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Below
are one-paragraph excerpts of important news articles you may have
missed.
These news articles include revealing information on the CIA's "Family
Jewels", food safety, Special Operations in the U.S., and more. Each
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Files on Illegal Spying Show C.I.A. Skeletons
From Cold WarJune 26, 2007, New York
Timeshttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/washington/27cia.html
Long-secret
documents released Tuesday provide new details about how the Central
Intelligence Agency illegally spied on Americans decades ago.
Known inside the agency as the “family jewels,” the 702 pages of
documents released Tuesday catalog domestic wiretapping operations,
failed
assassination plots, mind-control experiments and spying on journalists
from the early years of the C.I.A. The papers provide evidence
of
paranoia and occasional incompetence as the agency began a string of
illegal spying operations in the 1960s and 1970s, often to hunt links
between Communist governments and the domestic protests that roiled the
nation in that period. Yet the long-awaited documents leave out a great
deal. Large sections are censored, showing that the C.I.A. still cannot
bring itself to expose all the skeletons in its closet. And many
activities about overseas operations disclosed years ago by journalists,
Congressional investigators and a presidential commission — which led to
reforms of the nation’s intelligence agencies — are not detailed in the
papers. The 60-year-old agency has been under fire ... by critics [of]
the
secret prisons and harsh interrogation practices it has adopted since the
Sept. 11 attacks. Some intelligence experts suggested ... that the
release
of the documents was intended to distract from the current controversies.
And they and historians expressed disappointment that the documents were
so heavily censored. Tom Blanton of the National Security
Archive, the research group that filed the Freedom of Information
request in 1992 that led to the documents’ becoming public, said he was
initially underwhelmed by them because they contained little about the
agency’s foreign operations. But Mr. Blanton said what was striking was
the scope of the C.I.A’s domestic spying efforts.
Note:The entire body of the CIA's "Family Jewels" documents have
been
posted online by the National Security Archives, and can be read by clicking
here.
Agency's Strangeloves altered mind of a girl
aged 4June 28, 2007, The Australian
(Australia's national daily newspaper)http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21980496-2703,00.html
Easily
lost, on page 425, in the mass of the CIA's notorious "Family Jewels"
files is a short paragraph outlining "potentially embarrassing Agency
activities". "Experiments in influencing human behaviour through the
administration of mind- or personality-altering drugs to unwitting
subjects." Of all the heinous acts committed by the CIA in the name of
national security, these experiments, done on the agency's behalf by
prominent psychiatrists on innocent victims - including children as young
as four - may be the darkest. "We have no answer to the moral issue,"
former director Richard Helms infamously said when asked about the nature
of the projects. The release of the Family Jewels documents revealed the
CIA handsomely funded these real-life Dr Strangeloves and engaged
pharmaceutical companies to help its experiments. The agency appealed to
Big Pharma to pass on any drugs that could not be marketed because of
"unfavourable side effects" to be tested on mice and monkeys. Any drugs
that passed muster would then be used ... on volunteer US soldiers. The
Family Jewels files do not provide further detail into the numerous
mind-control programs, such as MKULTRA, covertly propped up by the
agency.
In 1953, MKULTRA was given 6 per cent of the total CIA budget
without any oversight. The nature of the experiments, gathered
from government documents and testimony in numerous lawsuits brought
against the CIA, is shocking, from testing LSD on children to implanting
electrodes in victims' brains to deliberately poisoning people with
uranium.
"The CIA bought my services from my grandfather in 1952
starting at the tender age of four," wrote Carol Rutz of her
experiences.Note:The entire body of the CIA's "Family Jewels" documents have
been
posted online by the National Security Archives, and can be read by clicking
here. And for a 10-page summary of Carol Rutz's riveting book on her
experiences as a government-created Manchurian candidate, click here.
Fighting War ProtestersJune 27, 2007, Washington
Posthttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/26/AR2007062601736.html
In the
early 1970s, as Vietnam War-era protests swirled around the Washington
area, local police borrowed riot equipment and received intelligence
training from an unusual source: the CIA.
The agency, which is
barred from domestic law enforcement, provided gas masks, stun guns,
searchlights and protective vests. CIA specialists trained more than 20
officers ... in surveillance photography, countersabotage and
surreptitious entry. The CIA-local nexus was included in
hundreds
of pages of documents released yesterday by the agency that detailed a
quarter-century of CIA history. The records said the agency recruited
officers primarily to protect CIA facilities from attack by protesters.
"A
conscious decision was made . . . to utilize the services of local police
to repel invaders in case of riot or dissension," a top CIA official
wrote
in May 1973. But the documents make it clear that the intelligence agency
also wanted to keep tabs on the mammoth antiwar demonstrations in
Washington from 1969 through 1971. The D.C. police department, for
example, was given a communications system "to monitor major anti-Vietnam
war demonstrations," the records said. The CIA aid also extended to basic
law enforcement. Police officials in Montgomery County told The Post in
1973 that they received CIA surveillance training to combat street crime.
The agency also gave Arlington and Alexandria a substance it had
developed
to detect whether someone had recently handled metallic objects, such as
firearms.
Note:The entire body of the CIA's "Family Jewels" documents have
been
posted online by the National Security Archives, and can be read by clicking
here.
Survey Finds Action on Information Requests
Can
Take YearsJuly 1, 2007, New York
Timeshttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/washington/02secrets.html
The
Freedom of Information Act requires a federal agency to provide an
initial
response to a request within 20 days and to provide the documents in a
timely manner.
But the oldest pending request uncovered in a new
survey of 87 agencies and departments has been awaiting a response for 20
years, and 16 requesters have been waiting more than 15 years for
results.
The survey, to be released on Monday, is the latest proof of a
fact well-known to historians and journalists who regularly seek
government documents: Agencies often take months or years to respond to
requests for information under the law, known as FOIA, which went into
effect on July 4, 1967. “The law is 40 years old, and we’re seeing 20
years of delay,” said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National
Security
Archive, a research group at George Washington University. The survey
will
be posted at nsarchive.org.
The
survey found that 10 federal agencies had misrepresented their backlog of
FOIA requests in annual reports to Congress, misstating the age of their
oldest pending request. It found that the State Department accounted for
most of the oldest unanswered requests, with 10 requests filed in 1991 or
earlier still awaiting responses. The public interest in some aging
government documents was vividly illustrated last week, when the Central
Intelligence Agency released the so-called family jewels, papers that
described illegal wiretaps, assassination plots and other agency misdeeds
from the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. The papers were first requested
by
the National Security Archive in 1992, and a cover letter accompanying
the
C.I.A. release identified that request as the intelligence agency’s
oldest
still pending.
Angler: The Cheney Vice
PresidencyJune 24, 2007, Washington
Posthttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/23/AR2007062300890.html
Part
One: 'A Different Understanding With the President': In less than an
hour ... Cheney's proposal had become a military order from the commander
in chief. Foreign terrorism suspects held by the United States were
stripped of access to any court -- civilian or military, domestic or
foreign. They could be confined indefinitely without charges and would be
tried, if at all, in closed "military commissions." "What the hell just
happened?" Secretary of State Colin L. Powell demanded ... when CNN
announced the order that evening, Nov. 13, 2001. National security
adviser
Condoleezza Rice, incensed, sent an aide to find out. Even witnesses to
the
Oval Office signing said they did not know the vice president had played
any part.
"Angler," as the Secret Service code-named him, has
approached the levers of power obliquely, skirting orderly lines of
debate
he once enforced as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford. He has
battled a bureaucracy he saw as hostile, using intimate knowledge of its
terrain. He has empowered aides to fight above their rank,
taking
on roles reserved in other times for a White House counsel or national
security adviser. And he has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for
edge-of-the-envelope views on executive supremacy that previous
presidents
did not assert. Over the past six years, Cheney has shaped his times as
no
vice president has before. [The] relationship [between Bush and Cheney]
is opaque, a vital unknown in assessing Cheney's impact on events.
Officials who see them together often, not all of them admirers of the
vice president, detect a strong sense of mutual confidence that Cheney is
serving Bush's aims.
Special Operations Prepared for Domestic
MissionsJune 22, 2007, Washington
Posthttp://blog.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2007/06/special_operations_prepared_fo.html?nav=rss_blog
The U.S.
Northern Command, the military command responsible for "homeland
defense,"
has asked the Pentagon if it can establish its own special operations
command for domestic missions. The request ... would establish a
permanent
sub-command for responses to incidents of domestic terrorism as well as
other occasions where special operators may be necessary on American
soil.
The establishment of a domestic special operations mission, and the
preparation of contingency plans to employ commandos in the United
States,
would upend decades of tradition. Military actions within the United
States
are the responsibility of state militias (the National Guard), and
federal
law enforcement is a function of the FBI.
Employing special
operations for domestic missions sounds very ominous, and NORTHCOM's
request earlier this year should receive the closest possible Pentagon
and
congressional scrutiny. There's only one problem: NORTHCOM is already
doing
what it has requested permission to do. When NORTHCOM was
established after 9/11 to be the military counterpart to the Department
of
Homeland Security, within its headquarters staff it established a
Compartmented Planning and Operations Cell (CPOC) responsible for
planning
and directing a set of "compartmented" and "sensitive" operations on
U.S.,
Canadian and Mexican soil. In other words, these are the very special
operations that NORTHCOM is now formally asking the Pentagon to beef up
into a public and acknowledged sub-command.
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