Badgers for Freedom

What are those beady little eyes watching? | blog.bioethics.net:

Via the Washington Post and the BBC, apparently, comes a story that's just too good to check. The Post cites a BBC translation of an article in the Iranian newspaper Resalat:

'A few weeks ago, 14 squirrels equipped with espionage systems of foreign intelligence services were captured by [Iranian] intelligence forces along the country's borders. These trained squirrels, each of which weighed just over 700 grams, were released on the borders of the country for intelligence and espionage purposes. According to the announcement made by Iranian intelligence officials, alert police officials caught these squirrels before they could carry out any task.'

...Still, there's no way this story of spy squirrels could be true... right? I mean, everyone knows the cutting edge of animal weapons systems is the ill-tempered badger.

-Greg Dahlmann

CIA Said Instability Seemed 'Irreversible'

washingtonpost.com: By Bob Woodward

Early on the morning of Nov. 13, 2006, members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group gathered around a dark wooden conference table in the windowless Roosevelt Room of the White House.

For more than an hour, they listened to President Bush give what one panel member called a 'Churchillian' vision of 'victory' in Iraq and defend the country's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. 'A constitutional order is emerging,' he said.

Later that morning, around the same conference table, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden painted a starkly different picture for members of the study group. Hayden said "the inability of the government to govern seems irreversible," adding that he could not "point to any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around," according to written records of his briefing and the recollections of six participants.

"The government is unable to govern," Hayden concluded. "We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government that is balanced, and it cannot function."...

Hayden's bleak assessment, which came just a week after Republicans had lost control of Congress and Bush had dismissed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, was a pivotal moment in the study group's intensive examination of the Iraq war, and it helped shape its conclusion in its final report that the situation in Iraq was "grave and deteriorating."

In the eight months since the interview, neither Hayden nor any other high-ranking administration official has publicly described the Iraqi government in the uniformly negative terms that the CIA director used in his closed-door briefing. ...

A senior intelligence official familiar with Hayden's session with the Iraq Study Group said that Hayden told the panel his assessment was "somber" and acknowledged that Hayden had used the term "irreversible." But the official insisted that Hayden instead said, "The current situation, with regard to governance in Iraq, was probably irreversible in the short term, because of the world views of many of the [Iraqi] government leaders, which were shaped by a sectarian filter and a government that was organized for its ethnic and religious balance rather than competence or capacity."

But another senior intelligence official confirmed the thrust and detail of Hayden's assessment, saying that the intelligence out of Iraq this month shows that the ability of the Maliki government to execute decisions and govern Iraq remains "awful." ...

Former defense secretary William J. Perry, one of the five Democrats on the Iraq Study Group, confirmed that Hayden told them the Iraqi government seemed beyond repair.

"That was what we'd been hearing everywhere," Perry said. "He just said it a little more clearly and more explicitly than other people."

Can you fool all of the people all of the time?
It seems the Bush Administration is willing to die trying.*

(* Ooops, forgot. That's other people who will die. Got to be careful with these metaphor things.)

CIA Documents Shed More Light on Agency's Interest in Student Dissenters

The Chronicle:

Information about Operation CHAOS is part of the much-discussed cache. In particular, a number of documents concern a 1968 study of student dissent, entitled 'Restless Youth,' that was prepared by the agency for President Lyndon B. Johnson.

In two memoranda dated May 7, 1973, the agency's director of current intelligence informed Mr. Schlesinger of a series of episodes in which the agency had assessed and produced reports on the level of foreign involvement in the antiwar movement. One memo (Document No. 193 in Tuesday's release) states that a late 1967 review of the evidence of such links by the agency -- disseminated via memoranda -- had concluded that 'there was some evidence of ad-hoc contacts between antiwar activists at home and abroad but no evidence of direction or formal coordination.'

The other May 7 memo (Document No. 190 in Tuesday's release) gives details of the genesis of the 'Restless Youth' report, which was given to President Johnson in September 1968. The memo states that a national-security adviser, Walt W. Rostow -- who later was a professor of economics and history at the University of Texas at Austin -- asked the agency to put together a report on worldwide student unrest. ...

The chapter of "Restless Youth" on domestic student dissenters, "Student Dissent and Its Techniques in the U.S.," was sent to President Johnson in January 1968. Much of that document focused on Students for a Democratic Society, known as SDS, and drew heavily on FBI intelligence about the group. ...

The material on "Restless Youth" contained in the "family jewels" material is particularly illuminating about the agency's desire to conceal its interests and reporting on a U.S.-based organization, which was strictly forbidden by the agency's charter. ...

"The paper 'Restless Youth' is sensitive because of its subject matter," states the 1968 memo, "because of the likelihood that public exposure of the agency's interest in the problem of student dissidence would result in considerable notoriety, particularly in the university world, and because pursuant to Mr. Rostow's instructions, the author included in his text a study of student radicals in the United States, thereby exceeding the agency's charter."

Post hoc rationalization of paranoia. Not.
The agents apparently complained about having to wear long hair and beards. I hope they got lice, and not much sex.

The Family Jewels | Video

New York Times Video

The family jewels, updated

Slate Magazine: By Daniel Politi

Although CIA Director Michael Hayden made sure to emphasize the documents 'provide a glimpse of a very different era and a very different agency,' all the papers note that some of the documents 'seem remarkably relevant today,' as the LAT says. Back then the enemy was communism, and, just like today, the agency often didn't have good sources for information. The NYT provides a separate analysis inside with the 'irresistible' comparisons, and mentions how a suspected Soviet spy was illegally detained for three years, and, of course, the warrantless wiretapping. 'What's going on today makes the family jewels pale by comparison,' James Bamford, who writes about intelligence, tells the NYT.

C.I.A. Chief Tries Preaching a Culture of More Openness

New York Times: "By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, June 22 — William E. Colby faced an uneasy decision in late 1973 when he took over the Central Intelligence Agency: whether to make public the agency’s internal accounting, then being compiled, of its domestic spying, assassination plots and other misdeeds since its founding nearly three decades earlier.

Mr. Colby decided to keep the so-called family jewels a secret, and wrote in his memoir in 1978 that he believed the agency’s already sullied reputation, including a link to the Watergate scandal, could not have withstood a public airing of all its dirty laundry.

So why, at a time when the agency has again been besieged by criticism, this time for its program of secret detentions and interrogations since the Sept. 11 attacks, would the current director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, decide to declassify the same documents that Mr. Colby chose to keep secret?...

General Hayden’s decision to declassify the family jewels now has been greeted negatively by some C.I.A. veterans, who say it could be a blow to the morale of a proud organization afflicted by turmoil during the last five years.

“C.I.A. officers, especially the young officers, want to belong to an organization that has a history and tradition they can look up to,” said one recently retired veteran, who insisted on anonymity because he had been an undercover officer. “If you put something out that says the founders of the agency were a bunch of criminals, that doesn’t exactly help.”

Truthiness, forever.
They can't handle the truth.

Coming Attractions at the CIA Megaplex

washingtonpost.com: By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus

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

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of 'unwitting' tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.

"Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA's history," Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians. The documents have been sought for decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests.

In anticipation of the CIA's release, the National Security Archive at George Washington University yesterday published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government discussions of the abuses. Those documents portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of President Gerald R. Ford that what then-CIA Director William E. Colby called "skeletons" in the CIA's closet had begun to be revealed in news accounts.

And, extra special for anti-war activists of my generation:

Among several new details, the summary document reveals a 1969 program about CIA efforts against "the international activities of radicals and black militants." Undercover CIA agents were placed inside U.S. peace groups and sent abroad as credentialed members to identify any foreign contacts. This came at a time when the Soviet Union was suspected of financing and influencing U.S. domestic organizations.

The program included "information on the domestic activities" of the organizations and led to the accumulation of 10,000 American names, which Colby told Silberman were retained "as a result of the tendency of bureaucrats to retain paper whether they needed it or acted on it or not," according to the summary memo.

Who would have thunk it?

And in case this didn't occur to you...

washingtonpost.com:

Barred by secrecy restrictions from correcting 'misinformation,' he said, the CIA is at the mercy of the press. 'Unfortunately, there seems to be an instinct among some in the media today to take a few pieces of information, which may or may not be accurate, and run with them to the darkest corner of the room,' Hayden said.

Hayden's speech and some questions that followed evoked more recent criticism of the intelligence community, which has been accused of illegal wiretapping, infiltration of antiwar groups, and kidnapping and torturing of terrorism suspects.

'It's surely part of [Hayden's] program now to draw a bright line with the past,' said National Security Archive Director Thomas S. Blanton. 'But it's uncanny how the government keeps dipping into the black bag.' Newly revealed details of ancient CIA operations, Blanton said, 'are pretty resonant today.'