Well, soon we’ll have more information to build up conspiracy theories on!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6229750.stm

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.

Doesn’t surprise me one little bit. The CIA makes the government conspiracy syndicate in the X-Files look tame.

Amateurs. The Illuminati are so much better. And the Bilderberg group.

You know, a truly clandestine organization opeerated by our government would not even be known to most of us, d’ya think?

I mean, why give it a name and a known place of business?

Da, going hmmmmm, what an idea for a book

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

Add the fact to this that it concerns a government agency of a country that posesses Weapons of Mass Destruction, and me thinks we should consider adding this country to the Axis of Evil.

Add every country that either has an intelligence agency or a strong military to the Axis then.

I’m having a hard time coming up with a country’s government that doesn’t have blood on their hands from some misdeed or another. Even the so perceived “peaceful” countries such as Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, etc.

I’m not excusing it. Just saying, is all.

I agree. But who was it that coined the whole concept of an “Axis of Evil”? Not Canada, Sweden or Switzerland. It was the son of the man that during the ‘70-ies was director of this very CIA.

As a guy who’s ancestry is half Polish I’d say let the truth be told.

LaMa - 24 June 2007 09:06 AM

I agree. But who was it that coined the whole concept of an “Axis of Evil”? Not Canada, Sweden or Switzerland. It was the son of the man that during the ‘70-ies was director of this very CIA.

Well, to be fair to the elder Bush, he was DCI, not just DCIA.  Which meant that he was in charge of keeping over a dozen different intelligence agencies from squabbling too much and in briefing the President, rather than looking into the day-to-day doings of any one particular agency.  Besides, he was in office for less than a year, which probably didn’t give him enough time to learn where all the restrooms were, much less plot and scheme.  The DDCIA would have more knowledge over what was going on in the CIA itself, but the guy who’d had that job for the past several years (Vernon Walters) had moved on to another job just a few months after Bush started, and Enno Knoche moved into the position for a little while and would have had to get settled in.  So it’s likely that nobody really knew much of what was going on overall.