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CIA Releases 13M Pages of Declassified Documents Online (bbc.com)

About 13 million pages of declassified documents from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have been released online. The records include UFO sightings and psychic experiments from the Stargate programme, which has long been of interest to conspiracy theorists. From a report on BBC: The move came after lengthy efforts from freedom of information advocates and a lawsuit against the CIA. The full archive is made up of almost 800,000 files. They had previously only been accessible at the National Archives in Maryland. The trove includes the papers of Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as well as several hundred thousand pages of intelligence analysis and science research and development.

1 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Re:13 million pages of evidence of misspent tax $$ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    A lot of companies have a couple people that do something of value, and 1000 boondoggle projects and worthless executives to go with them.

    They, at least, sometimes go out of business, and have therefore some incentive to improve toward marginal efficiency and rational resource allocation.

    "Intelligence agencies" have neither. And the results of this are becoming manifestly obvious. Not sure what your point is, but let's draw a real-world example. For the cost of the Iraq war, we could have provided every man, worman, and child in that country with a college education, labeled "goodwill of the United States". Which choice of financial expenditure do you think would have left us with better relations with the Islamic world? And the fact we didn't make that choice, lies squarely with the "OMGWMD" agencies. There were no enhanced salaries and ever-growing bureaucracies on offer for Option #1, so, of course, that didn't happen.

    If you think there aren't better, vastly more straightforward ways to influence countries and work toward peace with 70 billion dollars that don't involve massive payoffs to the military-industrial complex and killing people nearly at random, you seem just about unimaginative enough to apply to a three-letter-agency yourself.