CIA Secrets Released

[MA-Caver]

CIA to release details on decades of secrets
Fri Jun 22, 6:16 AM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070622/us_nm/cia_secrets_dc
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The 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 U.S. journalists, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, and "behavior modification" experiments on "unwitting" U.S. civilians.
"Much of it has been in the press before, and most of it is unflattering, but it's the CIA's history," Hayden said in a speech on Thursday to the American Foreign Relations Conference.
"This is about telling the American people what we have done in their name," Hayden said.
The CIA chief said the documents provide a glimpse of "a very different time and a very difference agency."
Hayden said 147 documents, 11,000 pages of analysis done between 1953 and 1973, would be available on the CIA's Web site.

How many of these secrets are doctored? How many are left out? How many are things that wouldn't affect the CIA either way. A different time and a different (very different) agency. A lot of the "guilty" parties in these secrets are retired or dead. So does it matter who we can hold accountable? Will it really provide a insight to the agency today? It'd make interesting reading to be sure but that's all it would be; interesting reading. About as useful as reading a Tom Clancy or Ken Follett novel.
"Telling the American (and the world) what we have done in their name..." Yeah okay, but are there going to be consequences? Should there be? Would there be?

 

[Makalakumu]

You can bet that the "secrets" that were released are absolutely nothing compared to what has been with held or destroyed. This is a public relations ploy.

 

[MA-Caver]

You can bet that the "secrets" that were released are absolutely nothing compared to what has been with held or destroyed. This is a public relations ploy.

Agreed, freedom of information act notwithstanding. The CIA, NSA probably see themselves above such mundane public wants.

 

[Ping898]

Agreed, freedom of information act notwithstanding. The CIA, NSA probably see themselves above such mundane public wants.

I don't know about that. The majority of the people (at least the working class type people, no clue as to the higher ups) there really see what they do as saving lives and serving the country and see keeping what they do a secret as vital to that mission. They take their job very seriously and are always on guard for a threat to safety.

 

[Makalakumu]

The problem with those benign feelings is that they degenerate in the presence of secrecy. Suddenly, the idea that one is helping the country becomes perverted because no body can know about the way that YOU want to do it. And if people disagree with the machinations of one's own ego, you can completely sidestep those disagreements by hiding the true nature of what you are doing. The end result of all this is that the "ends" are pursued by any "means" neccesary because their is nobody that can check or disagree on them. This is how secrecy leads to totalitarianism.