Angelo M. Codevilla, who is a professor of international relations at Boston University and a fellow of the Claremont Institute, offers quite a different perspective on the newly released CIA documents:
THE CIA last week released a heavily redacted version of a 1973 report what it considers its fathers’ sins. There was nothing new: In the ’70s and ’80s, agency employees on all sides of the quarrels over what the CIA should do shopped their versions of the report to whoever would listen on the congressional Intelligence Committees (including myself) as well as to the press.
These quarrels were rooted in the deep political, social and personal animosities that split the CIA’s founding generation. Riding the post-Vietnam/Watergate wave of U.S. politics, one CIA faction wrote the report to discredit and oust their bureaucratic rivals.
Because this faction succeeded, important changes took place in the CIA. Beginning in 1975, counterintelligence – which was principally quality control of operations – became the responsibility of those conducting the operations. Freed from independent scrutiny, CIA officers gullibly accepted more information than ever from “walk-in” sources and from foreign governments’ intelligence services.
Since then, whenever we have had a intelligence windfall (e.g., access to the East German Stasi files after 1989) we have learned that all or nearly all CIA sources had been controlled by hostile services. In Iraq, in 2003, CIA sources reported watching as Saddam Hussein and sons entered a house with bunker; U.S. aircraft immediately demolished it. But there had never been any bunker, never mind Saddam. As usual, the CIA’s agents were doubles…
He goes on to write that the CIA became “the leftmost influence on foreign policy within the executive branch.” “Is it really improper, when foreign forces are killing Americans, to keep track of those Americans who espouse the killers’ cause?” Codevilla wonders. The ‘new’ generation, who won the battle within the CIA, ‘built the well-known “wall” between foreign intelligence and domestic intelligence,’ which Codevilla considers to be a bad thing, since this “wall” – again, according to the author – “shielded the 9/11 plotters on their way to mass murder.”
Furthermore, Codevilla wonders why the newly released documents do not say anything about the fact that the CIA “helped arm Castro (against the U.S. embassy’s wishes) and acted to destabilize the regime he was trying to overthrow.” Nor does it mention “the CIA’s sponsorship of Iraq’s Ba’ath party, and of its 1959 hiring of a young thug named Saddam Hussein, or of its romance with the PLO.”
True enough: that does not, however, make the released documents any less significant. It merely means that the CIA still has quite some skeletons in its closet for us to discover. Personally, I find it incredibly interesting to read these documents: it truly provides the reader the opportunity to understand better how the CIA – and (other) government officials – operated, and how they reached certain conclusions, what they worried about, etc.
Meanwhile, Watching America – one of the most innovative and fascinating websites on the net – has an article up from the Novosti, a Russian newspaper. William Kern translated Vladimir Simonov’s article:
So why is all of this compromising material being released today, apparently with the blessing of Langley? My view is that this act of public repentance is a way of saying to Americans and the world, “Yes we have sinned. Yes, we have now revealed these things for all to see. This is a pledge that what happened before is over, and forgive us Lord, along with all the other things we have done …”
But in fact, this is just a regular part of the CIA’s program of disinformation. This is merely an intelligence agency trying to divert attention from its current heavy and daily sins. Such as the camp at Guantanamo, were aggressive interrogation methods are routinely used – including keeping prisoners in the fetal position, keeping them in high temperatures and “waterboarding,” which is holding prisoners under water long enough to convince them that they are going to drown. (In Guantanamo, 34 attempted suicides have been reported).
The network of secret prisons established by the CIA in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland and Romania, operate within a complete legal vacuum. In his essay of June 25, Fidel Castro once again accused President George Bush of “authorizing and ordering” his assassination.
On the many other acts of lawlessness, violence and gross violations of human rights that come to the surface every day, these hundreds of censored documents say nothing. In that sense, this public confession by the CIA should already be a distant memory.
If you have not read the documents yourself yet – I have only partially read them so far – you can do so here. You can either download the entire PDF at once – all 700+ pages – or you can download it in five smaller parts.
PAST CONTRIBUTOR.