CIA documents point to massive and ongoing government criminality

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/jun2007/cia-j28.shtml

By Bill Van Auken

28 June 2007

The CIA's release Wednesday of a nearly 700-page, previously classified set
of documents known within the agency as the "family jewels" has served to
spotlight rampant state criminality in Washington that continues to this
day.

The documents were compiled in the midst of the 1973-74 Watergate scandal,
sparked by the bungled burglary of Democratic Party offices in Washington,
in which two of the perpetrators were long-time CIA operatives. The CIA
assembled the documents as part of an attempt to shield itself from the
ensuing crisis of the Nixon administration.

The documents provide a written record of crimes ranging from the CIA's
collaboration with the Mafia in the attempted assassination of Cuban
President Fidel Castro to an assassination plot against Congolese Prime
Minister Patrice Lumumba, spying on journalists, antiwar and civil rights
activists and other opponents of US government policy, and infiltration of
covert agents into left-wing organizations.

In a statement to CIA staff members on the release of the documents, the
agency's current director, Michael Hayden, described the declassification as
an effort to close the door on an unpleasant but long ago concluded chapter
in the CIA's history.

The documents, he said, represented "reminders of some things the CIA should
not have done." They provide, he claimed, "a glimpse of a very different era
and a very different agency." Post-Watergate reforms, he contended, had
given the CIA "a far stronger place in our democratic system."

Yet a succession of recent revelations concerning CIA kidnappings and
torture as well as wholesale illegal domestic spying refute Hayden's attempt
to portray the criminal activities of an agency once known as Murder Inc. as
ancient history. Reading these documents in the context of present political
developments calls to mind William Faulkner's observation: "The past is not
dead. In fact, it's not even past."

While little in the declassified documents represents information that was
not already in the pubic domain as a result of investigative reporting and
congressional probes carried out more than three decades ago, the files have
nonetheless aroused substantial public interest, including among the
majority of the US population which was not yet born at the time of the
original revelations.

This popular resonance stems from the stark similarities between the illegal
activities carried out by the CIA in the 1960s and 1970s and the current
crimes of the Bush administration.

On Wednesday, just a day after the release of the "family jewels," a Senate
committee issued subpoenas to the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney's
office, the National Security Council and the Justice Department for
documents related to a massive domestic spying operation mounted by the
National Security Agency (NSA) on the orders of Bush administration by means
of warrantless wiretaps and the collection of millions of call records. The
White House response indicated that it will continue to stonewall
congressional investigators.

Hayden himself presided over these domestic spying programs as director of
the NSA from 1999 to 2005.

Last week, John Rizzo, the man nominated by the Bush administration to serve
as the CIA's general counsel, indicated in congressional hearings his
agreement with the administration's ruling defining torture so
narrowly—causing pain associated with organ failure or death—as to allow
water-boarding and other forms of torture by CIA interrogators, who have
trained military personnel in the same methods.

Rizzo, a career CIA attorney, refused to answer whether the CIA had used its
kidnappings and "extraordinary rendition" flights to transfer prisoners to
third countries in order that they be tortured in secret prisons. While the
CIA lawyer claimed that it was impossible to discuss this issue in a public
session, numerous international investigations and testimony by those who
have been abducted have already exposed the CIA's current practice of
"disappearing," torturing and, in some cases, murdering alleged terror
suspects.

The juxtaposition of the CIA documents that were compiled more than three
decades ago with the exposure of the current illegal practices of the agency
and other branches of the US national security establishment raises a number
of profoundly disturbing political questions.

While the revelations of CIA plots and conspiracies in the 1970s triggered
public outrage, extensive media investigations and aggressive congressional
probes, the Bush administration has thus far proven able—thanks in large
part to the complicity of congressional Democrats—to suppress similar
challenges to operations that in many ways are even more criminal than those
carried out three decades ago.

The treatment of the type of actions that caused an immense national scandal
nearly 35 years ago as standard operating procedure in the ongoing "global
war on terror" is a measure of the deep-going criminalization of America's
political establishment and the financial oligarchy it represents.

One thing that the documents released Wednesday establish is that the US
government, while claiming to be waging a worldwide war on terrorism,
historically and today represents the principal force for terror on the
planet.

Among the more revealing documents contained in the "family jewels" is a
memo drafted by James Jesus Angleton, the agency's longstanding chief of
counterintelligence, who directed such programs as CHAOS, involving domestic
surveillance and infiltration of the civil rights and antiwar movements in
the US. (Aside from the brazen violation of the Bill of Rights involved in
such activities, the CIA was barred by its charter from engaging in any form
of domestic, as opposed to foreign, spying).

The subject line of the memo is "Joint CIA/USAID Terrorist (Technical
Investigations Course)."

Described as a "training course for foreign police/security personnel" run
jointly by the CIA and the Agency for International Development, it included
training in interrogation and surveillance as well as discussions with the
"students" on "terrorist and other hostile activities currently existing in
their countries."

This was followed by training in the use of explosives designed to "develop
basic familiarity and use proficiently through handling, preparing and
applying various explosive charges, incendiary agents, terrorist devices and
sabotage techniques."

Such schools were used to train terrorists, secret police operatives and
death squads that were unleashed against the working class movement
throughout Latin America and elsewhere, inflicting death, terror and torture
on hundreds of thousands of people and destroying the democratic rights of
millions.

One student at an earlier version of such schools was long-time CIA
operative Luis Posada Carriles, who is currently being harbored by the Bush
administration, which refuses to extradite him to Venezuela to face charges
in connection with the 1976 terrorist bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner
in which 73 people lost their lives.

The documents contained in the "family jewels" only hint at such crimes.
There is no mention of the CIA-organized coups in Iran, Guatemala, Chile or
Indonesia, nor any material on the organization of the death squads in
Central America or the bloody clandestine and illegal wars the agency
organized in Southeast Asia, Angola, Nicaragua, Afghanistan and elsewhere,
which together claimed millions of lives.

Even what is presented is heavily censored, with dozens of pages—at least 10
percent of the entire document—whited-out. The National Security
Archive<http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/index.htm>,
an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at
George Washington University, pointed to one document that had previously
been released in 1977. The document concerned the CIA's role in providing
the Secret Service with a safe house and surveillance equipment to spy on
protesters coming to the 1972 Democratic and Republican national conventions
in Miami.

The archive posted both the 1977 version and the newly released one side by
side, showing that more than half of the information released 30 years ago
had been excised.

So much for CIA Director Hayden's claim that the release of the "family
jewels" showed that the agency is being "as open as possible" with the
American public.

Indeed, in the opening section of the "family jewels," which summarizes the
CIA's illegal activities in eight points, the very first point is blanked
out. This comes before the agency's conspiracy to organize an operation with
the Mafia to kill Castro. Presumably, whatever crime is still being
concealed was even more heinous.

There is ample reason for taking such extreme care with the material in
these documents, and it has nothing to do with the usual pretext of
protecting intelligence "sources and methods."

In its coverage of the release of the "family jewels," the *New York
Times*published a graphic chronology of their history, including
photographs of
leading participants in the creation and handling of the documents. Featured
prominently in these photos are none other than Vice President Cheney and
former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom were intimately
involved in what Rumsfeld, White House chief of staff in 1975, referred to
as a "damage-limiting operation."

Also pictured are George H.W. Bush, the former president and father of the
current occupant of the White House, who took over as director of the CIA
during the same period, and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who
remains a prominent advisor to the present administration.

It also should be recalled that some of the worst crimes catalogued in the
"family jewels"—assassination plots against foreign leaders and spying on
civil rights and antiwar activists, as well as on journalists—were organized
either at the direct behest or with the approval of the Democratic
administrations of presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

Undoubtedly, the release of documents requested more than 15 years ago under
the Freedom of Information Act was intended as a public relations exercise
to distract public opinion from the current crimes of the CIA and portray
the agency as a more democratic and open institution.

Its effect, however, is just the opposite, underscoring the culpability of
not just the CIA, but also both major political parties and key figures who
remain at the pinnacle of state power, in historic and continuing crimes
against working people all over the globe.

See Also:
CIA to release 1970s documents on agency's crimes
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/jun2007/cia-j23.shtml>[23 June 2007]

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