The US Central Intelligence Agency is to declassify hundreds of documents detailing some of the agency’s worst illegal abuses from the 1950s to 1970s. The papers, to be released next week, will detail assassination plots, domestic spying and wiretapping, kidnapping and human experiments.
Conveniently, the papers being declassified stop in 1975 – the year before the current President’s father became Director of Central Intelligence (1976–1977).
One good thing out of this, I hope, is that fewer people will now call any theory that suggests the CIA is or has been involved in some pretty dirty business a “conspiracy theory”. It shouldn’t be beyond belief that American intelligence has played a fairly critical role in global politics over the last 60 years. They play with the same espionage toolkit as everyone else. Just because America has been the greatest experiment in human democracy, doesn’t mean it hasn’t got it’s fair share of skeletons. And if these things were true in the 50s, 60s and 70s, what makes you think it isn’t still true today?
Now, if we can get FBI to release their documents from that era, we might find out the truth about who ordered the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK and Marilyn….
1975 more likely chosen because it was the date of the Church committee and Congressional oversight became a requirement of operation. Also much more into the future and you may impact active covert agents.
It’s a step in the right direction considering how much Bush’s administration has been pushing against FOIA requests.
Thomas, I’d still like to see their papers relating to the list of post-1975 CIA activities that Steve Kangas keeps here:
http://www.serendipity.li/cia/cia_time.htm
I wonder if the papers will say much about the CIA’s involvement in Australia’s most infamous political debacle , the sacking of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam?