The CIA is about to reveal skeletons in its closet

Xevious

Xevious

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CIA to reveal decades of misdeeds
The US Central Intelligence Agency is to declassify hundreds of documents detailing some of the agency's worst illegal abuses from the 1950s to 1970s. The papers, to be released next week, will detail assassination plots, domestic spying and wiretapping, kidnapping and human experiments.
Many of the incidents are already known, but the documents are expected to give more comprehensive accounts.
It is "unflattering" but part of agency history, CIA chief Michael Hayden said.
"This is about telling the American people what we have done in their name," Gen Hayden told a conference of foreign policy historians.
The documents, dubbed the "Family Jewels", offer a "glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency".
The full 693-page file detailing CIA illegal activities was compiled on the orders of the then CIA director James Schlesinger in 1973.
He had been alarmed by accounts of CIA involvement in the Watergate scandal under his predecessor and asked CIA officials to inform him of all activities that fell outside the agency's legal charter.
'Skeletons'
Ahead of the documents' release by the CIA, the National Security Archive, an independent research body, on Thursday published related papers it had obtained.
These detail government discussions in 1975 of the CIA abuses and briefings by Mr Schlesinger's successor at the CIA, William Colby, who said the CIA had "done some things it shouldn't have".
Among the incidents that were said to "present legal questions" were:

  • the confinement of a Soviet defector in the mid-1960s
  • assassination plots of foreign leaders, including Cuba's Fidel Castro
  • wiretapping and surveillance of journalists
  • behaviour modification experiments on "unwitting" US citizens
  • surveillance of dissident groups between 1967 and 1971
  • opening from 1953 to 1973 of letters to and from the Soviet Union; from 1969 to 1972 of mail to and from China
The papers also convey mounting concern in President Gerald Ford's administration that what were dubbed the CIA's "skeletons" were surfacing in the media.
Henry Kissinger, then both secretary of state and national security adviser, was against Mr Colby's moves to investigate the CIA's past abuses and the fact that agency secrets were being divulged.
Accusations appearing in the media about the CIA were "worse than in the days of McCarthy", Mr Kissinger said.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/6229750.stm

Published: 2007/06/22 12:50:34 GMT

© BBC MMVII
 
All I have to say is that this aught to be good. As in OMFG, Behaviour Modification on unwitting citizens, good. I am sure the books that will be written in the next few years based on this new info will be interesting, along with the orginal reports themselves.
 
Hooray for America!


Will be picking this up.


I like Gen Hayden's quote "Documents give a glimpse of a very different time"

BULLSHIT. The government is still recklessly abusing our civil liberties. If in the 2000s the president can get away with legalizing gross violations of our liberties, imaging what's happening behind closed doors. I'm sure the book doesn't contain half of this shit that happened back in those days, or any of the worse shit that is undoubtedly going on as we speak.

Hooray for America!
 
[quote name='PyroGamer']I like Gen Hayden's quote "Documents give a glimpse of a very different time"

BULLSHIT.[/QUOTE]

That, of course, is the great fucking punchline of history: that people (certainly not just Americans) relegate what happened, you know, back then as something totally unconnected from what's relevent to their lives today. "We tested what on who? Nah, they'd never do that NOW. We overthrew what democratically elected leader of where? Those were the old days. I'm sure they don't still hate us for that."

My dislike for the current administration/war aside, I'm no dove, and certainly no pollyanna -- bad guys, unfortunately, don't just shoot themselves. The CIA should have a pretty deep well of dirty tricks. But I've read the CIA charter, and the parts that expressly forbid the agency from working inside the country and from engaging in assassination are there for fucking reasons. You don't just get to ignore the laws you don't like, and it doesn't matter if you're some dirty hippy, or a stone-cold spook, or the president himself.

Plus this is going to be grist for the conspiracy-theory mill for a long time to come...
 
[quote name='Xevious']behaviour modification experiments on "unwitting" US citizens[/QUOTE]




Now, let's all participate in the modern versions of these activities, put our hands over our ears, and pretend like this kind of activity ended in 1973. :lol:
 
[quote name='mykevermin']


Now, let's all participate in the modern versions of these activities, put our hands over our ears, and pretend like this kind of activity ended in 1973. :lol:[/QUOTE]

Thank you, I was waiting for someone to post something like that :lol:
 
I find this stupid and dumb why in the Hell would the CIA give this information out but the Cubans wont give their information out as well as the Chinese and the Former Soviet Union. Nobody ever mentions that noo there to stuck and worried about the secret's of the USA so what the usa wanted to kill castro & so do I so whats the big damn deal. I dont wish the CIA to give out anymore information we dont need to know any more about the covert ops this agency has done. It gets me so upset that they do this , the damn bureacracy in the CIA has pretty much f*ked up that orgz.
 
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