Obama administration embraces war criminal Henry Kissinger with Distinguished Public Servant Award

The Obama administration, via its Department of Defense, had war criminal Henry Kissinger over at the Pentagon yesterday. The reason? To award Kissinger its highest honor, the award for Distinguished Public Service.

If you measure “public service” as being responsible for more deaths than any other living American in the effort to spread the influence of American empire over the globe, Kissinger was surely deserving.

It is not news that Kissinger has been embraced by this White House. The Obama administration use of this criminal has been open since the first days of the Obama presidency. The Kissinger issue, if I may call it that, surfaced again during the Clinton-Sanders debates, when Sanders decried Clinton’s reliance on the advice and counseling of Kissinger. For her part, Clinton lionized the former Nixon Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. (See the full transcript here.)

Sanders made it clear, that given Kissinger’s record, he would never rely on him for anything having to do with a Sanders administration. Indeed, it’s clear that Kissinger should be in jail. Sanders erred only in not saying it would prosecute him for war crimes.

The fact is, support for Kissinger is right at the dividing line between those who support and those who oppose an aggressive, militaristic foreign policy. In his reward speech, speaking of his so-called accomplishments , Kissinger said, “the fact is we were engaged in good causes" during his tenure in the Nixon and Ford White Houses.

For Kissinger, the Vietnam War, with its massive use of napalm, Agent Orange, its secret bombing campaigns, and use of torture and assassination, was a “good cause.” When the Obama administration, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, embrace Kissinger, both his legacy and the man, they are embracing the greatest set of war crimes in living memory by the United States, a war that killed millions, and also destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of Americans.

Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, who gave the award personally to Kissinger, was named by Politico recently as a top candidate for the Secretary of Defense position under a Hillary Clinton administration, not least because of his hawkish views.

Vox editorialized news of the recent award, in its article, “The Obama administration is honoring Henry Kissinger today. It shouldn’t be.”

While Kissinger deserves real credit for some of America's most important Cold War victories, including Nixon's diplomatic opening to China, he is also responsible for some of its worst atrocities. Carpet-bombing Cambodia, supporting Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh, greenlighting the Argentinian dictatorship's murderous crackdown on dissidents — all of those were Kissinger initiatives, all pushed in the name of pursuing American national interests and fighting communism.
While the Obama administration might want to pretend that only the first half of his résumé exists, that doesn't change reality. The secretary of defense is handing an award to a man whose actions belie the values Obama administration claims to stand for.

The Nation also chimed in:

It’s exhausting trying to keep track of what is now a quarterly celebration of the 92-year-old Kissinger. It was just six or so months ago when The New York Times Book Review assigned Kissinger’s preferred authorized biographer to review a Kissinger biography written by Kissinger’s second-choice biographer. A “masterpiece”! the first said of the second. And then, three months ago, Hillary Clinton, in a debate with Bernie Sanders, cited Kissinger’s recommendation as a referral for the White House. 

At the time, Clinton’s remarks seemed a misstep, allowing Sanders an opening to criticize her catastrophic interventionism in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Now, though, it is clear that Clinton’s invocation of Kissinger wasn’t a fluke but rather a preview of a general election strategy to run to Trump’s right on foreign policy and win over the hawkish wing of the Republican Party.

Now some of you reading this may not realize how horrific Kissinger really is. But since he has become a campaign issue, and for some people — like myself — is a serious consideration not to support the presumptive candidate for the Democratic Party, you will need to educate yourself about who Kissinger is and what he’s done. Among his crimes are the mass bombing of civilian populations, support for assassinations and torture, wiretapping of journalists, support for invasions and military repression in numerous countries. He was notoriously involved in helping secure a military coup against the democratically elected government of Salvadore Allende in Chile.

Anyone can Google the information these days, but I particularly recommend reading the reproduction of Chapter One of the late Christopher Hitchens’ book, The Case Against Henry Kissinger at this link. Here’s a small section:

Declassified documents show that Kissinger- who had previously neither known nor cared about Chile, describing it offhandedly as "a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica"-took seriously this chance to impress his boss. A group was set up in Langley, Virginia, with the express purpose of running a "two track" policy for Chile, one the ostensible diplomatic one and the other -- unknown to the State Department or the U.S. ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry -- a strategy of destabilization, kidnapping, and assassination designed to provoke a military coup…. 

The short-term obstacle lay in the person of one man: General Rene Schneider. As chief of the Chilean Army, he was adamantly opposed to any military meddling in the electoral process. Accordingly, it was decided at a meeting on September 18, 1970, that General Schneider had to go…. 

On September 15, 1970, Kissinger was told of an extremist right-wing officer named General Roberto Viaux, who had ties to Patria y Libertad and who was willing to accept the secret American commission to remove General Schneider from the chessboard. The term "kidnap" was still being employed at this point and is often employed still. Kissinger's "track two" group, however, authorized the supply of machine guns as well as tear-gas grenades to Viaux's associates and never seem to have asked what they would do with the general once they had kidnapped him.

On October 22, 1970, after one failed attempt, Kissinger’s Chilean surrogates succeeded in machine gunning Schneider. It was a prelude to the coup that was to come.

The Obama administration is to be condemned for honoring this mass murderer. The supporters of Hillary Clinton have to answer for why they are supporting a candidate whose foreign policy mentor is someone who lauds the Vietnam War as a “good cause.”

Once upon a time, a site such as Daily Kos, which claimed to be for progressive causes, would not have let something like this pass unnoticed or uncommented upon. But with the rush to support a hawkish candidate for president in Hillary Clinton, the past crimes of U.S. foreign policy are being flushed down the memory hole. An earlier diary on this by pablito got ignored or disparaged by various readers.

That should not be.

Originally posted at Daily Kos, May 10, 2016

Rep. Rogers: Kidnapped Argentinian Babies Distract From Fight Against Al Qaeda

How nice that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican Congressman from Michigan, and 206 of his House GOP colleagues live in a country where political opponents are not disappeared, tortured, or murdered in the dead of night, their children stolen to be brought up by the very intelligence officers that disappeared them.

So maybe Rogers didn't appreciate the criminal absurdity of his comments to the Washington Post on Friday May 13, after a House vote defeated a proposed amendment by Democratic Rep. Maurice Hinchey (NY) on the declassification of U.S. intelligence files regarding the 1976 Argentine generals coup and the bloody seven year dictatorship that followed. According to the Post, Rogers "said declassifying them would distract U.S. spies from the fight against al-Qaida."

A similar Congressional vote for declassification of documents related to Chile, in a 1999 amendment by Rep. Hinchey, which passed, led to the release of over 24,000 documents, and to accelerated investigations and prosecutions of state crimes in Chile. But the GOP, which voted largely on party lines to defeat the amendment on declassification of documents related to Argentina, made this vote into a bogus stand in support of the "war on terror."

The vote comes only weeks after a trial has opened in Argentina, placing into the dock two former Argentine dictators, Jorge Videla and Reynaldo Bignone, for literally stealing babies during what has become known as Argentina's "Dirty War." A recently released document available via National Security Archive shows that the Chilean intelligence attaché to Buenos Aires estimated the number of dead and disappeared in Argentina as over 22,000 between 1975 and 1978 (original document PDF).

The Jurist summarized the baby stealing case against the dictators:

The two are accused in 34 separate cases of infants who were taken from mothers held in clandestine torture and detention centers, the Navy Mechanics School and Campo de Mayo army base. The case was opened 14 years ago at the request of Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and includes as defendants five military judges and a doctor who attended to the detainees. The trial is expected to hear 370 witnesses and last up to a year. With the help of the Grandmothers' DNA database, 102 people born to vanished detainees have recovered their true identities.

This is not the first trial of the criminal leaders of the former Argentine junta. Former Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla was sentenced last year to life in prison for crimes against humanity. And just recently a former agent of the Argentine Secretariat of State Intelligence (SIDE), Miguel Angel Furci, was arrested and charged with human rights abuses, including kidnapping and torture. His trial starts this June. And there have been others brought up on charges and/or convicted as well.

The baby stealing charges are a particularly sickening part of the Dirty War history. As an AP story explained it, "the existence of babies belonging to people who officially no longer existed created a problem for the junta leaders." So the solution was to falsify documents and arrange "illegal adoptions by people sympathetic to the military regime." According to the indictment, there were hundreds of such "adoptions."

American Complicity: You Can Run But You Can't Hide

The U.S. support for the Argentinian junta and Dirty War was part of a larger program known as Operation Condor, which operated throughout the Southern Cone, and was responsible for death squads and torture and a reign of terror throughout Latin America, as the right-wing operations spread northward into Central America in the 1980s.

Even though the U.S. government still seeks to hide documents implicating U.S. intelligence and other state agencies from complicity in the terrible crimes in Argentina, some documents have been released over the years. There's a goodly collection of them at the National Security Archive website.

The documents include a formerly secret transcript of Henry Kissinger's staff meeting during which he ordered immediate U.S. support for the new military regime, and Defense and State Department reports on the ensuing repression. The Archive has also obtained internal memoranda and cables from the infamous Argentina intelligence unit, Battalion 601, as well as the Chilean secret police agency, known as DINA, which was secretly collaborating with the military in Buenos Aires.

The documents record Washington's initial reaction to the military takeover. "I do want to encourage them. I don't want to give the sense that they're harassed by the United States," Secretary of State Kissinger ordered his staff after his assistants warned him that the junta would initiate a bloodbath following the coup. According to the transcript, Kissinger's top deputy on Latin America, William Rogers, told him two days after the coup that "we've got to expect a fair amount of repression, probably a good deal of blood, in Argentina before too long."

Regarding that last quote, what Rogers actually said in full, according to the transcript (PDF) of Kissinger's March 26, 1976 staff meeting, and following upon a discussion of how the regime would need U.S. financial support: "I think also we've got to expect a fair amount of repression, probably a good deal of blood, in Argentina before too long. I think they're going to have to come down not only on the terrorists but on the dissidents of trade unions and their parties."

Kissinger then tells Rogers, who suggests the U.S. might want to hold off on recognition of the junta, that he wants to "encourage" the generals: "I don't want to give the sense that they're harassed by the United States." Rogers then rushes to assure him his reasoning wasn't humanitarian, but simply that he was concerned about "public posture."

The U.S. government is complicit in war crimes that have killed and tortured and disappeared many, many thousands of people, millions going back to Vietnam. But the U.S. population appears to be largely untouched by these crimes, insensate, living in fear, or complacent... it's hard to say. In any case, those in this country, like Rep. Hinchey, and the many fine workers in human and civil rights organizations, will have to keep pounding on these issues.

Note: Eighteen Republicans did vote for Hinchey's amendment, and seven Democrats voted against it. Twenty-three were listed as "Not Voting," including, surprisingly, two liberal Democratic congresswomen from the Bay Area, Zoe Lofgren and Jackie Speier.

Cross-posted from Firedoglake/MyFDL

War Criminal Kissinger Top Speaker at State Department Conference

There was also a deficiency in imagination likely to circumscribe the value of any study by Kissinger of Kissinger. Asked about his role in the Cambodian war, in which an estimated five hundred thousand people died, he’d said, "I may have a lack of imagination, but I fail to see the moral issue involved." — Joseph Heller, Good as Gold (Kissinger’s original quote is from William Shawcross’s Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia)

Fred Branfman has a great article up over at AlterNet pillorying the State Department’s invitation to Henry Kissinger to address a conference on "the American Experience in Southeast Asia, 1946-1975." The conference was scheduled for September 29-30 at the George C. Marshall Conference Center at the U.S. Department of State. Along with bona fide war criminal Kissinger, the other invitees included current Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, and Former Deputy Secretary of State, and Former Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte.

It was only last April here at The Seminal/Firedoglake that I reported on the declassification of a 1976 State Department cable from Henry Kissinger to "his assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, Harry Shlaudeman, to cancel a formal demarche to the Uruguayan government, protesting the assassinations and other activities of Operation Condor." Only five days later, former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his assistant Ronnie Moffat were assassinated on the streets of Washington, D.C. by a CIA-supported Chilean secret police killer.

But, as the Obama administration rehabilitation of the odious Kissinger demonstrates, memory is short in Washington, even when there is blood on the streets… unless that blood can be turned in for demagogic currency, as is the case with the deaths on 9/11. To have Kissinger honored as an authority on the Indochinese War is an obscenity of the first order. Branfman recalls some of the essential history:

Kissinger orchestrated the most massive bombing in world history, dropping 3,984,563 million tons on an area inhabited by some 50 million people, twice the 2 million tons dropped on hundreds of millions through Europe and the Pacific in World War II. He dropped 1.6 million tons on South Vietnam, as many as Lyndon Johnson at the height of U.S. involvement; quadrupled the bombing of Laos, from 454,200 to 1,628,900 million tons; initiated widespread bombing of previously peaceful Cambodia, including B52 carpet bombing of undefended villages, for a total of 600,000-1 million tons; and vastly expanded the bombing of civilian targets in North Vietnam….

In Cambodia, Kissinger told Alexander Haig to undertake "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies or anything that moves," the clearest possible violation of international law requiring the protection of civilians. Two million people in Khmer Rouge zones, as estimated by the U.S. Embassy, were driven underground by massive U.S. bombing that featured regular B52 carpet-bombing of undefended villages.

But when it comes to crimes, we’re just getting started here. Christopher Hitchens positioned part of his career as a would-be prosecutor for war criminal Kissinger. A quick review of just the first part of his March 2001 article at Harpers, "The Making of a War Criminal," notes Kissinger’s activities. For instance, there was the "recruitment and betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds, who were falsely encouraged by him to take up arms against Saddam Hussein in 1972-75, and who were then abandoned to extermination on their hillsides when Saddam Hussein made a diplomatic deal with the Shah of Iran…" Or consider "Kissinger’s orchestration of political and military and diplomatic cover for apartheid in South Africa." Or read Hitchen’s detailed, documentary discussion of Kissinger’s brain-trusting for assassination and coup plotting in Chile.

What Has Hillary Wrought?

Of course, Hillary Clinton deserves her own share of obloquy for inviting Kissinger and friends, including former Kissinger protege Holbrooke and the latter’s former Saigon Foreign Service roommate, the unsavory John Negroponte. (Negroponte worked at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon from 1964-68… uh huh.) One could write an entire column about the war crimes of Mr. Negroponte, who, according to the introduction by the National Security Archive (NSA) to a slew of documents implicating him, as former U.S. Ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s "sought to undermine regional peace efforts" in the Nicaraguan Civil War. NSA also cites "multiple reports of meetings and conversations [by Negroponte] with Honduran military officers who were instrumental in providing logistical support and infrastructure for CIA covert operations in support of the contras against Nicaragua."

Holbrooke, of course, was recently implicated in a controversy with General Stanley McChrystal over policy in Afghanistan. MrChrystal got the heave-ho for being injudicious in his comments to a Rolling Stone reporter, and even though Holbrooke has been critical of U.S. goals in Afghanistan, it’s Holbrooke on the State Department podium, while McChrystal is out in the wilderness (for the time being). Branfman notes the ironies, and political agenda, behind the invite:

Clinton has also invited Richard Holbrooke, who as State Department head of Afghanistan/Pakistan policy has learned nothing from history and is repeating precisely the same policies that caused the U.S. to lose in Indochina — support of a corrupt and unpopular regime that cannot stand on its own. Inviting Holbrooke is particularly egregious, because following Obama’s strategy review, according to Bob Woodward’s new book, "perhaps the most pessimistic view came from Richard Holbrooke. "It can’t work," he said. Lacking even a fraction of the integrity and moral courage of a Daniel Ellsberg, Holbrooke continues to promote in public a policy he privately believes is doomed to fail.

Branfman also notes that Kissinger is on hand to promote his "we lost Vietnam" garbage, claiming it was Congressional betrayal that failed the U.S. mission in Vietnam at the end. And sure enough, Kissinger was true to form at the conference, as reported by WRGW News:

“I believe most of what went wrong in Vietnam we did to ourselves,” said Kissinger, speaking candidly about his Vietnam experience in front of a capacity audience, including the Vietnamese Embassy….

Henry Kissinger… explained that during the Vietnam War “the faith of Americans in each other became destroyed in the process” of America reaching the limits of its foreign policy….

“America wanted compromise, Hanoi wanted victory,” he stated.

According to Dr. Kissinger, lack of support at home ultimately lost the war for South Vietnam and the United States.

Kissinger, Holbrooke, and Negroponte at the podium represent the true face of U.S. diplomacy today, which relies on the nostrums and machinations of an entire post-WWII generation which saw nothing wrong in ruling American Empire by means of mass murder, assassination, and the bombing of civilians. Today, the Obama administration steps up bombings in Pakistan, escalates the war in Afghanistan (as an exit strategy?), and conducts a world-wide Murder, Inc., which grants itself the right to execute without due process American citizens by Hellfire missiles, even as it trumpets secrecy for everything it does.

Obama’s embrace of Kissinger tells you all you need to know about what this administration is about. Behind the special treatment for war criminal Kissinger is the current administration’s aggressive pursuit of war in Afghanistan and military and covert operations around the world.

I try to imagine how the left would have responded if Bush had invited Kissinger to reflect for history upon the Vietnam War. I’d like to think there would have been universal derision. Today, there’s very little outrage expressed by this official government appearance by a bona fide war criminal. Whether it is fealty to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or a U.S. military and national security apparatus that says it stands for democracy but really stands for endless war, the state right to assassinate U.S. critics, and to intervene anywhere in the world that U.S. "interests" are involved, what stands for politics in this country is a joke. Something is very, very rotten at the core of this country. The falsification of history by the very criminals who conducted crimes against humanity is a primary exhibit of the degeneration of political discourse in America.

Originally posted at Firedoglake/The Seminal

Declassified Document: Kissinger Blocked U.S. Protest on South American Assassinations

Originally posted at FDL/The Seminal

A controversy has simmered for some years over the role of the United States, and particularly of its then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in the actions surrounding Operation Condor. Condor was an assassination and torture plan implemented by a number of South American countries, braintrusted by Pinochet’s Chile.

A new FOIA release, courtesy of the National Security Archive, shows that only five days before former high-ranking Allende official, Orlando Letelier, and his U.S. assistant, Ronnie Moffit, were assassinated by Chile’s notorious DINA secret service in Washington, DC, a September 16, 1976 State Department cable from Henry Kissinger told his assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, Harry Shlaudeman, to cancel a formal demarche to the Uruguayan government, protesting the assassinations and other activities of Operation Condor. The cable was followed four days later by instructions from Shlaudeman to numerous South American U.S. embassies to forego any protests regarding Condor policy, offering the excuse that Condor appeared to be inactive.

Yet, only the next day, a Condor assassination took place in the streets of Washington, DC, when a car bomb blew up Letelier and Moffitt. According to British historian, Kenneth Maxwell, the U.S. government was aware of Operation Condor, and even "that a Chilean assassination team had been planning to enter the United States." A flap over Maxwell’s favorable review in the journal of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), Foreign Affairs of Peter Kornbluh’s book The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, led to Maxwell’s resignation from the CFR some months later.

See Maxwell’s account in "The Case of the Missing Letter in Foreign Affairs: Kissinger, Pinochet and Operation Condor," PDF. Today, Kornbluh is a Senior Analyst at the National Security Archive, and edited the introduction to the documents on Kissinger and Operation Condor.

What is Operation Condor?

According to a September 28, 1976 cable to FBI headquarters from FBI agent Robert Scherrer, who previously had worked with Paraguayan police in intelligence gathering on leftists, Operation Condor was work of "cooperating services in South America in order to eliminate Marxist terrorists and their activities in the area…. Chile is the center for Operation Condor, and in addition it includes Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay. Brazil has also tentatively agreed to supply input for Operation Condor."

Scherrer, who later captured Letelier and Moffitt’s killer, continued:

A third and more secret phase of Operation Condor involves the formation of special teams from member countries to travel anywhere in the world to non-member countries to carry out sanctions, [including] assassination, against terrorists or supporters of terrorist organizations from Operation Condor member countries. For example, should a terrorist or a supporter of a terrorist organization from a member country be located in a European country, a special team from Operation Condor would be dispatched to locate and surveil the target. When the location and surveillance operation has terminated, a second team from Operation Condor would be dispatched to carry out the actual sanction against the target. Special teams would be issued false documentation from member countries of Operation Condor.

According to a 2005 BBC story, greater documentary evidence came to light in 1992, thanks to the chance discovery of a Paraguayan judge. "The archives counted 50,000 persons murdered, 30,000 "desaparecidos" and 400,000 incarcerated" (link).

The participation of U.S. military and intelligence agencies in facilitating Condor have been slow to surface, but there are some. In October 1978, a State Department cable from U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay Robert White, to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, noted that the intelligence chiefs in Condor kept in touch with each other through encrypted messages sent through "a U.S. communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone which covers all of Latin America." White told Vance that since "there is [a] likelihood Condor will surface during Letelier trial in the U.S…. it would seem advisable to review this arrangement to insure that its continuation is in U.S. interest."

Further declassifications of the Scherrer memo have shown that the Pentagon had quite detailed information about the mobilizations behind Condor operations.

Most recently, just yesterday, the Los Angeles Times, with Andrew Zajac and David S. Cloud reporting, described the response to the latest revelations surrounding Kissinger’s role in letting Operation Condor proceed:

"The document confirms that it’s Kissinger’s complete responsibility for having rescinded a cease-and-desist order to Condor killers," said Kornbluh, author of a 2004 book on Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

In a statement, Kissinger said Kornbluh "distorted" the meaning of the cable and said it was intended only to disapprove a specific approach to the Uruguayan government, not to cancel the plan to issue warnings to other nations in the Condor network.

Former State Department officials who worked under Kissinger during that period now say that his cable did interrupt the U.S. effort to rein in Operation Condor, not just with Uruguay but with other countries in the region.

Assassinations, Then and Now

The Kissinger/Condor revelations come at a time with the issue of U.S. assassinations abroad have taken center stage. There is the ongoing controversy over whether the United States has a legal right to conduct "targeted killings", i.e., murders, by pilotless drones in Afghanistan and elsewhere. These drone killings have left a trail of assassinations of purported Al Qaeda leaders, and hundreds of innocent civilians dead, and are believed to be alienating support for U.S. policy in that region.

Even more, reports of CIA and Joint Special Forces assassination squads, given the green-light by former President George W. Bush, and approved by his successor, Barack Obama, have also surfaced. Marcy Wheeler has followed the story in a number of recent articles. There was also the explosive tale by Seymour Hersh, that alleged that there was a special assassination squad attached directly to the office of Vice President Cheney.

The history of the United States is not one generally known to its average citizen. It involves the support and engagement in the use of torture, assassination, and covert interventions into the sovereign affairs of scores of other nations over the course of many decades, from Operation Gladio to Operation Condor. This policy has culminated in 2001-2003 with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, over a quarter million U.S. troops are in that region, and the United States has documented use of torture and assassination as a matter of state policy.

President Obama came to office promising change and greater transparency. He has not lived up to this promise, and it may be that no commander-in-chief can do so, lacking from the populace itself a determination to uproot the militarist mind-set that occupies the programmatic operations of much of the government. But on the other hand, Obama has not indicated any appetite to appeal to the people on these issues, and instead follows the policies of his generals and admirals, and the spooks who populate the vaunted IC ("Intelligence Community").

The military and intelligence sectors of the government and the economy have grown unimaginably powerful. It is not an exaggeration that the actions of the U.S. government have made any claims of benefit in its activities abroad suspect. It is up to citizens of this country to take its democracy back, and hold its government accountable for what it has done.

Washington Post: CIA to Release Long Classified Records

The Washington Post has a major article on CIA abuse over the past 60 years, following the news that the CIA plans to release hundreds of documents next week. These documents apparently will fill in many gaps in our knowledge of CIA surveillance of U.S. protest groups, on CIA use of drug experimentation on unwitting victims, on break-ins, wiretapping, theft, and monitoring of journalists, congressmen, and much more. The story is written by Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus.

A small preview:

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs....

In anticipation of the CIA's release, the National Security Archive at George Washington University yesterday published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government deliberations of the abuses. Those documents portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of President Gerald R. Ford that what then-CIA Director William E. Colby called "skeletons" in the CIA's closet had begun to be revealed in news accounts.

Kissinger warned that if other operations were divulged, "blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of [Cuban President Fidel] Castro"....

Worried that the disclosures could lead to criminal prosecutions, Kissinger added that "when the FBI has a hunting license into the CIA, this could end up worse for the country than Watergate," the scandal that led to the fall of the Nixon administration the previous year.

This should be a very interesting upcoming week. Meanwhile, AP is reporting that the U.S. is seriously considering closing down the Guantanamo gulag. Here's a link to that story, but it's from Yahoo News and those links seem to disappear after awhile. Sorry, only source I have right now.

To make up for it, here's a link to the National Security Archive, a wonderful site, who will be apparently hosting many of these released documents. They also have already the document where Kissinger warns Ford noted above. And this link goes to a PDF of the 6 page summary that supposedly reveals the CIA's top "skeltons", as of the mid-1970s. (God knows there are many new skeletons being born in the creepy basement rooms of 21st century Foggy Bottom.)