"Embarrassing" is the word that’s been chosen by a plethora of pundits and commentators about what’s contained in the 693 pages of documents CIA Director Michael Hayden has approved for release concerning the agency’s long-known secrets. "Appalling," "enraging," "distressing," "depressing" and even "unpleasant" didn’t figure in any coverage I read or heard over the weekend from the usual suspects of the megamedia, although I am sure I missed a few.
Whatever details may be gleaned from those documents regarding long-known secrets about long-ago events exposed in nine volumes by the [Senator Frank] Church Committee in 1975, what most of us would really like to know is what the CIA and other intelligence agencies are doing illegally now that will provide for an "embarrassing" document release a quarter- or half-century from now.
As James Bamford points out, we already have some significant hints. Bamford’s ground-breaking book about the National Security Agency, The Puzzle Palace, was published 25 years ago. And he has followed up with several other noteworthy books, including Body of Secrets in 2001 and A Pretext for War in 2004. He’s a national treasure deserving more than five minutes, but that’s all he got on NPR’s Weekend Edition with Liane Hansen.
Liane Hansen: Does the information...this is from more than 30 years ago, 32 years ago, actually ... does it say very much about what might be going on at the CIA now? Did it tell you anything about that?
James Bamford: Well, it’s ironic, you know. Usually the horror stories back in the ‘70s, everybody was aghast at what was happening. This was the whole creation of a congressional committee, joint committees to look into all this stuff. And now, looking back, it seems so minor compared to what the CIA is doing today. They have a whole section here on how the CIA held a Russian defector in a jail that was created by the CIA, a mini-prison for this person on CIA property for two or three years. Now you have the CIA keeping people in prisons all over the world, in secret prisons. It talks about the mail-opening that was done by the CIA, reading letters going from the United States to and from Russia, and also China. And that was an outrage at the time. But today the intelligence community is reading hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of e-mails of Americans.
Hansen: Do you see anything new in this information that reveals more about the relationship between the CIA and the White House, or the CIA and other agencies, for that matter?
Bamford: There are good and bad aspects. One is that Richard Helms rejected a lot of the overtures from the White House to get involved in Watergate, for example. Helms didn’t want his agency to have any taint of Watergate. And that, in the end, really sort of cost him his job because he defied the Nixon White House on that issue. So I think that was the very high point. The low points, of course, were the fact that the CIA did do these things.
Hansen: Does the release though say anything about today’s relationship between the White House and the CIA?
Bamford: Back then, if you want to compare those two, it’s very interesting that CIA resisted a lot of the White House overtures. And today you had George Tenet seemed to go along with most of what the White House was proposing, despite the fact that most of his or a lot of his employees below him were saying the opposite thing, that there weren’t weapons of mass destruction.
As reported by John Goetz, Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark in today’s English-language version of the German Spiegel Online, activities a lot more recent than the stuff contained in the CIA documents being released is causing some problems between Berlin and Washington:
But the orderly world of a handful of US intelligence agents is about to be turned upside down. The district attorney's office in Munich has filed international warrants with Interpol for the arrest of Lyle L., 51, and nine other CIA employees. Lyle L., also known as "Uncle Bud," a former member of the elite Green Berets combat unit, is alleged to have been part of a group of agents who kidnapped Khaled el-Masri, a Lebanese-born German citizen, in Macedonia in January 2004 and flew him to Afghanistan via the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. A trained medic, Lyle L. was probably the one who administered sedatives to Masri on board the Boeing 737.
Officials in Washington have since realized that the German investigation is more than just a symbolic act. This week in Berlin, a group of senior officials from the interior, foreign and justice ministries will meet to discuss the sensitive issue of how the German government should handle the Munich petition for "arrest for the purposes of extradition." There is general agreement within the government in Berlin that the request should be promptly delivered to the Bush administration, which would be tantamount to an official request for the arrest of the men being sought.
If you’d like to do your own exploration of previously released CIA documents that are unlikely to mention rendition or secret prisons, Entropic Memes points out that you can have a few hours of fun with a search engine on the CIA’s Web site.
As Entropic points out, there's no index. "They do provide a list of (supposedly) all relevant keywords, taken from what seems like a full-text search of every document released. This is frustrating, however, because they only make the documents available as a series of low-resolution images, not PDF files or anything machine-readable."
Of course, while you’re checking out goofy stuff about UFOs over Murmansk, there’s no telling what the CIA is uploading to or downloading from your computer.