C.I.A. to Let "Skeletons" Out of its Closet 235
sgt_doom writes "The C.I.A. announced it was going to reveal "skeletons" by declassifying hundreds of pages of documents detailing illegal abuses over the years. As a preamble, the National Security Archive at George Washington University released a separate set of documents covering internal government deliberations of the abuses from January 1975. Mandatory reading for all those history-challenged individuals who believe government knows best!"
I forgot (Score:3, Insightful)
Just saying...
Re:This is politically motivated (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I forgot (Score:3, Insightful)
USA! USA! Greatest democracy in the world (when compared to Cuba and Saudi Arabia), greatest living standards (when compared to Bangladesh), greatest freedom (when compared to China), largest (when compared to the Vatican)
We're Much Better Now (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is politically motivated (Score:3, Insightful)
The other documents cover the "fifties to the seventies", and while that does include the Carter era, that's just the tail end of it. From the description it's largely about the targeting of leftists, and while that may have continued under Carter it sure wasn't his doing.
Why does so much people hate the USA? (Score:5, Insightful)
Take a look at this article in Wikipedia about the School of the Americas [wikipedia.org], an USA army institue that for decades taught torture, fear, bounties for enemy dead, false imprisonment, torture, execution, and kidnapping a target's family members to Latin America dictatorships in the 60's, 70's and 80's.
An excerpt:
It's not hard to figure out why some many people in Latin America hate the USA and its hipocrisy of allegedly spreading democracy while supporting dictatorships.
Re:History Challenged? (Score:5, Insightful)
In general, do you think the mis-deeds of the CIA will involved illegal spying on bad corporations to protect the US Public, or will they involve illegal spying to protect the big corporations ?
Stop and think, buddy.
Re:I forgot (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you an apologizer for atrocity?
"Just saying"? State what it is your implying. Is it that because other countries do bad things that it doesn't matter what yours does?
The only way things change is by pointing these things out and by being outraged when your country or your country's allies do these things.
Re:Why does so much people hate the USA? (Score:3, Insightful)
X. (not American)
Re:History Challenged? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do people reduce everything to A versus B? ("false dichotomy") It's not "govt or corps, choose one" - how about they both have good and bad qualities, and we need to reign in BOTH of them so that we can enjoy their good qualities while not suffering their ill effects?
Corporations allow for pooling of capital to achieve great efficiencies and new products. Abusive corporations can squeeze out competitors, raise prices, and prevent new products from challenging their dominance.
Government allows for a fair system of law and order. Abuse of governmental authority allow for repression and deprivation of life and liberty.
Thinking the either govt or business (or even the people) always know best is silly. All three are both right and wrong quite often.
Re:I forgot (Score:1, Insightful)
Your post reeks of anti-American propaganda.
Not all Americans think they're the best in the world, just as America actually (still) is one of the better countries in the world.
Just as America is the most powerful. And, some would say, the most economically developed.
The US doesn't have any social nets to catch/elevate falling/underprivileged citizens and it has had governments who wage war entirely too easily.
Grave, perhaps, but the US has many great qualities, too.
There's no need to barf your own frustration over the first best thing the medias tell you to hate.
Re:Why does so much people hate the USA? (Score:3, Insightful)
X.
Re:dream on (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the things being done right now? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's easy to slip into a little nap and forget what's just around the corner. War with Iran, and either 'terrorist' attacks on U.S. soil, or a U.S. ecconomic collapse, (or both), which pr
Slow Learners (Score:4, Insightful)
The first job is to try to determine what is going on in foreign countries. Where is Osama bin Laden? (Who the hell knows) Is Iran trying to build a nuclear bomb? (probably) How many ICBMs does China have (not a lot), etc. This is where most of the money goes because it involves a lot of expensive technology.-- satellite photos, communications intercepts, etc. It's hard to object to this except for the issue of at what point the sum cost of getting data exceeds the value of the data. And keep in mind that the value of the data includes the costs of acting on bad data or data that should probably have been available -- about $400 billion so far for the Iraq fiasco alone.
There is also a covert action component -- the James Bond stuff. This seems to be overwhelmingly attractive to certain overgrown adolescents. The problem is that covert action frequently misfires. On good days, the misfire is harmless. Castro doen't smoke the booby trapped cigar. Sometimes it comes back to haunt us. We overthrow a democratic government in Iran in the 1950s and -- suprise -- our chosen stooge, the Shaw gets pitched out in the 1970s and we find ourselves faced with a theocracy that doesn't much like us.
These papers seem to deal with the covert stuff and to chronicle what went wrong and (I assume) what went right as well.
Re:I forgot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:dream on (Score:3, Insightful)
Even that is a misconception. "Pointy haired bosses" have accountability; in the end, they must make a profit as a consequence of their choices or the company will fold, because in a commercial enterprise, funds result from sales of a product and/or service, and said sale is at the option of the consumer.
The government suffers no loss of income, regardless of how poorly they perform. In fact, they often increase their income if they determine that performance is lacking. In the US, that income is taken by coercion (the threat of force, not to mention the occasional use of force) from the populace as income taxes, except of course for those who think that paying income taxes for services not in the general population's best interests is a good thing.
For instance, paying for an adequate national defense is easily argued to be in the populace's best interests; paying for an expeditionary force that attacks oil-rich countries is not. Paying the salaries of congress-people who make constitutional laws is easily argued to be in the populace's best interests; paying for ex-post facto law, law that abolishes habeas corpus, law that attempts to limit personal, consensual choices and liberties... these are the fruits of a coercive government out of control — argument for them is nonsensical.
The model for coercive tax-based government is defective with regard to ensuring performance at any level other than the elected personages. Even there, the political parties have created an assembly line of essentially similar candidates. These preserve the status quo of service to big money interests, with the people's interests placed dead last.
So while you may be entirely justified with regard to your derisive characterization of commercial command structure, just remember that such people do respond to a built-in and ultimately terminal feedback mechanism that the people have control of. This is not the case for government, or at least, the US government, which is the one I am most familiar with.
Disclosure: I am both a teacher and a "pointy headed boss" of a series of successful commercial enterprises.
Re:I forgot (Score:2, Insightful)
Da Truth! (Score:5, Insightful)
Also mandatory reading for those conspiracists among you. While you do not believe that goverment knows best, you do believe that government has super-human powers of secrecy, competency and planning. Did the CIA assassinate Kennedy? Did they shoot Reagan to keep him in line? Was the moonshot faked? Was 9/11 and inside job?
There will be lots of eyebrow-raising information in this collection, but none of it will help the conspiracists. They'll just claim more of the same coverup when they don't find their smoking gun.
Re:I forgot (Score:3, Insightful)
That others have sinned doesn't justify it, but don't come off as morally superior or something.
Re:I forgot (Score:5, Insightful)
And I'm Canadian
From my experience, americans think highly of their country, but most fall short at saying "best place in the world." When I worked for AMD I routinely had to visit the states and had occasion to chat it up with my co-workers from California. They often remarked about the good times they had in Europe, Canada, etc. If you asked them if they liked living in the USA they would say yes, and speak positive about it. But don't confuse thinking positive with zealotry. Most educated folk in the USA have been all over the planet and aren't as dillusioned as
Tom
Re:Destined to Repeat It (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not gonna say the "government knows best", since they have a remarkable tendency to fuck up pretty much everything they get involved in, both foreign and domestic. I am, however, all for "illegal" covert action by the CIA if it's in our National Interest (e.g. secret prisons in East Europe), and have been since well before the "war on terror" started. I'm a child of the Cold War.
The Geneva Conventions were designed for the times when armies, led by nation-states and wearing uniforms, met on battlefields. The "bad guys" are beheading journalists and civilians on video and dragging mutilated bodies through the streets and you're worried about the US?
Re:This is politically motivated (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I forgot (Score:5, Insightful)
That's stupid. If we require perfection before being able to point out bad stuff - nobody would be able to speak out at all. Or is that what you want?
Re:I forgot (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean like you guys left cleaning Iraq to the Iraqis? Oh wait...
Re:I forgot (Score:3, Insightful)
You have, in a sense. You've met the people around you.
I'm sure everyone here is aware that any sufficiently large group of people loses homogeneity. When you applying it to the entirety of the American population you're going to end up touching on pretty much the entire spectrum of possible characters. Even united with what may seem like a common idealogy, Christianity ranges from frothing-at-the-mouth hatemongers, to socially liberal love-for-everything folks. The group is still a composition of individuals, each with their own schema for value judgement. In any country you have criminals. They are not representative of the larger whole. You also have exceptionally generous, quality people, who are also by definition not representative of the larger whole.
It's the reason stereotypes are frowned upon. While some may be correct in identifying a larger trend, individual variation makes stereotypes inaccurate until it's functionally useless.
Re:I forgot (Score:3, Insightful)
I think what you're basing your opinions on is the media, and the fact that there simply is a lot of it in the states. I've been to the states enough to know that for the most part they're decent folk just like anywhere else. They say excuse me when they try to pass in front, sorry when they bump into you, I've even seen them hold doors open for folk. Amazin!!!