Boston Indymedia: "Responding to a publicity campaign by Indymedia, the Cyprus Govt. has been forced to admit that they were acting under orders from the US to carry out an intelligence investigation of Cyprus Indymedia and of one of its founding members in order to assess whether he 'constitutes a threat to US interests'. Police... inadvertently blurted out that the source of this investigation was a directive by the CIA. After a series of denials and cover-ups the Police issued an official statement on Fri. admitting to everything that Indymedia had accused them of, namely that directives of the CIA and the US Embassy have priority over their own mission which, believe it or not, is to protect the tiny and independent Republic from foreign intervention. This campaign to intimidate IndyMedia is part of a global trend, including the nation-wide 'pre-emptive' interrogations by the FBI in Boston and across the US in order to thwart preparations to protest at the two conventions."

Ray McGovern writes, "Several of us have just spent a painful weekend digesting the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee on prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq. The corruption is far deeper than we suspected. The only silver lining is that corrupter-in-chief George Tenet is now gone... 'Who could have believed that about our intelligence community, that the system could be so dishonest?' wondered the normally soft-spoken David Albright, a widely respected veteran expert on Iraq's work toward developing a nuclear weapon. I share his wonderment. I too am appalled-and angry. You give 27 years of your professional life to an institution whose main mission-to get at the truth... and then you find it has been prostituted. You realize that your former colleagues lacked the moral courage to rebuff efforts to enlist them as accomplices in deception. Deception that involved hoodwinking our elected representatives into giving their blessing to an ill-conceived, unnecessary war."

Former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern writes: "There is, thankfully, a remnant of CIA professionals who still put objective analysis above political correctness and career advancement. Just when they thought there were no indignities left for them to suffer, they are shuddering again at press reports that Rep. Porter Goss (R-FL) may soon be their new boss. That possibility conjures up a painful flashback for those of us who served as CIA analysts when Richard Nixon was president. Chalk it up to our naivete' but we were taken aback when swashbuckling James Schlesinger, who followed Richard Helms as CIA director, announced on arrival, 'I am here to see that you guys don't screw Richard Nixon!'... [Goss] has long shown himself to be under the spell of Vice President Dick Cheney, and would likely report primarily to him and to White House political adviser Karl Rove rather than to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice."

"Despite Cambone's and Rumsfeld's denials, Cambone probably wouldn't have been tapped for the position if Rumsfeld wasn't interested in wielding more control over the nation's intelligence policy. As one of Rumsfeld's closest aides and earliest hires, Cambone's various tasks have all had a single overarching goal, according to his current and former Pentagon colleagues: to ensure that Rumsfeld's will is properly carried out within the Pentagon bureaucracy. The Pentagon's increasing assertiveness on intelligence matters is already cause for concern, as Abu Ghraib shows. But there's a broader issue beyond the scandal. The rise of a new intelligence czar at the Pentagon sets the stage for another round of bruising bureaucratic turf wars between the Department of Defense and the CIA - one with large implications for the war on terrorism - at a time when Langley, weakened by George Tenet's abrupt departure last week, is ill-prepared to do battle with Rumsfeld and his deputies. "

Michael Ruppert and Wayne Madsen write, "Why did DCI George Tenet suddenly resign on June 3rd, only to be followed a day later by James Pavitt, the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations (DDO)? The real reasons, contrary to the saturation spin being put out by major news outlets, have nothing to do with Tenet's role as taking the fall for alleged 9/11 and Iraqi intelligence 'failures' before the upcoming presidential election. Both resignations, perhaps soon to be followed by resignations from Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage, are about the imminent and extremely messy demise of George W. Bush and his Neocon administration in a coup d'etat being executed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The coup, in the planning for at least two years, has apparently become an urgent priority as a number of deepening crises threaten a global meltdown."

"The CIA that George Tenet leaves behind next month is a shadow of its imaginary self, a butt of jokes rather than the envy of the world. It is an agency that has become self-protective and bureaucratic; it is too reliant on gadgets rather than spies to steal secrets. Tenet restored the agency's morale, but he leaves behind a string of spectacular intelligence failures. And that may not be the worst of it. In his new book A Pretext for War, intelligence expert James Bamford alleges that the CIA not only failed to detect and deter the secret army of Muslim extremists gathering over the horizon in the late 1990s but also failed to take action when a group of Administration hard-liners began to advance the case for war with Iraq in secret using data the CIA widely believed weren't supportable or were just plain false. Instead of fighting back, Bamford argues, the CIA for the most part rolled over and went along. The result was a war sold largely on a fiction."

Guardian: "A senior intelligence official said last night that James Pavitt, the head of the CIA's clandestine service, plans to announce his retirement. Mr Pavitt heads the agency's best-known division, which is responsible for gathering foreign intelligence. An unnamed CIA official told the Associated Press that Mr Pavitt had taken his decision several weeks ago, and had not known of Mr Tenet's impending resignation. In an emotional speech to his agency yesterday, Mr Tenet cited personal reasons for his departure. Mr Pavitt has been with the CIA for 31 years, and Stephen Kappes, an agency veteran of 23 years service, is expected to replace him."

Steve Weissman writes, "Contrary to what many news reports now suggest, the Bush Administration was not creating this Brave New World from scratch in the hectic days after 9/11. CIA dragons had long 'disappeared' a select group of captives into secret dungeons, where they pried loose unwilling tongues with hooding, sensory deprivation and sensory assault, preventing sleep, withholding food and water, extremes of hot and cold, threats and humiliation, and forced standing or kneeling in painful positions. 'The Company' had employed these techniques at least as far back as the Phoenix program in Vietnam, and had taught them to client armies and police forces around the globe, most infamously in Central American and Chile under Gen. Pinochet... Where Bush broke new ground was in the scope of what he set in motion, the industrial scale on which the CIA - and later the Pentagon - violated all but the faintest pretense of providing humane treatment to those they took captive."

Kurt Nimmo writes, "As Bush was knee-deep into his invasion of Iraq, the UPI ran a story about Saddam's connection to the CIA. The story...was buried beneath a tidal wave of anti-Saddam propaganda unleashed by the Bushites and parroted by an obedient corporate media. Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer confirmed that the Ba'ath Party now so reviled by average Americans was essentially installed by the CIA in 1963." Add to this the numerous CIA engineered coups, assassinations, and sundry plotted incidents of mayhem in such far-flung places as Guatemala (1954), Zaire (1960), Cuba (1961), Dominican Republic (1961), Indonesia (1965), Greece (1965), Chile (1973), Angola (1975), El Salvador (1979), etc. John Stockwell, former CIA official notes: "The CIA has overthrown functioning democracies in over 20 countries." Now Haiti can be added to the list of CIA "successes."

San Jose Mercury News reports: "Confronting problems on critical fronts, the CIA recently removed its top officer in Baghdad because of questions about his ability to lead the massive station there, and has closed a number of satellite bases in Afghanistan amid concerns over that country's deteriorating security situation, according to U.S. intelligence sources."

"The recent deaths of two paramilitary operatives tracking terrorists in Afghanistan opened a small window into one of the CIA's secret methods in fighting the war on terror: using guns-for-hire. The agency has turned more frequently to contractors -- often retired Green Berets or Navy SEALs -- as it has worked to rapidly expand its covert paramilitary force, boosted by a big increase in funding in the two years since the Sept. 11 attacks. William Carlson and Christopher Glenn Mueller were retired military commandos hired by the CIA as contractors to hunt al-Qaida and Taliban fighters near Shkin, in the wilds of eastern Afghanistan. They died Oct. 25 when they were ambushed while taking part in a larger military offensive in the area. It appears they were hired by the CIA during the rapid growth of the agency's covert paramilitary force after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They were among an undisclosed number of former special operators hired to augment the CIA's own employees."

"A federal judge threw out the conviction of a former CIA operative who has spent 20 years in prison for selling arms to Libya, saying the government knowingly used false evidence against him. Edwin P. Wilson, 75, was convicted in 1983 of shipping 20 tons of C-4 plastic explosives to Libya -- something he said he did to ingratiate himself with the Libyan government at the CIA's request. In a scathing opinion released Tuesday, US District Judge Lynn N. Hughes said the federal government failed to correct information about Wilson's service to the CIA that it admitted internally was false... At his 1983 trial in Texas, prosecutors introduced a sworn statement from a top-ranking official that Wilson did nothing for the CIA after his retirement in 1971. 'It was just a flat-out lie. He did a lot,' Adler said Tuesday. Adler said the Reagan-era officials who pushed the case had been embarrassed by revelations the government was trading arms for information and made Wilson a scapegoat."

"There's a 'total meltdown' in America's intelligence services - and the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy is one of the major reasons why, current and former top U.S. spooks charged Tuesday. Bush's White House has pushed like few before it to put government information out of the public's grasp. Moves to classify documents are up 400 percent from a decade ago, to more than 23 million such actions in 2002, according to the Information Security Oversight Office, a division of the National Archives. But despite their cloak-and-dagger reputation, several of the country's leading spies, past and present, aren't happy about the rush to make things secret. To counter far-reaching, stealthy terrorist cabals, the country needs more openness, not less... Said Rich Haver, until recently Donald Rumsfeld's special assistant for intelligence, now with Northrop Grumman. 'We're compartmentalizing the s**t out of things. It's causing a total meltdown of our intelligence processes.'"

"A former CIA director and a former deputy national security adviser on Tuesday advocated major changes to the U.S. intelligence establishment in testimony before the independent commission studying the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. John M. Deutch, CIA director from 1995-1996, and James B. Steinberg, deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration, endorsed two structural reforms: appointing a director of national intelligence separate from the CIA, and creating a domestic security service modeled after Britain's MI5... The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which is reviewing intelligence failures as part of its probe of Sept. 11, was also hearing Tuesday from a second former national intelligence director who cautions against dramatic realignment. 'No one would question that management can always be improved, but major organizational change is not the salvation,' [said] James Schlesinger, director of central intelligence in 1973.'"

"Nearly 50 years before the war in Iraq, Britain and America sought a secretive 'regime change' in another Arab country they accused of spreading terror and threatening the west's oil supplies, by planning the invasion of Syria and the assassination of leading figures. Newly discovered documents show how in 1957 Harold Macmillan and President Eisenhower approved a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion by Syria's pro-western neighbours, and then to 'eliminate' the most influential triumvirate in Damascus. Although historians know that intelligence services had sought to topple the Syrian regime in 1957, this is the first time any document has been found showing that the assassination of three leading figures was at the heart of the scheme. In the document drawn up by a top secret and high-level working group that met in Washington in September 1957, Macmillan and Eisenhower were left in no doubt about the need to assassinate the top men in Damascus."

In 'Into the Buzzsaw', author and ABC producer John Kelly writes: "ABC hired me to help produce a story about an investment firm that was heavily involved with the CIA. Part of the report charged that the CIA had plotted to assassinate an American, Ron Rewald, the president of [the firm]. Scott Barnes said on camera that the CIA had asked him to kill Rewald. After the show aired, CIA officials met with ABC exec David Burke, [who] was sufficiently impressed 'by the vigor with which they made their case' to order an on-air 'clarification.' But that was not enough. [CIA Director] Casey called ABC Chairman Goldenson. [Thus] despite all the documented evidence presented in the program, Peter Jennings reported that ABC could no longer substantiate the charges. That same day, the CIA filed a formal complaint with the FCC charging that ABC had 'deliberately distorted' the news. In the complaint, Casey asked that ABC be stripped of its TV and radio licenses." Click below for more excerpts.

"The CIA says actress Jennifer Garner, star of ABC's... 'Alias,' has what it takes to be a real-life spy, and will soon be helping to lure new recruits to the intelligence agency. The 31-year-old actress has agreed to appear in a recruitment video that the CIA plans to produce and screen for prospective applicants at job fairs and college campuses, said Chase Brandon, the CIA's liaison with the film industry and a consultant for 'Alias.' 'We've been talking to Jennifer for a number of months, and she's been interested in doing it,' Brandon told Reuters on Thursday. 'The issue has really been her incredibly busy schedule.' Brandon said the CIA was 'standing by' with a commercial film crew in California ready to tape what would be the 'fairly few lines' she would contribute to the video... Brandon said. 'If Jennifer ever decides she doesn't want to wear dark glasses of the celebrity status, she can put on dark glasses and be a spy. She's got what it takes.'" She's our Leni Riefenstahl.

Meria Heller interviews Douglas Valentine author of 'The Phoenix Program' about the CIA's assassination program.

"Before the bombs fell on Baghdad, there were analysts inside the American intelligence community who were troubled by the U.S. case for war, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Acosta. Raymond McGovern, a former CIA analyst and supervisor, says, 'Never before in my 40 years of experience in this town has intelligence been used in so cynical and so orchestrated a way.' McGovern is one of several retired intelligence analysts who say they are speaking out for those who can't inside the CIA. 'The Agency analysts that we are in touch with are disheartened, dispirited, angry,' he says. 'They are outraged.'" If they get REALLY mad, maybe they'll remove the Bush name from CIA headquarters in Langley VA!

James Carroll writes, "So the intelligence community has provided faulty information to policy makers who then used it to justify disastrous decisions. When have I heard this story before?... Was it in 1968, when military intelligence, obsessed with 'body counts,' had so exaggerated the progress of the war (counting dead women and old people as soldiers) that the Tet Offensive took Washington by surprise? Or was it in 1969, when Richard Nixon, to justify his anti-ballistic missile (ABM) proposal, cited intelligence reports (disputed by the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency) that the Soviet Union was preparing to launch a first strike? ... Or was it in the 1980s, when, emphasizing the 'evil empire,' American intelligence entirely missed both the internal collapse of the Soviet economy and the historic significance of the nonviolent democracy movements? Failure of intelligence leading Washington to make world-threatening policy mistakes is not the exception, it's the rule."

AFP reports: "A Boeing 727 plane, whose sudden disappearance in Angola in May unnerved US intelligence agencies, reappeared last week in the Guinean capital Conakry before vanishing once again, British newspaper The Guardian reported today. Washington has been working with African governments in the past month in a frantic bid to hunt down the cargo plane, amid fears the aircraft could be used by terrorists in a repeat of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. The paper said the plane was spotted on June 28 by a Canadian pilot, Bob Strother, in Conakry, sporting a new coat of paint and a Guinean registration number. But Strother told the paper that two letters of the plane's old tail number - N844AA - were still showing, proving the aircraft was the same Boeing that was being sought by US diplomats throughout Africa."

"'Anthony A 'Tony Poe' Poshepny, a decorated former official of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who collected enemy ears, dropped decapitated human heads from the air on to communists and stuck heads on spikes, was buried on the weekend in California. Poshepny, who waged failed secret wars for the United States in Indonesia, Tibet and Laos, was often compared to the Marlon Brando character Kurtz in the movie Apocalypse Now... Said Smith of the Center for Public Policy Analysis: 'Tony Poe epitomized what the late Theodore Shackley, former CIA station chief in Laos, called the 'Third Option'. America - to avoid the potential twin options of using nuclear or conventional forces to defend its interests - should instead rely on special, elite clandestine forces to recruit, train and arm indigenous, or tribal forces, to project power... Clearly, Tony Poe symbolized America's decision to exercise its 'Third Option' in Laos.'"

Wired News reports: "Lie-detecting dogs and bullet-detecting radar sound like science fiction, but the brains behind these ideas aren't writers. These projects are just two of many being funded by a little-known Pentagon counterterrorism research group called the Technical Support Working Group, or TSWG. The group, pronounced tis-wig, began funding anti-terrorism projects in 1986 and has been known for its intra- and inter-agency cooperation in developing tools for fighting terrorism. 'TSWG is, in effect, a kind of mini-DARPA, except it is more clearly focused on a counterterrorism mission,' according to Stephen Aftergood, a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS)."

"The U.S. government has secretly launched an intensive campaign to find a Boeing 727 passenger jet that mysteriously disappeared in Africa three weeks ago, sources told ABCNews. Intelligence agencies have used satellites to try to locate the plane, the CIA is working its human sources in Africa, and embassies in Africa have been informed of the disappearance and asked to provide any information they may come across, sources said... The plane disappeared out of Angola on May 25. But a government official says the Angolans do not know whether it was bound for Burkina Faso, South Africa, Libya or Nigeria. It's also not clear how many people were on board. Some U.S. officials believe the plane may have been stolen to run drugs or guns. Others suspect it may have been crashed for insurance money... 'It's extraordinarily troubling that you can literally disappear off the face of the Earth once you are airborne and fly across a continent like Africa,' Yates said."

Chalmers Johnson writes, "According to [George Crile's] newly released Charlie Wilson's War, the exception to CIA incompetence was the arming between 1979 and 1988 of thousands of Afghan moujahedeen [who helped bring down the Soviet Union]... However, he never mentions that the 'tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists' the CIA armed are some of the same people who in 1996 killed 19 American airmen at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; blew a hole in the side of the U.S. destroyer Cole in Aden harbor in 2000; and on Sept. 11, 2001, flew hijacked airliners into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Today, the world awaits what is almost certain to happen soon at some airport -- a terrorist firing a U.S. Stinger low-level surface-to-air missile into an American jumbo jet... If the CIA's activities in Afghanistan are a 'success story,' then Enron should be considered a model of corporate behavior."

Jerry Meldon writes: "Obituaries can barely scrape the surface of anyone's 86-year life. That's especially true for a covert intelligence officer whose responsibility for top-secret decisions - and their consequences - is rarely acknowledged. But long before he succumbed to cancer on April 22, at the age of 86, retired CIA official James Critchfield had owned up to two of his decisions that were so momentous that they still influence the course of international events. One opened the CIA's doors to ex-Nazis. The other cleared the way for Saddam Hussein's rise to power in Iraq. Critchfield made the first of his fateful decisions soon after he joined the fledgling CIA in 1948. Three years earlier, Hitler's master spy for the Eastern Front, Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, had surrendered to U.S. forces. He then proposed a deal. In return for his freedom, he would turn over his voluminous files on the Soviet Union along with his former agents who had scattered across Europe."

"In the mid-'90s, Barry Broman was CIA station chief in Burma, also known as Myanmar, a leading producer of illegal narcotics that is governed by one of Southeast Asia's most repressive military regimes. In retirement, though, Broman switched clients: Last year, the former US intelligence officer worked on behalf of Burma as a $5,000-a-month lobbyist, trying to persuade American officials to adopt a more friendly stance toward the regime. Once tasked with gathering intelligence to advance US interests, Broman spent much of last year plying the Washington bureaucracy to embrace a more favorable stance toward Burma, whose illegal drug production -- much of it entering the United States -- accounts for between 10 percent and 15 percent of the country's economy. In February, Lorne Craner, an assistant US secretary of state, denounced Burma's military government for its 'disregard for human rights and democracy [that] extends to every conceivable category of violation.'"

Linda Diebel writes for the Toronto Star: "Let me open my CIA diaries and tell you what I know. It's not pretty. This is not some sophisticated TV 'Agency.' This is the land of broken dreams and scummy Third World bars, of coked-up informants and 'intelligence' so patently absurd you don't know whether to laugh or cry when you see it flash around the world as fact, becoming the official version of events. Becoming history. It's dirty and dismal, full of banal self-interest and not to be believed. What I learned first-hand - sometimes like a punch in my Mary Sunshine face - during years as a foreign correspondent explains why I am not surprised by what is happening in Iraq."

Nat Hentoff writes, "George W. Bush (as the December 15 New York Times reported) has authorized the CIA to kill terrorist leaders on an administration list - with, hopefully, minimum civilian casualties... [LA Times reporter Doyle McManus asks], 'If the CIA kills more suspected terrorists in more countries, will it have the unintended effect of 'legitimizing' terrorist attacks against U.S. military officers in foreign countries or even at home?'... The fundamental question, as McManus says, is whether Americans are ready 'to accept targeted-killing missions ... that kill clearly innocent civilians?' I would add a further question: How will we know how many of these killing missions will take place, including how many of the dead are innocent civilians?... At least one American citizen, in a CIA operation in Yemen, has been terminated in one of these CIA missions... Who's going to tell the citizenry? Not Tenet or Bush."

Time reports that after 9-11, the CIA "wanted its own army of James Bonds. So in the past year, hundreds of millions of additional dollars have been pumped into the CIA budget by George W. Bush, [who] even authorized the CIA to kidnap terrorists in order to break their cells or kill them. [This could create] a CIA that once again steps beyond the realm of collecting secrets to intervening forcibly in the affairs of foreign states. In that area, the agency's history has often been one of blunders and worse, from Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s through the Bay of Pigs fiasco under John F. Kennedy to the Nicaraguan war that led to the Iran-contra debacle in the '80s... And the military itself is not too pleased. It believes its special-ops forces are perfectly equipped to handle these jobs. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has reacted in part by planning his own secret unit, which would function much like the SOG but would answer to him rather than Tenet." Taking a cue from Ollie North?

"Uruguayan EP-FA congressman Jose Bayardi says he has information that far-reaching plans have been put into operation by the CIA and other North American intelligence agencies to overthrow Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias within the next 72 hours. Bayardi says he has received copies of top-secret communications between the Bush administration in Washington and the government of Uruguay requesting the latter's cooperation to support white collar executives and trade union activists 'to break down levels of intransigence within the Chavez Frias administration. In an interview with reporters from the Uruguyan newspaper La Juventud, Bayardi says he observes a domestic-political situation in Venezuela which could easily erupt into a civil war and bloodbath ... 'the whole process is a shocking reminder of what happened in Chile in 1973 ... I sincerely hope it does not come to that!'" So reports VHeadline.com.

CNN.com reports: "The secret side of the U.S. military's war on terrorism is quietly growing....(Referring to the use of mercenaries for covert operations.) Michael Vickers, a former Special Forces soldier and one-time CIA officer, said the evolving nature of the war on terrorism makes it likely that covert military operators will be called on more often in the months ahead. "This is basically a growth industry," said Vickers, now an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.... William Arkin, a private military and intelligence expert who has written about the Pentagon's efforts to expand covert capabilities, says Rumsfeld is building up 'an elite secret army' and that this emphasis on covert action reflects Pentagon frustrations with the performance of the CIA and other intelligence agencies."

This report ran in Agence France Presse on 10/29 - it looks like Condi cracked the whip at her quivering minions in the U.S. press and blocked the story here. The CIA, ignored and demeaned by the Bush junta, has warned that US counterterrorist operations around the world are likely to fail if they do not address the root causes of terrorism. "In an unusual display of candor, the CIA pointed out that continued instability in Afghanistan, challenges facing Saudi rulers and the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict were likely to fuel radicalism in the Muslim world." So what has the Bush junta's reaction been to repeated CIA warnings? To establish its "own" CIA cell, stuffed wtih hand-picked yes men devoted to trumping up "evidence" and telling Rummy and Bush exactly what they want to hear - damn the American people, full speed ahead!

"Richard Helms, a former director of central intelligence who defiantly guarded some of the darkest secrets of the cold war, died of multiple myeloma today. He was 89... he eventually ran afoul of Congressional investigators who found that he had lied or withheld information about the United States role in assassination attempts in Cuba, anti-government activities in Chile and the illegal surveillance of journalists in the United States. Mr. Helms pleaded no contest in 1977 to two misdemeanor counts of failing to testify fully four years earlier to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee... He fancied a career in journalism, and went to Europe as a reporter for United Press. His biggest scoop, he said, was an exclusive interview with Hitler...Helms clashed with President Richard M. Nixon, who sought his help in thwarting an F.B.I. investigation into the Watergate break-in. When Mr. Helms refused, Mr. Powers wrote, Mr. Nixon forced him out and sent him to Iran as ambassador."

"Operation Mockingbird - [In the late '40's] the CIA begins recruiting American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda. The effort is headed by Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham." According to Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain in "Acid Dreams", MK-ULTRA (the CIA's LSD program that experimented on unwitting military personnel and civilians) "was the brainchild of Richard Helms." CIA crimes during Helms' term as CIA Director from 1966 to 1973: Operation Chaos - illegal spying and covert operations on US citizens; Helms reportedly set up BCCI, the Saudi/CIA money laundromat; Operation Phoenix - the CIA assassination program in Vietnam; CIA-backed coups in Greece, Bolivia, Chile and Cambodia; CIA support of Haiti's "Baby Doc" Duvalier; CIA-backed torture and murder of thousands. Recently, the Village Voice reported on 6/6/01, that "Laili Helms, his niece by marriage...is the Taliban rulers' unofficial ambassador in the U.S."

One day BEFORE the shocking Congress vote on the Bush resolution, the CIA revealed that Bush's 'nightmare scenario' of a Saddam run amok is likely to come true only if Bush is allowed to follow through on his attack plans. 'Should Saddam conclude that a US-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. Such terrorism might involve conventional means ... or CBW. 'Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the US would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.' History will condemn all who voted 'yea' for Bush's W-ar.

Writes Heather Wokusch: "Dysfunctional Bush and his anachronistic cronies are leading us right into a catastrophic Middle Eastern blowout. That much is apparent. But what's not so clear is why we're allowing it to happen. Analyzing Dubya's psychological challenges is not enough - he's the symptom not the cause, and while the rapidity of societal decline has seemed to accelerate since 2000's farcical US presidential election, the framework for rollback was in place long before. If it hadn't been, citizens quite simply wouldn't have tolerated the rigged results. But what mechanisms could have been used to facilitate the rollback? How can an unwilling population be trained to blindly accept a new, repressive social order?"

"The CIA said the probability of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein initiating an attack without provocation on the United States in the foreseeable future was 'very low,' according to a letter made public on Tuesday. But if he was attacked, the likelihood that Saddam would respond with biological or chemical weapons was 'pretty high.' The letter, dated Oct. 7, was signed by Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin on behalf of CIA Director George Tenet and sent to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham in response to the Florida Democrat requesting the CIA declassify parts of its secret assessment on Iraq. The Senate is debating how much authority to give Bush in a war powers resolution, and some Democrats complained that the CIA was not providing intelligence that contradicted the Bush administration's views on Iraq." Still some deception here...since according to former UN inspector Scott Ritter, Iraq has no biological or chemical weapons with which to retaliate.

"Tony Blair has ordered a D-Notice on British media reporting government officials signing court gag orders. This regards the case of former MI5 officer David Shayler, who has evidence to prove MI6 gave 100,000 [English Pounds] to bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, arms to Iraq and had prior knowledge of several terrorist attacks on London in the 1990's. The original articles stated that top Labour MP's had signed gag orders, whereby upon mention of this evidence in court, media have to immediately leave the trial. Newspapers all over the country, including the Guardian, the London Evening Standard and the Scotsman have either completely removed or amended their articles. This evidence is damning. The British government is trying to bury the story, before it buries them."

Chris Floyd writes at Counterpunch.org: "There is a thread running through modern American history, a thin red cord that weaves in and out of the shifting facades of reason and respectability that mask the brutal machinery of power. At certain rare moments the thread flashes into sight, emerging from the chaotic jumble of unbearable truth and life-giving illusion that makes up human reality. It appears, bears witness, then vanishes again, forgotten behind the next facade. It's a thread that runs from horrified young intelligence operatives stumbling into the death camps of Nazi Germany to hardened agents running assassination programs in the jungles of Vietnam to august men of state building a shadow government with secret decrees authorizing tyranny, murder, torture and deceit. It's a thread of moral corruption, corruption by an idea, a temptation, a perversion of reason, the whisper of evil that says: 'The end justifies the means.'"

"Diversity has never been the CIA's strong suit. Born after World War II to a handful of Ivy League WASPs [The Mellons and Rockefellers were there from the start. Prescott Bush's business partner Robert Lovett drew up the blueprint for 'The Company'], the agency withstood years of congressional pressure before it actively recruited Americans of African, Asian or Latino descent...the CIA has hired consultants to help find universities and communities with Arab American or Middle Eastern-born U.S. citizens with adequate academic and English-language skills. 'We're rethinking our advertising,' said Bob Rebelo, the agency's director of recruiting. 'We are trying to come up with an appropriate approach to the Arab American world,' trying to 'debunk myths' about the agency through local Arabic-language newspapers and to exploit the business community." 'Myths' would be that the CIA only collects intelligence and doesn't engage in criminal, immoral activity – MKULTRA, Iran-Contra, Chile Coup.

Carla Binion writes: "The National Security Act of 1947, and the creation of the CIA...radically changed the direction of this country. This act helped create a secret government within our legitimate government...America's founders would probably see the period just after WWII, with the signing of the National Security Act, the creation of the CIA and the birth of the Cold War mentality, as the beginning of the end of the America they had in mind...they would have advised against collaborating with Nazis. As Bill Moyers says, the Cold War allowed for 'a mentality of permanent war, a perpetual state of emergency, and it meant a vast new apparatus of power.' The Bush administration now wants to take advantage of the...terrorist attacks to renew a mentality of permanent war and perpetual state of emergency...Bush and his advisers tell us we need a vast new apparatus of power. The America they ask us to salute and rally around is more the CIA's America than Jefferson's."

Excerpt: "...When I found that we were bringing drugs into the United States, and that we were receiving money which was being put into accounts which I knew to belong to the United States Government, as I'd set them up specifically for that purpose, I called Mr. Don Gregg, who was a CIA officer with whom I was acquainted, and complained about the nature of what we were doing. Q. Now, who is Mr. Don Gregg? A. At that time, he was George Bush - Vice-President George Bush's National Security Advisor..." (Note: back up to www.idfiles.com for the supporting story).

"Naturally, this reticence by the Japanese to face up to their past crimes is viewed as anathema to Americans, especially to the soldiers who suffered at the hands of their vicious enemy. The idea of censoring huge tracts of history seems foreign to our citizens. Yet, now it seems as though a movement is underfoot in the United States to censor our own history, stifle dissent and suppress the first amendment right to free speech." Check out Christian Dewar's sweeping overview of crimes by the CIA and the Bushes.

The Washington Post reports, "First elected with a landslide 56% of the vote in 1998, [Hugo] Chavez's folksy rhetoric and thunderous condemnations of the country's notoriously corrupt politicians generated huge enthusiasm among the millions of poor Venezuelans." Unfortunately, rich Venezuelans - and powerful Americans - despised Chavez because he gave hope to the poor, notwithstanding his Bush-like authoritarianism. The April 12 military coup d'etat had all the earmarks of past CIA efforts to overthrow populist governments, like Chile's Salvatore Allende, Congo's Patrice Lumumba, Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz, Indonesia's Sukarno, Iran's Mohammad Mossadeqh, and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega. Notice the careful wording of the precipitating event: "The move came after gunmen believed to be Chavez supporters opened fire on a massive demonstration by unarmed anti-government protesters in Caracas Thursday, killing 15 people." Time - and history - will tell who was truly responsible for this murder.

"Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday that the Pentagon would close its new Office of Strategic Influence, complaining that even though it was not true that the office would spread false news stories abroad, scathing media reports and commentary had made it impossible for the agency to do its job...The officials, who said they opposed the program and described it as disturbing and dangerous, told NBC's Jim Miklaszewski that the plan was a detailed proposal that would have included a sweeping campaign of disinformation not only overseas but also in the United States itself...The officials said the plan called for a campaign of lies, coercion and 'influence' against clerics, schools and news organizations. Some of the propaganda would have been aimed at Muslims inside the country, they said. News organizations that did not 'follow the Pentagon line' would be punished in unspecified ways, the officials said." Even without this new toy, Bush still has right-wing think tanks and the CIA to spread disinformation.

"Last Wednesday something strange happened. The American population was instructed to panic. Place themselves, that is, on a state of highest vigilance. Some cataclysmic act of terrorism would happen - within hours. But nothing terrible happened. Something creepy did. On Thursday there was an inconspicuous news item. John M Poindexter had been appointed to head a new agency 'to counter attacks on the US', such as Wednesday's no-show…The agency which Poindexter will run is called the Information Awareness Office. You want to know what that is? Think, Big Brother is Watching You. IAO will supply federal officials with 'instant' analysis on what is being written on email and said on phones all over the US. Domestic espionage." Poindexter ran Iran-Contra – that involved selling arms to Iran, money laundering, financing of the bloody Contra war, and alleged drug trafficking. Vice President Bush Sr. was "in the loop", if not actually directing the ops. Contra supply chief Felix Rodriguez reported to his office.

"In his new book,…See No Evil, [ex-CIA Agent Robert] Baer makes alarming charges about deficiencies in U.S. intelligence that he believes were precursors to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He says that, as the roots of terrorism were rapidly expanding, the CIA was inexplicably reducing its presence in the field. 'We basically closed down,' says Baer. 'The CIA closed down in the '90s.'" In the ABC News Magazine report about Baer, he said that the CIA would not get involved in car bombings. But there is evidence that CIA Director William Casey engineered a failed car bombing of Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, which killed 80 innocent people in Beirut. And Baer said that the CIA considered Iran to be waging war on us in the '80's. So why did Reagan-Bush sell them arms? Of course, the report failed to mention Iran-Contra - or that the CIA armed bin Laden and Hussein under Reagan-Bush. Baer started in the Directorate of Operations in 1976 under Bush Sr. Hey, it's since been named the Bush Center for Intelligence!

"A group of CIA officers has brought a class-action suit against the agency, alleging abuse of power against employees – including the cover-up of mistakes leading to the accidental US bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade in 1999...The case, filed by 15 past and present mid-to-upper level CIA employees, claims that the spy agency has used illegal tactics to prevent them pursuing legitimate grievances against the CIA, including altering and destroying documents, and eavesdropping on privileged discussions with their lawyers...The [15 officers] were disciplined [for the embassy bombing], while the senior officer received only a verbal reprimand, followed by a secret, backdated promotion. He now works at the White House, the lawsuit alleges." BushDaddy's CIA also provided the faulty intelligence that led to Clinton's bombing of the aspirin factory in Sudan. And Brill's Content reported that the CIA planted Media stories to undermine Clinton's war on Kosovo.

"After two days of interrogation by CIA agents and sporadic beatings by Albanian guards, [self-described terrorist] Saleh was put aboard a CIA-chartered plane and flown to Cairo, according to the Albanian agent and a confession Egyptian police elicited from Saleh in September 1998...America's clandestine role in Albania illuminates some of the tactical and moral questions that lie ahead in the global war on terrorism. Taking this fight to the enemy will mean teaming up with foreign security services that engage in political repression and pay little heed to human rights. By authorizing special military trials for some terrorists caught abroad,…Bush has signaled that the protections of American-style justice won't apply to all." This is an important (and unique) Wall Street Journal article about how the CIA broke up a terrorist cell in Albania. In detailing CIA training and support of Albania's SHIK intelligence service, it touches on how the CIA's methods can backfire.

In the middle of the fluff, Bob Woodward writes: "The CIA work with the Northern Alliance and tribes in the south is central to that strategy. Operationally, it means that once the CIA locates opposition groups in Afghanistan that have the will and capacity to hunt and kill Taliban and al Qaeda members, those groups will receive covert or overt U.S. support in the form of weapons, ammunition, food and money." (Remember Iran-Contra-Drugs?) Since Watergate, Carl Bernstein exposed the CIA penetration of the media (Operation MOCKINGBIRD), while Woodward has been a booster for the CIA. Before joining the Washington Post, Woodward was a Naval Intelligence officer. It is thought that Deep Throat was one of his friends from his days in Spookland. Was Deep Throat Alexander Haig (as John Dean speculated)? Or maybe former CIA Director James Schlesinger, who as Nixon's Defense Secretary instructed the Joint Chiefs to check with him first before reacting to Nixon's orders?

"It can thus be seen that all this talk we are being fed of late about giving the CIA 'new' powers to engage in 'targeted killings' is little more than spin, the native language of politicians. The same can be said for the public now being told that because of the terrorist crisis, the CIA is going to be allowed to revert to the good ol' days when they could cozy up to the most despicable human rights violators without getting permission from headquarters. It's hard to imagine that in recent years that even if an Agency officer felt moved to ask for such permission that it would have been refused. As I write this, the Agency is sleeping with the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan, a band of torturers, kidnappers and rapists so depraved that the people of Afghanistan at first welcomed the Taliban as heroes for conquering these worthies." So William Blum, author of an encyclopedic work on the (known) history of the CIA.

"In 1950, the Army secretly used a Navy ship cruising just outside the Golden Gate to spray supposedly harmless bacteria over the entire city and its outskirts. Eleven people were sickened by the germs in San Francisco, and one of them died. From 1956 to 1961, the CIA, in a secret behavior modification program called MK-ULTRA, dispatched agents to test the effects of mind-altering drugs such as LSD and synthetic mescaline on unsuspecting people in San Francisco, Mill Valley and other cities across the country. Many of the victims hallucinated, many became sick and at least two deaths resulted from the experiments. And from 1944 to 1974, both the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission conducted hundreds of secret experiments…that exposed unsuspecting patients to dangerous doses of radiation, including injections of plutonium." So writes David Perlman for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Writes FAIR's Jeff Cohen: "A decade after the collapse of our Soviet enemy (which the CIA largely failed to predict), positive media presentations can help sell the public on the need for the CIA and its estimated $30 billion price tag...['The Agency'] Producers say the CIA will have input on scripts but not script 'approval'...A new ABC spy series, 'Alias,' has also received some CIA assistance...don't expect a hard-hitting episode on the agency's alliance with the corrupt, often-brutal military in Colombia. Or on the CIA's past links to terrorists like Osama bin Laden." Interestingly, CBS/Viacom chief Sumner Redstone worked for US Military Intelligence during WWII. Until 1995, ABC was owned by Capital Cities, a CIA front founded by William Casey (a CIA spook who became DCI). While the Cap Cities/Disney merger was underway, the CIA was doing corporate espionage work for Disney in France. (Enter 'timeline' in our .Compass search engine for a list of CIA atrocities).

"Here we are in the early days of World War III, and television...is crawling with spies and spooks and secret agents. In three new series (The Agency, Alias and 24, which doesn’t premiere until next month), the CIA figures centrally; another two (UC: Undercover and Thieves) involve federal agencies and undercover work...It is true in any case that the CIA has been staging an assault of its own, a campaign for the hearts and minds of the American mediated public; in 1996 they installed as a liaison to the entertainment industry former field-op Chase Brandon...whose mission is to raise the profile of the agency — in a good way — to get the people picturing spies and spooks and secret agents as thoughtful citizens and patriotic team players, with full emotional lives, dynamite clothes sense, really nice hair (mostly), and a pretty high success rate." Brandon is doing for the CIA what Reagan-Bush propagandist Otto Reich did for the Contras, 'gluing on white hats.'

"The agency is determined to leave no room this time for 'plausible denial' of responsibility on the part of the president and the agency's top management. That does not mean that operations will be publicly proclaimed, one source said, but that the paper trail inside government must begin undeniably with 'the political leadership'… Today the Directorate of Operations retains a 'special activities' branch, but …'The paramilitary part of the directorate has atrophied,' one case officer said." Since this branch of the CIA was created out of the Gehlen organization, run by CIA-recruited Nazi Reinhard Gehlen, it is good that this branch atrophied under Clinton. Even a History Channel program explored if the CIA is actually a direct descendant of the Gestapo. Said former National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, '...I think you're on a slippery slope to becoming the Borgias.'" Are the Bushes already our Borgias? (See bk2k.com/bushbodycount/home.html).

"Bush last month signed an intelligence order directing the CIA to undertake its most sweeping and lethal covert action since the founding of the agency in 1947, explicitly calling for the destruction of Osama bin Laden and his worldwide al Qaeda network." Note how Bob Woodward (a former intelligence officer at the ONI) adroitly lays the blame for Iran-Contra on deceased CIA director William Casey, without mentioning any living participants. We now know that Bush Sr. was 'in the loop', if not playing a lead role. As for exposing the CIA's earlier covert history, we have the heroic Pike and Church committees to thank. Naturally, right-wing pundits and the freepers have been demonizing Sen. Frank Church for 'hamstringing the CIA' by uncovering this corrupt, bloody history. The freepers seem to think the CIA should be free to overthrow democracies, support death squads, perform drug experiments on unsuspecting civilians and infiltrate the Media.

Now that Bush has authorized the CIA's Directorate of Operations to do whatever it takes in the War on Terrorism, it is important to review the (known) history of the D.O.'s activities in the past. While it is a righteous cause to bring Osama bin Laden to justice – and destroy the Al-Qaeda network – these restored powers of the D.O. are ripe for abuse. The D.O. has acted as a private army for the elite, especially under the direction of George Bush Sr. This was the case not only during his time as CIA Director – but likely during other periods as well – such as the Reagan-Bush Iran-Contra and Iraqgate schemes. Advocates for the CIA working with 'unsavory characters' confuse the need for spies to infiltrate groups with outright support of 'counter-insurgents' and right-wing dictators. Here is a timeline of CIA atrocities based on William Blum's definitive work, "Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II." Are we to repeat this cycle?

"Imagine if Operation Ajax, coordinated by the British MI6 and the American CIA, which toppled the flourishing democracy in Iran of Mohammed Mossadeq [in 1953], had never left the drawing board...Had the coup never taken place, Iran probably would have gone on to build a sturdy, inclusive democracy that would have brought about a far more durable stability than what the shah--forever tainted in the eyes of his people as a weak, easily manipulated Western puppet--ever managed to deliver...Imagine a new era of foreign policy--an era in which international law is taken seriously, respected, in which sovereign democracies are encouraged, nurtured, applauded, rather than fought against, stifled and killed. Imagine if we abandoned, once and for all the poisonous doctrines of 'Iron Chancellor' Bismarck and Henry Kissinger and instead subscribed to those of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch." So writes Ahmed Bouzid.

"Although the F.B.I. was notified on Sept. 25 about suspicious letters sent to NBC, neither the letters, nor the powder residue inside them were tested until nearly two weeks later, and then only because a private doctor notified city public health officials about a troubling skin condition in the news assistant who had handled the mail, officials acknowledged yesterday. In fact, the F.B.I. laboratory neither performed nor sought any tests on the powder or the skin samples taken from the employee, identified as Erin M. O'Connor, a 38-year-old assistant to Tom Brokaw." Another one to add to the long list of FBI and CIA failures.

"The United States is mounting psychological operations across the entire Islamic world in the war against terrorism, deploying sophisticated weapons of propaganda, public diplomacy, information and disinformation. One object of information warfare -- or 'infowar,' as it is called by practitioners and those who study it -- is to frighten and destabilize an enemy. But as practiced in modern times, it has broader and more subtle effects. Tactics include mobilizing public opinion around the globe, finding financial pressure points, manipulating adversaries' perceptions of themselves and of their supporters, corrupting their sources of information, undermining their support and crippling their communications systems." Also see the following item in which former CIA agent Philip Agee asserts that CIA recruitment of US reporters and editors (called Operation Mockingbird through the '70's) continues in the present day.

"The United States is going to be in this for quite some time. I have feeling that it is going to go on for ten or fifteen years, because they are not going to wipe out international terrorism or something like bin Ladin's group overnight. During this period, they are going to be doing the same things they did in the Cold War. We can already here it in such expression as, 'Whoever is not with us is against us.' They are going to be trying to use every bit of power they have to bring countries in line behind the United States. It also means important changes within the United States, because the war on terrorism will serve as the justification for restraints on civil liberties. They are building a huge crisis in the United States. They are building the psychological climate for broad-based acceptance of an ongoing war, for which there will be no quick resolution." So writes former CIA agent Philip Agee.

"The National Security Act of 1947, and the creation of the CIA as a result of that act, radically changed the direction of this country. This act helped create a secret government within our legitimate government. In many ways, the beginnings of the CIA and other secretive agencies marked the end of the America created by the framers of our Constitution. When we encourage patriotism today, we should be clear about which America we're talking about. Do we intend to rally around the America of our founders and the liberties that later arose from the Constitution? Or do we salute the America of the national security state and its secret government?" So writes Carla Binion in the Online Journal.

When it comes to domestic issues like education, House Republicans adamantly insist that "throwing money at problems" doesn't solve them. Indeed, the Republican Right firmly believes that subsidizing failure just creates more failure, and the only real solution is accountability. But Republicans threw these principles out the window by increasing the secret (isn't this OUR money?) intelligence budget by 9%, up from current $30 billion levels. To help guarantee that this money would be wasted, Republicans blocked a meaningful investigation of the intelligence failures that led to America's lack of preparation for September 11. Finally, the House repealed the modest restriction against hiring murderers that was adopted by the CIA in 1995, following revelations that the CIA was paying a Guatemalan who murdered an American. Under the House's new rules, a low-level CIA operative could hire Bin Laden himself.

CIA director George Tenet is in the hot seat for the CIA's failure to detect the September 11 attack. But instead of trying to root out the CIA's real problems - turf wars, internal communications failures, and risk-averse agents - CIA officials are eager to blame laws and policies requiring them to demonstrate that potential investigation targets are real threats. They cite Zacarias Moussaoui as Exhibit A of the failure of these policies, but Moussaoui has been in US custody since August, and his hard drive revealed no clues of the hijackings. In order to save his job, Tenet has told his agents to simply break any laws they don't like. "The agency must give people the authority to do things they might not ordinarily be allowed to do. If there is some bureaucratic hurdle, leap it." This is outrageous misconduct by a government official, and Tenet should be replaced immediately by someone who will uphold the law.

According to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, the CIA is pretty much clueless about the terrorists who attacked us. Were they a semi-amateur "pickup team" who got "lucky," or highly trained professionals who carefully covered their real tracks and left only disinformation behind? The CIA doesn't know. What's coming next? Ditto. Says Robert Baer, described as "perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East": "You wouldn't believe how bad it is. What saved the White House on Flight 93" - the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania - "was a bunch of rugby players. Is that what you're paying thirty billion dollars for?" No, and throwing more money at the problem won't fix it. Sounds like the US should simply outsource Middle East intelligence to countries that are capable of doing it.

Former CIA operative Marc Gerecht says U.S. spies have little hope of capturing Bin Laden or infiltrating Al Qaeda. What's lacking is "non-official-cover" operatives with no connection to the U.S. govt. But no program to insert NOCs into an Islamic fundamentalist organization abroad had (as of late 1999) been implemented. Says one NOC: "NOCs haven't really changed at all since the Cold War. We're still a group of fake businessmen who live in big houses overseas. We don't go to mosques and pray." Another Near East operative says: "The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing."

Consortiumnews.com's Robert Parry writes, "[America's] blindness to the recent past often is justified by the notion that ignoring unpleasant facts is 'good for the country.' But the blind spots also prevent Americans from fully recognizing the dangers from abroad and comprehending the motives of potential enemies, a situation of sudden relevance as the U.S. prepares for war in retaliation for last Tuesday's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.The 'lost history' of recent decades has contained some very grim chapters. One is Washington's role in widespread 'death squad' operations throughout Latin America, bloody campaigns that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives... In the same twilight struggle with the Soviet Union, the Reagan-Bush administration allied itself with Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan and with right-wing religious forces in Lebanon and Israel... A third prong of the Reagan-Bush international strategy played out in Iran and Iraq."

If you want to trace the origins of the September 11 attack back to their roots, here are several books worth reading. Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (Pluto Press, £12.99), is by ABC journalist John Cooley. Jihad: The Secret War in Afghanistan (Mainstream, £7.99), is by ex-SAS soldier Tom Carew. Ghost Force: The Secret History of the SAS (Orion, £7.99), is by Ken Connor. Bush wants to fight evil, but unleashing the CIA may be the surest way to create that very evil.

According to CBS, "Following the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa in August 1998, President Clinton signed a directive authorizing the CIA to apprehend bin Laden and bring him to the United States to stand trial for his role in the bombings. The directive, which was modified several times, authorized the use of deadly force if taking bin Laden alive was deemed impossible. And in fact, according to government sources, non-Americans (we don't know what nationality) working on behalf of the CIA tried to kill bin Laden last year. These foreign operatives told the CIA they fired a rocket-propelled grenade at bin Laden as he drove in a convoy of cars through a mountainous road in Afghanistan, and that the grenade hit one of the vehicles -- though not the one bin Laden was in." Which just proves that all the nonsense about "unleashing" the CIA is just that - nonsense.

The Nation's David Corn writes, "Human intelligence against closed societies and secret outfits has long been a difficult, almost impossible, endeavor. Hurling money at it is likely no solution. During the Vietnam War, when resources were unlimited, the CIA failed spectacularly at humint, essentially never penetrating the inner sanctums of the enemy. Its record of infiltrating the Soviet government was unimpressive (and the same goes for China, Cuba and other targets). As for lifting existing restrictions, imagine the dilemmas posed if the CIA actually managed to recruit and pay murderous members of terrorist groups. What would the reaction be, if one of the September 11 conspirators turns out to have had a US intelligence connection?"

In 1976, following revelations of CIA assassination campaigns, President Ford imposed a ban. 25 years later, Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) and Bob Barr (R-GA) want the US government to get back into the business of cold-blooded murder. "The idea of targeting people for assassination is legally impermissible under international law," said M. Cherif Bassiouni, an international law expert at DePaul University in Chicago and the former chairman of the United Nations commission that investigated the war crimes in Yugoslavia. "I think it is a wise policy to not have the intelligence agencies be judge, jury and executioner all wrapped into one. The potential for abuse is too big and the symbolism is too harmful. It invites terrorists to engage in retaliatory assassinations," Bassiouni said. None of this wisdom seems likely to deter Bush.

Salon reporter Jeff Stein writes, "According to some of its own former spies in the region, America's premier information-gathering agency is virtually 'blind' in the Middle East. And while some Republicans blame the problem on cutbacks in intelligence budgets, in fact Washington has thrown piles of money at counter-terrorism programs since 1998, when U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were destroyed by Osama bin Laden's men."

The CIA headquarters at Langley is now called "The George Bush Center for Intelligence." There have long been questions that Bush Sr. worked for the Agency well before he was appointed CIA Director in 1976, possibly running a CIA front as far back at the '50's. Consider that the Bush family's clique was involved in the creation of the CIA. Robert Lovett, Prescott Bush's business partner, was an OSS officer who later headed a committee that drafted the plans for the CIA. The CIA has been exposed as meddling in elections around the world -- including those in Latin American countries during the 1980's. Bush's office was 'in the loop', if not actually directing the Iran-Contra operation and other CIA activities. Last summer, it was exposed that Bush advisor Richard Perle tried to undermine the Camp David Peace Talks. As the talks collapsed, Barak's popularity took a dive. We can only wonder what else the Bush gang was up to. Below is a history of the Bush Organized Crime Family.

Here's one we almost missed. "James E. Miller, a retired State Department historian who helped compile the volume [on US covert-operations in Greece], part of the prestigious Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, said the censorship is 'a classic example of marriage, bureaucratic-style,' between the State Department and the CIA…'They have to justify themselves, and the record of American covert operations since 1948 is incredibly embarrassing. Even the ones that succeeded left bad marks,' Miller said. What's bothering CIA officials about the mid-'60s history, which also chronicles dealings with Turkey and Cyprus, Miller said, are documents about two proposals to influence Greek politicians and elections." A familiar Bush/CIA pattern, eh? "CIA and State Department officials this spring ordered the latest volume on Indonesia to be held back because it documented a measure of U.S. responsibility for the killings of thousands of Indonesian communists in the mid-1960s."

George Washington University’s National Security Archive today posted on the Web (www.nsarchive.org) one of two State Department documentary histories whose release the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is stalling, even though the documents included in the volumes were officially declassified in 1998 and 1999. The Indonesia volume includes significant new documentation on the Indonesian Army’s campaign against the Indonesia Communist Party (PKI) in 1965-66, a slaughter which cemented Suharto's coup. In 1990, under George Bush, Sr., the CIA also censored a State volume on Iran to erase any reference to the CIA-backed coup there in 1953. In 1991, Congress passed a law requiring the State Dept. histories to include info. on ALL activities, including covert operations. Under Clinton, info. about YOUR govt. was made readily available, as it should be. Now, under Shrub, we are returning to the era of lies, lies, and damn lies.

Bush has just nominated Robert Mueller to replace Louis Freeh as the FBI head. Mueller conducted investigations that whitewashed Bush Daddy CIA criminal activities. "Under the first President Bush, Mueller served as assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's criminal division, where he supervised the prosecutions of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega and mobster John Gotti and headed the investigations of the BCCI banking scandal and the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland." Noriega was originally a CIA asset, and a key figure in the Contra supply operations (likely directed from VP Bush's office). These included the contra drug smuggling that the CIA eventually admitted to (at least) "tolerating." BCCI was the money-laundering bank that was at the heart of CIA-linked criminal activities. John Gotti had alleged ties to the CIA. Aboard Pan Am 103 were CIA agents about to blow the whistle on drug smuggling operations by a former Iran-Contra middleman.

"CBS is deep into filming a pilot for a series this fall that would tell stories of everyday life inside 'The Agency.'…What is surprising, perhaps, is that the CIA is cooperating. As part of its new mission, the CIA is working regularly with filmmakers, television producers and writers it considers sympathetic. By doing so, it hopes both to get out what it calls the truth about the agency [oh really?] and to explain to a skeptical public why, in the absence of an overarching national enemy, it needs a budget of about $30 billion a year for its operations and those of its sister intelligence agencies." Interestingly, "it declined to cooperate on the film 'Clear and Present Danger, ' for example, because it linked the agency with drug trafficking." So much for telling the truth about the Agency! The CIA's Inspector General recently released a report that finally admitted to tolerating Contra drug trafficking. And there is much evidence that the Agency played a more active role.

Now that the US has been thrown off the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Bush shills like Condi Rice and Ari Fleischer have been expressing outrage and bleating platitudes that the US will continue to be a "beacon shining for the cause of human rights." Meanwhile, CBS is filming 'The Agency' --- a new series that will no doubt paint a pretty, heroic image on the face of the Bush Daddy's CIA. So we offer this timeline of CIA atrocities based largely on William Blum's highly regarded research. From Operation Gladio in Italy to supporting Pinochet's military coup to Iran-Contra-Cocaine (and Plan Colombia today?), the CIA has run covert, inhumane operations through the years to subvert foreign governments. It has also committed illegal domestic operations that include spying on US citizens (Operation Chaos), immoral LSD experiments (MK-ULTRA), distributing LSD during the '60's, infiltrating the US Media (Operation Mockingbird) and recruiting Nazis (Operation Paperclip).

"Even as the government line continues to lose credibility, a change in a story by Bill Reddeker of ABC Network news raises additional questions about the possible role of the giant military contracting corporation DynCorp in the shootdown. (Former CIA Director James Woolsey is a stockholder in the privately held corporation.) As repeatedly covered in FTW, DynCorp is the largest US government contractor in the region and has armed civilian personnel flying escort for Colombian military aircraft on coca eradication missions in Southern Colombia...But confusion remains as to whether DynCorp personnel had been contracted by the CIA to fly on the US surveillance plane which initiated the Bowers tragedy." Former DEA agent Castillo says, "I think it all has to do with Plan Colombia [aka the 'Andean Initiative'] and the coming war. It's going to crank into high gear very soon. " At Michael Ruppert's "CopvCIA.com", read intriguing articles about the shootdown of the missionary plane in Peru.

CIA and Peruvian officials claim the U.S. missionary plane shot down last week ignored internationally-recognized warnings. However, a spokesman for the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism deny this claim: "All regulations were followed, such as flight plan, remaining in Peruvian airspace, and maintaining contact with the flight towers." Yet a woman and her child are now dead. Perhaps the CIA should redirect the energy of its "spinning wheels" to finding out how its contractors and Peruvian Air Force allies could have made such a disastrous mistake in judgement.

The US plane that directed a Peruvian fighter jet to the plane flown by US missionaries was operated by the CIA. Why the CIA, when drug interdiction is the job of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)? No one is saying, or even asking the question. Meanwhile, the CIA says that its crew "objected strongly" to orders to shoot down the plane, but the crew registered its objections only with the US embassy, not with the Peruvian Air Force. "The U.S. plane remained about a mile from the missionary aircraft during most of the the incident and the crew was able to see what transpired but did not come close enough to determine who was aboard" - or to stop the Peruvian jet from shooting down the plane without following American-imposed "procedures". During the attack, missionary pilot Kevin Donaldson was talking to civilian air controllers, saying "They're going to kill us! They're killing us! They're killing us!" This CIA is waging an all-out damage control operation by spinning the lead stories in the corporate media to deny direct responsibility. But the CIA should still be held morally responsible - and could well be sued -for its negligent role in the reckless killing of a US missionary and her baby.