CIA’s exposure of “family jewels” intended as a titillating distraction -The iPINIONS Journal

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency’s worst illegal abuses — the so-called “family jewels” documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s. [CIA Director Michael Hayden]

Even though a congenital cynic, I am still incredulous that reputable journalists – from those Watergate hounds at the Washington Post to the Whitewater sleuths at the New York Times – are reporting this week’s document dump by the CIA as a bona-fide declassification of secret information about the agency’s legacy of illegal activities – the so-called “black ops”.

After all, so much light has already been shed on the CIA’s dark side that these records have about as much lifeblood in them as Count Dracula would have in him at high noon. In fact, “all the news that’s fit to print” about the crooked quality of the CIA’s family jewels has been published by everyone from Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Gary Webb in his book – Dark Alliance, in which he details the CIA’s illegal funding of the Contras in Nicaragua and its hand in the crack cocaine explosion in America, to MIT educator and political gadfly Noam Chomsky in one of his many books on the subject – US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2, in which he documents the agency’s bloody fingerprints not only on the types of activities CIA Director Hayden cops to above, but also on many others that were perpetrated over the years in countries from The Philippines during the 1940s and 1950s to Haiti between 1986 and 1994.

In fact, even I indicted the CIA on similar counts in a February 2005 article entitled President Chavez: Bush trying to kill me, in which I cited the many reasons why Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez had just cause to be fearful about the prospect of being assassinated by the CIA on direct orders from President George W. Bush. Although Chavez’s mentor, Cuban President Fidel Castro, probably mollified his fears by regaling Chavez with first-hand accounts of all of the harebrained schemes the CIA deployed over the years in futile attempts to assassinate him.

Meanwhile, the fact that Robert F. Kennedy’s fingerprints are all over the plans to kill Castro has been widely reported. What would be a newsworthy declassification, however, is the alleged fact that his and JFK’s fingerprints are all over the well-executed plan to “silence” Marilyn Monroe….

Therefore, why all the hype about these family jewels, right? Indeed, why the farce of pretending to air decades of dirty laundry – the contents of which have been public knowledge for almost as long?

Well, in a nutshell, reports about the CIA’s more recent (and ongoing) black ops, including operating secret prisons in Eastern Europe, renditioning terror suspects to rogue states like Egypt to be tortured for information and spying on American citizens, have outraged so many voters that Congress is threatening knee-jerk oversight over its legitimate activities. And this portends grave consequences for national security, to say nothing of the storied careers of some of the CIA’s more decorated rogue agents….

(Incidentally, hopelessly-uninformed, terminally-gullible and now reflexively-outraged Americans were shocked, shocked by recent revelations about the government’s relatively-benign domestic spying program. Yet any college graduate who bothered to attend just a few of his freshman Political Science classes should have learned that political activists – from the sublime Dr Martin Luther King Jr to the ridiculous Jane Fonda – were the targets of positively-nefarious eavesdropping, which made them vulnerable, in some cases, to state-sanctioned blackmail. Therefore, it’s hardly “breaking news” that the CIA wiretapped journalists and political dissidents.)

At any rate, I suspect the CIA manufactured this hype – about purportedly exposing itself – as part of a classic bait and switch operation. Because Hayden & Co not only hope these fossilized pages, with all of their cloak and dagger details, will not only flatter indignant Congressmen by making it seem as though they forced the CIA to give up these “long-secret records”; they also expect the titillating details they contain about past activities will deflect the public’s glare from the agency’s current activities.

In fact, this is a textbook case of Manufacturing Consent, in which mass media has become a willing accomplice in a calculated scheme to give the American people the impression that the CIA is a reformed agency that welcomes Congressional and public scrutiny.

Never mind that this alleged declassification is made patently-specious not only by glaring omissions (redactions) in the records being released this week, but also by the fact that much of what is considered legal CIA activity today makes some of the illegal activities being declassified seem relatively tame.

Therefore, don’t believe the hype!

(But if you really get off on this stuff, then just wait until the FBI deems it expedient to expose its family jewels….)

CIA family jewels