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Subject:
From:
Kabir Njaay <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
The Gambia and related-issues mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 28 Jun 2007 13:36:10 +0200
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Abdoukarim,

The link to the archives is contained in the forward. You can access them
at: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/index.htm
and one can also search with key words.

The link: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/top06.pdf for
example, is to the memo that ordered the murder of Lumbumba. The plot and
murder has of course been an open secret for many years now and was given
wide coverage by 'New African' in 2000 and can be accessed on the Gambia-L
archives. BBC also aired a documentary on the same topic a few years back
which I believe can still me watched on the net.

Regards,

Kabir.





On 6/28/07, ABDOUKARIM SANNEH <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Kabir
> Thanks for the forward. I learn about the document form BBC Radio 4 news
> but unable to access the web link. I am more interested in CIA activities in
> Africa. For that of Latin America, the scharlarly work of Noam Chomsky gave
> a lot of account about the activities of the agency.
>
> Kabir Njaay <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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,
> 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
> [23 June 2007]
>
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