On this 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., there's been a lot of speechifying and article-writing. But I have seen precious little that recounts the campaign of the United States government to discredit and vilify Dr. King. The activities of the FBI's Cointelpro program were documented by the United States Senate in its Church Committee Report. The "likelihood" that King was shot by James Earl Ray "as a result of a conspiracy" was the conclusion of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1975. Unlike the JFK case, the HSCA documents on the MLK assassination remain classified to this day.

Yet we will hear nothing about these facts in today's mainstream news. It's unlikely that much will even be said at the liberal blogs. Yet, outside of the work of Dr. King himself, it's the most salient fact about this day of dark remembrance.

Philip Agee, the spy who dragged everyone else in from the cold, has passed away in Cuba at 72.

Agee, whose 1975 book "Inside the Company," revealed numerous CIA activities and operatives worldwide and supercharged the Church Committee investigations of intelligence community abuses, had been an operative with the CIA from 1957 to 1968.

Juan Cole, in his 27 December 2007 column, noted that the banner under all CNN stories on Iraq from the previous day in the US was "Progress in Iraq 2008," with the 'reduction in violence' the subtext. He goes on to write "This is not news, it is propaganda" and proceeds to provide undeniable evidence to back up his statement.

This diary is not intended to single out CNN nor is it intended to finger anyone in particular as being responsible for an obvious lack of forthcoming information provided to the American public by the establishment media. I hope to provide some facts and examples which might serve to promote further discussion on this topic.

We're all aware of important stories relegated to the back pages of the NY Times and the Washington Post, Judith Miller of the Times hyping the non-existent WMDs in Iraq, "Fair and Balanced" Fox News and fake reporter Jeff Gannon. There are endless other examples we see every day.

Where did it all begin, how did we arrive at where we are today and why don't we get the truth?

By L C Johnson (blog/bio)

Looks like the cat is out of the bag and the "new family jewels" were destroyed.  What am I talking about?  Today's revelation in the NY Times that,  "the Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program, according to current and former government officials."

It seems like we're reliving the early 1970s. We're locked in a terrible quagmire of a war with an extremely unpopular president who thinks he's king. We've even got the illegal spying on Americans by our intelligence agencies. Coincidentally, we even have a Rockefeller involved in impeding investigation into this illegal activity. Then it was Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, whose Rockefeller Commission report on CIA activities was largely seen as a whitewash. This time around it's his nephew, Jay Rockefeller, who as Chairman of the Intelligence Committee ceded to the White House's demands that our current version of warrantless spying never be investigated by granting the telecoms amnesty for their activities.

What we don't have in 2007 is a fourth estate, in large part, that has the principle and the gumption to fill it's role exposing government abuses. Partly as a result, we also don't have an electorate that is shocked and outraged at what has been done to them in the name of national security.

What we most unfortunately do not have in 2007, is Frank Church. Nor do we have enough of the spirit and principle he embodied in enough of our representatives to stand against the would-be tyranny of an out-of-control executive branch.

In April 1976, after months of hearings and investigations, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee) released its final report (out of fourteen). The reported detailed the illegal activities of U.S. intelligence agencies and the need for Congress to reassert the Constitutional system of checks and balances to order to rein in the excesses of the executive.

Here is an extensive quote from the Senator's final report which will hopefully provide some perspective on exactly how critical the fight we are currently waging is:

Personal privacy is protected because it is essential to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Our Constitution checks the power of Government for purposes of protecting the rights of individuals, in order that all our citizens may live in a free and decent society. Unlike totalitarian states, we do not believe that any government has a monopoly on truth.

When government infringes those right instead of nurturing and protecting them, the injury spreads far beyond the particular citizens targeted to untold numbers of other Americans who may be intimidated.

Free government depends upon the ability of all its citizens to speak their minds without fear of official sanction. The ability of ordinary people to be heard by their leaders means that they must be free to join in groups in order more effectively to express their grievances. Constitutional safeguards are needed to protect the timid as well as the courageous, the weak as well as the strong. While many Americans have been willing to assert their beliefs in the face of possible governmental reprisals, no citizen should have to weigh his or her desire to express and opinion, or join a group, against the risk of having lawful speech or association used against him....

The natural tendency of government is toward abuse of power. Men entrusted with power, even those aware of its dangers, tend, particularly when pressured, to slight liberty.

Our constitutional system guards against this tendency. It establishes many different checks upon power. It is those wise restraints which keep men free. In the field of intelligence those restraints have too often been ignored....

The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy. Means are important, as ends. Crisis makes it tempting to ignore the wise restraints that make men free. But each time we do so, each time the means we use are wrong, our inner strength, the strength which makes us free, is lessened.

And speaking directly about the NSA:

I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss," explained Church. "That is the abyss from which there is no return.

Watching the unwinding of the latest venture into government-sponsored lawlessness, and the apparent lack of will in our Congress to fight it, I've wondered what Senator Church would say. How he would react to seeing his groundbreaking and difficult work--an investigation that seriously jeopardized his own political future--being undone. Senator Church died in 1984, falling victim to the cancer that he had miraculously defeated once before. So we can't ask him.

But I did have the opportunity to ask his son, Rev. Forrest Church what he thought his father would say. I was in Idaho recently, working on research for my book, and had the chance to sit down with Forrest to talk about his father, Idaho, politics, and the state of the nation today. Forrest is so like his father in demeanor, in voice, and in the sheer power of his intellect that he is a more than adequate spokesman for his father.

I think that we don’t learn from our own history . . . we forget why we did things, why we corrected anti-American behavior in the first place when it becomes convenient for us to be anti-American again. The ends justify the means mentality is what leads us to violate our own first principles. That behavior is on a Möbius loop—it just keeps coming back and keeps returning . . . it’s remarkable. Much of what he did in 1974 is now being dismantled because of the fear of people in Congress that they’ll be perceived as insufficiently vigilant on terrorism. It will simply all have to be done again. That work will have to be restored, because it’s not good for the United States and it’s not good for the world. What appears to be self serving ultimately destroys the country’s integrity, the country’s morality, and the country’s image abroad.

One of the things that was so clear when he was investigating the CIA is that every time we did something that was un-American in order to advance American interests, we ended up setting back our own interests and undermining our ideals. So it was not even effective in terms of realpolitik.... Again, the same sorts of things are happening. He would be appalled, and he would just shake his head, I’m sure, at how quickly we are willing to cede that hard-won ground. It’s remarkable to me. But . . . that flag has been planted on a hill and it can be accosted but it can ultimately never be removed. It’s always there as a reminder.

Not all are so "willing to cede that hard-won ground." Senators Dodd, Biden, and Obama are heeding the past, as are Senators Wyden and Feingold, who voted in the Intelligence Committee to block this terrible bill. Hopefully, the Senate Judiciary Committee will follow suit, and strip the amnesty provisions from the bill.

Hopefully the spirit of Senator Church still haunts the corridors of the Senate and the Capitol. Hopefully enough Senators, like Church's protege Biden, recall the political risks he took in the name of preserving our Constitution and our freedoms, and will rally around that flag he planted.

Cowboy King Bush stampedes Bluedog Democrats into a massive trampling of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights via a restrictive FISA law.

"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.

While I am no fan of absurd conspiracy theories, the attempt to discredit those who make claims based on sound inference as either conspiracy theorists or violators of kos's doctrine that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is exasperating.

I understand that allowing kooks to take over the site with whacky theories, or irresponsible hypotheses, would discredit the good work done here. But when someone on another diary wondered aloud whether administration threats had been made to silence Pelosi and Reid on impeachment, another commenter warned that this sounded like 9/11 conspiracy mongering.

I don't anything about 9/11, but there are plenty of good reasons to believe the government operates in a seriously repressive fashion from time to time. Some of this was detailed in the findings of the U.S. Senate Church Committee, for one. -- How about this extraordinary claim? The FBI, with the approval of Attorney General Kennedy, tried to destroy the life and reputation of Martin Luther King, Jr., using wiretaps, blackmail, and a wide campaign of political pressure, all while preparing a "Negro" successor to follow upon King's final ignominy.

If Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confession is believable in all its particulars, then we’ve heard the best reason yet for shutting down Camp Delta in that permanently leased bit of land the Bush Administration once tried to persuade us was neither part of the United States nor Cuba, making the law there whatever the lawless Donald Rumsfeld and his minions said it was. Makes you wonder what "enemy combatant" actions could possibly remain that KSM didn’t plan, lead, supervise or carry out all by his lonesome. Makes you almost think the rest of the detainees could just as well go home since there’s not much left they could have done.

Unlike some folks in wwwLand, including a few Diarists here, I’m not saying the man didn’t do every single thing claimed in the written and oral remarks at his military tribunal hearing at Guantánamo Bay last weekend. Maybe he did. Probably did, if you leave him some wiggle room for braggadocio.

But we will never know for certain because we’ve got gangsters running the executive branch instead of men and women committed to the rule of law. Rendition, torture, secret prisons, rancid legal reasoning, attempts to transform the Constitution and Geneva Conventions into so much confetti, and lies, lies, lies have characterized every aspect of the treatment our so-called leaders have meted out to those they say were responsible for Nine Eleven and other terrorist acts.

Count as bad enough what we’ve learned about what’s been going on – including snatching alleged suspects off foreign streets and plopping them into impromptu or real dungeons where their screams won’t be noticed amid all the other screams. We know many of them were tortured, and Mohammed says he was, which makes his confession wholly worthless. But, like so much about this Administration, the bulk of misbehavior remains concealed, Guantánamo being no exception. Is it any wonder then that so many people have voiced suspicions deep and wide regarding what we’ve been told overflows the mastermind’s résumé? Can it be surprising that the news of the confession even prompted some single-minded folks to raise once again a matter that FAQ Section 4.3.5 forbids me to elaborate upon?

It didn’t have to be this way. Transparency, allegiance to the letter and spirit of national and international law, and a refusal to behave like the cops of some Klan-riddled 1950s police department could have made us proud to be Americans, unified behind our government at a time of crisis, adhering to the principles we all were taught America stood for, and able to believe the confessions of those caught and questioned for criminal acts against our fellow citizens. Instead, the Bushbots made sure we don’t believe a word they say, or a word they say others have said.

I’m not a Pollyanna about government lies. Particularly when it comes to secretive government agencies whose stock-in-trade is lying, as is the case with the CIA, which, it is said, secretly held Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for more than three years before he was turned over to authorities at Camp Delta for sham legal proceedings. My eyes were first opened when I read The Invisible Government in 1964. And, more personally, when, 40 years ago last month, Robert Scheer exposed in Ramparts magazine that the National Student Association, an organization for which I was then my university’s delegate, was a CIA cutout.

Eight years later a host of CIA (and FBI) abuses came to light in the hearings of the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, better known as the Church Committee, after Idaho Sen. Frank Church. A decade after that, in 1984, AP reporter Robert Parry wrote about the assassination manual the CIA provided to the Nicaraguan terrorists known as contras. In 1985, the Baltimore Sun exposed torture manuals the CIA had produced for five Latin American security forces. "While we do not stress the use of coercive techniques, we want to make you aware of them and the proper way to use them," the authors wrote.

Before these exposés shed light on the CIA’s activities, the agency, of course, denied everything. Whether it was rumors about the coup in Iran, the opening of domestic mail, the assassination of foreign leaders or the planting of disinformation designed to persuade otherwise skeptical people of something that the agency and its bosses wanted done, the CIA said: Not us. For those of us who watched all this unfold, it would have been exceedingly difficult not to mistrust everything anybody from the CIA ever said.

This was all in the days before CIA deputy directors spoke openly to the press and ex-CIA agents appeared on cable news shows as paid analysts. Today, I’d like to believe the Michael Scheuers, Robert Baers and Ray McGoverns because they say things that sound plausible and they appear to hold many views of U.S. foreign and intelligence policy that I agree with – Hell, I sometimes Recommend Diaries here by L.C. Johnson – and Valerie Plame Wilson is a kind of hero even though we’ve just begun to hear what she has to say.

But a little voice in the back of my head intones: Have you forgotten? It reminds me that in addition to overthrowing governments, training terrorists, recruiting spies and gathering information, one of the CIA’s tasks has always been to spread disinformation. As Fresh Air interviewer Terry Gross – in her trademark polite-but-direct way – asked former Congo CIA station chief Larry Devlin on her March 13 show, why she should believe anything he says. Why, indeed.

The Bush Administration could have behaved differently after Nine Eleven. It could have upended the long and unsavory history of government lying. It could have given Americans reason to believe their government's officials. Instead, it’s provided a surfeit of reasons for disbelieving every word they utter or say someone else has uttered, including the likes of the Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds. Any President or Congress who wants to begin reversing that attitude has hard work ahead of them.

You may have your favorites, but I believe the most important Congressional investigation in modern times (excepting any future such work as will be done by this or Congresses on the crimes of the Bush Administration) was The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, known as the "Church Committee" after its chairman Democratic Senator Frank Church.

Sen. Church, who died in 1984 of pancreatic cancer, was the fifth youngest senator elected to the U.S. Senate, and was one of the prime movers in the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

This diary looks in some detail at 1975-76 Church Committee investigation of the intelligence agencies in the post-Watergate period, taking public and private testimony from hundreds of people, collecting thousands of files from the FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, and many other federal agencies.

363 tons ... and the U.S. taxpayer is another day older and deeper in debt.  

The "company store" is the Bush administration, whose Iraq war is now costing $10 billion per month.  St. Peter is Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and, oh yeah, he's heard our calls, beginning with yesterday's hearing that disclosed that "$8.8 billion in cash was disbursed without adequate financial controls" and that 363 tons of U.S. currency -- "shrink-wrapped into $400,000 bricks and carried on C-130 cargo planes" -- was "handed it over to Iraqi ministries with only the sketchiest accounting controls."

It's days like this that make my geeky habit of reading Church Committee testimony worthwhile.  All of you should read the Church Committee's report on mail opening.  It's especially relevant today because the program was run by James Jesus Angleton and he is the subject of a movie currently in the theaters, The Good Shepherd.  Yes, he was quite an unsavory fellow.  

It's also relevant today because the New York Daily News is reporting that the President has asserted his authority to read our mail by issuing a signing statement.  

The New York Times's recent story about government spying on international banking transactions has got the Schoolyard Bullies in the Bush administration all in a kerfuffle. The Bullies once again have resorted to name-calling, saying that the Times editors and reporters are traitors and MUST BE STOPPED! WAAAHHHHH!

Awww, too bad. Seems the Bullies are upset that once again, someone acting like an Adult has found out about their Bullying Ways, and has dragged them by the ear in front of the court of public opinion, to stop them from beating up on the individual liberties of The Other Kids In The Schoolyard. And all the while they are being dragged by the ear, they're squealing, "National security! National security!" like the nasty little piggies they are.

(Cross-posted at My Left Wing)

With the nomination of former NSA chief Michael Hayden to be Director of Central Intelligence, we are faced with the prospect of having a serious law breaker going through a heated confirmation process. I feel the need to go back in the time machine to show what the intelligence community did the last time Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were united in the White House, and to try to make clear how they think and why we cannot trust them to tell the truth about the illegal domestic surveillance program...to us...or even to the President. Back then, the NSA spied on American citizens, too. But that was reserved for electronic surveillance. For good old fashioned snail mail, the CIA took charge. I believe the following testimony will reflect precisely what we are dealing with today: a belief that the enemy (in this case, Islamic terrorists rather than Soviets) could be penetrated more effectively by giving them the false impression that our laws prevented domestic surveillance. And then, further, the abuse of that system to spy on critics of the government.

The Bush administration continues to mimic and trace the trajectory of the Nixon administration. There on the front of your New York Times you see the big article: Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts, where it is revealed that:

Now, let's get in our time machine: