, nothing that wasn't already known except maybe a little finger pointing and agreeing to take the blame. Anything actually "new" in this? Anything that never made the news back then? Any fresh skeletons? If we find the answer is "no" then one must assume this is just more misdirection. Of course stuff like this just goes to prove that the CIA and its similar organizations should have been abolished years ago. The really big question: is this pile of bones but the tip of the iceberg?
"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones".
Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613 - 1680)
Those documents are about 60 years old. In other words, around 2070 we'll finally get to see what is done now.
You think it's in any way different today? If anything, it gets worse.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What exactly is your point? That we should stop giving the CIA the finger because Mossad and KGB and all the others were/are doing the same thing?
I think it's an interesting step to release all this information, though. Would be great if more agencies would follow.
What I find very funny about your post, though: Do you really think the agencies are there to protect the security and wealth of a nation? The nation basically consists of the people and the government. So this is at least partially wrong. The agencies are there to protect the government and its agenda. Nothing more, nothing less. Whether that is in the best interest of the public is a matter of opinion and coincidence.
The message this sends current CIA operatives: go ahead, do whatever illegal stuff you want because you're going to get away with it - in 50 years time we'll tell everyone and have a good laugh about it.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
CIA = ( $evil ) ^ -1
The CIA is the reciprocal of evil? (Did you mean $evil ^ 0.5?)
But yes, clearly an officially endorsed and secretive organization with so much power will be highly subject to corruption. In Stalin's Russia, the secret police effectively ran the country. Perhaps it is the same here.
I'm starting to wonder whether being a "powerful" country is such a good thing. The US (and to a lesser extent, the UK) is in all kinds of trouble trying to maintain and exercise it's power all over the world. If you compare this to countries that just mind their own business, like those in Scandinavia, I wonder what the point is. Denmark, Norway and Sweden routinely come out top in quality of life and happiness surveys.
A particular example of this: the proposal to renew the Trident missile system in the UK. It will cost a vast amount of money. A lot of it will be housed in Scotland, and nobody in Scotland wants it. It raises foreign policy hypocrisy questions, because we have nukes and we say other people shouldn't have nukes. So why are we doing it? I think it's because post-imperial Britain wants to believe it can still sit at the big table.
I say let's stop trying to do that.
Peter
Also, wouldn't a partial release of sanitized (but still shameful) information help build trust, as people would assume there is nothing else being hidden? We have no guarantee (and no way to prove) that the CIA doesn't have other much darker secrets they're withholding. The agencies are there to protect the government and its agenda. And the agenda of anyone within the agency who wants to make money from smuggling, drug trafficking or economic espionage? They've got enormous responsibility (more than the White House) as they virtually have immunity from the law.
The idea that the CIA gets its hands dirty with 'you' is very very old now.
Now they mess with the whole region.
Your President thinking him/herself? Or a taking a bit too long to allow new US bases?
Why turn them into a dead hero or get the army involved?
Next 'free' election the 'opposition' gets millions in free cash and a PR unit takes you apart.
People will lol at your family name for generations when its over.
Making problems in the street?
Its rendition for you.
Then the CIA gets a transcript and your Congress critter can say 'we never torture'.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Weaker countries ride on the coat-tails of the stronger ones. Best example I can think of is Canada - for decades we've been able to neglect all our national defence responsibilities because we live next door to a guy with some really big guns. Ofcourse, this doesn't mean that being small is better, only that it's nice to be small and have big friends.
Yes, but is this the modern threat? These days, the biggest threat is not from invasion and occupation, but from global guerilla warfare, also known as terrorism. The weapons we spend all our money on - submarines, fighter jets and all that high tech robotic crap - is almost useless against all that. There might be an argument for removing a huge proportion of the money we spend on all that phallic hardware and sticking it into other activities, like intelligence and hearts-and-minds work to stop the terrorists from hating us so much.
It's a bit like the Royal Navy in WW2. They thought battleships still ruled the waves, because that's what Nelson used. Then they sent a few to the Pacific theatre, which were promptly sunk by Japanese air power, leading to the fall of Singapore. Now nobody has battleships anymore.
Also, the cost of one bunker buster is probably enough to buy a school in Palestine. That school might prevent a good few people from becoming suicide bombers. That sounds quite cost effective to me.
I know, I know part 1: it doesn't really work like that in the real world, but we're not really trying these other options are we?
I know, I know part 2: I'm a commie pinko leftist bastard who needs to be beaten senseless by a large red-neck.
Peter
The U.S. tried policies of isolation in the early 20th century, but they didnt' work. The outcome of WWII placed a lot of responsibility on the U.S. Blame Europe.
I no this is no excuse for abusing power. The U.S. is far from perfect. But in general, the U.S. is not evil and hasn't changed in the last 10 years. We'll have a new election.
Is is unfortunate that people use articles like this to try to prove some political point (i.e. Republicans are evil). Instead, perhaps we would be better focussing on how nations cannot protect themselves without an organization like this. The CIA, FBI, and NSA are not tied to one president. All the presidents have used them to do distasteful things. That is the point of the secrecy. It allows these organizations to do things that need doing: to make hard lose-lose decisions in the best interest of the country. If it were not for the secrecy, we'd have more politically hand-tied organizations that had to bow down before political pressure and popular opinion. Let's face it - popular opinion isn't about the right decision or what's best for the country. I think these documents are interesting part of history that we can use to understand how the government is functioning behind the scenes. Some people will use this to wave around how secrecy can foster abuse, but the simple fact is that we need departments and organizations like this to survive in the world.
Why should we be concerned?
Not because so much of what they did was underhanded. We should be concerned that so much of what they did was pointlessly stupid.
That's the problem with secrecy. It is necessary to protect reasonable covert action, but undispensible at covering up incompetence.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
How many decades will pass before we learn about the truth about 9-11?
In your case, I'm guessing all of them.
Sometimes, the ends justify the means, and the means ain't too pretty. But the thing is, most of these abuses are just that- they're abuses, not places where tough choices had to be made to save lives. For instance, in the 1960s, Johnson was convinced that the Communists were behind all the protests, so the CIA had agents grow long hair and learn to talk like hippies so they could infiltrate leftist groups, where they collected hundreds of thousands of names and created dossiers on thousands of people. And they found that among the foreign supporters who contributed money to these groups were John Lennon. Lennon, hm? Sounds a lot like "Lenin". Coincidence? They were spying on reporters, testing LSD on citizens, and to put things in context, there were some doors at a little place called the Watergate that the Nixon administration wanted opened, and that's why the CIA was asked about a lockpicker.
The lesson I take from this isn't that dangerous times require drastic measures. It's that breaking the law didn't really produce much in the way of good intelligence, didn't uncover many Commie plots, and didn't save many lies. And likewise, I think that 30 years from now, we'll look back at the secret prisons, Guantanamo Bay, domestic wiretapping, and uses of torture, and find that it did damned little to make the United States safer, and if anything, made us less safe because it convinced more people that America really is an Evil Empire which has to be fought.
A noble sentiment. However, I doubt it has much value as a means to console (for example) the victims killed in our war upon, and subsequent occupation of, Iraq. Or those held without access to legal representation. Or those who have been tortured.
The fact is, our political system is far too unresponsive to the will of the people, and while it may indeed, as you infer, be self-correcting over the long term, this does not seem to be sufficient because we don't live for the long term, we live for now. For some people, particularly victims of nationalist aggression like those in Iraq, now is all they'll ever have.
That is entirely aside from the domestic mess this president, vice president, and their political allies in the system have enhanced, created, and defended.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This is just an administration's response to the insinuation that they are somehow the first to do unpleasant things "in the service of" their country. This says, "even you Democrats did bad things; not only that, your great Champion Kennedy did some of the worst. We could easily declassify plenty of damaging goods on Clinton the Popular, but we don't want to set that precedent, now, do we?"
This has nothing to do with the past, except insofar as it might distract from the present.
Fighting terrorism directly is pouring water on burning oil. The victim of terrorism is - generally speaking - intended to be politically and/or emotionally linked to what the terrorist sees as the source of their troubles. That's the cause, the 'message' of terrorism.
I sincerely doubt any terrorist wants to "kill everyone", leave that for depressed teenagers. Terrorists usually want more power, a return to prior power, the end of an occupation or freedom of movement in a 'free market' (an end to trade embargos). In the case of anti-US terrorism, they probably feel they are fighting a gigantic geo-strategic and economic machine that has historically exerted power over them, so reducing their options in many areas. The U.S is the target of so much terrorism because it plays nastily and such with a hard-hand abroad. So, terrorists play very unfairly back, resorting to all sorts of horrific and unquestionably sickening measures in turn.
To think that terrorists are just some rabid suicidal maniacs that fantasise about putting holes in the buildings and people to "exert terror" for the fun or fear of it is a grave misunderstanding I think. Blame your current Government for designing that misunderstanding.Terrorists seem to believe they are messengers, speaking for desperate people in extremely harsh situations elsewhere. Only a terrible mess, bleak maldistributions of power, will produce these animal responses. No, I don't think terrorism is a valid 'reponse' in any case at all. History tells that many do however.
A sorry fact, for much of the world America is perhaps the scariest, least trusted country on Earth. Many countries are shit-scared and/or angry with America and they don't like that feeling. Few Americans have the slightest idea what their Government gets upto abroad. Until America learns to back-off and stop being so economically and geo-strategically aggressive, it will sadly continue to experience hard times on the home front.
Americans can change that with their vote - if it still counts.
To think that the agency did not have its own agenda is (in the opinion of someone who generally trusts the government and is not a conspiracy theorist) naive.
To think that any President is fully aware of all of the activities proposed or undertaken by agencies under the executive branch is delusional.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
There is one reason to keep information that old classified: Protecting the identities, and the lives, of current operatives.
Here's an example: Let's say the CIA's current operatives in Shanghai were all recruited by a long-serving operative there, starting back in the 1960's. If the classified information provides enough information for China to identify him, China can go back into their intelligence files and possibly identify people with whom he has had regular contact over the years, allowing them to identify the current operatives. This could cripple the intelligence network for that area, and possibly result in the deaths of many CIA employees.
They'll get my encryption algorithm when they pry it from my cold, dead hard drive.
Hey, great idea! And it's about time Britain learned lessons from history. After 1914 and 1938, you finally learned that staying out of foreign conflicts is a good way to prevent war.
Er.... wait....
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
Canada has been able to ignore our defence responsibilities because we don't need to defend ourselves militarily. Really, I mean who would we ever have to defend ourselves against? The the only really credible threat to Canadian defence is the US itself (maybe the old USSR), and no matter how much we invest in the military we'd never be able to counter them anyway. Any use of the Canadian military over the past 50 years has been over-seas and not directly related to Canadian defence. We don't need a strong military because the US is protecting us. We don't need it because we're geograpically isolated from anyone who might be threat.
You could spend those billions in schools for Palestine and still have them hating you for whatever irrational grievance they might have.
The most beautiful thing about this kind of acknowledgement is that no one pays for the illegal activity. The connections between the CIA and the mob which likely protected the mob can be revealed without jailing the case officers involved. Presidents who authorized this kind of thing are beyond just out of office. As criminal activities go, these things are an incredible success even when they didn't accomplished their criminal objectives. To me, this is most unabashed insult to the American people that I can think of.
Well. He's obviously a little somewhere off of center. Be that as it may, there's nothing particularly speculative about his assertion that there are agencies that we are not allowed to know about. There are plenty of organizations of that type, most of them fairly small when compared to NSA and CIA. They're are generally purpose-built, some of them temporarily, some more permanently. I'm not speculating. Hint, hint. :)
C//
There's a big difference between now and 1933. European states had been intermittently at war with each other ever since they were formed. Plenty of people knew that the Versailles conference hadn't solved anything, and that the same thing was bound to happen again. But war between European states is today unthinkable, and this is one of the major diplomatic achievements in history. War between Britain and Germany is about as likely as war between England and Scotland.
The only countries that could conceivably pose a threat to Britain are Russia and China. No one else can currently threaten Britain, and the idea that mickey mouse states like Iran could ever do so is ridiculous. Russian interests would not be served by war with the EU, and in any case the EU is rich enough and they are poor enough to be bought off with trade agreements and possible membership. The Chinese simply aren't interested in starting a war. They are probably the most restrained country when it comes to nuclear weapons, holding just enough for a deterrent, and they have more than enough problems trying to drag their own country into the modern age to worry about war with Britain, which is far away and cannot threaten China at all. Whatever you think of Israel's nuclear arsenal, at least they have an obvious reason to have one.
As someone else said, threats these days are from non-state actors, who will not be deterred by Trident. Trident is a monument to the British inability to accept that Britain is now a small country with diminishing clout, and one whose citizens are not served by pathetic attempts to maintain "credibility". That money would be better spent on solving British social problems, or by giving it back to the taxpayers.
The problem with the precautionary principle is that it leads to absurd outcomes. There are any number of terrible things that have a minute chance of happening, and which it would be very expensive to protect against. If you take the PP seriously, then you're like that guy who's worried about crime who can only afford Kraft Dinner because his house is surrounded by razor wire, floodlights, attack dogs and a private milita. Everyone can see how ridiculous that is, yet the defence policies of many nations are similarly irrational.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
Saddam is likely comparatively worse (and I say likely because the US is very good at hiding things that would be embarrassing) but the issue is not relative morality. The horrible things that we do we decide to lump into a different category than that of our adversaries. We contextualize our atrocities to justify or say "shame, shame, shame" for those we can't contextualize (Abu Ghraib). When presenting the atrocities of our foes we completely remove all context and offer the implication that they did this horrible thing because they were evil. If we're going to justify our action by contextualizing them it's only fair to apply the same metric to the atrocities of others.
Is is unfortunate that people use articles like this to try to prove some political point (i.e. Republicans are evil).
It is unfortunate that people use the power invested in them to try to prove that they are indeed evil (i.e. the present US administration).
Seeing Dick Cheney trying to avoid legal checks and balances by claiming that the office of the Vice Presidency doesn't fall under the Executive Branch is just the latest disgraceful act of a morally corrupt administration. I wonder how long before they start using that line for the President himself?
I wonder what the Founding Fathers would have thought of the current occupants of the White House. Not only will they lie and cheat, but they'll lie and cheat about their lying and cheating, even when the whole world can see that they're doing it.
The fact that 29 percent or so of Americans still approve of the job that the President is shocking. Presumably these people would need to see their leader sprout horns and a forked tail, slip George Michael the tongue at a pro-choice rally, and see him waste the land with seven plagues before finding any fault in his job performance.
But returning to the article...
If this is the kind of shit that they will admit to, albeit decades later, doesn't it make you think about what stuff they won't admit to that's happening right now? Remember, that's your government and your tax dollars at work.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I do not understand what nutcase modded this Troll.
It is somewhat confused about a few details, but it is mostly just a restatement of well-known (and well-known-for-a-long-time) facts.
That said, let me add a few clarifications:
The CIA collects information when and where they think it is useful for them. They release information when and where they think it is useful for them. This does not distinguish the CIA from any other person, group, corporation, or other identifiable entity (government or otherwise). In particular it does not distinguish them from you or anybody you know.
In the case of the CIA, "collecting information" is their job description. Consequently they are happy to err on the side of collecting and storing too much too early too eagerly since, after all, that's their taxpayer-funded mandate. "Disseminating information" is NOT in their job description and thus they do not go out of their way to hand it to every passer-by on the street.
You've read too many spy novels. The US (and most other governments) has learned long ago that the easiest way to hide something is in plain view. Yes, there's several dozen intelligence agencies in the US. But there's no point in (trying to) make their existence a secret. Why should anybody try? As long as the operations are classified, why create more black holes for crackpots to spin conspiracy theories around?
Googling "intelligence agency" right now yields a plethora of links, for example this one (the current number three for me) which lists dozens of them. Does it help you to know that there is an "Office for Intelligence" tucked away in the Energy Department? No. Do you know what they're doing that they're not talking about on their webpage? No. Do you care? No, because you're obsessing over "secret agencies" that you imagine you don't even know the identity of.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
That statement applies to a large percentage of bible-thumping, bible-belt, good ol' boys in the United States.
Hell... the queen of the right, Ann Coulter, said we should go to the middle-east and "kill or convert" them all.
"From the Middle East to the Middle West, it's 'pray and pass the ammunition'"
---From Rush's new song "Way the Wind Blows"
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
Tell that to JFK and E. Howard Hunt.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
It's likely that's why it gets news coverage. I don't think they lie to help the industry along, but they have said in internal documents that they should release some information on the Kennedy Assassination every once in a awhile to divert people.
It seems to work pretty well. A lot of energy spent on things that are unimportant, which is as useful to them as you not paying any attention.
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