C.I.A. to Let "Skeletons" Out of its Closet

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 wonder if JFK is in there

[Heir Of The Mess]

So we can find out the truth about who killed JFK with their magic bullets.

uh...

[cosmocain]

this idea is an output of a crisis-meeting:

mr x: "hey, anoybody got a clue of how we can get those folks to forget our current abuses of law, like, err ...those search warrants and stuff.. ah, you all know. no need to heat it up." mr y: "we could just release old files. that will keep'em busy for some time. and we always can state: what's done, is done. we can't undo, but actually we are full of shame and guilt. forgive us, pleaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase"

This is politically motivated

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the US government is required to review ALL classified material after SOME period of time to determine when it can be released. However, the US gov. (CIA in this case) does NOT routinely announce in advance that it's going to release some exceptional material. Generally the stuff gets declassified as a result of a "Freedom of Information Act Request" on the part of some media organization or activist group.

I suspect that some of the stuff that's about to come out will be quite embarrasing to Jimmy Carter.

CIA Just a Servant

[ChePibe]

I realize that picking on the CIA for what they do is all good fun for many, but the CIA is ultimately a servant of its masters - most often the president, especially before the Church committee which resulted in much more congressional oversight. Not to say the CIA hasn't exceeded its own orders from time to time - it most certainly has, and once is too many times - but instead of saying, "ooh, look what the dirty CIA did!", it may be useful to look at why they did it and where the order came from. Presidents have often used it for their dirty work, particularly prior to 1975 or so when signed directives were not required, which allowed presidents to order the CIA to do their bidding without a paper trail and have plausible deniability otherwise.

An interesting read on this and other espionage/covert action matters is James Olson's Fair Play [amazon.com]. After giving a brief overview of what espionage is like, he puts forward 50 or so "hypothetical" situations and collects ethical and other opinions from a wide variety of people. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to look at common ethical questions the intelligence community faces and common pro and con arguments against them, as well as practical looks at how the intelligence gathering is done.

Motivation?

[spiritraveller]

Are they changing their tune or are they just trying to show us what they are capable of so that we won't get out of line?

Hmmmmmmmm.

History Challenged?

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Mandatory reading for all those history-challenged individuals who believe government knows best!

As compared to whom? The history challenged individuals who think corporations know best?

Like Shell Oil? [oxfordjournals.org]

Or Texaco? [american.edu]

Or Enron? [wikipedia.org]

Or These 14 rapacious monsters (Caterpillar, Chevron, CocaCola, Dow, Dyncorp, Ford, KBR-Halliburton, Lockheed, Monsanto, Nestle, Phillip Morris, Pfizer, SLDE, Walmart [karim.gnn.tv] all of whom have disgusting track records of either exploitation, environmental destruction, corruption, or some combination thereof?

Government is the only remaining bullwark between the thugs who run industry and the people they use up as labour resource and then destroy as a product. It is the only safeguard the environment has: if governments do not constrain industry, then industry will always look at the quarterly report and continue to crap all over the planet. And given how collusive government is with industry, it is NOT a pretty or welcoming picture - as government has, for the past several thousand years, proven itself to be little more than the means of protecting and projecting the interests of the ruling classes. The struggle is real, not imagined. And it is only through a re-imagined and re-energised public sector will our species have any hope of surviving the coming crises in Energy, Environment, and Population reduction.

It is the poster who is historically challenged and politically ignorant.

RS

Re:I wonder if JFK is in there

[Scrameustache]

So we can find out the truth about who killed JFK with their magic bullets.

The JFK files are due to be released 70 years (the life expectancy) after the facts.
That way no one who was old enough to remember what happened will be around to contradict the official version of events (nor to suffer the consequences of their actions).
Sleep tight, your government is watching you sleep at night.

Re:History Challenged?

[Scrameustache]

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.

And kill hundreds of thousands of people in one go.
Read GP's link, the DOW section provides a perfect example of how much worse corps are than you think.

Aside from that, your point about false dichotomies is spot on. Keep enlightening people.

Re:Well thats a good thing

[Emetophobe]

Or it could just be another limited hangout [wikipedia.org]

A "limited hangout" is a form of deception, misdirection, or coverup often associated with intelligence agencies involving a release or "mea culpa" type of confession of only part of a set of previously hidden sensitive information, that establishes credibility for the one releasing the information who by the very act of confession appears to be "coming clean" and acting with integrity; but in actuality by withholding key facts is protecting a deeper crime and those who could be exposed if the whole truth came out.

Re:dream on

[Anonymous Coward]

The government suffers no loss of income, regardless of how poorly they perform.

Government (at least the people in it) do carry accountability, if they don't perform well, they can be voted out of office (at least in a working democracy, yes, you can argue that is a fiction but so is a free market with customers who have perfect information).

On the other hand, with a private enterprise it's one dollar, one vote and sometimes not even that: A company (unless it's a public one) doesn't have to make a profit. For example, if I'm rich and want to influence public opinion at all cost, I can run a private enterprise at a loss, possibly to support a profitable one (for example by distorting the market through misinformation).

Does government have problems? Yes. Is it sometimes the wrong approach to solve something? Yes. Does private enterprise have problems too? Most definitely yes.

Re:I forgot

[good soldier svejk]

Obviously, none of them. It's just that a lot of us were greatly saddened when the nation whose armies liberated Buchenwald concentration camp, invented Guantanamo & Abu Ghraib. Perhaps there's a perception that some spring-cleaning was needed.

An ironic aspect of the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau is that the Army continues to deny that some of the liberators were black GIs from the 761st Tank and 183rd Combat Engineer battalions. There is overwhelming eyewitness evidence to their actions, much of it from inmates who had never seen a black man before and were hardly likely to imagine such an event.

Re:I forgot

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that's some grade A bullshit right there.

America is the country most likely to stick their nose into other countries' business, and you're insisting that the rest of the world not criticise them?

You, sir, are a dumbass.

Re:I forgot

[Anonymous Coward]

Well first off, not everyone can be rich or even "well to do". It's a sad fact of economics. You want to only pay $5 for that bag of oranges. Well until robotic farming really takes off [and who pays for that?] it's going to be picked by people who don't earn a proper wage.

What? You think oranges in France are picked by well-to-do folk? Well first off, oranges don't grow in France, but if they did, they would be picked by the same style of immigrant low-paid labour as in the states.

I'm not saying it's right. Exploiting people to live comfortably isn't right. But it's the way the ENTIRE WORLD works. It's hardly a US problem. And to compare the USA (GDP per capita of $44K) to Bangladesh (GDP per capita $2.2K) hardly makes any sense. People are simply more wealthy in the USA. so living conditions ought to be better (and they most certainly are, for example, pop density is 31 per km^2 in USA, and 1045 per km^2 in the latter).

Tom

Tom, I'm just taking an opportunity to respond to your comment, since I used to feel the same as you do, and I'm sure many others feel the same way as you do. I'm also working out my own ideas

It may be how the entire world currently works, but why do you want to be stuck with the status quo? It seems that many people tend to quote Darwin's "survival of the fittest", and entirely ignoring the rest of Darwin's Theory. "Darwin said it's the 'survival of the fittest' so those poor people are not the fittest. We're rich because we're fit. That's just how the world works." They just heard that one important phrase and regurgitate it as if that's the only thing about Darwin's Theory. We are human beings, a species. We have changed the face of the planet as a species. We can change the status quo.

No other current species has the capacity to alter the landscape and manage other species on such grand scales as we have. We can build, alter and destroy and we use our intelligence to do so. We are now managing fish. What do you think fishing season and licenses are for. If we didn't put up regulations to limit fishing, we'd probably have no fish left today. That would be the "survival of the fittest" that the uneducated would preach. Instead, we monitor them, allow the fish population to flourish, and fish them in a more sustainable manner. We manage farmland. If we allowed the farmer to use up the farmland the way they did during the Great Depression, we'd still have a dustbowl of thousands of square miles of unusable land. We manage cattle. We set aside wild forests and create parks. All of these regulations we put on ourselves are really Darwin's theory at work too. Our intelligence and ability to reason out consequences and do something about it is what makes our species "the fittest."

We can manage poverty, we have done so in the past to some effect. If you don't manage poverty, you'll end up with disenfranchised people who would be willing to take up ideas such as communism. It's happend before. It's all because the rich people robbed from the poor. The USA created Social Security because of it. Unions grew at the turn of the century because of the robber barons. Left on their own, corporations would fleece the middle class until they are all poor again. After all it's the job of the public corporation to make money, not take care of employees. All the current deregulations have created some modern robber barons. While they're not quite the same, because we have laws in place that prevent those abuses of the past, they are robber barons none the less. These individuals have similar traits, as the earlier robber barons.

These robber barons were stopped when individuals who voted, got fed up, rose up and elected a government that eventually put a stop to the horrible working conditions. The farm labor could have benefited also, but migrant workers with no fixed addresses couldn't vote, so they had no voice in government. The farm unions were destroyed