What do you believe now that you didn't a few years back? (CIA Secrets)

[Philosoraptor]

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=3&art_id=nw20070622092519254C261154

CIA secrets out in the open

June 22 2007 at 09:43AM

Washington - The US Central Intelligence Agency is declassifying hundreds of pages of documents on secret operations from over three decades ago, CIA Director Michael Hayden said.

The so-called "Family Jewels" document overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, according to a summary posted on the Web site of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

The documents to be released next week also include accounts of break-ins and theft, surveillance of US journalists, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, and "behaviour modification" experiments on "unwitting" US civilians.

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The cia is playing footsie with us again, claiming to be releasing 'dirty laundry' secrets from 35 years back, I wonder if any conspiracy theories will be solved?

Is it any wonder that Americans like to dwell on theories? Is it any wonder that we see conspiracies everywhere? If you have an extremely secretive government, you are doomed to sit around and wonder what the hell happened, because they sure won't tell you.

The cia is giving us cheap secrets, they won't tell us what's REALLY been going on. We'll just have to theorize.

What things did you used to believe in that you no longer do? And what things that you never thought you'd believe do you now believe? People these days believe in the strangest things, and since bush showed up they seem like they'll believe ANY thing.

[Philosoraptor]

1. Would'ja believe they experimented on we citizens with LSD?

They did.

[Bobbieo]

2. Our greatest fears come from within!!!

[ljm2002]

3. A long, long time ago...

...when I was young and naive, I believed that the government in general told the truth, and that they followed the laws. I believed that politicians told us what they really thought about things, and that people voted for what they thought was right, not necessarily only what they thought would be of immediate benefit to them.

Now what do I think? For one thing, in the immortal words of Daniel Schorr: "Governments lie". That is a given -- doesn't matter which government, of which country, just assume they're lying for one reason or another and you'll not go far astray. As for following the laws, ha ha ha. They make the laws that the rest of us have to follow; laws are not for the elite, especially the elite that resides inside the Beltway. And politicians nowadays, they take a poll, then they stake out their positions, then they have speech writers write stuff so they'll actually have something to say at all those rallies and town halls and the like -- but rare is the politician who will tell you what they, as a human being, really think about anything at all. Finally, voters: they are either totally cynical and don't vote, or they are informed only by the sound bites, never getting below the surface of an issue, and they really will vote either for their own selfish interests, or for policies based on lies.

It's amazing it ever worked. It did used to work -- didn't it? Maybe that was a naive belief I had 'way back when, too. After all, if we look at our history books, we will find many low points, including the Gilded Age and the Depression, the Civil War, and others -- there was Tammany Hall, other Presidential corruption scandals -- there have been other illegal invasions of foreign lands, other times when our troops were used to defend the privilege of Big Business to exploit people the world over. So now I realize that not only was I naive when younger about how the world works, I stayed naive a lot longer about how it was before that. I suppose that naivete is part of being a Boomer -- we had a couple of brief moments where idealism seemed to carry the day -- including the Civil Rights movement and the Women's movement, for example -- yet the fierce backlash we are seeing now is really more in line with how this country operates if you take a historical perspective. Which is really, really depressing.

[Philosoraptor]

4. Pretty much all of U.S. history was lies when we were kids.

I too was naive, but we find out lots of ugly truths when we investigate.