The CIA’s ‘family jewels’, and what they really tell us
07.06.07 - 02:01pm
Americans and the British need to face facts: their governments and ’security services’ are up to no good
The release of previously secret CIA files show that during the 1970s alone the agency:
- tortured defectors
- illegally spied on the domestic population of the United States
- harassed American citizens engaged in constitutionally-protected activities
- infiltrated and tried to destroy peaceful anti-war organisations
- bugged leading journalists
- plotted to assassinate foreign leaders, including conspiring with the Mafia to off Fidel Castro
- took part in illegal kidnappings
Not only did it organise and participate in all these activities, by its own admission, it was fully aware that every single one of them was contrary to the law of the United States of America. In fact, the documents, 702 pages of them released under America’s freedom of information legislation, were compiled by the CIA itself as an actual list of activities the agency was involved in, activities contrary to the National Security Act. The documents paint the CIA as an organisation completely out of control, one which participated in institutionalised criminal behaviour, one that regarded itself as beyond the law and beyond real democratic constraints.
Rather predictably, the revelations in these files have been treated by the media as an interesting piece of history, and the main focus of much of the coverage has been the CIA’s attempts to kill the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. The Guardian’s article is representative. Media gullibility notwithstanding, one would have to be naive in the extreme to believe that the security service’s rampant lawbreaking is in the past. One would also have to be naive to believe that such behaviour is limited to the Central Intelligence Agency, or to the USA. The institutional, economic and internal cultural factors which provide the framework for the activities of such organisations cut across national boundaries and remain broadly similar to those of 30, 40 or 50 years ago. As sure as the sun will rise tomorrow morning, in 10 years time there will be similar revelations about similar despicable practices in the 1980s, 10 years after that it will be the 1990s and so on. And each time the revelations will be treated as an intriguing insight into disreputable behaviour in the past with no contemporary significance.
The uniquely broad and determinedly enforced freedom of information laws in the United States, legislation that nation is justifiably proud of, allows such documentation to reach the public. In the United Kingdom and other western democracies, freedom of information laws are weaker if not non-existent. Britain has made some tentative progress but the workings of the government and the security services are still hidden from public scrutiny as much as possible. Here in Britain, such information rarely if ever reaches the public. Civil employees of considerable bravery and good conscience have been hauled before the courts for revealing the inner workings of the British state, no matter how immoral and regardless of their illegality. MI5 and MI6, despite their public relations campaigns of recent years, are still protected by a wall of silence.
Only when the media, and via them the public, are willing to face up to the simple fact that their government, the governments of allied nations, and their agencies, are implicated in activities which bear comparison with the foulest deeds of the villains of the age, will we begin to take serious steps towards functioning democracy.
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