Release of “Family Jewels”, CIA Acknowledges Years of Assassination Plots, Coerced Drug Tests...

[babylonsister]

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/27/1428212

With Release of “Family Jewels”, CIA Acknowledges Years of Assassination Plots, Coerced Drug Tests, and Domestic Spying


The CIA has released its so-called “family jewels” -- nearly 700 pages of documents detailing some if its most infamous and illegal operations dating back to the 1950s. These include assassination plots against foreign leaders, drugs tests on unwitting citizens, wiretapping of U.S. journalists, spying on activists, opening mail, break-ins at the homes of ex-CIA employees and more. We speak with John Prados of the National Security Archive, is an independent research institute that filed the original Freedom of Information Act request for the “family jewels” 15 years ago. The CIA has released its so-called "family jewels.” On Tuesday, the Agency declassified nearly 700 pages of documents that detail some if its most infamous and illegal operations from the 1950s to the early 1970s. Although many portions of the documents were blacked out, they detail assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba, the testing of mind and behavior-altering drugs like LSD on unwitting citizens, wiretapping of U.S. journalists, spying on civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protesters, opening mail between the United States and the Soviet Union and China, break-ins at the homes of ex-CIA employees and more.

Announcing the release of the family jewels’ last week, CIA Director Michael Hayden said: “Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA’s history.” He added that the declassified documents provided “a glimpse of a very different time and a very different Agency.”

Tuesday’s release of the documents marks the first time the CIA is publicly acknowledging responsibility for its illegal activities. The file was produced in 1973 in response to a directive from then CIA director James Schlesinger to conduct an internal investigation into the agency’s covert operations that were ‘outside the CIA’s charter.”

John Prados is a Senior Fellow at the National Security Archive. The archive is an independent research institute that filed the original Freedom of Information Act request for the “family jewels” fifteen years ago. John Prados, joining us from Washington, DC, Welcome to Democracy Now!

* John Prados. Senior Fellow at the National Security Archive. He directs the Vietnam Documentation Project at the archive and is the author of Pulitzer-prize nominated books, including “Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA”, “Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War”, and “Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby.”

[yardwork]

1. This is just a drop in the bucket. And I suspect it has all been cleaned up.

As bad as this sounds, the CIA has and is doing worse, much worse. This is a smokescreen to distract from what the current regime is doing.

[librechik]

2. Good thing they don't do anything like that anymore!

at least not that we'll know until about 2042.

[RufusTFirefly]

9. Right. Ask this guy about the CIA

I'm guessing he has knowledge of some more recent family jewels.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

3. I'm delighted they've been released. I'll be impressed if some the criminals stand trial.

But, I'm not holding my breath.

[pwb]

4. They did this to try and spin what bush did as normal.

why else?

[babylonsister]

5. That's my take, too. nt

[FormerDittoHead]

6. Exactly. Way too much media emphasis on the Castro/Kennedy plot...

From the people who took down Dan Rather...

[uberllama42]

7. I see it as more likely

that they are trying to make a show of having come completely clean. Ron Paul has been calling for the abolition of the CIA, and he is not the first to do so. I think they are trying to make it look like they no longer engage in objectionable behavior. Of course, they still do. I would have liked to see them admit that they sell cocaine to LA gangs. It is my understanding that the CIA has always bankrolled its illegal activities with drug money.

[Blue_Tires]

8. k+r

[PATRICK]

10. Deja Vu

This so-called revelation has stirred a lot of echos in my memory. of court cases, leaks, speculations not denied, details from many reliable sources. ALL the stories seem seem as fresh as last summer's market haddock. There were movies, more than one that referenced this sly analogy with its subtle undertones. In those movies one would get real clarification as to the plot to assassinate JFK- and those other pesky Americans. The underworld of America's overlords, the secret ties with Nazis(though sadly much of that is common history thanks to Loftus and others). The CIA's seal of approval has been stamped on many "covert" operations. What we lacked were names and signatures on the official orders. Are there names here?

Think about that. The spooks committing all these crimes, slithering around secret banks, drug operations to escape the notice of Congressional oversight and public horror had sank their souls deep into Cheney's dark side decades ago. Some are dead, most retired, some still closeted away somewhere in various pockets of the flasher's overcoat. Who inherited the jewels and who were they hocked to when cleanup time sent the vermin scurrying back under the rotting flesh of democracy? To even imagine that some of the very did not end up in BFEE employ, using their bile against democracy and their corrupted skills against their own nation is ridiculous.

Yet as in every other important, vital matter of civil government, imagination is left to the fictionally prurient dredging up Old Testament style slander against men of good will. The following of names attached to guns and orders and chains of surreptitious command is likely as missing from the castrated jewel box as the crimes not already known, already proved, long in the in-prosecutable past. Both parties seem to breathe a sigh of relief that the supposed responsibility of now dead presidents from both parties have locked the box on the one inviolable treasure stolen from the American people and its basic ideals- Accountability. You can skip around, skim the surface of the cheap trinkets, avoid the sleeping dragon, leave your excursion ticket stub at the door and FORGET. The news people that followed each of those stories briefly- as incompletely then as now, having actually unlearned the crimes better than any spook sworn to blood oaths and hypnotic drugs, have offered up a Pollyanna National Enquirer treatment of childlike(with a mock low IQ reportage) wonder at what historians have been plumbing very successfully for all these decades.

The past was not dealt with. The abuses were repressed and mainly driven underground for a brief period until Reagan was helped to dodder in with the political arms of the Old Guard. Casey's diseased brain took most of the secrets with him yet he too was spilling the beans to interviewers. Names remain. Like Ice Pick. The work in contrast NOW is worse than then. Big name political assassinations do not happen. The reasons, besides the storied incompetence, are still of interest. Torture, rendition, subversion of governments, even popular democracies is as "covert" as the Contras and run by the same vigilantes of plutocracy. The money chain is still in the shadows despite the drug connections and the BCCI scandals having been breached by the brave.

Our news media has no collective family jewels, as has been obvious. That palace eunuch is a little confused though drooling and admiring of what other fakes claim to have. Real ones make them nervous or envious. It is presented as having less interest than the gal prison story of social misfit Paris Hilton. Bored, they will pass another blanket of oblivion over the main fact, the main conclusion, the pressing question and the new details that mean anything. Another controlled, safe, entertaining hype from the master whose message here is a silent threat. Nothing was done but death then and they can do worse to people everywhere for any reason now. So tame is the modern press that this menace is too deep, too unnecessary. it is like reading a vintage scary comic book and nothing more. After getting over a recent Hilton binge, this nostalgic gloss hardly rates a burp.

But the people, the people, the unrepresented, silenced, lied to, betrayed and taxpaying people...what would they say were they allowed or listened to about... accountability, justice, reform? About having their robes of citizenship washed red in the blood of countless people like themselves for the sake of self-styled overlords and their thugs, their false ideologies of power and wealth? We, today, are responsible to hold these things to account.

[RufusTFirefly]

11. As William Faulkner once wrote...

"The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."