Editorial: CIA abuses aren't history (MetroWest Daily News)

[struggle4progress]

GHS
Fri Jun 29, 2007, 12:45 AM EDT

~snip~ The CIA released the documents - which remain heavily censored, indicating there are still some sins officials don't want to confess - in an attempt to score points for candor. "I firmly believe that the improved system of intelligence oversight that came out of the 1970s gives the CIA a far stronger place in our democratic system," CIA director Michael Hayden said in releasing the documents.

He should tell that to a judge in Italy, where 25 CIA agents are being tried in absentia, charged with kidnapping an Egyptian cleric. The trial, now recessed until October pending the appeal of a ruling, is a test of the agency's "extraordinary rendition program." He should ask the more than 100 terror suspects held since 2002 in the CIA's secret prisons overseas, subjected to interrogation techniques often described as torture.

The incidents of domestic surveillance described in the family jewels documents are dwarfed by the electronic surveillance program currently operating under the National Security Agency. There are also intelligence operations being run out of the Pentagon for which there is less oversight than for CIA operations.

The family jewels papers are lively reading, important to policy-makers as well as historians. But it's not what the CIA was doing 30 years ago that truly merits our attention. It is what the spies are up to now.

http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/opinion/x90094115

[lligrd]

1. No Kidding. Remember When The CIA Using The Mob

was a wacky conspiracy theory?

[L. Coyote]

2. NIP, TIARA, JMIP, CIA, NSA, DIA, NRO, NGA, FBI, USASA, ONI, MCIA, AIA, SS, RFIs,

to name some intelligence agencies we know about, that we should be concerned about today.